Title: He was one of the world’s most wanted men. So he bought a west African country
Subtitle: How Jos Leijdekkers turned Sierra Leone into a drug-dealer’s paradise
Author: By Alexander Clapp
Date: September 18th 2026
Note: This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center
According to the rumour, the man was a Turkish investor called Omar Sheriff. He looked young, with the flabby cheeks of a teenager, but was soon asserting his authority around Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. From the tiers of slums south of the city his black G-Wagon was seen cruising up and down the Atlantic coast. At weekends he could be spotted ordering bottles of Jack Daniel’s at Sky Bar, rubbing shoulders with the Chinese card-sharks at the Grand Leone Casino across the street, or receiving government ministers in his waterfront suite at the 2 Seasons Resort, where they were sometimes observed by road-workers departing with flowers or envelopes tucked under their arms. He astounded local fishermen in the villages near Freetown with handouts of cash—sometimes $300 or more—and bags of rice distributed from a fleet of Land Cruisers.
Four months after his arrival, an unfortunate incident tarnished his good name. In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2023, one of his bodyguards discharged seven bullets into the kneecap of a young playboy named Hussein Fawaz at a Freetown nightclub called Scarlet. The Lebanese commercial elite of Sierra Leone—exporters of diamonds, importers of Toyotas, financiers of Hizbullah—were forced to confront the strange new threat to what they thought was their patch. “We tried to punish the man but couldn’t,” Hajj Fawaz, the victim’s uncle and one of Sierra Leone’s biggest construction tycoons, told me. “By the time we reached his house he had been moved away.”
Exactly two years after the shooting, the Turkish investor re-emerged in the jungle interior of Sierra Leone. On New Year’s Day 2025, he was momentarily captured on video at an intimate mass held at St Joseph’s Catholic church in the village of Tihun, seated two pews behind Julius Maada Bio, Sierra Leone’s president, and listening intently to the sermon. A source sent the recording to Dutch reporters, who made a startling identification. The man was Jos Leijdekkers, known as Chubby Jos, one of Europe’s most wanted criminals. “It was like, ‘Wow!'” Yelle Tieleman, an investigative journalist who helped break the story for the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad, told me. “This can’t be true. Jos Leijdekkers has been there this whole time? Hiding in plain sight?”
Leijdekkers’s career is a marvel. Less than a decade ago he was a hitman stalking the streets of Antwerp
In the shadowy world of international narco-trafficking, Jos Leijdekkers is a gangster of flair. Over the past five years, bricks of cocaine stamped with his underworld moniker—”Holly”, short for Hollywood—have been found everywhere from the Ecuadorian banana port of Guayaquil to the North Sea. In his native Netherlands, his exploits have spawned biographies, podcasts, comedy skits, battalions of YouTube sleuths and, this February, a portrait of his unsmiling face and a seven-foot knife blade, spraypainted on a railway carriage in the somnolent city of Eindhoven. For criminologists, Leijdekkers’s career is a marvel. Less than a decade ago he was a hitman stalking the streets of Antwerp. He has since created a trafficking network spanning Latin America, Europe and the Middle East that brings in more than $2bn a year.
Leijdekkers’s greatest caper yet looks to be the takeover of a country. In half a decade Leijdekkers has turned Sierra Leone, a place previously best known for blood diamonds, into a hub for billions of dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine, disguised as rice or plantain chips, which pass through each year en route to Europe. By funnelling a share of the profits to Sierra Leone’s political elite and funding large parts of the state itself, Leijdekkers has amassed perks that would be the envy of a Bond villain. He is believed to have a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport. The police and military establishment bow to him, squadrons of container ships and submarines ply the shores at his command, and he is escorted in a motorcade by the presidential guard beneath a cloud of drones. Leijdekkers is celebrated in krio rap, the English-based creole spoken in Sierra Leone—”Ar change di game e name lek Umar Sheriff” runs a lyric of Drizilik’s recent hit “Sabi Road”—and, last September, he fathered a child with Agnes Bio, the president’s favourite daughter. (1843 approached the president’s office, the police and the armed forces about allegations raised in this piece and received no response.)
Go to Freetown today and behold a nation in the throes of narco-capture. Its beaches thrum with nightclubs, its skyline bristles with empty highrises, its streets shimmer with Corvettes and Tesla trucks. It took gangs decades to transform Mexico and Montenegro. In Sierra Leone it has taken just four years for a 35-year-old Dutch convict, boasting little more than a smartphone and a network of suppliers, to transform a beautiful stretch of west Africa into his personal fief. How did he do it?
For decades Africa played a minor role in the world of cocaine trafficking. In the 1980s, when the mass export of Latin American cocaine began, the smugglers sent their product straight to Europe aboard cargo ships. By the 1990s Rotterdam, the continent’s biggest container port, had emerged as the preferred destination. In 2000 a quarter of the 200 tonnes of cocaine reaching Europe was believed to enter through its docks. Within two decades nearly 50 tonnes were being seized each year at the port by customs officials, who estimated that they found less than a fifth of the cocaine dispatched to their quays.
Fighting the narco-traffickers was a game of cat and mouse. In the 2000s Dutch officials rolled out new mobile scanning units that could manoeuvre around a port and examine any container with ease. In response, the cartels built their own version in the Colombian Amazon, which they used to determine whether cocaine could go undetected within a consignment of cocoa beans (it could not) or be successfully smuggled inside sections of steel machinery (it could). In the late 2010s, when it had become clear that the criminal organisations also had some Rotterdam customs officials in their pockets, the port authorities took countermeasures: customs-workers were no longer told in advance which containers they would handle on any given day.
The tenfold increase in seizures between 2017 and 2021 seemed to be evidence that the port’s methods were effective. Yet when I arrived in Rotterdam this May, I found that seizures had slumped again, from 70 tonnes in 2021 to 12 in 2025. Plenty of cocaine is still being manufactured: production volumes in Colombia are believed to be at an all-time high. And plenty is reaching Europe: the current street price is €15,000 ($17,400) per kilo, the lowest figure ever recorded. Sewage samples confirm that up to 60,000 lines of cocaine are snorted every day in Rotterdam alone.
So how are drugs reaching Europe? One answer is the African connection, the importance of which has soared in recent years. In the mid-2000s, Latin American gangs looking to diversify their trafficking routes began to send some of their goods by fishing boat across the Atlantic to west Africa. The cargo would be hustled northwards by pickup through the Sahel or by trawler to the Mediterranean. At first the main entry point was the minuscule nation of Guinea-Bissau. By 2006 so much cocaine was passing through that fishermen took to whitewashing their houses with it.
Fast forward two decades and it is estimated that one-third of the cocaine reaching Europe now arrives via west Africa. Guinea-Bissau has been superseded by Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Cape Verde, but the logistics remain the same. Cocaine is kept in warehouses, often for months at a time, before being dispatched in small boats to the Mediterranean. Sometimes the destination is a mid-size port like Marseille or Gioia Tauro in Calabria. Other times, it is just a remote beach. “The problem used to be Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg,” a customs analyst in Rotterdam told me. “Now it’s the entire southern coast of Europe!”
It’s easy to see why Sierra Leone, which sits between Guinea-Bissau and Côte d’Ivoire, presented such a mouthwatering opportunity for the narco-trade. Not long ago the country was wrecked by an 11-year civil war involving diamond-grabbing rebels, child soldiers, Liberian string-pullers, South African mercenaries and a panoply of peacekeepers. The conflict left 75,000 dead and displaced half the population. When it ended, international attention turned elsewhere, leaving behind a devastated country with a pliable political elite. Its Lebanese diaspora, which controlled much of the banking and construction sectors, offered a promising conduit for cleaning up earnings. Sierra Leone was also English-speaking and gorgeous, with teal waters and beaches of honey-golden sand. Some offered ideal harbours for cocaine arriving from Latin America; along others you could pitch hotels to launder the proceeds.
Today, Sierra Leone is the hub of a network that handles the equivalent of one-quarter of its GDP in cocaine each year. It is problematic enough when countries such as Ecuador or Serbia are infiltrated by so much narco-capital: it enters the political system, scares off legitimate investors and proves all but impossible to eradicate from the property and banking sectors. But in a place like Sierra Leone—where half the population survives on the equivalent of less than $3 a day and even parliamentarians make less than a waiter in Amsterdam—such an influx invariably ends up propping up much of the state itself, from public salaries to military expenditure to infrastructure.
Outside Sierra Leone, people ask how a country so desperate for European aid could possibly protect one of the continent’s most wanted men. Within it, a rather different concern is making the rounds. Between the luxury cars Leijdekkers has reportedly given to government ministers, the spate of new mining companies he is believed to be financing, the journalists he has bribed, the police and army units he is funding, and a forthcoming election in which his cash will probably play no small role, the question on everyone’s lips is how can Sierra Leone ever conceive of letting the man go.
In April I arrived in Sierra Leone to find a country in which hardly anyone could stop talking about Jos Leijdekkers even as I was reminded—sometimes discreetly, often not—never to inquire directly about the man. A UN mission head likened him to Clint Eastwood, the new sheriff in town. A hotel owner on the Banana Islands, an archipelago off Sierra Leone’s coast which Leijdekkers sometimes visits by yacht, compared his connections to those of Jeffrey Epstein. An army officer told me that one of the first things Leijdekkers did in Freetown was to visit a military barracks and fund the renovation of its gym out of his own pocket. His former driver told me that he does not like being looked in the eye. The “Big Boss” had a way of instilling confidence in workers who expressed fears over getting caught trafficking drugs. “Do not worry,” Leijdekkers would say. “This is normal.”
“These kinds of people, we are always seeing them in Africa. They come, they disappear. But the moment we learned who he was, it freaked me out,” Hassan Salman, a Lebanese car-dealer and one of the first people to sell a motor to Leijdekkers, told me. “I left Sierra Leone after finding out. I became really scared. Not small scared.” Sophie van Leeuwen, a Dutch correspondent for RTL News, told me she “had the strong feeling I was being followed by the secret police” during the first days of a reporting trip she took to Sierra Leone in February 2025. She was arrested outside a villa where Leijdekkers was believed to reside, informed that she had intruded upon a “special security situation”, and questioned for 15 hours. Her camera and computer were searched and scrubbed. The Flemish owner of her hotel was interrogated over her alleged role in seeding a European spy network in Sierra Leone.
One evening in the hills above Freetown I attended a cocktail party where Western diplomats mingled with aid-workers. “Careful with that,” a European mission head told me when I mentioned why I had come to Africa, swivelling her blue eyes round the room. A Norwegian mining investor assured me that there would only be one way of knowing whether I was making progress in my investigation: “The government will arrange a car crash for you.”
Across the political spectrum, Leijdekkers is afforded the peculiar privilege of not existing. President Bio has never publicly acknowledged the presence of the man who fathered his grandchild. Three times Kaifala Marah, a former governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone, pretended not to hear my question when I asked about Leijdekkers. Abdul Kargbo, head of the parliamentary opposition, stopped texting me when I mentioned his name.
It took two years from Leijdekkers’s arrival in Sierra Leone for Dutch authorities to confirm his presence in the country. In 2024, a member of his inner circle was flipped and presented them with a disposable coffee cup from which Leijdekkers had sipped, the lid of which was found to contain his DNA. (The source told me he was paid €750 for his bravery.) Yet to this day Leijdekkers’s precise location remains a mystery. In exchange for such information, the Dutch government has upped the bounty to €200,000, an amount designed to match the sum Leijdekkers is known to pay assassins to knock off his competitors. The number of confirmed sightings of Holland’s most wanted man can nevertheless still be counted on a single hand. The latest came in March 2025, when Leijdekkers was snapped at a rooftop restaurant in Freetown wearing a $700 Versace shirt and giving a Rolex to Alusine Kanneh, Sierra Leone’s chief immigration officer—who, during Leijdekkers’s first two years in Sierra Leone, bought three properties in the United States for $1.9m in total and was sacked soon after the receiving the watch. (“I have no association with the person in question,” Kanneh responded when asked about the gift and properties.)
The trail had since turned cold. The most pervasive rumour is that Leijdekkers is migratory, covertly moving every few days between heavily guarded compounds in and around Freetown.
From the capital I set out down the Peninsula Highway, a boisterous torrent of motorcycles and tuk-tuks. Smoke twirled from bonfires of rubbish in the slums that blanketed the hills. On one side hulked jagged green mountains, which Portuguese sailors likened to lions’ teeth, bestowing Sierra Leone with its name. On the other stretched the Atlantic, a turquoise sheet upon which cargo ships and oil tankers clung like beads on a string. “The resort of invalids”, a 19th-century British traveller wrote of the coast, where slave traders from Devon and Cornwall had arrived a century earlier and married tribal princesses. They turned delirious with the heat and drink, and renounced their homeland, declaring themselves kings of islands the size of village greens. It would take decades for the Royal Navy, whose cannons still litter the coral reefs, to quash their descendants.
The beach town of Tokeh is a disorderly scattering of squat houses. Leijdekkers, who often spends a few days every month at a nearby resort, has expertly fed his reputation among its residents as a local Robin Hood. He buys exercise books for Tokeh’s children, pays their school fees and, every Ramadan, gives a bag of rice and 600 leones ($26) to each of its thousand-odd families—or so I was told by a fisherman who sometimes caught barracudas for Leijdekkers. The fisherman believed his patron to be Colombian and knew him only as “Jagaban”, a Yoruba word for a chief of great wealth.
A similar description was offered by one of Leijdekkers’s former waiters at the 2 Seasons Resort, who spoke to me on the condition that we meet days later in a different village and that I never learn his last name. On December 3rd 2022 Leijdekkers had checked into the resort and stayed for a month, the man recalled. Certain eccentricities stood out. He claimed to come from Turkey and had a bulky retinue of bodyguards from Ghana and South Africa. He gently but unequivocally forbade photos to be taken in his presence. He detested noise, going so far as to pay the bills of guests who chatted too loudly in exchange for them leaving the hotel. He owned at least ten mobiles (“Pixels and iPhones”), many cars, including “Cadillacs like the ones Donald Trump has”, and frequently hosted politicians and, on one occasion, the then-Chinese ambassador (1843 approached the Chinese embassy for comment and received no response.)
Leijdekkers’s own story begins in the old-money town of Prinsenbeek in the Catholic south-east of the Netherlands, in a neighbourhood where fat mansions rise above manicured hedges. “You’re looking for Jos? He’s just upstairs, let me get him,” the current owner of Leijdekkers’s childhood home—a white brick two-storey with a flagpole in the front yard—said to me. “You’re not the first to come asking.” He then shut the door in my face.
Leijdekkers had come to wealth by unconventional means. A few kilometres from Prinsenbeek, in the placid city of Breda, the red door of a glum brothel called Club Reeperbahn still glowers at a seedy intersection. It was once owned by Jos’s father, Joseph Leijdekkers, who did well enough from the sex trade to buy his family a summer home on Spain’s Costa del Sol. (1843 approached Joseph Leijdekkers for comment on the matters raised in this article via his lawyer and received no response.)
His son Jos developed a reputation for intransigence from his childhood years. Leijdekkers’s first wife, Hanane Alla, told me that her husband earned the nickname Chubby Jos not for his weight, but because he was born with a digestive disorder that made him bloated after eating spicy foods; he underwent two stomach surgeries rather than adjust his diet. A therapist who met Leijdekkers when he was 17 found him to be obsessive about “proving himself correct”. The evaluation followed an incident in which Leijdekkers observed with vacant detachment as three of his friends beat a boy to a pulp on a bike path outside Prinsenbeek.
