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Crime He was one of the world’s most wanted men. So he bought a west African country How Jos Leijdekkers turned Sierra Leone into a drug-dealer’s paradise Share September 18th 2026 By Alexander Clapp 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. (Top left) Julius Maada Bio, the president of Sierra Leone. (Middle) Jos Leijdekkers attends church alongside Agnes Bio, the president’s daughter, with whom Leijdekkers has fathered a child 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. In half a decade Leijdekkers has turned Sierra Leone,