Investigation links Bolle Jos to record cocaine bust near Canary Islands

The massive over-30-ton cocaine shipment intercepted south of the Canary Islands on the cargo ship Arconian last month was almost certainly coordinated by the network of convicted Dutch drug trafficker Jos Leijdekkers, also known as Bolle Jos, NOS reports based on an investigation by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

On May 1, the Spanish Guardia Civil intercepted the Arconian and found over 30 tons of cocaine on board. The Spanish authorities arrested 17 Philippine crew members and six armed men - five Dutch and one Surinamese - who were guarding the drugs.

While the scale of the drug bust was unprecedented, the GI-TOC investigation found that the shipment was not an isolated incident. Since 2019, the volume of cocaine smuggled from West Africa to Europe has increased explosively. Over the past five years, GI-TOC mapped this cocaine trade using open-source data and interviews with over 190 people, including port employees. Based on this, GI-TOC did case studies on three ships linked to Bolle Jos’s criminal network: the Arconian, the White Eagle, and the White Labeille.

They found that bulk shipments of cocaine departed from storage points in West Africa an dligered off the coasts of Morocco, the Canary Islands, and Spain, before docking again in ports in North Africa. Some ships made the trip once, others multiple times.

According to the researchers, the collected evidence indicates that the drugs were loaded onto the Arconian in Sierra Leone, where Leijdekkers has reportedly been living since 2022. The ship then lingered off the coast of the Canary Islands, waiting for motorboats to collect smaller shipments of the drugs and take them ashore without having to use a seaport. In addition to the massive load of cocaine, the Arconian also transported over 42,000 liters of fuel intended for the motorboats.

Witness statements, photographs, and an extensive analysis of the activities of Leijdekkers’ criminal network led the researchers to conclude that Bolle Jos’s network coordinated drug shipments on the Arconinan and the two other investigated ships. According to GI-TOC, it is likely that Leijdekkers repeatedly used this method to smuggle drugs from West Africa to Europe since at least 2024.

The size of the intercepted shipment suggests that the cocaine traffickers believed themselves to be safe and that there may have been previous successful transports, GI-TOC said.

The method of using a “mothership” to transport a large quantity of drugs and then smaller boats to smuggle them onshore is relatively new, but has been employed by other criminal networks, GI-TOC said. This method has contributed to large quantities of cocaine reaching Europe undetected and partly explains why the price of cocaine has been falling for years, according to NOS. In the Netherlands, cocaine cost €28,000 per kilogram in 2021, and only €15,000 per kilogram in 2025.