Court tosses case against man accused of laundering Red Light District properties
An Amsterdam appeals court on Friday declared prosecutors inadmissible in the money laundering case against Marcel Kaatee, ruling they had charged him twice for the same offenses involving properties in the Wallen, Het Parool reported.
Prosecutors had accused Kaatee of acting as a frontman for Willem Holleeder and laundering ownership of nine buildings in Amsterdam's Wallen red-light district that they said actually belonged to the convicted crime figure. In October 2024, they asked the court to forfeit the buildings and sentence Kaatee, then 66, to one year in prison and two years of probation.
They alleged the properties were bought with unrecovered ransom money from the 1980s Heineken kidnapping. Holleeder and Cor van Hout, assassinated in 2003, invested their share of the proceeds in drug trafficking via South America. They then allegedly funneled the money through friend Rob Grifhorst's real estate company, which bought the buildings in 1992. When the kidnappers divided assets in 1996 due to a conflict, the Wallen properties went to Holleeder, according to prosecutors.
The buildings were later transferred on paper to Kaatee but remained under Holleeder's control in practice, witnesses including Holleeder himself testified. Prosecutors said the laundering continued afterward and cited new witness evidence.
The decision ends the appeals process following a district court acquittal in 2024 that prosecutors had appealed. The appeals court found the prosecution covered the same facts as an earlier case in which Holleeder was also a suspect and was convicted of extorting several businessmen. Authorities had targeted Kaatee since 2006, but judges repeatedly acquitted him.
The properties include the Buddy Buddy and Molensteeg 1 gambling halls, which authorities shut down in 2012, and Hotel Torenzicht on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal.
Kaatee has always denied the accusations. He disputed that missing ransom money financed the purchases. He has worked for decades in the Wallen and operated two gambling halls there. He has also been involved in other judicial and administrative procedures and describes and comments on his experiences on his website.
Kaatee claimed the renewed prosecution stemmed from his refusal to cooperate with prosecutors in a separate case against Holleeder involving assassinations, for which Holleeder has been sentenced to life in prison.
“On 3 July 2020, one of those public prosecutors presented me with two options. They used the Red Light District buildings as leverage to get me to make a statement. I chose to tell the truth [that he knew nothing about Holleeder and assassinations, ed], and I was promptly prosecuted again for money laundering,” Kaatee said in court, according to Parool. He called it blackmail and said the Public Prosecution Service should be the one facing charges, not him.
Kaatee's lawyer, Oscar Pluimer, argued at the end of March that the new prosecution was invalid. The appeals court agreed.
