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Ronnie Stam, Dutch footballers and the criminal underworld: ‘Once you're in, you never get out'
From the second floor of Breda's courthouse, it was possible to make out the floodlights of the football stadium where, in happier times, Ronnie Stam had been a local celebrity.
The shamed 41-year-old was about to be added to the list of footballers, or ex-footballers, who had been imprisoned for being enticed into the Dutch criminal underworld. And that list is getting bigger.
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'It's painful for Dutch football,' Evgenii Levchenko, chairman of the Dutch professional footballers association (VVCS), tells The Athletic. 'It's not good for Dutch football and it's not good for the Dutch image. And it's very painful when you see so many big, talented players who don't understand they are killing the image of our football.'
Stam won the Dutch league championship with Twente in 2010 and was part of Wigan Athletic's squad the following year, albeit injured, when they beat Manchester City to win the FA Cup in one of the biggest shocks in the history of English football.
On Tuesday, however, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for his part in an international drug-smuggling plot — the latest case to explain why Levchenko and his colleagues are warning the nation's footballers their industry 'is not only a magnet for the rich and beautiful, but also for criminals'.
In June, the former Ajax winger Quincy Promes was extradited to the Netherlands in another high-profile case that has left Dutch football questioning itself.
Promes, who earned 50 caps for the Netherlands, was sentenced to six years in prison in February last year for trafficking 1,363 kilograms (3,005lb) of cocaine with a street value estimated at £65million ($82m). Since then, he had been living as a fugitive, first in Russia and then Dubai.
Then there is the story of David Mendes da Silva, another former Netherlands international, who was jailed for seven years in 2022 for helping to smuggle two consignments of cocaine, weighing 74kg and 105kg, into the country.
The Da Silva case particularly hurt Levchenko, given that they had once been team-mates at Sparta Rotterdam. 'I was talking to David a month before he was caught. I asked: 'What are you doing now, David?'. He said: 'Oh, nothing much — something here, something there'. We agreed we would have to get together. Everything, to me, seemed very normal. But, in the end, these guys all did something very stupid.'
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Da Silva, whose career also included spells at Ajax, NAC Breda and AZ, was also convicted of bribing a shipping clerk with a €100,000 (£90,000; $120,000) payment. 'I let certain people get too close,' he admitted in court.
If that was the full extent of the issue — three multi-million-pound drug busts and three high-profile footballers in prison — it would still be shocking. Yet the Dutch authorities openly accept there have been numerous other cases whereby past and present players have hooked up with serious criminals, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years. Those players, in turn, have become involved in, or on the edges of, drug, money-laundering and match-fixing plots. And sometimes worse: weapons, shootings and death.
'The difficulty we have is that some players are so close to the criminals,' says Levchenko, VVCS chairman since 2019. 'They think they are friends. And that is the biggest mistake they can make.
'We hear it so often: 'Yeah, but he's my friend, I've known him all my life'. And I say: 'If he were your real friend, he would never transport drugs in your car. Or ask you to carry €1million of watches to different countries'. Because those are things that have happened.
'It can start with something so simple. 'Can I borrow your car? Can you look after these watches? Can you get a shirt signed for me? Fancy coming to my birthday party where I will introduce you to the other criminals?'. That is the start. And once you're in, you never get out.'
Are organised criminals deliberately targeting young, impressionable footballers?
Arno van Leeuwen, a retired Amsterdam detective, answered that question during an interview last year with BN DeStem, the Breda-based newspaper, in which he discussed his own experiences of liaising with Ajax and the Dutch football association (KNVB) to warn players of the dangers.
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Van Leeuwen explained how, in many cases, the footballers and criminals had grown up in the same areas.
He started to notice the pattern more clearly in 2015 when an Amsterdam criminal known as 'Boeloeloe' was warned by the police that his life was in danger. Boeloeloe left the police station in a leased Mercedes. When Van Leeuwen's colleagues checked the number plate, they discovered it belonged to an Ajax youth player.
'So I thought, 'Let's check all those other Ajax lease cars through the system',' said Van Leeuwen. 'And what did I know? They were often lent to criminals.'
Further inquiries revealed that one of the cars had been the target of gunfire after a footballer lent it to a friend. A hail of bullets went through the rear window and lodged in the driver's seat. It was a shocking scene — so shocking that the police still use the photos in their presentations to clubs and KNVB officials.
Another of the Ajax player's cars was being driven around by the son of Gwenette Martha, a career criminal who was gunned down in 2014 and left with 80 bullets in his body. And Boeloeloe? He, too, was shot dead in a separate incident.
Promes signed for Ajax in 2019 and Van Leeuwen recalled the footballer being seen with well-known criminals. 'We told him: 'Those are guys who could be targets for assassinations. And you're driving around with them. If they come under fire, you're sitting next to them in the car'.'
According to a file from the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, Promes was also linked to Piet Wortel, a notorious figure in the Dutch underworld.
Wortel was suspected of being involved in a litany of serious crimes, including drug trafficking and the 2019 murder of ex-footballer Kelvin Maynard, a Suriname-born right-back who was shot multiple times in his car in Amsterdam-Zuidoost.
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Maynard, whose career included two seasons with Burton Albion in England's lower divisions, was gunned down by two masked assailants on a moped. His assassination was allegedly ordered in revenge for the theft of 400kg of cocaine, and shortly after, the 32-year-old had posted a photograph on social media showing him holding a huge wad of €50 notes.
Wortel, who is serving a three-year prison term for money laundering, denies any involvement. Promes has lodged an appeal against his conviction and is fighting an additional 18-month sentence, imposed in 2023, for stabbing his cousin.
The difficulty for the police, the clubs, the players association and other Dutch authorities is that there is a culture in modern-day football for many players flaunting their wealth. In that world, being rich is seen as the best way to get street cred. And, in the process, they romanticise a lifestyle of fast cars, expensive jewellery and attractive women.
Levchenko says he has personally asked elite footballers from the Eredivisie, Dutch football's top flight, to reconsider what they put on social media. But do they listen? One leading international, he says, recently posted a picture of himself wearing a €200,000 watch.
'All the stars love to show off their different way of life: the cars, the beautiful women, the watches. What they don't seem to understand is that the younger players are watching them. It's wrong of the big stars. But they want to show off.'
Another case relates to Romeo Castelen, a former Feyenoord and ADO Den Haag footballer who was arrested at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport in 2019 on suspicion of laundering €2.2million. Castelen, who made 10 appearances for the Dutch national team, had €139,000 in his pocket but claimed the money was earned through football, the watch trade and casino wins.
'In the football world,' his lawyer, Evelien de Witte, told a preliminary court hearing in Zwolle last year, 'it is considered cool to show off a wad of cash in the locker room.' Castelen, 42, denies any wrongdoing.
On other occasions, high-profile footballers have been seen on nights out with known criminals, often in VIP sections of bars. One infamous occasion goes back to 2013 when the waterside river party at Amsterdam's Scheepvaartmuseum turned into a shootout between rival gangs, leaving one man dead.
One Netherlands international, according to the police, allowed his Porsche to be used by criminals and the car ended up riddled with bullet holes. Another issue is the frequency with which the players' properties have been used for illegal purposes.
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Reports in the Dutch media have alleged that Robin van Ouwerkerk, a feared criminal who gained international notoriety for allegedly creating 'torture containers' in Brabant, was the subject of an assassination plot while living in an apartment rented out by Karim Rekik, the former PSV youth-team player.
Marco Ebben, a convicted drugs kingpin who was shot dead in Mexico this year, was previously reported to have been hiding in the penthouse of former Feyenoord player Terence Kongolo (now at NAC Breda). Guns were found in a house rented by Jetro Willems, then a Groningen player, in the town of Barendrecht in 2023.
Willems, formerly of Newcastle United and now at NEC Nijmegen, said he was shocked by the discovery and it is important to make clear he was not treated as a suspect. Nor was Rekik, a former Manchester City player, or Kongolo, who played for Huddersfield Town and Fulham in the Premier League.
These stories are alarming, nonetheless, given the reputations of the criminals involved. The police advice is: if you are a footballer moving to a new city or country, rent out your property through a reputable estate agent — not via friends, or friends of friends.
'We once had a footballer who had transferred abroad,' Bob Schagen, another highly experienced Amsterdam detective, told the Het Parool newspaper in 2023. 'He had rented out his house through acquaintances. That house became a criminal hotbed. Someone else lived there who was later shot dead. In the end, that footballer himself was clearing out a cannabis plantation. You can become infected for life through criminal contacts.'
In Stam's case, the court in Breda was told he had established himself as one of the 'big boys' of the criminal underworld since retiring from playing in 2016.
He was arrested after the police intercepted six months of messages on encrypted phones — a favoured choice of communication for organised criminals — that showed him plotting to smuggle cocaine and MDMA with a street value running into millions of pounds.
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Stam, who was raised in Breda and had two spells at the city's biggest football club, admitted that he had colluded with his accomplices, including his brother, Rudi, to smuggle 20kg of cocaine from Brazil to Germany. The payment, he said, was 'an amount worth one kilo.' But he insisted that was his only involvement.
He also alleged that gangland figures had turned up at a PSV youth-team fixture where his eldest son was playing. 'They threatened me on the sidelines at my son's game,' Stam told the court. 'A grenade was thrown at my house.'
The reaction can largely be summed up by Ronald Waterreus, the former Netherlands goalkeeper, in a column for De Limburger newspaper, where he expressed 'pure disgust' for Stam and was heavily critical of Promes, too.
Promes, Waterreus noted, had described his time in a Dubai prison as 'hell on earth'. Stam also complained about his circumstances, including the impact on his family, and did not turn up for his sentencing because 'those rides in the van from prison to court are hell'.
'Disbelief, sadness, anger,' Waterreus wrote. 'But perhaps most of all: anger. And that is mainly due to the 'victim' role in which these two gentlemen manoeuvre themselves. Wanting to be so tough as to deal in large quantities of drugs, with all the life-threatening consequences for society. Then acting like a whining toddler when you get the punishment that you asked for.'
Waterreus urged the courts to impose the 'severest possible' punishment. And that anger is exacerbated because, reputation-wise, these cases are painting a picture of Dutch football that the relevant people see as unwanted and unfair.
Levchenko, a former Ukraine international, has lived in the Netherlands since the age of 18 and played for six of their professional teams. Now 47, he is part of regular meetings with the clubs and players, of all ages, warning them not to follow the lead of Stam and all the others.
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'It's not only the Netherlands,' says Levchenko. 'I have seen something similar in Bulgaria, in Ukraine and Russia. But this is a big, painful story for Dutch football because the whole world is watching the Netherlands.
'We are visiting the clubs, talking to the players, their mothers and their fathers, and what we are finding is that the young generation don't think too much about the future. They just think about the moment: 'OK, if I do this (crime), I can make a lot of money'.
'That is really not wise. We tell them: 'Guys, one wrong move and your career is over. Don't be stupid — don't just think it's easy money. The chance of you being caught is so big'.'
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