Who is criminal Cor ‘de Paling’ Pijnen, who is seen as the brutal leader of the ‘tattoo killers’?

Cor Pijnen is hot. It is 2022 and ‘the Eel’, as the 38-year-old criminal is known in the Dutch underworld, is wanted by both the Dutch authorities and by enemies in the criminal environment. In the Dominican Republic, where he then resides, he therefore identifies himself as Margaret Soto Harvey Gerardo, 44 ​​years old. Or with one of his other fake identities.

His pseudonyms offer no protection against the death squad that fires at him from a scooter when Pijnen drives his white SUV through the tourist town of Las Terrenas on January 4, 2022. He is hit by three bullets and loses control of his car. His car collides with another SUV and lands on its side. Pain wouldn’t be ‘the Eel’ if he didn’t manage to escape after all. He climbs out of the wreckage, seriously injured, and flees into an alley.

Wig and firearms

Because his criminal rivals failed to catch him again, the justice system succeeded. In the hospital it turns out that he is not the one whose name is on the identity card, but the internationally identified criminal. He is arrested in his sickbed and eventually extradited to the Netherlands. In his apartment, the Dominican police find a stack of fake IDs, a wig, loaded firearms, extra cartridge holders, expensive watches and fake license plates.

Next week, the attack on Pijnen will be central to a major criminal trial about underworld violence. His case is a sub-file in mega case 26Woltz, which has been dragging on in the Zwolle court for more than six months. Groups of suspects have already received prison sentences for their roles in gross underworld violence, threats and at a weapons depot in Alphen aan den Rijn where four rocket launchers, 45 automatic small arms, silencers and ammunition were found in early 2022. According to the judiciary, several suspects who wanted to set up ‘a Polish mafia’ in the Netherlands were also involved in the murder of Peter R. de Vries.

For once, Pijnen is not on trial as a suspect, but appears as a victim. It is still unknown whether he will be present at the case.

Toilet window

The Dutch Hindustani Cor Pijnen (1983) deserves his nickname ‘the Eel’ because he manages to elude justice or attackers time and time again. As a teenager and adolescent, he has been accused of robberies, shootings and hostage-taking, but continually slips out of trouble or manages to evade punishment.

When he is sixteen, an arrest team raids his girlfriend’s house. He flees through the window into the toilet. He is still arrested, but during transport to court he kicks open the door of a detainee bus and escapes again. At his house in Schiedam, the police want to arrest him, but he manages to escape during a struggle. Pijnen dives into De Schie, swims to the other side and is gone again.

The crimes he is linked to are becoming increasingly serious.

Barely an adult, Pijnen is accused of his first life crime: the murder of Dordrecht kickboxing champion Peter Smit on August 15, 2005 in Rotterdam. This is preceded by a number of things: Pijnen has held a friend of the top fighter responsible for a failed ecstasy deal, who has to give up his Rolex for this. On Smit’s advice, the friend reports the crime, after which Pijnen and two others crash that friend on a terrace in Schiedam. Pains pulls out a gun, but the friend manages to take it away and flees.

Breaking fingers

Smit demands Pijnen’s Rolex back and makes increasingly strong threats, including kidnapping Pijnen and breaking his fingers. In a café in the center of Schiedam, the rivals seem to reach an agreement, but three days later, during a new appointment with Pijnen, Smit is shot on the street by a man in a hoody. He succumbs to gunshot wounds to his abdomen, heart, liver and lungs.

According to a witness, a cousin of Pijnen shot the kickboxer dead to prove himself to Pijnen’s group. Confronted with that statement, eyewitnesses and DNA on the murder weapon and the shooter’s hoodie, Pijnen acknowledges that he had agreed again with Smit, but that his companion fired unexpectedly. That must be the cousin. Pains, cryptic: “One person’s act is not another person’s choice.”

The court sentences Pijnen and his cousin to 15 years in prison for jointly shooting Smit ‘like a dog’. Pijnen was acquitted on appeal. The Eel lives up to its nickname.

He is later convicted of a sex offense, but it is not proven that he and his Brazilian girlfriend set up a trade line in women from Brazil.

Assassination squad

Shootings in 2008 and 2009 made Pijnen nationally infamous. He is in the news as leader of a murder squad that is still unprecedented in the Netherlands.

It starts with the suspicion that Cor Pijnen and his brother Brian, who is four years younger, are involved in the double liquidation of Amsterdam underworld kingpin Boneka Belserang and Yassin Chakor from Enschede, on February 4, 2009, behind the pancake farm on the A4 near Leiderdorp. During the investigation, the detective also saw indications that the group had a hand in the liquidation of the violent drug trafficker August Adjoeba on August 11, 2008 in Amsterdam-Buitenveldert.

In the expanding investigation, the detectives placed an observation camera at a gallery house on the Tempelhof in Amstelveen, which the Pijnen brothers appear to use as a hiding place.

That turned out to be an unexpectedly fruitful move.

On August 10, 2009, the camera records four men leaving the apartment at 9:57 p.m. At 11:10 p.m., 34-year-old Amsterdam criminal Marlon Dalfour was shot at from a dark Volkswagen Golf in the Andries Vierlinghstraat in Amsterdam-Slotervaart. The gunman fires at least 34 bullets from a submachine gun through the right door window. Dalfour shoots back, but misses. Three bullets hit him in the face and side. He survives, but will remain disabled.

Warehouse of evidence

At 11:29 and 11:39 p.m., the users of the Tempelhof apartment return two by two. Observation teams follow all four men as they leave the flat the next day. An arrest team takes the Pijnen brothers off the road near Almere, together with Cor’s Brazilian girlfriend. Their friend Jeroen S. is arrested in his hometown of Leerdam. Evert Sijahailatua, number four, escapes and will later be placed on the National Investigation List.

Detectives find a warehouse of evidence in the abandoned house at the Tempelhof. There is a boiled cell phone in a pan on the stove. The attempt to permanently destroy the phone and the SIM card failed, because specialists managed to bring the SIM card back to life – which yielded usable telephone numbers and text messages. The memory card of an abandoned camera has been erased, but technicians are making it readable again.

Hundreds of photos show that the suspects have exhaustively photographed Marlon Dalfour and the route from the Tempelhof to his house on Andries Vierlinghstraat, as well as the route to the place where the getaway car was left burning. In that car there is a bullet casing of the same type and from the same weapon as the one found at the scene of the shooting.

Finds in other homes also support the investigation’s suspicion that the suspects form a professional and well-oiled employment agency for contract killings. (Automatic) firearms, hand grenades, an arsenal of communication equipment. Cell phone jammers to disrupt telephone traffic and positioning systems. Devices to detect sounding beacons and listening devices. Balaclavas, bulletproof vests, gloves. A key to lower movable poles in the city. A blue flashing light. Stolen blank license plates.

Same tattoo

What also makes the news: all suspects have the same tattoo of black Chinese characters from top to bottom across their backs. ‘Be decisive’, it says loosely. Photos prove that even more men have such tattoos. The Pijnen brothers also have Chinese characters on their arms that are said to stand for ‘brotherhood of murderers’.

From then on, their supposed murder brigade was nicknamed ‘the tattoo killers’. A photo distributed by law enforcement in which three tattoo killers at a shooting range show their decorated backs, each with a gun raised in their right hand, has become an iconic image.

For the attempted liquidation of Marlon Dalfour, Cor Pijnen and his three co-suspects receive sentences of up to 13 years. Ultimately, the justice department sees insufficient evidence for their roles in the liquidations of Belserang, Chakor and Adjoeba. The justice department cannot prove that Cor Pijnen, while in detention, ordered Boneka Belserang’s brother Etou’s (‘that bacon neck’) to be ‘hit’ or ‘split’.

Tortured and mutilated

Things are different for a shocking murder within the supposed death squad: that of Onno Kuut. His tortured and mutilated body was found on March 25, 2009 in a dune grave near Hoek van Holland. Kuut, adopted from South Korea and raised in Enschede, was also a ‘tattoo killer’, according to the well-known Chinese characters on his back. He was also a good friend of his fellow townsman Yassin Chakor, who was murdered in Leiderdorp.

The Public Prosecution Service is convinced that Kuut lured Chakor and Belserang to the parking lot at the pancake house. The fact that Belserang was unarmed, contrary to his custom, strengthens the assumption that they thought they were meeting a friend. Kuut seems to have fallen into disfavor among the tattoo killers for a variety of reasons, after which, according to the judicial authorities, he was tortured, murdered and possibly mutilated with his own knife in a house in Leerdam.

More than ten years after Kuut’s death, prosecutors are still asking for life in prison for the same four tattoo killers who were previously convicted for the assassination attempt on Dalfour. However, the court acquitted the quartet in February 2020.

Cor Pijnen is not waiting for his verdict. The Eel cuts his ankle bracelet in January 2020 and escapes again. So now to the Dominican Republic, where not the authorities, but his apparent rivals, find him. They may have been sent because Pijnen wanted to ‘rip’, or steal, drugs from a known Dutch criminal. Tuesday is the first day of the hearing where the attack on Cor Pijnen will be discussed.