Willem Holleeder, the biggest and best-known criminal in the Netherlands, will take part in the College Tour program on October 11, 2012. In this program, students will ask Holleeder questions. Presenter Twan Huys has agreed with Holleeder and his lawyer that all questions can be asked. However, there has been a lot of commotion about the broadcast. Politicians and police express their criticism openly through various media such as the radio and Twitter. The broadcast will take place on Saturday, October 13, 2012.
Who is Willem Holleeder?
Willem Holleeder was born and raised in the Amsterdam Jordaan. He had a very strict father who did heavy work for the beer brand Heineken. The Holleeder family lived near the Heineken factory. His father became ill because of the hard work he had done for Heineken, but was not respected for the work he did. That caused Willem to be angry towards Freddy Heineken.
Later in life, Willem Holleeder, together with his friends Cor van Hout, Frans Meijer, Jan Boellaard and Martin Erkamps, started making plans to carry out a kidnapping. They decided together that their target would be the wealthy Freddy Heineken. The kidnappers’ demand was a ransom of 35 million guilders, the largest money demand of all time. Willem Holleeder and his friends are eventually tracked down and sentenced to 11 years in prison. In December 2007, Holleeder was convicted again, this time he was sentenced to 9 years in prison for extortion and assault. However, on January 27, 2012, Holleeder was released early due to good behavior. He now has his own column in the Revue and has been invited to participate in the College Tour program that will be recorded on October 11, 2012. However, there has been a lot of commentary about this broadcast.
Absurd
This is what VVD MP Hennis calls Holleeder’s TV performance, she is afraid that Holleeder will become a cult hero among young people in this way. That comment shows that she may fear that young people are being encouraged to commit such crimes.
PvdA MP Recourt, in turn, announced via Twitter that Holleeder is being turned into a ,cuddle criminal, because of the attention he receives from the media. ,The upper world should not make the underworld more liberal., By this he means that the underworld, the criminal world, should not be accepted by the upper world. Former prison director and current CDA MP Van Toorenburg announced via Twitter that she does not agree with Holleeder being given a platform as a criminal. However, she does say that she understands people’s curiosity about evil.
,A businesslike and tight interview,
This is what editor-in-chief Carel Cuyl says in an interview with the radio program Stand.nl. According to Cuyl, there is still a lot of uncertainty among the Dutch population about Holleeder’s motives for the crime he committed and how he looks back on it. However, that comment is not entirely correct, the biographical book ,The Heineken kidnapping, by Peter R. de Vries is, as it were, an in-depth interview with Holleeder in which it becomes clear why he committed the crime and how he returned to it after the crime. looks. Whether his opinion about his crime has changed since the book was published will become apparent during the College Tour.
The broadcast
The College Tour will be broadcast on Saturday, October 13, 2012, and only then will it become clear how the public reacts to the criminal. It is possible that after seeing the interview, certain critics will approve of the intention of the program or will condemn it even more.