DUTROUX : THE MISSING PIECES, PART II
After starting with the missing children panic, my research into the missing pieces of the Dutroux case leads me to prostitution networks and their never ending ramifications.
Down the rabbit hole
In the first part of THE MISSING PIECES, I talked about how I wanted to look into the unknown areas surrounding the Dutroux affair. The shadows. The first entry in this series sets the tone for what we’re going to be dealing with. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check it out here :
This time, we’re going to take a look at a story told to us by a retired Belgian gendarme, Marc Toussaint. We’ll go from the dirty 80s in Brussels, in the wake of the Brabant Killers and the Haemers gang attacks, to the X witnesses investigation in the late 90s. Not everything will be covered in this part, PART III will finish the story. If you’re wondering why we’ll cover such a wide variety of cases all at once, it’s because they will assemble, forming an intricate web of people and networks, showcasing how child trafficking and prostitution operated together, culminating in the shadows of the Dutroux-Nihoul affair. That’s why it is such a special story, and one that has stayed unknown in the English language, for a lack of translation. After reading this, the revelation that Dutroux might have just been a cog in a larger machine should come to you as no surprise.
Marc Toussaint worked as a gendarme in Uccle, a municipality of Brussels, Belgium’s capital. During his career, he was at one point part of the Belgian Royal Escort, the horse escort for the Belgian royal family. Toussaint wrote a book with the help of Xavier Rossey, a Belgian journalist. Called Tous manipulés? Avant, pendant, après l’affaire Dutroux (Were we all manipulated? Before, During, After the Dutroux Affair, in English), it is a great read and a great source for the Dutroux case, and I will be quoting it extensively in this piece. It’s the entire base for this story. If the source isn’t mentioned or there isn’t any footnote leading to a specific set of pages, it comes from that book. Toussaint’s sources, if outside of his gendarmerie investigation, will be mentioned. Otherwise, assume everything comes from police reports filed and quoted by Marc Toussaint, in his own book. Also, I mentioned the bit about him working for the Belgian royal family as a gendarme escort simply because Toussaint makes it known in his book that he doesn’t believe the Belgian royal family could have been involved in the Belgian X files, where X witnesses mention one member, former Prince and King, Albert II1. It’s his personal opinion and I disagree, but it doesn’t diminish the quality of his work. Toussaint has his own opinion about the X witnesses as well, we’ll get to talk about it in PART III.
We’ll see how Marc Toussaint’s investigation into the Institut Bizaar, a front for a prostitution network, led him to work clandestinely for the Neufchâteau investigation cell of the Dutroux affair. After the White March of October 20th 1996, Toussaint got involved in the “White Comittees”, a series of local initiatives set up as mostly politically neutral and anti-corruption movements, a continuation of the White March. The goal was to deeply change Belgian society after the Dutroux affair and the numerous missing children cases. They were short lived because of the infighting and the lack of concrete goals or politics, as well as casual citizens leaving after a while, with only a few “die hards” remaining. Not to mention these were independent organisations, and so whoever formed it for their municipality would be in charge, and anybody could set up their chapter, with the parents of missing and dead children not being involved in any way with some of these groups. This also made it where it was easy to infiltrate any White Committee and sow dissent, accusing people of being pedophiles without any proof or simply throwing an egocentric fit.
Stepping stones
Toussaint started as a gendarme in 1986, right after the Brabant Killers shook Belgian society. He joined the Uccle (Brussels) gendarmerie in 1994. His investigation into the world of prostitution networks starts in early 1995, with a man called Farid Riffi. Farid reports to Toussaint that he’s being falsely accused of pimping two women, and so he wants to claim a file against them. One of them is named Bernadette Lepièce. Toussaint thinks this is a ruse to take legal advantage over the girls, and it seems like his intuition is right : the other woman, Sonia has previously reported him as a pimp, and Farid has files opened at other police stations. Toussaint then decides to look into him, learning that Farid’s lawyer is none other than Étienne Delhuvenne, a well known name in the prostitution milieu, but he doesn’t know that yet. Delhuvenne and his client Farid are involved together in a cooperative company, they sell drinks out of a small cabin called the Pavillon Malou, situated in one of Brussels’s parks, near a kids play area. It’s mostly used on weekends and on holidays by the local children and their parents, but Toussaint picks up interesting testimonies about BDSM parties being organized secretly at the cabin. We’ll get back to that in a bit.
Marc Toussaint starts looking into the people close to Farid and Delhuvenne. Toussaint auditions Bernadette Lepièce, mentioned earlier, who had Étienne Delhuvenne as a boyfriend and pimp until she reported him to the police in 1990. Since then, she’s been pressured to stop talking and denouncing him, with Farid harassing her over the phone. Bernadette worked for a very specific prostitution network in Belgium, one active in the 70s and 80s, know as the Fortunato-Montaricourt network, or Le Cercle de Tuna, Tuna’s Circle in English2. It was named after Fortuna “Tuna” Israel and Lydia Montaricourt, the two consecutive owners of this network. A whole article could be written about this specific network and so I’ll keep it concise. The Fortunato-Montaricourt prostitution network was used as a means for a Belgian consortium to secure building contracts in Saudi Arabia3. Called EuroSystem Hospitalier (ESH for short), this consortium4 was looking to win over hospital construction contracts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in the early 70s. With the help of Lydia Montaricourt’s girls easing up the negotiations, in 1975, ESH was chosen and given a 900 million euros contract to build two hospitals in Saudi Arabia. The then Prince Albert II of Belgium was said to have weighted heavily in the discussions with Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia5, having visited the country and presented the ESH project to the Saudi prince in 1975. After the contract was given to ESH, the consortium mysteriously goes bust in July 1979 and the whole project gets cancelled. In the following investigation by Belgium’s tax inspection services, it’s established that ESH gave 225 million of euros of commissions to Belgian intermediaries (that includes possibly Prince Albert) to use their powers to promote the project to the Saudi royal family. It smells of massive scam.
The Director of Human Relations for EuroSystem Hospitalier was none other than Fortunato “Tuna” Israel, a madame6. Tuna Israel had of course absolutely no experience as an HR, but her prostitutes were known to be “orgy specialists”. An enigmatic figure, Tuna Israel was even said to be an intelligence asset7. Her prostitution network was hired across Europe to charm businessmen and politicians on behalf of ESH. Lydia Montaricourt, a prostitute working for Tuna, would later receive Tuna’s contacts books and inherit her network when she became a madame herself. It’s easy to see where this is going. Interrogated by the police in 1979 after a house search, Tuna would say that her role for ESH was :
[…] to find girls to keep the Prince [Albert] and his companions company during their travels abroad. These girls were prostitutes.
The police found a document at Tuna’s house that indicated she had been in contact with Roger Boas (we’ll talk about him later) and gendarmerie general Fernand Beaurir, the highest rank in the service. It later appeared that girls from Tuna’s network were used as company by Paul Vanden Boyenants (we will also get to him later), Roger Boas, and friends at a safari in Kenya - and not any safari, a little get together organised by none other than Adnan Khashoggi8, who owned the Mount Kenya Safari Club9. The Montaricourt-Tuna Israel case was later hushed up10, everyone denying any involvement, with important evidence like Lydia’s Montaricourt client list and her diary going missing, and any cop daring to look deeper into it was moved away from the case. This network was said to be part of the pink ballets11 and the Brabant Killers case, as part of the Pinon affair12. There’s nothing illegal about hiring prostitutes, but doing so in the context of sensitive negotiations, and possibly falling into blackmail territory is where the line gets blurred. Fortunato Israel never was charged and later fled to Malta, with the help of Roger Boas. In 1990, a former prostitute of Tuna’s Circle, Maud Sarr, would come forward and accuse politicians, magistrates, and policemen of participating in sex parties with girls from the network, including minors… But for now, let’s get back to our case at hand.
The tall blonde man
Looking deeper into the Malou, Toussaint learns from the Woluwe (Brussels) police that one of their detectives, Mailleux13, is pretty well acquainted with Étienne Delhuvenne, and that the both of them often share a table at restaurants, accompanied by a man named Roland Potier. Delhuvenne is a very influential man according to Mailleux, and he’s the former lawyer and friend of Belgian gangster Patrick Haemers. Haemers is probably the most notorious Belgian criminal. He’s a good looking, bourgeois, tall, blonde man. He looks straight out of an American gangster movie. He’s known as Le grand blond, or the tall blonde man in English. A criminal organisation established itself around him and was commonly referred to as the “Haemers gang”. Haemers and his crew (which included gangsters Philippe Lacroix and Thierry Smars, and his gangster dad Achille Haemers, but not limited to) were specialists of robbing money transports. Usually non violent, the attacks turned deadly on the 4th of November 1985 in the town of Verviers14, where two postmen were killed by Haemers and his gang. The gendarmes escorting the transport were cuffed, but the two employees inside were killed instantly by the explosive charge used by the gang to get to the money. The timing is interesting as 5 days later, the Brabant Killers would strike for a final time, with their deadliest attack yet, in Alost. There’s an argument to be made that there could be an escalation in both operations, as part of the strategy of tension. Some witnesses of Alost, like victim and survivor David Van de Steen, even recognized Patrick Haemers as part of the Brabant gang leading the assault on the Delhaize that evening15. It’s also interesting to note that if you’ve read about the Brabant Killers, you know that the little money they made off the raids on the supermarkets was very limited, almost superfluous, not matching the deadly and military approaches the Brabant gang employed. Haemers and his crew were making far more money robbing money transports than the average Brabant hit. Another indicator, in my opinion, that there could not have been a monetary incentive behind the Brabant Killers operation.
Before going back to the case at hand here, we need to have a deeper look at Patrick Haemers and his activities in the 1980s, in order to fully grasp who is it exactly that we’re talking about, and how it will link back to this case later on.
VDB, tu ne va pas crever ici!
The Haemers gang16 kept growing in the following years, with Thierry Smars being pushed aside before he died in a suspicious suicide. They were part of the Brussels criminal milieu, meeting at shady spots like the Jonathan17, where that picture of Tuna Israel was taken. Haemers would gain even more notoriety with his final hit. On a January evening in 1989, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Vanden Boyenants18 suddenly disappeared. He’s been kidnapped! All that remains in front of his garage is his smoking pipe, his hearing aid and one of his shoes19. A few days later, newspaper offices across Belgium start receiving written letters from an obscure organisation called Brigades Socialistes Révolutionnaires, or Revolutionary Socialist Brigades in English. No one has ever heard of them before, they seem like a parody of the CCC20. Not to mention their name spells BSR in French, as if poking fun of the gendarmerie’s BSR unit, the Brigade Spéciale de Recherche. They want a ransom for Vanden Boyenants or else he’s not making it out alive. It quickly appeared the BSR was nothing but a fake pseudonym used by Haemers and his gang. The cops made Haemers the number one suspect in the case after the ransom was paid and the money was found on one of Haemers’s associates, Basri Bajrami. Outside of the official investigation, there are reasons to believe the whole kidnapping was planned in advance by VDB and that he used Haemers to execute his plans.
The kidnapping happened right as VDB was about to find out if he was going to face justice again for a massive bribery scandal involving him, then Defense Minister, the Belgian army, and Roger Boas’s ASCO21. Boas was an arms trafficker22 who had close ties to the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency23. With Paul Vanden Boyenants, they were the financiers of a gun magazine called AMI, later renamed Fire!24, a favorite of many people gravitating around the Brabant Killers case and the practical shooting scene. Boas was also the lover of Fortunato Israel, the madame I talked about earlier25. In 1979, through VDB, ASCO had gained a contract worth 600 million of today’s euros to provide 1000 armed tanks to the Belgian army. It was established Roger Boas had bribed Paul Vanden Boyenants to acquire the contract. VDB had managed to avoid prosecution, but Boas was condemned in 1992, and went through 15 months of a suspended prison sentence, before being rehabilitated in 1995. He was even a recipient of the Leopold II Order in 2004. VDB avoided a prison sentence but his hearing in front of the House Prosecution Committee, which happened right as he was kidnapped, was suspended because he “could be dead at this moment”. After VDB was released from his captors, just a month later, there was never any follow up to this procedure. The man designated by the Vanden Boyenants family to bring the ransom money to Geneva, Switzerland, was Jean Nathan26, a Kippur War veteran and Mossad asset. Nathan later told journalist Dirk Leestmans that the ransom money for VDB was provided by “Israeli relations” of his, in exchange for “services rendered to the nation of Israel” by VDB, as a politician.
Allow me to get lighter for a second. The day after Vanden Boyenants was freed, he gave a press conference that quickly became infamous in Belgium for just how funnily eerie and weird it is. The tone employed, the way VDB addressed himself in the third person, his recollection of events with weird details… If you can understand French, it’s a must watch :
Here’s a few excerpts :
I lived in briefs and in a shirt!
They took my tobacco pipe away.
WHO kidnapped me ? If only I knew…
VDB, you’re not going to die here!
I was a victim of the VDB myth. They wanted VDB’s fortune.
[Talking to his captors] I’d like to know by which right you’re allowing yourself to be familiar with me.
[The place I was held at] was further than the north [of France], or if I was in the north, it was pretty far away.
An audio engineer of the press conference, Paul Delnoy, had the bright idea of gathering the sound from it and decided to fuck with it, recording samples over a simple new beat song. It was released under the name Qui..? (Who..?) by Brussels Sound Revolution (playing on the fake name used by Haemers and his gang, Brigades Socialistes Révolutionnaires) and immediately became the number 1 song in Belgium, selling more than 50.000 copies.
After this break and before going back to the case we’re interested in, it’s important to note that Haemers and especially his dad, Achille Haemers, were actually close to the Brussels milieu VDB operated in - the “VDB Connection”, as it was called. Patrick Haemers’s career as a gangster started out as an errand boy for them, delivering dirty cash in Switzerland for the Caisse Privée bank, close to VDB and the Christian Democrats. That’s why it doesn’t really make sense for Haemers to kidnap VDB on his own accord, for monetary reasons, and under the name of a socialist group - he didn’t have any politics, he was a gangster, and one of great use to VDB and his associates, whom he was close to.
La bande à Haemers
After VDB was freed, Haemers became the number one suspect in the kidnapping and immediately went on the run and hid away in Brazil before being snitched on by his dad (Achille) and brother (Éric), who worked as police informants27. During this infiltration, through these informants, the gendarmes learned that behind the gang was “the organisation", a very powerful one, which Patrick Haemers declared to be full of "raging madmen", and that it included in its ranks politicians, lawyers, and doctors. The person who served as a link between this organization and the Haemers gang was Michel Vander Elst, one of Haemers’s lawyers. Curiously enough, Vander Elst was a close friend of another man named Michel, a certain… Michel Nihoul. Nihoul himself was pretty close with the PSC and Vanden Boyenants. Vander Elst would later appear in the Dutroux affair in 1996 as the man who gave a false alibi to cover for Nihoul on the day of the disappearance of Laetitia Delhez… Could these people be part of the “organisation” Haemers was referring to?
The infiltration of the Haemers family’s inner circles led to a 85-page report named “VDBJ”28, made by the two gendarmes working the case. In it, they report about Vanden Boyenants being part of this “organisation”, and that the kidnapping was staged, with their help and Haemers. Quotes from the report :
Patrick allegedly told Achille that he worked for an "organization" and that his services were well paid. The "organisation" took care of renting apartments, and they [the Haemers gang] didn't have to worry about anything. This organization would be composed of prominent people and would have a doctor and a lawyer. They had dangerous political ideas, and Patrick described them as "dangerous lunatics". Patrick himself didn't get involved in politics, "only money matters”. […] According to the informant, VDB also has ties to the organization, and his kidnapping could have been staged. In any case, VDB maintains good relations with his captors.
[…] X18 [Eric Haemers] confirms the existence of the organisation for which Patrick Haemers allegedly works for and tells us about a doctor who allegedly plays a major role in the organisation. Eric Haemers is said to know a lot more about the organization, but he is afraid to speak out.
[…] For eight years, Achille Haemers was an active member of the [Freemason] lodge. After the robbery in Deerlijk, he was put into "sleep" and had to surrender his glove and deposit. At that time, Eric Haemers also became a member of the lodge.
VDB’s lawyers, Jean Paul Dumont and Martial Lancaster (who would also both serve as Michel Nihoul and Madani Bouhouche’s lawyers29) were alleged to have been in contact with Achille Haemers, to tell him about how it was imperative that his son does not have a direct confrontation with VDB, and that he should not be extradited back to Belgium after he was arrested in Brazil. Was Haemers being entrapped by the organisation and VDB after he had served his role? Was he being made a patsy? One of the two gendarmes working the Haemers family informants later told journalist Douglas De Coninck30 that he was under the impression that, for the good of certain Belgian political and judicial circles, Haemers should not have been extradited.
Finally, inside the VDBJ report, we find out that Thierry Smars of the Haemers gang had been contacted by a man who presented himself as a French secret service agent, Roland Bastiani, but who was in fact, Elio Ciolini31. He was supposedly the man who received the money made from the robberies by the gang. Ciolini is a well known character of the Years of Lead in Italy, instigating fake leads after Bologna’s train station attack in 1980. He’s also linked to the P2 lodge32, as well as various intelligence agencies. What interest did he have in the Haemers gang? It’s suspicious that in the context of the Belgian 80s and the Brabant Killers, a man like Ciolini appears. Could it be that the Brabant Killers weren’t the only gang used for purposes beyond robberies? If you consider the CCC, the Haemers gang, and the Brabant Killers as different versions (with different goals, perhaps) of the same method - the strategy of tension, we might have a better understanding of the 1980s in Belgium as les années de plombs, the Years of Lead.
Haemers was finally extradited from Brazil to Belgium in 1990. He was considered a suspect in the Brabant Killers, and made declarations about revealing “all that he knew”. That is before he died in his cell, on May 14th 1993, at the dawn of his trial. He hanged himself. Jean-Paul Dumont, his lawyer, will say that his suicide could have been "provoked" : Haemers was on Rohypnol, and if his treatment was abruptly interrupted, he would have had a lot of difficulty dealing with the withdrawing, and it could have led to his suicide.
Eyes Wide Open
All of this now leads us back to where we were, with gendarme Marc Toussaint and his investigation. Patrick Haemers’s widow, Denise Tyack, a former French prostitute, was now dating Roland Potier, a petty criminal. Mailleux tells Toussaint about the parties held at the Malou, that in 1994 a fetish party was supposed to be held for New Year's Eve but it was canceled last minute by local authorities, and so it had to be moved somewhere else. But other parties followed, and the vibe was always mysterious, à la Eyes Wide Shut, with every attendee wearing a mask or a hood, with leather clothing, and all of them were bourgeois or from noble families, judging from the cars parked out front.
We’re now in June 1995. Toussaint has been interviewing some of the girls hired by Farid who was running the Malou with Delhuvenne. Despite it only really making money during the summer, the place was always hiring new girls : it was a cover for the pimping activities of Farid, who was always seen driving expensive cars and spending absurd amounts of money. He provided the women, and Delhuvenne provided the clients, old wealthy men with a taste for BDSM. Besides Bernadette and Sonia, another girl, Isabelle, stepped up and accused Farid of being a pimp. She said he had tried to make her boyfriend get into his scheme and make money off her, and that even if she filed a complaint against him, he was backed by the local police and “untouchable”. Farid was a close friend of the Forest (Brussels) police commissioner. He also used fake names and adresses to cover his tracks. Isabelle had learned of Farid through his former girlfriend, Nathalie. Both girls spoke of sex parties at the Malou. Nathalie talks about a BDSM event where she gave out drinks as a waitress :
All these people were dressed in leather and latex. […] I saw strange things during that evening. I saw women flirting with several different men. I saw women tied to columns and men walking past to hit them, kiss them.
She does mention the NYE party of 1994, which was finally held in a warehouse in Schaerbeek (Brussels). There are many other parties she mentions, like this shiny science fiction “Star-Trek” themed party… These are all organised by Farid and another man named Guy, they’re all focused on BDSM, they have the same wealthy and 30 to 50 years old attendees, and they wear masks that they never remove.
So far, it looks like Toussaint has stumbled upon the private sex parties of the local bourgeoisie. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these, nothing illegal, but things definitely get weird when a pimp is involved with bringing in young fresh women. The place where these are held, the Malou, is also a curious choice. But this is only the beginning. The next part of this story gets a bit tangled, so pay attention.
A very Bizaar institute
Toussaint meets a former girl of Farid on the tip of a colleague. Also named Nathalie, Nathalie V. was friends with three girls who worked at a bar in Affligem (Brussels). Bea, Soria, and Deborah were all waitresses at the Bubbles Bar, ran by… Farid. Nathalie V. starts working there. The clients of this special bar were “stimulated” with massages by the waitresses while they have their drinks. Farid tells Nathalie V. that he’s looking for women to work in a new facility, that he’s already got 3 others on board. It’s run by a woman named Chantal, her friend Soria has worked for her before. Who’s that woman, Chantal? Chantal Roefs is a madame, who had been to prison for pimping. She’s close to the Fortunato-Montaricourt network. She also owns her own tanning salon operation and runs an escort-girls network. Soria, interrogated by Toussaint, says that Chantal works closely with Farid, who has girls working for both of them in Germany, and they also both drug their own prostitutes to force them to work. He also would provide her regularly with new girls, for a fee.
Chantal Roefs was the owner of and worked at the Body Sun tanning salon in Brussels, at number 144 in Vleurgat Street. Right next door, at number 142, is the Isis, an establishment also known as the Institut Bizaar, a brothel that she operated as well. Nathalie V. and Soria were asked by Farid if they liked BDSM, and if so, he knew a place where they could work, with Chantal, meaning the Institut Bizaar. Chantal has had troubles because she went to prison for pimping and had a police investigation file opened. The Institut Bizaar had to shut down because she couldn’t run it, meaning that it was officially closed, but behind doors, prostitutes were still provided to the clients. It worked with a catalog system, where the client is provided a girl based on what he chose in the catalog, like a blonde, or a brunette. Soria had previously worked as a brunette for Chantal. Chantal also took pride in the fact that she had provided women for important people like celebrity lawyers or a famous Swedish football player, who played for the Brussels club Anderlecht33.
To sum it up, the Malou was used as a cover for pimping operations and as a place to hold BDSM sex parties. Farid Riffi recruited women to work there and then brought them into prostitution. He used these girls for his own network or for Chantal Roefs's brothel, for a fee. Drugs can be used if necessary, to force the girls to work. The clientele is always wealthy, Brussels’s elite, and sadomasochism is their specialty, Delhuvenne being able to help find this specific clientele. But Soria has one big reveal to make to Toussaint : there’s pedophilia involved with Chantal and Farid’s prostitution rings. She tells the story of how on February 12th 1995, at the Institut Bizaar, she saw a young girl come in, brought by Chantal, for a specific client. He wanted a virgin. Chantal said that she was 18, but in reality, she’s only 14. This young girl, named Cindy, had just ran away from her Italian family in Mons, near Charleroi. She met up with a friend of hers, Isabelle (a different one than the one previously mentioned), who’s 17 and dating a 32 years old drug dealer and former pimp named Carlo, and they decide to all go out at a club in Brussels. At the club, Cindy’s friends talk with a few men, including one named Faysal. He’s Farid errand boy. They have a great time, Cindy drinks alcohol for the first time, they go home. Then next morning, Cindy’s friend tells her that she can make a lot of money if she accepts to have sex with an old man. She’s afraid and only accepts because she thinks Isabelle’s boyfriend might beat them up. After she’s brought to the Bizaar by Isabelle and Carlo, Cindy is brought to a private room by Chantal, where she’s raped by a man in his 50s. That’s when Soria finds her, crying in the hallways of the brothel, and notices immediately that she is obviously a minor. A complaint was never filed, and Cindy simply left the Bizaar completely broken and in tears, not even getting the money she was promised for what she was forced to do. Here’s part of Soria’s testimony about Cindy :
[…] Around mid-February, I was working at the Institut Bizaar with my friend Mee-Ai. There, we met a young girl I had never seen before. Her name was Cindy. Chantal brought her to Barbara. Chantal told Barbara that she had a client for Cindy. […] She said she was a virgin and that was what the client was looking for. Barbara said she looked young, but Chantal said she had just turned eighteen. […] Chantal replied that he was paying 120,000 francs and that she was giving Cindy 20,000 francs (respectively 3000 and 500 of today’s euros). […] I know that the client “consumed” her right there. I also saw the client, he was a big, ugly old man. The girl left crying. […] I was moved to see her leave in that state. She kept crying. I tried to comfort her, but she kept sobbing. A week later, I talked to Barbara about it, and she told me that Chantal was crazy, that the girl from last week wasn't eighteen […] but was actually fourteen. […] I was disgusted.
At the end of August 1995, Toussaint and his team find Cindy and bring her in for questioning. She accepts, telling Toussaint that everything Soria told them was true. Her friends are also interrogated, and it’s established that they knew Faysal, Farid’s sidekick. Toussaint establishes a list of the people involved with the Bizaar : there’s Barbara and Raphaelle, two prostitutes who are the “new owners” of the Bizaar after it was forced to close down, they’re subletting it and running it for Chantal Roefs because she legally can’t anymore. They say that Chantal is now back to being a prostitute herself, broke, operating in the Bizaar and a nearby bar called L’Excellence where Farid is often seen hanging out. Her boyfriend is a man named Alain Rekk, director of a garage called Radar, a mysterious company that pops up in the Dutroux-Nihoul affair34. He’s close with Roland Potier, the small time criminal dating Patrick Haemer’s widow, Denise Tyack. Cindy’s friend, Isabelle, says that Chantal was the one who gave her the money when she brought the girl to the Bizaar. She also mentions that her boyfriend Carlo, the pimp, wanted to force her to do it, having asked her to do it before, but then decided that bringing in Cindy instead would solve their problem. Isabelle also identifies the 50 years old man she saw get in and who she’s certain has raped Cindy : it’s Étienne Delhuvenne, judging from pictures she’s shown from Toussaint’s file on the Malou.
Dominoes falling
Based upon the information given to him by Cindy and Isabelle, Toussaint proceeds with the arrestation of Étienne Delhuvenne. Living with his old mother, Delhuvenne reads the arrest warrant outloud to her :
Look at this mom, it’s [Judge] Damien who signed the warrant. And we went out to eat with him, again, that one day…
This mysterious sentence is clearly a hint for the gendarmes proceeding with the arrest that Delhuvenne is very familiar with the judge who ordered his arrest. Such a statement could often be used to dismiss a judge on grounds of legitimate suspicion, but nothing of that sort happens, evidently... At the gendarmerie station, a colleague of Toussaint seems awfully familiar with Delhuvenne too, almost joking with him while everyone else is silent :
And so, Mr. Delhuvenne, having troubles with Bernadette Lepièce ?
He’s obviously referring to the woman who was denouncing Farid and Delhuvenne, though she has nothing to do with the specific case Delhuvenne was brought in for… Very curious indeed. Chantal Roefs denies knowing Delhuvenne but Cindy recognizes him as her rapist and Isabelle is certain to have seen Chantal bring the girl to her room. She also says that Delhuvenne is the man who paid Chantal and went to Cindy’s room. Soria recognizes him as well. After this identification session, Delhuvenne takes one last look at Toussaint and says :
I don't know what's going on, but believe me, Mr. Toussaint, as soon as I leave the judge's office, I'll find you again.
A clear warning. It seems that Mr. Delhuvenne has a lot of friends in the police and among judges.
So, the Institut Bizaar is implicated in pedophilia through at least one case, with this 14 years old girl, Cindy. Étienne Delhuvenne paid 120,000 Belgian francs (3,000 euros) to rape her, he wanted a virgin. Since the brothel was working through a catalog, we can suppose that minors might be part of their catalog, and so this is not an isolated case35. Chantal Roefs, friend of Delhuvenne and owner of the Bizaar, handled the money and promised him a virgin, bringing in a minor through her network. Carlo, who knows Faysal, who is none other than Farid's errand boy, first suggested that his girlfriend Isabelle should be used by Delhuvenne, but she refuses, resulting in Cindy being forced instead. Cindy is taken to Brussels and the Institut Bizaar by her friends, and is then raped and abused by Delhuvenne, Patrick Haemers' former lawyer, who is associated with Farid in a prostitution and BDSM sex party network for the elite of Brussels and Belgium. It is clear now that we are dealing with an organized child abuse network, on top of a prostitution network.
Mysterious calls
At the end of August 1995, Toussaint is surprisingly sidelined and removed from the case, his superior assigning him to administrative tasks. Did he do something wrong? Was it because he looked too deep into this and strings were pulled to sabotage him? The gendarme taking over the case is a "pedophile case specialist" : it couldn’t be further from the truth, the gendarme is simply following orders and showing absolutely no signs of critical thinking. Toussaint continues to consult the Institut Bizaar file in secret, thanks to his colleagues sharing it with him, and he becomes aware of serious dysfunctions that simply cannot be errors, according to him.
The last important inquiry requested by the investigating judge Vandermeesch working the case was to identify incoming and outgoing telephone calls to the numbers of the Bizaar, the Body Sun, and Chantal Roefs’ phones. The slang casually used for this act by the Belgian gendarmerie at that time period was “to establish a zoller”. Quickly, Toussaint noticed something weird : in his request, the investigating judge specifies incoming and outgoing calls coming ONLY from “Zone 02” (Brussels). Cindy comes from Mons, Carlo lives in Morlanwelz, Delhuvenne has a second home in the Namur region, etc. Obviously, you have to look everywhere if you're trying to establish links between the perpetrators and the victim, since many of the people in the case live outside the Brussels area. There was an "order" made followed by a "delivery" in the case of the rape of a young girl in a prostitution ring. There’s a chain of events and people. There are therefore people involved outside Brussels.
Another disturbing detail is the length of time it took to analyze the information contained in this zoller : the inquiry was requested on September 21, 1995, and on October 9, three weeks later, Belgacom36 provided the telephone information. These results were given to the head of the investigation at the Uccle gendarmerie brigade. There were 65 pages to analyze, and these analyses would take until… May 17, 1996. That’s 8 months later. What would the conclusion of the report be after the investigation into the zoller by the gendarmerie?
We are working on identifying the telephone numbers. We have found no usable clues.
Toussaint is infuriated. 8 months to read a 65 pages report and no one has taken the time. If they had, they would have noticed that more than 800 (!) telephone numbers were clearly identified, with some belonging to official Belgian institutions, like
The Ministry of National Defense
The Ministry of the Interior
The Ministry of Finance
The Ministry of the Brussels-Capital Region
The Ministry of the Flemish Community
The Municipal Administration of Molenbeek (Brussels)
The European Affairs Commission
The Embassy of the United States
The Embassy of Morocco
The Embassy of San Marino
The Brussels Gendarmerie
The Brussels Judiciary Police
Several doctors, lawyers, a journalist
RTBF (Belgian public broadcast television)
SNCB (Belgian national railway company)
This alone is enough to make you stop and wonder what could possibly have been the communications made between some of these and a brothel ran by Chantal Roefs. But it gets weirder. Some very worrying child services were also in contact with the Bizaar :
The Association of Parents for the Development of Autistic People (APEPA)
The Office of Birth and Childhood (ONE)
The Federation of Catholic Scouts (FSC)
Administration of Physical Education, Sport and Outdoor Life, under the Ministry of Culture and Social Affairs (ADEPS)
Brussels Municipal Council Youth and Family
IRSA (Royal Institute for the Deaf and Blind) – IMP Prince of Orange
These are mostly organizations that help children and young people, sometimes psychologically or physically weak – it's shocking to see them on a list of incoming and outgoing calls to and from a brothel specializing in BDSM where a child was raped. These organizations may not be connected, it might only be their employees who called or were called, but it's still extremely disturbing and should certainly not lead to establishing that there’s "no usable clues”. And these are all only coming from a small, defined Brussels area… Delhuvenne's statement about the judge and to Toussaint upon his arrest, Toussaint’s removal from the case, the restriction of the phone numbers investigation to the Brussels area, the lack of investigations into the organizations found in the zoller, the 8 months of analysis to reach the conclusion "no usable evidence”… It seemed clear to Toussaint that something was off. The Dutroux affair hadn’t happened yet, we’re still in 1995, but the gendarmerie was already moving in the shadows with the Othello operation in Charleroi. We know that the gendarmerie wanted to be solo on the Dutroux case, saying they wanted to bring down a larger network. Is that why they weren’t communicating anything with the Institut Bizaar ? Toussaint was also reminded of a similar case to this one, the CRIES scandal. It is pretty unknown outside of Belgium and it’s absolutely massive, in every way. Let’s take the time to establish the facts. The acts described in the next three paragraphs are particularly graphic and disgusting, even when just sticking to the facts, and if you wish to, you could skip them entirely without it impacting your reading of this piece at all.
The CRIES scandal
CRIES stands for Center for Research and Information on Childhood and Sexuality (in English) and was founded in 1987, in Belgium. Its founder, Philippe Carpentier, intended to help pedophiles fight their pedophilia. Carpentier had formerly worked as a translator at a police station. But as it turned out, CRIES was in fact an international CSAM distribution network and child prostitution organization37. The CRIES edited a pedophile magazine called L’Espoir (Hope) and it is what led the police towards it. They staked out the entry door of the CRIES and noticed that a condemned pedophile registered in their files was seen entering the premises. After an investigation, 16 different searches were organized in and around the CRIES. 15 people were arrested and a listing of more than 400 clients of the CRIES was acquired. It was filled with adresses of pedophiles and pro-pedophile organisations all around the world. More than 20.000 pictures of children as young as a few months old were seized. Only 20 children were identified in the pictures.
One member of the CRIES, Michel Felu, worked at UNICEF in Brussels, as a sort of “handyman”. He sometimes spent his nights down in the basement of the international organisation. It’s like he lived there. The police searched it and found out that the basement had been used for CSAM38 photo shoots. There was a whole photo development laboratory, a catalogue made from CSAM pictures, as well as a computer full of adresses of children to be sent to pedophiles. Felu was supposedly bringing in children and gaining the trust of their parents by pretending to be giving out computer science lessons in his basement. Others were arrested, like an employee of the Minister of Justice, or a couple who “rented” their handicapped child to members of the CRIES. Another person arrested was Olivier Ralet, a school teacher who had written about arms trafficking as well as Wackenhut and the far right in Belgium39. Ralet photographed minors for the CRIES. In total, 14 people were sentenced to prison, with sentences ranging from 3 to 10 years.
The CRIES network was like an octopus, making its way to the Netherlands, Italy, France, the USA, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and more. 280 members were identified by the Belgian police in foreign countries. But all they could do was share the information with the foreign police services, and so most got away with it.
Trial and tribulations
In January of 1996, Toussaint learns of new developments with Cindy and her family.
We learned that the mother and her daughter [Cindy] no longer reside at home. They are staying at the maternal home in Cuesmes. Cindy's father could no longer bear the tension surrounding his daughter, the threats weighing on her and her family. The parents therefore decided to break up following this very unstable climate.
No follow up was given to this police report besides the fact that tension and threats are mentioned. From whom and why? The gendarmerie doesn’t care to know. At the same time period, Soria and Isabelle stop their collaboration with the gendarmes for the same reason : they’re being threatened. What’s even worse is that later on, in March 1999, in the Étienne Delhuvenne trial for the rape of Cindy, Isabelle will completely disavow her statement about him. She is made to write a 5 pages letter in Delhuvenne’s own lawyer’s office, in his home, and the draft is even found there, in the bin. Bit of an unusual, highly personal and stressful environment to make someone write a letter in. In this letter, she says that the investigators “forced her to testify”, that she was ordered to “sign a statement previously written by the gendarmes and Toussaint”, that she was forced to “recognize Delhuvenne” because a gendarme told her to “look carefully at this picture, because it is him that you will have to recognize, wearing the number 6", and that this whole case was a setup, that she would have been beaten if she had not cooperated with the gendarmes. Upon reading her letter at the trial, here’s what the judge had to say to Isabelle :
Do you realize the seriousness of your remarks? […] You wrote this letter without even speaking to your lawyer. There’s only two possible explanations. Either, as you say, the police forced you. Or it was someone else. Are you afraid of someone?
Isabelle stands by her letter. Chantal Roefs agrees with Isabelle on what she said, it was a setup by Carlo (out of all people) and Bernadette Lepièce, Delhuvenne's former girlfriend. The tribunal’s presiding judge also had something to say about the letter, to Delhuvenne :
Don't you think it's a strange for a lawyer to have a letter of withdrawal written at his own home?
Delhuvenne says he had it written while he was still in jail but he’s lying in a very obvious way, the dates don’t correspond at all.
Cindy doesn’t even show up at the trial. The prosecution's representative considers that the charges are not strong enough to charge Delhuvenne with rape of a minor without Isabelle's testimony, and so, he’s acquitted. But Chantal Roefs and Delhuvenne still remained charged for their involvement in pimping, Delhuvenne receiving a three-year suspended prison sentence40 for it. He appealed, his sentence increasing to three years in prison in 2000. He did not appear at his appeal trial, he opposed it, and dragged out the proceedings until the statute of limitations expired and his sentence was therefore overturned. He was a free man.
I think it’s fair to say the investigation was sabotaged. Same for the trial. Étienne Delhuvenne was prosecuted again in 2003 (forgery in connection with trafficking in CSAM video tapes) and in 2007 (malfeasance in connection with the management of retirement homes) but he remained free, and was never even bothered. We will get back to those CSAM VHS tapes shortly…
Beyond the bizarre
We understand now that the Institut Bizaar was a brothel working as a coverup for a prostitution network involved in pedophilia. We have established that it reached to people like Étienne Delhuvenne, a man close to the Haemers gang and the VDB Connection. We know that Patrick Haemers and his dad, Achille Haemers were definitely involved in criminal activities throughout the 80s. But it won’t be until 1996 and the beginning of the Dutroux affair that we’ll hear about Achille Haemers’s involvement with prostitution and… child trafficking.
Brigitte Jenart, a dentist in Brussels, had her office on the ground floor of rue du Conseil, number 35. According to the Dutroux police files41, Jenart met Annie Bouty, Michel Nihoul’s wife, through a mutual friend. Quickly, Nihoul, Bouty and her children all became clients of the dentist. Nihoul ended up trying to hit on her but was shut down, she says. In the same building, above the dentist’s office, were multiple apartments, including one belonging to a man named Roland Corvillain, on the first floor. Corvillain was accused of pedophilia by his wife, Rita Vetsuypens, for assaulting their 4 children. On the second floor, there was the apartment of Serge Fransevitch, another petty criminal, close friend of Achille Haemers. Frantsevitch was said to be involved in drugs trafficking and had contacts in Colombia, precisely the Medellin cartel, according to the VDBJ report. Those contacts would have helped Patrick Haemers escape before he was extradited, in some grandiose plot. It never happened. What we know though, is that Corvillain and Frantsevitch knew each other and ran a company called Logitel, who’s office was in the same building, at Conseil Street, number 35. Frantsevitch was an adept of shell companies, and ran some with Étienne Delhuvenne, who was also a friend of his. These shell companies were effectively hiding the income made from the sale of CSAM VHS tapes. Those companies include Logitel, Clairbel, Montex. The last one, Montex, belonged to Achille Haemers until Fransetvitch bought all his shares in 1989.
Fransetvitch had previously been in prison for fraud, arson, and usurpation. He was known by authorities to be involved with CSAM and the money laundering of the money made from selling said CSAM. Corvillain was later questioned by the police when his wife revealed that he had abused their children. He said that Frantsevitch and Michel Nihoul were business partners. His wife Rita added that Logitel, ran by Corvillain and Fransevitch, served as a cover for a CSAM business in which Nihoul was involved. She’d hear them talk in their apartment :
They were talking about white horses, brown horses, young horses, expensive but good and young. […] It is clear to me that they were not talking about horses, but about young children.
But those were not the only people seen at this apartment. Brigitte Jenart, the dentist, and Rita Vetsuypens, Corvillain’s wife, would both make what is sensibly the same claim to the police, when they were questioned for the Dutroux case. They said that during the 80s, there were meetings attended by Achille Haemers, Michel Nihoul, Roland Corvillain, Serge Fransetvitch, Robert Darville42 (the arms dealer of the Haemers gang, we’ll get to him) AND Marc Dutroux, at this apartment at the building number 35 of Conseil Street. Nihoul’s the boss of this little gang, and Dutroux only appears from time to time. This obviously causes a timeline problem for Dutroux and Nihoul, as both say they met around 1995, and not the 1980s. There’s a few other hints that Dutroux might have known Nihoul and this small gang during the 80s : he often ice skated at the Poséidon ice rink in Woluwe (Brussels) and coincidentally, Achille and Patrick Haemers owned a store there, called Montex-Sport. There are also these witnesses testimonies that said that Dutroux was often seen hanging around Nihoul, Haemers, and Fransewitch at the Chez Rosa bar, in the 80s. It’s important to note that Marc Dutroux was in jail from 1986 to 1992, and so the late 80s are off the table. But we know that Dutroux kidnapped and/or abused 14 girls and women from 1979 to 198543, as we’ve established in the previous installment of the Missing Pieces. It’s not far fetched to imagine he could have known these people, took part in their CSAM distribution network, learned from them, before starting an operation on his own upon his release in 1992.
Jenart, the dentist, has a few more interesting stories to tell the police. She had a relationship with a friend of Michel Nihoul, a man named Juan Borges. He was also a former lover of Annie Bouty, Nihoul’s wife. Borges was an arms dealer and had been close to a number of intelligence agencies, including the Mossad. He ran a shell company called Candy Medical, with the company seat being Conseil Street, number 35. Again. And he was involved in a myriad of NGOs, like Annie Bouty’s Cadreco, specialized in legal advice, which facilitated the sale of missiles to the ayatollahs' regime in Iran44. Then there’s the fact that Nihoul and Bouty were involved into human trafficking through various NGOs and companies : Bouty, specialized in immigration, operated trafficking from African countries like Nigeria to Belgium, through a cult named the Celestian Church of Christ, which was under surveillance by Belgian intelligence services at the time. Brigitte Jenart said that Bouty took in children from pregnant mothers who were in Belgium illegally and arranged for their adoption, without the mother even being able to touch the child. Bouty also made Jenart sign certificates that gave her legal custody of forty Zairians and Nigerians. Brigitte Jenart, who would have liked to say more, unfortunately committed suicide on April 5, 1998. According to her mother, the day before, she simply seemed “normal”. There was no autopsy of her body.
There’s one last troubling detail : Marc Toussaint mentions in his book that journalist Douglas De Coninck, author of 30 témoins morts (30 dead witnesses)45, a book about the numerous dead witnesses related to the Dutroux affair, had a chapter talking about Brigitte Jenart in his book, but it was removed or forgotten from the French translation by the editor, seemingly for “no particular reason”. I’ve read the book and it’s true, the chapter is missing. It was later translated by readers online46 but not shared officially, nor was the French version updated to feature the removed chapter.
And so, this is how we start with an investigation into a local pimp in 1995, and we end up with Marc Dutroux and Michel Nihoul being part of a CSAM network in the 1980s. This building at 35, Conseil Street in Brussels seems to be a hub for this polycriminal milieu : arms trafficking, money laundering, pedophilia, CSAM distribution, human trafficking, intelligence, etc. All of that is discussed here. We can establish links between Achille Haemers, Serge Frantsevitch, Michel Nihoul, Annie Bouty, Juan Borges, Roland Corvillain, Étienne Delhuvenne and possibly even Dutroux, among others. They had their own fields of activity, but were linked to each other through shared criminal activities and personal relationships. The testimonies of Jenart and Vetsuypens were completely ignored after the Belgian X witnesses investigation fell through and Jacques Langlois, the prosecutor, focused on establishing Marc Dutroux as nothing but a “lone predator”.
Loose ends
Before moving on to Marc Toussaint’s involvement with the Neufchâteau investigation of the Dutroux affair, there are two people that need to be addressed : Roland Potier and Roger Darville.
Potier, the boyfriend of Denise Tyack, Patrick Haemers’s widow, was a dear friend of Étienne Delhuvenne, himself friend and lawyer of Patrick Haemers. It’s no surprise then that Roland Potier was identified as the car supplier of the Haemers Gang by X58, aka Éric Haemers, Patrick’s brother, in the VDBJ report. Potier and Tyack owned a bar named Bird’s Nest Tavern in Brussels, where Chantal Roefs was a regular and a friend of Tyack, according to Roefs herself, in a police audition made in August of 1995. It also seems like Potier was running his own prostitution operation. At his address, Potier registered his own real estate company, X-Car Immo, as well as the cleaning company Omnium Maintenance, ran by someone else. Marie France F., a prostitute, was working for Chantal Roefs as a “cleaner” through Omnium Maintenance. The cleaning company rents its premises to the real estate company, both being located at the same address, Potier’s house. The employees of the cleaning company are prostitutes. Potier protected himself from being accused of pimping by not being involved with Omnium Maintenance other than just renting to them…
Brigitte Jenart and Rita Vetsuypens mentioned Roger Darville as part of the people attending the meetings of this group involved in CSAM distribution at the apartment of the building number 35 of Conseil Street. In February of 1985, Edmond Vissers, 57 and Maria-Louiza Vanruyskensvelde, 56 are found shot dead47. She was a prostitute who worked out of an RV at a “camping”, a spot where campers can rent out cabins or park their own vehicles. Maria-Louiza mostly advertised in newspapers. Vissers was still holding his cigarette and his lighter when his body was found. His wife was killed 30 minutes after him, indicating she was possibly questioned. Inside the RV, a business card was found : it says Robert Darville, it’s his weapons shop in Ixelles (Brussels). Darville was pretty lowkey in Brussels before he was revealed as the arms dealer of the Haemers gang after VDB’s kidnapping, only being known by local cops as an attendee of the jam orgy nights at the Jonathan… What was his business card doing here?
Vissers and Vanruyskensvelde were involved in the world of prostitution and orgies. Vissers was the owner of a sex club in Brussels, near the headquarters of the gendarmerie. One of Vissers’s favorite activities was taking pictures of the people attending the orgies at his sex club. He kept a ton of these negatives as part of his own collection. They were found after a search of the house of the camping site owner, Jean-Marie V. A lot were missing, and after analysis, none were believed to showcase minors. Vissers worked for a man named Robert M., finding apartments and places where clients could have some peace and quiet with the prostitutes. When the police searched Robert M.’s home, they found a diary full of interesting names : financiers, diplomats, European commissioners, Belgian nobility, you name it. Smelling blackmail again. Under the letter D, two references are filed :
Dolo Michel 734.43.78, 145 rue des Atrébates
Dolo 649.22.09
The Dolo was another one of these infamous clubs where orgies were part of the folklore. First named Atrébates, it became The Dolo after Michel Nihoul, a regular, bought the operation from Michel Forgeot.
The only two suspects in this case were gendarmes who were part of the Groupe Diane48. One was accused of making a false alibi for his colleague and tampering with evidence from the case. The gendarme accused, “M.D.”, went to the couple’s van the night they died, at around 8pm. He said that he found Maria-Louiza’s prostitution ad in a newspaper but thought she was too old and so he left, at midnight. There’s a time gap of 4 hours… He’s the last one to have seen the couple alive.
While it only mentions Robert Darville, this story showcases the murky, dirty world of the 80s in Brussels : they truly were the decade of sex and blackmail. Everything in the Belgian capital seemed to be revolving around both…
Neufchâteau and the X witnesses
Marc Toussaint first became involved with the investigation of Neufchâteau49 in 1997 through an informant named Claude Vankeerbergen, a taximan who worked for The Dolo. Claude knew the original owners Dolores Bara (aka Dolo) and Michel Forgeot, but also Michel Nihoul. According to him, Nihoul’s involved in “pedophile networks” with his lawyer friend Edouard Vanhuynegem, aka Doudou. In January 1997, white Mercedes cars were spotted taking pictures of children in front of schools. It was a real panic at the time, it had been going on since 1995, and these white Mercedes were believed to be part of a network taking pictures of kids to build a catalog and then kidnap them50. Witnesses could give out the license plate of one of these cars and it matched the car of Guy Vankeervergen, the brother of Claude, Toussaint’s informant. Toussaint happened to be at the gendarmerie station when the fax arrived, and he was the one who established they were brothers because he knew one of them.
He finds out they live at the same place. A search warrant is established. Information is exchanged between the Neufchâteau cell and all the various gendarmerie units investigating the “white Mercedes” gang. A meeting is called in February of 1997. Yves Zimmer51 of the judiciary police is there. He immediately went to Toussaint and asked him if he knew a man named Tino. He tried getting details on him from the Uccle police station, where Toussaint worked, but kept getting told nobody knew him. But he’s in luck : Tino is Toussaint’s most important informant in the Brussels criminal milieu. And so Toussaint makes Zimmer and Tino meet later in February. The two had met each other before, when Tino was in jail and had talked to him about being part of a pedophile network in his youth, but Zimmer had lost track of him. Tino had told Zimmer about how he had been “placed into a childcare home of the O.N.E.52” and was regularly taken from that home to be abused in orgies. When Zimmer got assigned to the Neufchâteau cell, he remembered Tino, and now Toussaint reunited the two. Tino was going to become an X witness, with VM1 as his codename (Victime Masculine 1, masculine victim one). Toussaint was asked to unofficially override his gendarmerie jurisdiction and work for the Neufchâteau cell as Tino’s handler, which he accepted. Toussaint was going to have to look into Tino’s story and past, as well as protect him if threats appeared.
This is where we end this story… for now. I don’t want to bloat this piece too much, and there’s still so much more we’re going to look into. In PART III, we’ll discover how Marc Toussaint manages his time as an unofficial investigator of the X witnesses, discuss similar European cases to the story of Tino, Toussaint’s informant, as well as establish more links between the criminal milieu of Brussels in the 1980s and the Dutroux-Nihoul affair in the late 90s. As always, thank you for reading this, and feel free to ask any questions.
IRC_NIC
All books and articles excerpts translated by myself.
Most of the content of this article comes from the book Marc Toussaint and Xavier Rossey. (2010) Tous manipulés ? Avant, pendant, après l’affaire Dutroux, Brussels : Bernard Gilson.
Albert was accused in the pink ballets and by X Witness X3 (See Nicolas Jean and Lavachery Frédéric. (2001) Dossier Pédophilie. Le scandale de l’affaire Dutroux, Paris : Flammarion, pp. 211-221). Michel Nihoul mentioned seeing a picture of Albert II having sex with a minor at the Mirano club in a recorded conversation (in French) :
Albert was also involved with the prostitution network I’m about to evoke.
Tuna’s Circle was an extension of the Madame Claude prostitution network, used to blackmail politicians in France in the 60s and 70s. Pictures of officials from the French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s political party with girls from Madame Claude were retrieved by the French police. See Philippe Brewayes and Jean-Frédérick Deliège. (1992) de Bonvoisin et Cie. De Liège à Bruxelles, les prédateurs de l’état, Brussels : Éditions EPO, p. 136.
The hospitals were military installations to serve for the Saudi Arabian National Guard. See de Bonvoisin et Cie. De Liège à Bruxelles, les prédateurs de l’état, ibid, pp. 134-135.
Composed of multiple investors, the EuroSystem Hospitalier consortium was mainly invested in by the Société Générale, through their Poudreries Réunies de Belgique filial. See de Bonvoisin et Cie. De Liège à Bruxelles, les prédateurs de l’état, ibid
“Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (1920, 1921, 1923 – 1 August 2005) was King and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia from 13 June 1982 until his death in 2005. Prior to his ascension, he was Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia from 1975 to 1982. He was the eighth son of King Abdulaziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia.” (Wikipedia)
“A woman who runs a brothel, particularly one that specializes in finding prostitutes for rich and important clients.” (Wiktionary)
The origin of the use of the word madame in that sense stems to the Madame Claude network, which I mention in the first footnote.
Not much is know about Fortunato Israel’s life. She was born in Egypt, in a Jewish community, could speak Arabic, English, French, Dutch and Hebrew. She moved to the Netherlands where she married and acquired the Dutch nationality, and worked as a flight attendant for the italian airline Alitalia. She then divorced and moved to Brussels. She has been involved in prostitution since her early 20s, and it’s very likely she partook in blackmail and had ties to the Mossad, through Roger Boas. See René Haquin. “RIEN DANS LES PAGES ROSES DU RAPPORT BANDITISME-TERRORISME” Le Soir, May 8 1990.
“Adnan Khashoggi was a Saudi businessman and arms dealer known for his business dealings, extensive geopolitical influence, and opulent lifestyle, which earned him the moniker "The Great Gatsby of the Middle East”. During his peak in the early 1980s, Khashoggi's net worth was estimated at around $4 billion, amassed through his pivotal role as an intermediary between Western defense companies and the Saudi government.” (Wikipedia)
Jeffrey Epstein is said to have worked for Adnan Khashoggi in Africa :
According to his former friend the journalist Jesse Kornbluth, in the mid-1980s Epstein said he “worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators” and occasionally subcontracted to those same autocrats to “help them hide their stolen money.” A source who spoke with journalist Vicky Ward said one of Epstein’s clients was the late Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal who helped smuggle cash for the Marcos family out of the Philippines. In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland for concealing assets and later faced fraud and racketeering charges in the U.S. (He was later acquitted). That year, he sold his 282-foot yacht to the Sultan of Brunei, who soon flipped it to Donald Trump. —Matt Stieb
See this New York Magazine Intelligencer article.
Robert Maxwell also bought his infamous Lady Ghislaine yacht from the Khashoggi family :
“Dancing Hare (formerly Lady Ghislaine and Lady Mona K) is a superyacht built by Amels in 1986. Built for Emad Khashoggi, it was then purchased, also in 1986, by Robert Maxwell, who died by drowning whilst cruising on the yacht off the Canary Islands.” (Wikipedia)
Home of the infamous “Safari Club” :
“The Safari Club was a covert alliance of intelligence services formed in 1976 that ran clandestine operations around Africa at a time when the United States Congress had limited the power of the CIA after years of abuses and when Portugal was dismantling its colonial empire in Africa.” (Wikipedia)
This is what the second parliementary inquiry into the Brabant Killers had to say about the Fortunato-Montaricourt prostitution network :
[…] The existence of “pink ballets” has indeed been confirmed – at least in the 1980s – but without the involvement of minors ever being proven. […] The findings made concerning the way in which the cases were handled […] are of such a nature that “protections” cannot be excluded. […] Thus, in the “Montaricourt” file, there is no evidence relating to research into the presence of a minor who may have been active in the network. The rogatory commission to investigate safes abroad was not executed. Not all the seized documents were filed with the court registry. Also noted is the disappearance of an album of photos of call girls, a file of the gendarmes in charge of the case, as well as a diary containing the names of prominent people. Finally, this “Montaricourt” file was handled with extreme speed. The “[Fortunato] Israel” case was also the subject of special treatment and resulted in a rapid closure. We are also witnessing the disappearance of a certain number of pieces of evidence taken during searches, in particular a seating plan including the names of one or more personalities. Finally, we note the lack of rigor in the investigation regarding [Fortunato] Israel’s relations with certain individuals. It is surprising that, in the investigation conducted in the “Eurosystem Hospitalier” case, a closure without further action was decided quickly while an investigative order was yet to be executed. […] The commission finally recalls the role played by prosecutor Deprêtre in the investigation of certain cases. It was Mr. Deprêtre who, in his capacity as first deputy, had the Fortunato Israël case closed. The commission considers that the cases in question were not handled normally. […]
Report of the second parliamentary inquiry into the Brabant killings, p. 106, October 17 1997. You can download the PDF here.
Les ballets roses (“pink ballets” in English) is the term used in Belgium to refer to sex parties and orgies with minors, inspired by a 1959 French scandal :
“The ballets roses ("pink ballets"), also known as the ballets roses affair), was a sex abuse scandal that was publicised in 1959 in France. In a fashionable country house near Paris, the Pavillon du Butard in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, belonging to the National Assembly, a group of girls aged 15 to 17 performed "ballets" attended by prominent figures of the political and social worlds, notably, André Le Troquer, at the time president of the National Assembly. The performances were alleged to have ended in orgies.” (Wikipedia)
The term was later reused every time a similar story emerged, with the alternative “blue ballets” being used when it was about the abuse of young boys.
The Pinon affair is the story of a man named André Pinon, a doctor, who decided to divorce from his wife, Josiane Jeunniau, in 1979. This story took place in Walloon Brabant, the province where the Brabant Killers would later strike. Pinon thought he could get an easier divorce deal if he could prove that his wife was cheating on him like he suspected, and so he hired a private detective, Bob Louvigny, to stake her out. That’s when he found out that she was spending her evenings at one of his colleague’s house. It turns out that select sex parties were taking place in his house, as well as other villas and apartments all around the Brabant province and Brussels, with minors involved, and the alleged presence of officials, like a former prime minister (Paul Vanden Boyenants), lawyers, magistrates, doctors, land developers (Charly de Pauw), even possibly a member of the royal family (Albert II).
Pinon managed to record his wife admitting to these parties with the help of Louvigny, but then his house was broken into - but they did not find the tape. It was also found out that two of the minors who were abused at those parties had died and their deaths were covered by the people attending, pulling some strings. Pinon went to a left wing publication called POUR to publish his story but right before it was released, the headquarters of POUR were burned down by Flemish neo-nazi elements of the Vlaams Militanten Orde, possibly tied to Westland New Post.
The Pinon affair would later become a sort of recurrent boogeyman of the Belgian years of lead (reappearing later on with the Dutroux case), with many of the people involved, like Paul Latinus of the Westland New Post, claiming to owning a copy of the “Pinon file”, which essentially is all the evidence that André Pinon accumulated in his private investigation. There were additional pieces of evidence that vanished from the Pinon file, like pictures or rumored tapes of these pink ballets parties. The Pinon affair emerged right before the Brabant Killers started, and it was thought that the sexual blackmail these Brabant bourgeois were exercising on each other might be the reason behind some of the first wave attacks, some of them looking like direct hits, like Jacques Fourez and Elise Dewit.
The “Pinon file” (at least part of it) was leaked in 2009 as part of a larger release about Paul Latinus on Wikileaks. It can be downloaded on the Wikileaks website here.
For more, see Hugo Gijsels. (1990) L’enquête. 20 années de déstabilisation en Belgique, Brussels : La Longue Vue, p. 153-176.
Mailleux is a fake name. The name of this judiciary police officer was changed in Toussaint’s book, his real name is unknown.
Marc Hildesheim. “Il y a 30 ans, deux postiers étaient tués par la bande de Patrick Haemers” RTBF, November 5 2015.
David Van De Steen & Annemie Bulté. (2011) Ne tirez pas, c’est mon papa! Un survivant des tueries du Brabant raconte, Paris/Brussels : Éditions Jourdan, pp. 206-207.
This documentary in French (you can turn on auto-translated subtitles on YouTube) is a great watch on the Haemers gang :
The Jonathan was a club where girls would entertain Brussels’s finest : gangsters, policemen, and far right sympathizers. The club security was ran by the Front de la Jeunesse. Pictures were taken at some of the events, like the infamous “jam orgies”, where girls would push clients in a giant pool of jam, or pretend wrestle for their entertainment. See Douglas De Coninck, Annemie Bulté and Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck. (1999) Les dossiers X. Ce que la Belgique ne devait pas savoir sur l’affaire Dutroux, Brussels : Éditions EPO, p. 186.
Paul Vanden Boyenants (born in 1919 and died in 2001) was a Christian Democrat politician in Belgium. His name has been mentioned in many cases, from the Brabant Killers to the Pink Ballets, all the way to the Dutroux Affair and the X witnesses. VDB for short, he was twice Prime Minister (1966-68 and 1978-79), multiple times Minister, and he headed the CEPIC (CEntre Politique des Indépendants et Cadres chrétiens) , the conservative right wing inside the PSC (Parti Socialiste Chrétien, the Christian Democrat party). CEPIC was close to anti-communist movements across the world, like the Cercle des Nations and the World Anti Communist League, and through their treasurer Baron Benoît de Bonvoisin (and other members as well), it financed the Belgian far right, like the Front de la Jeunesse militia and their political equivalent Parti des Forces Nouvelles, as well as the Nouvel Europe Magazine and their NEM-Clubs. VDB and Bonvoisin were said to be part of Opus Dei. VDB was also accused of being part of a coup attempt in Belgium, called Opération Bleue. If you want a full breakdown of VDB, CEPIC and their ties to the Belgian fascist underworld, check out the Belgian X-Files ep.4 on Ghost Stories For The End Of The World. See also Hugo Gijsels. (1990) L’enquête. 20 années de déstabilisation en Belgique, Brussels : La Longue Vue, pp. 217-232.
René Haquin and Pierre Stéphany. (2005) Les grands dossiers criminels en Belgique, Brussels : Éditions Racine, p. 288.
“Cellules Communistes Combattantes (CCC; Communist Combatant Cells, also known as Fighting Communist Cells) was a Belgian communist urban guerrilla organization.” (Wikipedia)
It’s speculated that the CCC were infiltrated by Belgian intelligence and Gladio elements and were part of the same strategy of tension as the Brabant Killers, only explicitly made to be left wing in their politics and their actions. They set up more than 30 bombings, hitting NATO and American installations throughout Belgium, only killing two firemen on accident. There are questions about how they could have accessed some of the NATO installations plans. Weapons stolen from Vielsalm’s Belgian army barracks (after it was attacked as part of a rogue NATO Oesling 84 exercise which had gone array) were also found in one of their weapon caches. Only lasting a year before the leaders of the communist guerilla movement were arrested, funnily enough, in a Belgian fast food chain restaurant (Quick, similar to McDonald’s), the CCC were also a complete success for the gendarmerie - the terrorists were found and dealt with, in complete contrast with what happened with the first wave of the Brabant Killers in 1982-1983, and then the second wave hitting right as the CCC bombings stopped in 1985. The hunt for the CCC also served the gendarmerie and the Belgian intelligence agency, the Sûreté de l’État, to map out the Belgian left wing in a way it had never been done before, when a massive crackdown on left wing organisations (some you’d barely call left-y) was launched with the Mammoth Operation, in October of 1984. 120 house searches were made, none of it leading to the CCC, only to a juicy amount of agendas, adresses, and name files on almost every left wing organisation in the country. See Hugo Gijsels. (1990) L’enquête. 20 années de déstabilisation en Belgique, Brussels : La Longue Vue, pp. 233-246
ASCO was an arms company and a minority shareholder of EuroSystem Hospitalier. See de Bonvoisin et Cie. De Liège à Bruxelles, les prédateurs de l’état, ibid, p. 135
According to Belgian journalist Serge Dumont, Roger Boas used his filial ASCO Malta to provide guns to Iran during the embargo in the 1980s, as part of Iran-Contra. Contracts and bills were retrieved. See Walter De Bock and Jean-Charles Deniau. (1988) Des armes pour l’Iran, Paris : Éditions Gallimard.
See Marc Toussaint and Xavier Rossey. (2010) Tous manipulés ? Avant, pendant, après l’affaire Dutroux, Brussels : Bernard Gilson, p. 86.
Fire! was later sold to Faez Al Ajjaz, a Saudi intelligence/CIA asset working undercover as a journalist in Brussels, and financier of Paul Latinus's paramilitary neo-nazi group Westland New Post. See René Haquin. (1985) Des taupes dans l’extrême-droite. La Sûreté de l’État et le WNP, Antwerp/Brussels : EPO/Éditions Vie Ouvrière, pp. 74-78.
After the ESH fiasco, Roger Boas hired his mistress Tuna as a “decorator” in various companies. de Bonvoisin et Cie. De Liège à Bruxelles, les prédateurs de l’état, ibid, p.135
Jean Nathan, a business man and close friend of Paul Vanden Boyenants, shared a Swiss bank account with him. The money on that account was used to “finance the travel of African Jews to the State of Israel to settle”. See René Haquin and Pierre Stéphany. (2005) Les grands dossiers criminels en Belgique, Brussels : Éditions Racine, p. 297.
We know this because in the police files, the informants are referred to as X18 and X58. The cops used the basic “X” designation for an anonymous informant and then followed it by 2 numbers which correspond to the name initials of the informant, based on the order of the letters in the alphabet : Achille Haemers aka A and H or 1 and 8, and Éric Haemers aka E and H or 5 and 8.
René Haquin. “BOUHOUCHE PARLE A SES AVOCATS” Le Soir, October 30 1989.
Douglas De Coninck is a Belgian journalist who has written two major books on the Dutroux case, one on the Belgian X files and the other on the 30 dead witnesses :
Douglas De Coninck, Annemie Bulté and Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck. (1999) Les dossiers X. Ce que la Belgique ne devait pas savoir sur l’affaire Dutroux, Brussels : Éditions EPO.
Douglas De Coninck. (2004) 30 témoins morts, Wavre : Éditions Mols.
De Coninck has also written articles on both the Brabant Killers and the Dutroux affair. He is one of the most reliable sources on both cases.
Most of what is known about Elio Ciolini comes from the VDBJ report and the “Godbille file”, a report written by Belgian magistrate Jean-François Godbille (you can access it on the Internet Archive, but it’s in French). Here’s what Godbille says about Ciolini :
The person concerned [Ciolini] is known to the Italian judiciary as a member of the P2 lodge and for having denounced the extreme left to the Italian magistrates in charge of the investigation into the attack at Bologna station which left 85 dead on 2 August 1980.
The gendarmes writing the VDBJ report got in contact with Philippe Lacroix of the Haemers gang, as well as the private detective Bob Louvigny (see the previous instalment of the Missing Pieces). Here’s a summary of what’s mentioned about Ciolini in the VDBJ report :
[…] According to Bob LOUVIGNY, CIOLINI had contacts with the Israeli embassy (MOSSAD). […] CIOLINI would have a contact address in ARGENTINA, province of BUENOS AIRES. […] Thierry [Smars]’s behavior began to change around July 1985, when he met Ciolini. Ciolini was allegedly part of a far-right group with plans for the Franco-Spanish border. Ciolini was the founder of the detective agency “S.I.S.”.
Walter De Bock (Belgian journalist) and Denise Tyack (Haemers’s wife) both accused Ciolini of being a CIA asset.
The P2 (Propaganda Due) lodge refers to scandal surrounding the Masonic lodge Propaganda Due in Italy in 1981 following the reveal of a list of members containing numerous figures in positions of power and in intelligence services. The P2 lodge was accused of participating, along with the Gladio network, in what we refer to as the “strategy of tension” in Italy. There is much more to say about the P2 lodge that we can’t talk about here and if you’re interested, check out this book by Daniele Ganser :
Daniele Ganser. (2004) NATO's Secret Armies. Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, London : Routledge.
You can also check out the BBC documentary Timewatch : Operation Gladio.
By deduction, it could be Pär Zetterberg.
Radar was a car breakdown company and garage ran by Alain Rekk and Daniel Barre. Both owners were familiar with Nihoul. They met when Nihoul was a radio host at Radio Activité, around 1992. According to Rekk, Nihoul bought a Mercedes and rented a Chevrolet Impala from Radar. Barre and Rekk seemed to be regulars at The Dolo, like Nihoul. In 1996, when Marc Dutroux was supposedly taking care of the repairs on Michel Nihoul’s Audi 80 vehicle, he brought it to the Radar garage.
See the Dutroux dossier summary on Wikileaks, a compilation of police files from the case.
In an interview with the Dossier Secrets d'États magazine, Marc Toussaint said “there were rumors” about potential “other minor abuse cases” at the Institut Bizaar.
See Dossier Secrets d'États 10, August 2010.
For the next 3 paragraphs on CRIES, see Michel Bouffioux and Jean-Pierre De Staercke. (1994) Appelez-moi Elvira… Traite des femmes et réseaux de pédophilies en Belgique francophone. Enquête et témoignages, Brussels : Éditions Luc Pire, pp. 129-135.
Child Sexual Abuse Material, or CSAM for short. Imagery, pictures or videos.
“Wackenhut was founded in 1954 by former FBI agent George Wackenhut and three partners as Special Agent Investigators Inc.. Early board members included individuals with ties to the anti-communist John Birch Society. […] Wackenhut has a long history of working with the U.S. government and military. The company recruited extensively from the military and intelligence communities. Many former CIA, FBI and other government officials have served on the company's upper levels over the years.” (Wikipedia)
Wackenhut had installed a branch in Belgium, ran by Jean-Francis Calmette, a French self defense instructor, member of the Front de la Jeunesse far-right militia. Calmette had been part of the Organisation Armée Secrète (far-right terrorist group) in France, as well as an instructor for the Belgian elit gendarmerie unit Groupe Diane. Marcel Barbier, member of the Front de la Jeunesse and Westland New Post worked for Wackenhut in Brussels, where they served as security guards at a mall but were fired after beating up people.
See Guy Bouten. (2020) Tueurs du Brabant. La CIA, la Sûreté de l'État, Bouhouche, Beijer, Beuckels, et les autres, Paris : La boîte à Pandore, pp. 71-75.
De Liège à Bruxelles, les prédateurs de l’état, ibid, pp. 149-150
La rédaction. “Retour sur les tueries du Brabant : D'un vol d'arme à Dinant à la tuerie d'Alost (série 1/3)” Le Soir, May 16 2014.
Wackenhut pops up in The Octopus story (Danny Casolaro), see the 14 episodes of The Octopus series on Ghost Stories For The End Of The World. The company also did security for work Area 51 (See Wendy S. Painting. (2016) Aberration in the Heartland of the Real. The Secret Lives of Tim McVeigh, Walterville : Trine Day, p. 496), as well as nuclear weapons testing sites.
“A suspended sentence is a sentence on conviction for a criminal offence, the serving of which the court orders to be deferred in order to allow the defendant to perform a period of probation. If the defendant does not break the law during that period and fulfills the particular conditions of the probation, the sentence is usually considered fulfilled. If the defendant commits another offence or breaks the terms of probation, the court can order the sentence to be served, in addition to any sentence for the new offence.” (Wikipedia)
The Dutroux dossier summary on Wikileaks, a compilation of police files from the case.
Darville was also a close friend of Madani Bouhouche and Juan Mendez, according to the VDBJ report.
See this Le Parisien online article as well as Nicolas Jean and Lavachery Frédéric. (2001) Dossier Pédophilie. Le scandale de l’affaire Dutroux, Paris : Flammarion, pp. 24-31 and René-Philippe Dawant. (1997) Marc Dutroux. Le dossier, Brussels : Éditions Luc Pire, pp. 40-50.
From : Douglas De Coninck. (2004) 30 témoins morts, Wavre : Éditions Mols.
As an agent of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, [Juan Borges] was involved in arranging a contract for the delivery of 6,000 TOW missiles to the ayatollahs' regime in Iran, worth $83 million. Legal advice was provided by Cadreco, a company founded by Annie Bouty and Juan Borges. At the time, Brussels was a hub for arms trafficking to Iran, through which the Americans and Israelis hoped to weaken Saddam Hussein's position. All this only came to light in late 2002, following the extradition to Belgium of Belgian arms trafficker Jacques Monsieur, who had been detained for a long time in Iran.
Douglas De Coninck. (2004) 30 témoins morts, Wavre : Éditions Mols.
For the following paragraphs regarding the double murder, see Douglas De Coninck, Annemie Bulté and Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck. (1999) Les dossiers X. Ce que la Belgique ne devait pas savoir sur l’affaire Dutroux, Brussels : Éditions EPO, pp. 185-188.
The Dutroux investigation cell was established in August of 1996 in the town of Neufchâteau because it’s where the case started : Laetitia’s disappearance in Bertrix, near Neufchâteau, led to the discovery of Dutroux’s involvement with Sabine, Laetitia, An, Eefje, Julie and Mélissa. Local prosecutor Michel Bourlet and investigating judge Jean-Marc Connerotte were in charge of the investigation until october 1996, when Connerotte was dismissed for Jacques Langlois.
Nihoul was said to be involved with the white Mercedes gang through a company called Achat Service Commerce (ASCO for short, not the same ASCO as Rogar Boas). The company owned 4 of these white Mercedes cars. See Douglas De Coninck, Annemie Bulté and Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck. (1999) Les dossiers X. Ce que la Belgique ne devait pas savoir sur l’affaire Dutroux, Brussels : Éditions EPO, pp. 84-87.
Zimmer had worked on multiple sex crimes cases before, including the Mirano scandal and the CRIES.
The Office of Birth and Childhood. See “Mysterious Calls” chapter, where it appears on the outgoing and incoming calls list of the Institut Bizaar.
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