Alessio Perrone and Berber Verpoest | The Atavist Magazine | October 2026 | 2,080 words (7 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 181, “The Rise and Fall of a Super-Cop.”
The shipping container came from Costa Rica, and it was supposed to hold timber. When it arrived in the Belgian city of Antwerp in October 2019, the steel box with tracking number TCKU1048144 was loaded into what looked like a massive game of Tetris: As Europe’s second-largest port, handling some 290 million metric tons of cargo every year, Antwerp holds tens of thousands of shipping containers at any moment, painted in bright hues and arranged in long, neat rows. From the outside, nothing seemed amiss with TCKU1048144, which is exactly what the drug traffickers who’d packed it intended.
Cocaine had been flooding into Antwerp for at least a decade. After Mexican cartels took over the U.S. market, Colombian traffickers looked to Europe, and Antwerp’s port provided them with readymade infrastructure to shuttle their product onto the continent. The cocaine trade warped life in the city. As gangs fought for control, Antwerp was rocked by car bombings, shootings, and other violence. Local media reported on houses battered by grenades as the worst of the city’s underworld attempted to intimidate rivals and snitches. Corruption spread, with trafficking networks paying off port workers, cops, hospital staff—anyone they needed to look the other way.
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Customs agents found themselves on the front lines of an escalating war, trying to keep cocaine out of Belgium against what seemed like impossible odds. Antwerp’s government had boosted funding for personnel, technology, and other investigative resources, helping customs increase the amount of cocaine it seized each year; the figure more than doubled between 2016 and 2019. Still, European demand for coke was stratospheric, and suppliers were determined to meet it. Powder just kept coming.
On October 28, container TCKU1048144 was selected for X-ray inspection. Containers moving through Antwerp’s port can be designated for a scan at random or for any number of logistical reasons, including improper documentation or suspicious shipping information. The X-ray showed that there was timber inside TCKU1048144, as its paperwork indicated, but agents spotted something else beneath the wood—bags, from the look of it. They opened the container’s heavy doors and found taped-up slabs of cocaine, 2,792 kilograms’ worth. There was also a counterfeit container seal, left by the South American traffickers for the shipment’s European recipients. By resealing the box after removing the drugs, the criminals could make it look as though no one had tampered with TCKU1048144.
Law enforcement decided to let the container continue on to the destination indicated on its paperwork: Maasmechelen, a sleepy town sixty miles southeast of Antwerp. They hoped that this tactic would help them identify and eventually arrest key players in the trafficking network. Customs removed the cocaine, resealed the container, then kept watch over it. The next evening, a driver arrived to pick it up. Law enforcement followed him, but instead of heading toward Maasmechelen, he went north, speeding to the Dutch border. He crossed over and stopped at a warehouse in Zevenbergen, a small city on the Rhine estuary. Outside were several vehicles, including an Audi SUV.
As police watched from a distance, they got a look at the man in the Audi. He was elderly, with steely blue eyes and dark hair. It didn’t take long to identify him. In fact, plenty of people in Belgian law enforcement knew him by sight. His name was Willy Van Mechelen, and once upon a time, he’d been the most famous cop in the country.
Chapter 1
Willy Karel Ferdinand Van Mechelen was born in 1943 into a Catholic family in a middle-class suburb of Antwerp. He spent much of his childhood at his grandfather’s mill in a hamlet in the Kempen, an area between Antwerp and the Dutch border known for its farms and wetlands. Van Mechelen was an exuberant, rebellious boy. When his peers dared him to climb onto a windmill’s rotating blades, he would race to do it. If a priest told him to be quiet during mass, he would storm out of church. According to a memoir he published in 1997, he and his two brothers never caused any serious trouble, but they got up to so much mischief that they became known to their neighbors as “the Dalton brothers,” after a fabled gang of outlaws in the American frontier. (In addition to that memoir, this article is based on dozens of hours of interviews with sources, hundreds of pages of court documents, and several books written by Van Mechelen’s contemporaries.)
During his senior year of high school, Van Mechelen decided to drop out. His father, who worked as a gendarme, had acquaintances at a shipping agency in Antwerp and secured his son a position clearing goods through customs. The job wasn’t exactly adrenaline pumping, even if obtaining stamps from Belgian customs sometimes required greasing the right palms. But Van Mechelen was able to spend his days outdoors, roaming among the terminals of the city’s huge port.
When he turned 18, he began his mandatory military service, and the army gave him direction and purpose. He became a paratrooper and deployed to Burundi, which at that point was still part of a Belgian colony. After fifteen months, he returned to the shipping company a changed man. He was more confident but also more impatient, easily frustrated by older colleagues he would later dismiss as “mummies” who only talked about retirement.
One day a customs agent asked him for a larger than usual bribe. Van Mechelen was unfazed and handed over the banknotes. Back in the office, his boss didn’t thank or reimburse him. Instead he lectured Van Mechelen on how to do his job properly—and did so in French instead of Dutch, the language everyone spoke in Antwerp. Van Mechelen thought that his boss was talking down to him, and he was furious. He grabbed a lectern and hurled it across the room. When he went home, he expressed an interest in his father’s line of work for the first time. Might the national police have a position for him? “That’s how I became a gendarme,” Van Mechelen wrote in his memoir, “out of rage.”
He joined the force in the late 1960s and was assigned to the mounted division, a position he detested for not seeing enough action. Eventually, he became a shooting instructor for the anti-terror squad and then joined a special unit in charge of Antwerp’s most challenging criminal investigations. The unit was known as the BOB, short for Bewakings- en Opsporingsbrigade, or Surveillance and Investigation Brigade.
Belgian law enforcement at the time operated with so few checks and balances that it more or less did as it pleased. In robbery cases where insurance companies offered rewards to informants if their tips contributed to the recovery of loot, cops sometimes roped in civilians after locating stolen items, allowing so-called informants to claim the money and then split it with the officers. The scheme was lucrative but illegal. “There was a bit of a cowboy mentality,” said Jean-Charles Verwaest, a retired journalist.
Complicating matters was the fact that Belgium had three distinct police services: the gendarmerie, a national force under the authority of the country’s interior and defense ministries; the judicial police, which reported to public prosecutors’ offices; and the municipal police, the equivalent of local law enforcement in the U.S. The gendarmerie and the judicial police in particular were locked in a power struggle. They often refused to share intelligence or even acknowledge each other’s authority. Investigations were duplicated or sabotaged, and suspects slipped through cracks widened by ego and pride. The turf struggle reached a peak in the 1980s, becoming known as the guerre des flics, or “cop war.”
Van Mechelen learned the rules of battle early. On his first case with the BOB, he let a more senior colleague drive to the crime scene, only to discover that the judicial police had arrived first and staked their claim to the investigation. “That was my first lesson at the BOB,” he later wrote. “Always get behind the wheel yourself.”
Van Mechelen quickly made a name for himself. He was the kind of man who could have a pint with anyone, and often picked up the tab when he did. Tall and broad shouldered, he cut such an imposing figure that people sometimes compared him to the Belgian comic-book character Jerom, who has superhuman strength. He became known for shows of force and for refusing to take guff from anyone. Once, during a raid, he flung a man through a ground-floor window for the offense of mocking him. “Everyone knew where the line was then,” he later wrote.
Van Mechelen could also be clever. “He was the best detective in the BOB, there’s no getting away from that,” said Walter De Smedt, a former investigative judge who led inquiries into organized crime in Antwerp and often chose to work with Van Mechelen. In those days police officers didn’t specialize. They had to do it all: investigative work, raids, interrogations. “Only Van Mechelen was very good at all of them,” De Smedt said. “If you assigned a case to him, you always got something back.”
Van Mechelen developed his own way of handling the various crimes that afflicted Antwerp, from prostitution rackets to contraband smuggling to violent robberies. When he raided a bar or restaurant during a BOB operation, he scribbled down the name of every person there, noting who was sitting with whom. Over time he developed extensive knowledge of Antwerp’s underworld. “If a robbery happened and we caught one of the perpetrators, all we had to do was check in the file catalog with whom he had been sitting in the bar the days before,” he wrote in his memoir. “Nine times out of ten, we caught the whole gang.”
Van Mechelen rose through the ranks of the BOB until he was head of an entire division. His men loved him; working for him meant plenty of action and also freedom. “There was basically no discipline,” said Guy Verhemeldonck, a former officer who later became the godfather to two of Van Mechelen’s children. (Van Mechelen had two children in the 1980s with his then-partner, and one in the 1990s after marrying another woman.) Sometimes the men had to work long hours, even pull night shifts. Other times they would leave the office in the middle of the day to grab a drink. When they did, Van Mechelen only reminded them to keep their eyes and ears open—after all, criminals hung out in bars, too.
For proof they needed to look no further than the kidnapping of Baron Charles-Victor Bracht, a diplomat, businessman, and multimillionaire. On March 7, 1978, a masked, armed man grabbed Bracht in an Antwerp garage where he’d just parked his Jaguar. The suspect, who called himself “Dexter” when communicating with authorities, asked for more than $2 million in ransom and refused to give proof of life. About a month after the abduction, he called a local newspaper and said that Bracht was dead. One week later, the baron’s body was found in a garbage dump, badly decomposed. Officers aired the perpetrator’s voice to the public, and someone recognized it as belonging to Marcel Van Tongelen, an electrician with a criminal record. But when officers showed up at his parents’ house—Van Tongelen’s registered address—they said they hadn’t seen him in years.
Van Mechelen and his men hit the bars. Armed with a name and a photograph, they went from one establishment to another around Antwerp, looking for anyone who knew the man behind the voice. An officer eventually found a mail carrier who looked at the suspect’s photo and recognized someone he occasionally had a beer with, although he knew him by a different name. The mail carrier pointed officers toward the broad avenue where the man lived. They knocked on the door of every flat until they found the suspect, four months after Bracht’s abduction.
Van Mechelen made liberal use of informants, a practice that was common among Belgian police and largely unregulated at the time. When he caught a criminal, he sometimes offered to help them avoid a harsh sentence if they provided information. “I loved working with Van Mechelen,” a one-time informant told us. “He always offered protection.”
A former member of the judicial police once said that Van Mechelen’s informants “almost seemed like [his] colleagues.” But no one considered it a problem. After all, it was hard to argue with Van Mechelen’s results.
