How Belgium Became Europe's Crossroads of Organized Crime

On January 9, 2023, at around 18:30 local time, armed men sprayed bullets at a garage door. The local mayor would later describe the attack as “a settling of accounts among drug traffickers” — the kind of phrase that turns a killing into a statistic. But this one carried a grim twist. Behind that door was an eleven-year-old girl. She did not survive.

Told plainly, the story of that cold evening sounds like a scene from an episode of Narcos — a tale you might expect from the slums of Bogotá or the most gang-ridden corners of Ecuador. Instead, it unfolded in a country that has long prided itself on being peaceful and uneventful: Belgium. Yes, that Belgium — the administrative heart of the European Union, home to the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union. These days, it is host to something else as well: a surging wave of organized crime.

Officials say more than 100 of Europe’s most dangerous criminal networks now operate inside Belgium, each competing to carve out its own sphere of influence with the help of connections that stretch across the globe. The result is a sophisticated international machine that fuels Europe’s drug epidemic while spreading corruption and bloodshed in its wake.

How a wealthy, stable, first-world country became the continent’s premier hub for organized crime is not a story of bad luck — it is a story of geography, opportunity, and a fractured state that struggles to respond.

Why Belgium? Geography as Destiny

So why Belgium? The answer is depressingly simple: the country is simply too alluring for organized crime groups to ignore.

Look at a map of Europe and you will find Belgium cradled comfortably among the massive economies of France, Germany, and the Netherlands, with the United Kingdom just across the water. Add Luxembourg — a pocket-sized nation whose enormous per-capita GDP gives its residents some of the deepest wallets on the continent — and the picture sharpens. This is a country ringed by vast markets full of wealthy consumers with money to spend and an appetite for getting high.

But location alone does not explain Belgium’s transformation. The country is also home to the continent’s second-largest and most inland port: Antwerp. That combination — a wealthy, densely populated neighborhood and a colossal maritime gateway feeding directly into it — is precisely the kind of setup that turns a quiet nation into a logistics dream for traffickers. Where legitimate commerce flows freely, illicit commerce learns to flow alongside it.

The Port That Couldn’t Say No

So many containers carrying legitimate goods pass through Antwerp that it is physically impossible for Belgian customs to inspect the majority of them. For a long stretch, authorities barely tried — at least, not nearly as hard as they could have. Faced with a choice between slowing the port to catch more drug shipments or keeping it fast to maximize profit, they chose speed, even at the risk of waving through sacks of cocaine. Before 2021, according to Politico, a mere one in every 42 containers was scanned.

That is less than 2.4 percent. By comparison, the United States around the same period scanned roughly 3.7 percent of incoming containers — not dramatically higher — but it also prescreened, though did not physically scan, more than 80 percent of maritime cargo arriving from at least 58 ports worldwide. In practice, that means American customs officers were stationed at foreign ports to flag high-risk containers in advance, long before they reached home soil.

Criminals, of course, cannot simply rely on customs officers missing a spot, even in a port as permissive as Antwerp. They have learned what makes ports tick: which insiders are vulnerable to recruitment, and how to identify and extract the containers pre-packed with the goods they want. Europe’s organized crime groups, it turns out, became exceptionally good at exactly this.

A Tsunami of Cocaine

Before long, organized criminals had a cost-effective channel for moving all manner of illicit goods — gold, diamonds, timber, weapons, even human beings. But the commodity reshaping the European continent most dramatically is cocaine.

Demand for it is staggering. According to the European Commission, the European cocaine market did not merely grow between 2011 and 2021 — it ballooned by 416 percent. If Tony Montana were reincarnated as a twenty-first-century trading bloc, he would be the EU.

This surge was driven by several converging forces. Americans began consuming less cocaine, global production exploded in the mid-2010s, and dominant players like the Mexican cartels left little room for newcomers in the US market. Other Latin American crime groups were forced to diversify — and a booming market beckoned across the Atlantic, with plenty of foreign partners eager to help them seize it. Italian mafia networks, Turks, Russians, Moroccans, and Albanians all helped build a pipeline that would drown Europe in cocaine.

From a purely commercial standpoint, Europe makes perfect sense. According to InSight Crime, a kilogram of cocaine in 2021 was worth $28,000 in the United States but could fetch $40,000 in Europe. The continent also sits closer to other wealthy markets in the Middle East and Asia. The American market was never abandoned — but why pass up a golden opportunity like Europe?

Antwerp: Europe’s Cocaine Capital

The biggest casualty of all this is Antwerp itself. The city has the misfortune of being labeled “Europe’s cocaine capital,” accounting for 40 percent of all cocaine findings on the continent in 2023.

The sheer magnitude of what has been captured there tells the story. In 2021, nearly 90 tons were seized in the port city. In 2022, the figure rose to 110 tons. And in 2023, it reached 116 tons of cocaine — roughly three times what American customs intercepted over the same period, despite the United States being vastly larger than Belgium. And those figures represent only the shipments that were caught. Far more, in all likelihood, slipped through undetected.

Belgian authorities have not been idle. They have cracked down hard on the gangs, mounting operations like the 2021 penetration of the encrypted phone network Sky ECC, which led to a wave of arrests. Corrupt insiders working for the state have been rounded up too — from lowly port authority staff all the way up to a chief police inspector on Antwerp’s drug support team. Port security at Antwerp and beyond has been substantially reinforced.

When the Numbers Lie

By some measures, the results should speak for themselves. Across 2024, Belgian customs officers intercepted only 44 tons of cocaine — about a third of what they found the year before. On its face, that looks like progress.

But the phrasing matters: the results should speak for themselves. One interpretation of falling seizures is that less cocaine is entering the country. The other, more troubling interpretation is that organized crime is adapting — exploiting alternative routes and methods designed to evade current detection. A drop in what gets caught is not the same as a drop in what gets through.

Belgium’s customs head captured the ambiguity directly: “The quantities we seize in our country are decreasing, but the number of interceptions we make here is increasing.” The criminals, the official added, “are testing us. They are spreading their risks by reducing the quantities.” In other words, smaller, more frequent shipments are harder to detect and cheaper to lose.

There are other signs that shrinking tonnage does not mean shrinking power. In a letter dated October 27, 2025, an anonymous Antwerp judge warned that “extensive mafia-like structures” are transforming Belgium into a narco-state — one where an illicit economy, widespread corruption, and rampant violence grow steadily more normalized. The gangs, it seems, are not retreating. They are entrenching.

The Corruption and the Violence

Listen to how Belgian officials describe the situation, and you could easily mistake the country for a cartel-plagued state like Brazil or Mexico.

Back in 2022, then-Antwerp Mayor De Wever said drug money was “poisoning traditional sectors, such as real estate and hospitality.” In 2023, Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne warned that the country had “entered a new phase of narcoterrorism” — a phase in which the drug world would menace both the public and decision-makers, and in which things would get worse. He spoke from experience: Quickenborne had gone into hiding with his family after drug dealers threatened him.

Other officials have taken their own precautions. Customs officers have been instructed to avoid being filmed or photographed. Belgium’s first drug commissioner, Ine Van Wymersch, keeps the location of her office secret. Brussels Public Prosecutor Julien Moinil is among those granted extra police protection — a precaution underscored by a foiled, Albanian mafia-linked plot to assassinate him.

It would be comforting to believe such dangers are confined to officials whose work pits them against traffickers, with ordinary citizens left untouched. Reality is less reassuring. There are clear signs that the government itself is alarmed by the mounting potential for disaster.

A Government on Edge

In May 2025, Belgian Security and Home Affairs Minister Bernard Quintin warned that Brussels was “in a catastrophic situation.” By September 2025, he proposed deploying soldiers to patrol the streets in mixed teams with the police, focusing on metro stations and certain districts — among them Peterbos, in the Anderlecht commune southwest of Brussels. He also proposed allocating 20 million euros to expand surveillance cameras. Defense Minister Theo Francken indicated that the legal framework for such a deployment was already underway, and noted that Brussels had ranked number one for physical crime rates among European capitals in 2023.

The unease comes amid a wave of shootings. In 2024 alone, there were 92 shootings resulting in nine deaths, placing Brussels among the top three European cities for gun violence — alongside the notorious gang and mafia strongholds of Marseille and Naples. That marks an almost 50 percent jump from 62 shootings in 2023, and much of the violence is drug-related. Some criminals have grown bold enough to raid customs facilities to recover seized cocaine, prepared to kill customs officers if necessary.

Belgium has also seen its share of bombings — less cinematic than a Hollywood blockbuster, but more ruthless. In February of last year, at around 3:00 in the morning, four young Brussels residents reportedly detonated an explosive at the front door of a home in Blauwe Poort. The target was the mother of an arrested cocaine dealer. To many politicians, such attacks are unmistakable signs of Belgium’s drug turf wars.

Children as Shields

A recurring and chilling feature of Belgium’s most violent crimes is who commits them: increasingly, young people.

There is now a demand within the criminal underworld to outsource violence to the young. Gangs deliberately exploit the impressionable to widen the distance between the criminals who truly matter and the brutal acts they want carried out. In effect, organized crime groups are using children as human shields to evade detection and prosecution.

Children as young as twelve are taking on roles for these groups. If not as killers, then as street dealers, cash couriers, warehouse operators, lookouts, and drug deliverers. The groups have a keen instinct for the most vulnerable, and one demographic that fits the profile is unaccompanied North African children — predominantly from Morocco and Algeria, though Afghan youths from the Middle East are also targeted. Many are kept under the thumb of crime groups through threats of torture and rape if they fail to sell enough drugs.

It is the kind of detail that makes you wonder why such horrors are not dominating the headlines, and whether Europe has quietly become, as one might put it, Mexico with better wine and worse weather.

Keeping the Fear in Proportion

It has not. As alarming as the violence is, the statistics — viewed in context — remain relatively low by global standards.

In 2023, officials recorded 1.38 homicides per 100,000 people in Belgium. That places the country third highest in the EU, behind only Latvia and Lithuania — but the United States, by contrast, recorded 6.8 deaths per 100,000. Nations with genuinely severe cartel problems, such as Brazil and Mexico, see murder rates of roughly 19 and 25 per 100,000 respectively.

Measured against those countries, Belgium remains effectively a low-crime haven. In a nation of 11.9 million people that logged nearly 45 million overnight stays in tourist accommodation, there were just 1,461 murders and attempted murders recorded in 2024. Tragic as those numbers are, they bear no comparison to a country like Ecuador.

So if you are an American planning a trip to Belgium and tempted to cancel out of fear, the better advice is to go and enjoy it. The odds of harm in Brussels are far lower than the risks in most American cities — and most American cities cannot offer chocolates that look like tiny works of art. Still, the country deserves more attention than it gets, because while Belgium remains safe by global standards, it is clearly getting worse by the standards of its own recent history. And the obstacles to reversing that trend run deep.

A Country That Would Rather Break Apart

Governments are rarely famous for moving quickly. Then there is Belgium, whose political structure is unusually — almost defiantly — complex. That complexity touches everything, not just public transport and education, but the fight against organized crime itself.

The problems begin with a highly decentralized federal system layered over very distinct national communities. Belgium functions less like a single state than a partnership of governments, deliberately engineered to prevent any one group from dominating. At the top sits the federal government; then three Communities — Flemish, French, and German; and finally three Regions — Flemish Flanders in the north, predominantly French Wallonia in the south, and multilingual but French-leaning Brussels. Each has its own mix of parliaments and councils, and each guards its turf zealously.

Add political parties divided sharply by language, culture, region, and ideology, and consensus becomes nearly unreachable — at times rendering Belgium effectively ungovernable. This is not hyperbole. Squabbling parties have repeatedly failed to form a government for days, months, even well over a year. Between 2018 and 2020, Belgium went 541 days without a federal government — a near world record, except that the Brussels regional government recently surpassed it.

The city of 1.25 million people has been without representation since June 2024.

Paralysis as Opportunity

Lacking a government does not mean everything grinds to a halt. A caretaker administration steps in to keep day-to-day services running, including public transportation and the police. But it does not mean things function smoothly either.

When Belgium spent 541 days without a government, plenty of online observers took it as proof that a nation can manage perfectly well without politicians arguing at the top. On the ground, the costs were plainly visible. A caretaker administration operates on a “provisional twelfths” budget, able to spend only one-twelfth of the previous year’s monthly budget plus inflation adjustments — and it cannot make new policies. New policies responding to, say, an unprecedented crime wave.

That kind of paralysis is precisely the environment in which organized crime thrives. A society so consumed by political division, so slow to decide, and so ill-equipped to finance its basic functions cannot get a grip on spiraling violence. It is exactly the dysfunction that drives reformers like Brussels prosecutor Moinil to despair.

Too Parochial to Cope

Even setting paralysis aside, Belgium’s institutions can be too parochial to tackle major problems. Consider the decades-long debate over whether to permanently merge Brussels’ six police zones under a single central command. The Flemish have long favored it, arguing it would make crime-fighting more efficient and cost-effective. But the capital’s 19 French-speaking district mayors rejected the idea, fearing the loss of autonomy over how they deploy personnel and resources in their own areas.

This is not to say the zones have never combined. In moments of crisis, Belgium has done exactly that — as it did after a flurry of attacks in February of this year, including an early-morning shooting at Clémenceau metro station. But if temporary mergers are necessary every time disaster strikes, perhaps a lasting one makes more sense. That, ultimately, was the conclusion Brussels officials reached when they agreed to a merger beginning in 2027 — a sign that the French-speaking holdouts had finally relented.

Beyond the friction of governing a country that often seems to want to split apart, Belgium faces broader resource-allocation problems. Speaking to The Parliament Magazine in 2023, one anonymous Antwerp official blamed the rise of organized crime partly on the response to Islamist terrorism. Through the 2010s, that threat consumed so much official attention that little else received focus.

The Terrorism Hangover and the Limits of Cooperation

At the time, the priority seemed sensible. Belgium had become notorious worldwide as a hotbed for Islamist jihadists — many perpetrators of the 2015 Paris attacks had lived in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek. Yet the same anonymous official argued that operations targeting Islamist networks in French-speaking hotspots siphoned crime-fighting resources away from Flemish-speaking Antwerp, with political power struggles between Flemish and French interests shaping how those resources were divided. “Very few Belgian officials see the problems of Antwerp as a national issue,” the official said, “and getting co-operation between the various police departments and branches of the [Belgian] Federal Police is always a nightmare.”

The dysfunction reached even into counterterrorism itself. In its analysis of Belgium’s campaign against Islamist jihadists, the RAND Corporation found gaps in intelligence-sharing and prevention-program coordination across the French- and Flemish-speaking regions. None of this means Belgium is incapable of action — a country this paralyzed could never sustain the powerful economy it has. But it does mean coordination could improve, both within its borders and with partners abroad.

International cooperation, on the surface, sounds simpler than navigating Belgium’s tangle of parliaments and competing interests. What country, after all, would not want to crack down on drugs? The problem is that not every nation does. As Brussels has learned the hard way, some countries simply do not live up to expectations.

The Havens Abroad: Dubai and Ankara

Perhaps the most frustrating of them is the United Arab Emirates. The UAE professes — with a certain dry irony — a “shared commitment to the rule of law and the principles of international justice.” In practice, international justice in the Emirates has taken on a different meaning: a place where the world’s criminals can party undisturbed.

Consider Edin “Tito” Gacanin, a convicted Bosnian-Dutch drug dealer and leader of the Balkan Tito and Dino Cartel — and the holder of a Dubai residency card, despite the very public record of his cartel’s brutality. In 2017, he hosted a wedding at the Burj Al Arab hotel attended by some of the underworld’s most powerful figures. In almost any other country, such a gathering of drug lords in one place would have been a goldmine for law enforcement. In Dubai, it was nothing worth fussing over.

This is not Belgium’s problem alone. According to The Brussels Times, Belgian officials complain that the UAE “consistently slow-walks or outright ignores requests for arrests and extraditions from Belgium and the Netherlands.” The official excuse is paperwork. The Emirates have occasionally bowed to pressure — Gacanin was arrested in 2022 at the Netherlands’ request — but what followed stunned Western officials: he was released in just two months, without bail or extradition. A man the United States has called “one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers,” nicknamed the “European Escobar,” walked free.

Turkey poses a similar obstacle. After reportedly smuggling 3.2 tons of cocaine through Antwerp, two alleged members of the Serbian-Montenegrin Skaljari cartel fled there. Belgian authorities sought to prosecute them, but the Turks refused extradition on the grounds that the men were Turkish citizens — not by birth, but through Turkey’s citizenship-by-investment scheme.

For as little as $500,000 or a property purchase, one can obtain Turkish citizenship and the protections that come with it, including shelter from foreign extradition. It is, in effect, one of the best insurance policies an organized criminal can buy. Even when Turkish authorities do make arrests — as they did after the Skaljari cartel’s bloody war with the rival Kavak clan — Belgian officials suspect they will ultimately turn a blind eye, treating any crackdown as little more than a warning to keep the violence quiet and the bribes flowing.

What Comes Next

One thing can be said with reasonable certainty: Belgium’s organized crime problems will not vanish overnight. How could they, given the international scope of the networks involved? There is only so much any single country can do beyond its own borders.

What Belgium can do is implement policies to offset the damage at home — and that will require sufficient funding, disciplined use of limited resources, genuine willingness to cooperate across its many communities, and the political willpower to make it all happen. None of those are guaranteed in a state as fractured as this one.

Until the costs of doing illicit business far outweigh the rewards, the crossroads of Europe will remain the crossroads of organized crime. The hope, for the eleven-year-old behind that garage door and for the children being pulled into the trade, is that Belgium gets a grip on its gang problem before it is too late.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why has Belgium become a hub for organized crime? Belgium sits at the center of Europe’s wealthiest markets — surrounded by France, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom — and is home to Antwerp, the continent’s second-largest and most inland port. That combination of rich consumer demand and a colossal shipping gateway makes it irresistible to traffickers.

Why is the Port of Antwerp so central to the cocaine trade? The volume of legitimate cargo moving through Antwerp makes it physically impossible to inspect most containers. Before 2021, only about one in every 42 containers was scanned — under 2.4 percent — and criminals learned to exploit port insiders and pre-pack containers to slip cocaine through undetected.

How much cocaine moves through Antwerp? Seizures rose from nearly 90 tons in 2021 to 110 tons in 2022 and 116 tons in 2023 — roughly three times what American customs intercepted in the same period. Antwerp accounted for 40 percent of all cocaine findings in Europe in 2023, and those figures reflect only the shipments that were caught.

Did falling seizures in 2024 mean the problem is improving? Not necessarily. Belgian customs intercepted only 44 tons in 2024, about a third of the previous year’s total. But officials warn that smaller, more frequent shipments are harder to detect, and an Antwerp judge described “extensive mafia-like structures” transforming Belgium into a narco-state — suggesting the gangs are adapting, not retreating.

Why are criminal groups recruiting children? Gangs outsource violence and drug work to young people to put distance between the leaders who matter and the crimes being committed, shielding themselves from prosecution. Children as young as twelve serve as dealers, couriers, lookouts, and more, with unaccompanied North African and Afghan minors among those most heavily targeted and coerced.

Is Belgium actually dangerous for ordinary visitors? By global standards, no. Belgium recorded 1.38 homicides per 100,000 people in 2023 — far below the United States’ 6.8, and a fraction of rates in Brazil or Mexico. Violence is rising by Belgium’s own historical standards, but the country remains comparatively safe, including for tourists.

Why is Belgium’s political system an obstacle to fighting crime? Belgium’s highly decentralized federal structure splits power among the federal government, three Communities, and three Regions, each guarding its own authority. Consensus is hard to reach — the country once went 541 days without a federal government — and caretaker administrations cannot make new policy, leaving the state slow to respond to a fast-moving crime wave.

Why can’t Belgium simply extradite the traffickers who flee abroad? Major figures often shelter in countries that resist cooperation. The UAE has released traffickers like Edin “Tito” Gacanin within months and is accused of ignoring extradition requests, while Turkey’s citizenship-by-investment scheme lets criminals buy protection from extradition. With much of the network operating overseas, Belgium’s reach is limited.