What Should a Comprehensive Fight Against the Brussels Drug Mafias Entail?

Johan Leman, 7 February 2025

What follows is a plea for an integrated approach to tackling mafia-like structures in Brussels’ drug trade.

Mafia is a complex reality. Here, I interpret it in a restrictive sense, excluding politics and the business world. I limit the concept to the mafia-like structures that, through drug dealing, enrich certain people and families in Brussels. Anyone who does not see this is blind.

To combat this phenomenon, many politicians believe that the solution lies in creating a unified police force, increasing police presence on the streets, enforcing stricter judicial measures, and imposing severe financial penalties on those who profit from drug trade. Experience from other countries shows that these are indeed effective measures that can help keep mafias in check. Let’s call them necessary conditions, but they are not sufficient on their own.

My impression is that there is insufficient awareness here that, to be effective in the long term, the approach must be significantly broadened. I draw on insights I gained years ago as a young anthropologist from Italian mafia hunters in Sicily.

Applying their approach to Brussels, the strategy should look as follows: Fundamentally, as has been known for 30 years here in Belgium, the modus operandi of mafias must be mapped out. The modus operandi of a mafia organization, in its simplest form, consists of five phases:

Creating insecurity in a small or large area (e.g., disabling surveillance cameras, etc.);
Recruiting dealers (usually from disadvantaged neighborhoods);
Having enforcers to guard the territory or conquer new territory—enforcers who appear and disappear quickly;
Having lieutenants who oversee phases 1 through 3;
Finally, the bosses themselves, who do not want violence to occur in their immediate surroundings. In other words, do not expect them to live in Kuregem.

Naturally, law enforcement and the judiciary seek to dismantle this chain. However, it must be understood that everyone in the first three phases can easily be replaced by lieutenants and bosses.

Targeting these lieutenants and especially the bosses logically involves dismantling financial flows. In Brussels, efforts are being made in this regard, and the issue is rightly framed in terms of staff shortages.

However, three crucial aspects receive too little attention. Even if this approach works, new mafia-like structures will emerge in the short term, with new bosses, new lieutenants, and so on. Other contributing factors facilitate their creation.

1. Easy Access to Weapons
Brussels is notorious for the ease with which people can illegally acquire firearms. To ensure lasting success, all locations involved in this trade (cafés, garages, workshops, etc.) must be identified.

2. Urban Design and Public Spaces
A city like Brussels has public spaces where the police have little to no access, and social control is minimal. Criminal organizations can easily privatize these spaces for their own use.

3. Lack of Involvement from Municipal and Regional Authorities
Do municipal and regional administrations feel sufficiently engaged in addressing the problem? Do they assess their projects for potential use by criminal organizations?

To illustrate, consider an issue that Foyer currently faces. Today, youth workers must actively keep drug dealers at a distance. Meanwhile, they have to plead with the Municipality and the Region not to construct a “green walkway” between Place Sainctelette and rue du Ruisseau—a completely useless project for the neighborhood and inaccessible to the police. This walkway would start between two well-known drug-dealing hotspots (Ribaucourt and Yser), effectively becoming a drug dealers’ highway within three months. Everyone living there understands this, except the administration. If Brussels does not adopt a broader and more forceful integrated strategy against the mafia-like structures in drug trafficking, we are headed for difficult times. Anyone who believes that mafias will disappear once the areas around North and South Stations are cleaned up is mistaken. Once that is done, too many other zones will be at risk. Molenbeek and surrounding areas: ‘fasten your seatbelts‘.

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