Soccer star Quincy Promes was on his phone, again. Promes was constantly fielding messages: about his role on the most famous team in the Netherlands, his place on the Dutch national squad, the endorsement deals that netted him a small fortune. This time, Promes was texting from a burner phone about his secret life off the field. In 2020, he was finalizing the import of a shipment of cocaine arriving at a Belgian port. “My boys are on their way to Antwerp,” wrote Promes His phone records were obtained by Dutch law enforcement and were used to convict him of drug trafficking in an Amsterdam court this year.
The growing intersection of sports and organized crime has alarmed the world’s biggest law enforcement agencies. The FBI and Interpol now have their own specialized sports units. Often their targets are corrupt sports officials, criminal investors who have infiltrated professional sports teams to launder their money or reputations, or gamblers seeking to fix matches, the Washington Post reports. When investigators started surveilling Promes, they discovered he was an elite athlete who seemed obsessed with becoming a gangster. His success on the field had intensified his appetite for a different kind of power on the streets of Amsterdam. On a wiretapped line, a friend asked Promes, “Do you make more money playing football or doing business,” apparently alluding to drug trafficking. “Doing business,” he responded. In February, Promes was sentenced to six years in prison. By then, he’d left the country to play for Spartak Moscow in Russia’s premier league, where he became a top scorer, and was beyond the reach of Dutch authorities. He surfaced in Dubai, where he was detained after Dutch authorities filed an extradition request. Last month, with that request pending, Promes said that while fighting extradition, he would play professional soccer for a second-division team in Dubai.
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