Behind the mask: How a soccer star became a cocaine trafficker

“My boys are on their way to Antwerp,” wrote Promes, a forward at the time for Ajax Amsterdam. His phone records were obtained by Dutch law enforcement and were used to convict him of drug trafficking in an Amsterdam court this year.

Promes paid intermediaries — his “soldiers,” he called them — to secure 2,850 pounds of cocaine that had just arrived from Latin America in a shipping container packed with bags of salt.

The other traffickers seemed perplexed by Promes’s role.

“Is he definitely that footballer?” one asked in a separate text.

The growing intersection of sports and organized crime has alarmed some of 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.

But when investigators started surveilling Promes, they discovered he was an unusual target: an elite athlete who seemed obsessed with becoming a gangster. His success on the field had only intensified his appetite for a different kind of power on the streets of Amsterdam, they said.

On a wiretapped line in July 2020, a friend asked Promes, “Do you make more money playing football or doing business,” apparently alluding to drug trafficking.

“Doing business,” Promes responded.

This account of Promes’s descent into criminality is based on hundreds of pages of court documents that include Promes’s text messages, as well as interviews with police and soccer officials. Promes did not respond to requests for comment and his lawyer and several family members declined to be interviewed. Promes had pleaded not guilty.

In February, however, Promes was sentenced to six years in prison. By then, he was gone. He’d left the country to play for Spartak Moscow, a team in Russia’s premier league, where he became a top scorer, and was beyond the reach of the Dutch authorities. But a few weeks later he surfaced in Dubai, where he was briefly detained after Dutch authorities filed an extradition request.

Last month, with that request still pending, Promes announced another twist to the story: While fighting extradition, he would play professional soccer for United F.C., a second-division team in Dubai.

His legion of fans in the Netherlands have been left stunned by the star’s fall from grace. Why would Promes, whose annual salary at Ajax — an institution in European soccer — was more than $3 million, risk everything by getting involved with drug trafficking?

But the shock was different on the second floor of the West Amsterdam police station, where two veteran officers had quietly been meeting with Promes as his star had risen in professional soccer.

Those officers, Arno Van Leeuwen and Bob Schagen, have spent years investigating the connections between sports and crime in the Netherlands. Those ties appear to be increasing, the officers said, as young athletes experiencing extraordinary wealth for the first time have become targets for criminal exploitation. Players whose careers are floundering can be easy targets, too; last month, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, a once-promising British forward who had fallen to a second-division Scottish team, was arrested near Glasgow and charged with what police said was the importation of $800,000 of marijuana from Thailand. He was released by his club.

People around Promes saw him as a wealthy investor, investigators said, someone infatuated with “gangsters” whose cash could help underwrite drug deals. Because of a surge in cocaine arriving in Dutch ports, groups that were once involved in low-level crime in the Netherlands now have a hand in trafficking vast quantities of drugs or are trying to force their way into the booming business.

Between 2018 and 2022, the amount of cocaine arriving at the Dutch port of Rotterdam — the biggest in Europe — skyrocketed from 20.8 tons to 55.1 tons, a 164 percent increase, according to the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA). At the Belgian port of Antwerp, the increase was only slightly smaller, the surge driven in part by increasing cooperation between Latin American drug traffickers and European organized crime, police said.

The Dutch police now liaise with both players and security officials at their clubs to warn of dangerous associations before they tip over into criminal behavior. But in Promes, whom they once tried to pry away from organized crime, Van Leeuwen and Schagen had their most tragic failure.

The wrong kind of friends

For years, Promes had been cultivating an alter ego in the rap songs he recorded. He seemed to want his fans to believe that he lived a double life. He rapped about his proximity to crime and violence. He performed with men who would later be convicted of murder and kidnapping.

“We do not fear bullets,” Promes wrote in one song. “We see men running for their deaths.”

Over the years, the allusions to drug trafficking became more explicit. “All those containers, like a present, must be unwrapped,” he said on the recording “Wicked Man.”

It was easy to dismiss Promes’s lyrics as mere posturing.

On the field, he was graceful and tireless, a naturally gifted forward known for his speed and ball control — a talent who, like many of his peers in Dutch soccer, had emerged from an immigrant home.

Promes was born in the Osdorp neighborhood in east Amsterdam — a grid of neat, modest homes where new arrivals to the Netherlands often settled. Promes’s parents came from Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America. He grew up playing soccer on neighborhood streets. By Promes’s telling, even getting a place in a street game required ferocity.

“You had to fight for your place,” he said in an Ajax promotional interview in 2020. “If you wanted to play football on the square, you had to have a certain attitude.”

By the time Promes was 13, soccer already promised a better life, and he was offered places in some of the country’s top youth academies. But he struggled with disciplinary problems. At 16, he was kicked off Ajax’s youth team. One factor, he would later say in another Ajax interview was that he “made lots of the wrong kind of friends and was generally in a tornado.”

His contacts allegedly included Piet Wortel, a Dutch-Surinamese man who police allege has been involved in cocaine transport for decades. Police say that Wortel and Promes teamed up to traffic cocaine. Wortel could not be reached for comment.

A friendly warning

Van Leeuwen and Schagen were lifelong Ajax fans. In the late 2010s, the two officers approached a contact at Ajax, who worked as a kind of fixer for the team. The Dutch police had for years met with the country’s clubs about soccer hooligans and preventing violence at games.

The officers wanted to increase their cooperation with Ajax. They suggested that they should meet with young players — particularly those who had made it onto the police’s radar — to counsel them.

Those presentations became regular sessions and a formal assignment for Van Leeuwen and Schagen after the initiative was endorsed by the Dutch police.

“We saw that these young players were vulnerable,” Van Leeuwen said. “These are guys who grew up in the same neighborhoods as criminals. It’s hard to distance yourself from your childhood friends.”

At the same time, European soccer had become a massive business, with $35 billion in annual revenue, and the players were increasingly valuable assets to be protected.

Ajax did not respond to requests for comment. But police officials said the liaison relationship is not unusual at European clubs. The detectives flagged early signs of trouble to officials at Ajax, naming players who were loaning team vehicles to childhood friends with criminal records (one such vehicle was found with a bullet hole in the driver’s seat). In other cases, Van Leeuwen and Schagen reported players who sold expensive watches for cash without realizing they were helping criminals launder money.

In 2019, the two officers said they had heard from a colleague that a young Ajax player was in the passenger seat of a car during a routine traffic stop. Police suspected the driver of having ties to organized crime. The player was Promes.

By then, he was a star, a prolific striker for his club and country. In June 2019, his goal against England had helped the Netherlands advance to Europe’s Nations League final.

The Dutch press chronicled his rise.

“Quincy Promes: from ballboy to top scorer,” read a headline in De Volkskrant.

The traffic stop didn’t result in any charges, but Van Leeuwen and Schagen felt they should offer a friendly warning to Promes about placing too much trust in some of his friends. It was the kind of advice that could be misperceived, the officers knew. Some members of the Surinamese community accused them of racial profiling when they made routine traffic stops, like the one where officers spotted Promes.

He would later articulate his own anger at law enforcement in his songs.

“Cars no lease,” he rapped in a mix of Dutch and English. “F--- the police.”

But the first meeting with Promes in the Ajax front office appeared to go well, the officers said.

“We just told him, ‘We like you. We want to give you some awareness for your career,’ ” Van Leeuwen said.

Promes struck them as innocent and perhaps naive. At one point, he volunteered somberly that he had very few friends. But a few months after they met with him, Promes was stopped with the same suspect. The officers once again requested a meeting with him in Ajax’s front office. This time, they arranged for one of the team’s coaches to join them.

“We told him, ‘We warned you the first time. Is there something you don’t understand?’” Van Leeuwen said.

Promes said it was difficult to cut off people he had known for a long time.

“I can’t leave them. I can’t say goodbye to my friends,” the officers recalled him saying.

Remaining in Moscow

By the time Van Leeuwen and Schagen met with Promes in 2019, he was already trafficking cocaine, according to court documents, though the two officers were unaware of that at the time.

In retrospect, the officers concluded, Promes was already alluding to his alter ego. When he scored a goal, he lifted his hand over his face to form a mask. In a rap video, he wore a diamond studded mask. He started a clothing line called Mask QP.

It remains unclear how Promes became involved in the drug trade. In 2020, the Dutch police’s criminal intelligence team received information that Promes had invested at least $200,000 in a drug deal as early as April 2018, according to court filings.

The police began using wiretaps and undercover surveillance to track the player. They dubbed the investigation “Porto.” Like many criminals, Promes was using Sky ECC, an encrypted messaging service. Belgian police hacked the app in 2020, opening a vulnerability for law enforcement to exploit and ultimately providing a bonanza of intelligence that police across Europe benefited from.

That’s how Dutch police learned that Promes was involved in the shipment of cocaine that arrived at the port of Antwerp. The ship, the Cap Sant Nicolas, had passed through Brazil before crossing the Atlantic. But it had made several stops in Latin America, including Uruguay.

After the men had finished unloading the drugs in Antwerp, Promes, in a text message, said that he wanted to remain involved in the next step of the process.

“I suggest we measure tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

Prosecutors would later say in court filings that Promes had a “directing and coordinating role” in the trafficking.

In July 2020, Dutch police said they learned from conversations on a wiretapped phone that Promes had stabbed his cousin in the knee at a party in Amsterdam. The man was rushed to the hospital.

“Next time he will get bullets,” Promes said on a wiretapped line.

Promes was still on the Ajax squad that December when he was arrested for the assault. Reporters began asking team officials how they could rationalize keeping him on the team.

“He told me he didn’t do anything,” Ajax manager Erik ten Hag, now at Manchester United, said at a news conference. “In this country you are innocent until proven otherwise. We stand behind him, including the entire locker room.”

He was convicted of the assault in June 2023.

After the stabbing, Promes represented Ajax in the 2020-2021 UEFA Champions League. It’s unclear when Ajax or the Dutch national team became aware of Promes’s drug trafficking charges. Officials for the national team also declined requests for comment.

Yehudi Moszkowicz, the lawyer who represented Promes’s cousin in the stabbing case, told The Post that he asked the Dutch prosecutor when a decision would be made to prosecute Promes and was told “after the European championships.”

A spokesman for the Dutch prosecutor’s office said that Promes’s arrest was delayed because of a league match.

“With regard to the timing of the arrest, the Champions League group stage match was taken into account,” said the spokesman, Franklin Wattimena. “It is not uncommon to take into account the schedule of the person to be arrested. For example, if someone can be arrested at home, it is preferred over arresting them in the workplace in the presence of all their colleagues.”

In February 2021, Promes was traded to Spartak Moscow for a transfer fee of 8.5 million euros. Promes was still playing for Spartak when he was sentenced in absentia to 18 months in prison for assaulting his cousin. But Russia has no extradition treaty with the Netherlands, so Promes remained in Moscow. To avoid prison time at home, he stayed even after Russia invaded Ukraine, when most Western players fled. He also continued releasing rap videos. In one of them, he waved a Russian flag.

He posted Instagram photos at elite Moscow parties. He started posting soccer-related images with Russian captions. He showed off a new necklace, the word “Mask” filled with diamonds.

He was still in Russia this February when he was convicted on drug trafficking charges based largely on the 2020 cocaine importation. In its verdict, the court said it was struck by how Promes was already making millions of dollars playing soccer while he trafficked drugs.

“This makes it even more objectionable that the suspect tries to increase his wealth (and possibly also prestige in certain circles) through involvement in large international drug transports,” the court wrote in its judgment.

Some of Promes’s former teammates said they didn’t recognize the man described by prosecutors.

“The Quincy Promes that you people read about is not the Quincy Promes that I know,” Memphis Depay, a forward on the Dutch national team, told reporters earlier this year.

In March, Dutch authorities announced that Promes had been arrested in Dubai at their request, and that they would request his extradition. He was jailed briefly and then released. Emirati authorities did not explain why he was allowed to leave prison and was not placed on house arrest. Dutch authorities declined to give an update on their extradition request.

Promes once again began posting photos of his life on Instagram, even though there was now an Interpol red notice in his name. There was a photo of him in front of the Dubai skyline. He posted videos of him playing soccer and tennis. Emirati authorities did not respond to requests for comment.

His life in professional soccer appeared to be over.

In July, Spartak released a statement saying the club was ending Promes’s contract “due to personal reasons that prevented him from returning to Russia.”

And then, in early September, Dubai’s United F.C. posted a cryptic video on its Instagram. It showed a silhouetted man lacing his cleats. “Big news coming soon,” read the caption.

The next day, the team followed up with a news release. The silhouetted man was Promes. The team gushed over their new addition:

“His arrival adds significant firepower to United FC’s squad as we prepare for an exciting season ahead.”