UK Edition
The secrets of Amsterdam’s red light district – from a vice cop turned tour guide
Apparently not even hardened cops are immune to the forces of nostalgia. Standing outside the old police station in Amsterdam’s red light district, Piet Middelkoop looks forlornly at the empty building he used to work from. “They’re turning it into apartments,” he sighs. “That’s sad.”
It seems hard to believe now – what with its fancy restaurants and bustling bars – but in the Eighties and Nineties this corner of old Amsterdam was a den of iniquity. Pimps, prostitutes, junkies, dealers; they all came here to ply their trades, indulge their vices.
Bringing law and order to the chaos, as best he could, was Middelkoop, who worked as a cop during the bad old days. He hung up his truncheon in the late Nineties to work, bizarrely, in IT, but once again finds himself walking his old beat – this time as a tour guide.
Middelkoop provides a unique perspective on a red light district that is slipping beneath the rising tide of gentrification. But no amount of gourmet burger restaurants or souvenir shops can strip the former cop of his memories: fond memories; fun memories; frightening memories.
A diminutive man with a kind face, flat cap and round specs – hardly your archetypal constable – Middelkoop is not a man prone to political correctness. Lingering outside the defunct station on Warmoesstraat, he tells me what he and his exclusively male colleagues would do when they arrested a transexual or, as he puts it, “chick with a d***”.
“We would call the newest girl at the other station and get her to come and search them,” he laughs. “She would get a big surprise.”
As we set off down Warmoesstraat, one of the oldest streets in Amsterdam, Middelkoop recalls the high speed police chases – or, rather, lack of them.
“We would get in the car, put the blue lights and race down the road, only to realise it was being blocked by a Heineken lorry unloading beer,” he says. “Eventually we said ‘okay, no cars’.”
And the fetish clubs? He visited a few, professionally of course. And the patrons loved his uniform. “People would ask us to search them,” he laughs. “It was part of the fun, part of Amsterdam.”
He made a few good busts – including a kilo of heroin concealed in someone’s false leg – and even learned Surinamese, so he could eavesdrop on Surinamese criminals. Disappointingly for Middelkoop, their conversations would often be about banal subjects – food, family members – rather than anything incriminating.
“I got to know a lot of Surinamese songs, though,” he declares, with genuine joy.
It wasn’t all fun, though. Far from it. Danger followed the force around every corner. One of Middelkoop’s colleagues was stabbed to death on duty and another gunned down.
“A fugitive from England was robbing a shop and he came out, saw our car and started shooting,” he recalls. “It could have been me.”
We hang a left at the end of Warmoesstraat and stop outside the unremarkable looking Hotel Prins Hendrik. This is where Chet Baker, the American jazz musician, fell from the window of his second-floor room. Cocaine and heroin were found in his bloodstream. A black plaque marks the spot where his life slipped away, where the music stopped.
Appropriately enough, we find ourselves witnessing a real arrest outside the hotel. An intoxicated old man with a long grey beard and white hair – Santa’s drunk brother, perhaps – has got into a spat with two police officers on bikes. They call for backup and a van swiftly arrives to take him away.
A routine arrest, of which Middelkoop made many. The only difference: he would later have to travel home with them. “I would arrest these guys, go back to the station, type up their notes and take the train home with them,” he says. “We would talk about it on the train.”
Middelkoop leads me down Zeedijk, once Amsterdam’s most villainous street.
“The city council declared Zeedijk a disaster area,” he says, pulling out black and white photographs of the street, taken in the Eighties. “It was a no-go zone.”
The pictures show dealers brazenly peddling heroin, pickpockets pilfering money and the vacant stares of addicts, wandering the streets. Hogarth’s famous etching, Gin Lane, springs to mind.
At the end of Zeedijk was the old port. “Where the heroin came in,” explains Middelkoop. “You would see a lot of Surinamese, Dutch, German, Italian and English here because you could buy good heroin for a cheap price.”
We stop on a bridge next to a bar, which used to sell a shot of heroin and a bottle of Coca-Cola for 27 guilders, about €12 (£10) in today’s money.
“I would arrest people on this bridge and throw their knives into the water,” says Middelkoop, peering into the canal below. “There must be a lot of knives down there.”
We wander further down Zeedijk, through Chinatown and onto Oudezijds Achterburgwal, where the red lights of window brothels still reflect in the canal. Night is falling now and the tour is concluding, but not before a quick stop outside the now disbanded “Church of Satan”, formerly an illegal bar.
“The owners took advantage of Dutch law, which respects all religions,” explains Middelkoop. “So they turned it into a church, the Church of Satan, which meant we couldn’t arrest anyone in there.”
Today the building is a strip club, so still a smut-peddling institution. Some things never change.
The essentials
Gavin Haines travelled to Amsterdam courtesy of Stena Line, whose Rail and Sail package, from London Liverpool Street to Amsterdam Centraal, starts from £55 one way.
The two-hour walking tour with Piet Middelkoop is organised by Amsterdam Red Light District Tours and costs €30 per person. The tour takes place every Friday at 3pm and Saturday on request.
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