March 29, 2024, 03:44:50 AM *
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: NEW CHILD BOARD CREATED IN THE POLITICAL SECTION FOR THE 2016 ELECTION
 
   Home   Help Login Register  
Pages: « 1 2   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Overboard by Patrick van der Eem - as reported by Frierljepper at BFN  (Read 16323 times)
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
carpe noctem
Monkey All Star Jr.
****
Offline Offline

Posts: 9286


History repeats itself. It's a cyclical beast.


« Reply #20 on: July 21, 2008, 05:54:10 PM »

Yupppp....


...and then I picked up on this little Joran ditty...



J: They were drinking the entire time and I also know something about those girls…they were also taking cocaine because I know Boeti on Aruba & he told me. The went to him and got it there, you know?

P: Yeah.

J: That's possible, I know that for sure.


If something is 'POSSIBLE' ... you do not know it FOR SURE.

At least the boy is consistent... consistently an asho, that is.

Boeti of Aruba, a well know crack addict, his word is gospel, right? Wrong.
Logged

For Natalee and Stephany, whatever it takes.

-JUSTICE FOR NATALEE ANN - BOYCOTT ARUBA
------------------
"Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do." Thomas Jefferson
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."Thomas Jeff
KarmaRoundUp
Monkey Junky
***
Offline Offline

Posts: 4912


Angels Are True


« Reply #21 on: July 22, 2008, 08:27:06 AM »

I agree very interesting Carpe from the time Patrick puts out the idea that it was his
father that helped Joran lies....and yes he lies about walking. We know he didn't walk, but that is likely what he told ALE at least the first time. Paulus was questioned about Joran's feet...and were Joran's legs sore the following day. LOL

I find this interesting too. Just as we all knew, this tourist game was honed and perfected and Joran admits it here:

Pages 240 - 251 from 16-01……..
 
P: Tell me exactly, ok. Carlos ‘n Charlies. You left there with her with those two or..?

J: I went there…ok, this is how it happened. I was at the casino, ok? I went and sat at the blackjacktable. Bit of blackjack, a little big money. There are a lot of girls at that table. I’m flirting with them, talk a bit with them, smooth. Then they tell me... We perfectioned this, Patrick. We made up a whole story of ‘we come from the Netherlands, also on holiday here’. We had perfectioned that playershit for those girls, you know? Because when you say: ‘I’m not a local’ then they immediately only want to f***, you know? They know, that’s how they play it: go high-roller a bit. Those bitches are going crazy there, Patrick, you know this. The will, they can’t do anything. So yeah those bitches just ask me: ‘will you go out with us tonight? Will you go to Carlos 'n Charlie's, that bar, tonight?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that's fine’. They'd already been drinking the entire time, he?

P: Mhm…..oh, wait a minute…

J: They were drinking the entire time and I also know something about those girls…they were also taking cocaine because I know Boeti on Aruba & he told me. The went to him and got it there, you know?

P: Yeah.

Thank you MrsKub and Klaas for bringing over these translations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Funny how right after this part of the conversation above joran says he has to go to school the next day.I really dislike how Patrick seems to help joran a little too much with this whole car conversation,finishing sentences for him and giving him words to use.....he should have just let the AH talk.


P: Mhm…..oh, wait a minute…

J: They were drinking the entire time and I also know something about those girls…they were also taking cocaine because I know Boeti on Aruba & he told me. The went to him and got it there, you know?

P: Yeah.

J: That's possible, I know that for sure.  So yeah, I was like: ‘No, I have to go to school the next day.’ And the girl says: ‘please’. I was like: oooooh…..I know she wants to f***, I just know it for sure.
Logged

Karma Is Coming

Justice for Natalee Holloway!

Rest In Peace Sweet Angels

Help Light Lindsey's Way Home
klaasend
Administrator
Monkey Mega Star
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 74276



WWW
« Reply #22 on: July 29, 2008, 03:20:13 PM »

Posted at RU:

Quote from: GBMW
Hereby the preface of Peter R. de Vries; it's not a literal translation and there might be a few mistakes in it. Sometimes he used expressions or words I didn't know in English so I worked my way around it...but most of it is literally translated and I figured it's better than nothing...and to be honest I'm just glad it's finished now and I'm too tired / lazy (take your pick, LOL) to reread & fix up the grammar / words / expressions that I didn't know before. 

PART 1 (it's too big for one post)

Preface

When in the fall of 2007 my colleague Kees van der Spek said that a friend of Joran van der Sloot announced himself by phone; who claimed he would be able to get Joran to confess, my first reaction was a bit sceptical. A friend? Well, that couldn’t be a real friend, because he wouldn’t sell out his buddy to his worst enemy. And I had practically become that with my programme, after Kees van der Spek & I went to Aruba in the Indian summer of 2006 to research the disappearance of Natalee Holloway at the spot ourselves.
That journey resulted in an unveiling –extra long- report, where we closed the net around Joran pretty tight. And that wasn’t because it was Joran, but because what happened, the facts,  the background, the circumstances & not to forget Jorans own  statements that gave us that motive. Where a lot of people gave him the benefit of the doubt because of lack of factual knowledge, after our show aired in the Netherlands the conclusion was quite unanimous: Joran has something to do with it & isn’t telling the truth.
To fit the principle of hearing both sides we had given Joran and his parents the opportunity of giving comment about our findings of course, but they didn’t use that. We did receive a letter, with threats to hire a  lawyer, judicial steps & the council of Journalism, but we never heard anything about that anymore. And to me that said something about the findings we had done.
Either way, from that moment on it was quite clear that Joran saw us as ‘the enemy’.  In the book he later published about the disappearance of Natalee he took great effort to paint a negative picture of me, for instance by claiming I broke into his house.
So when this so called friend of his announced himself, I frowned a little. There were also alarm bells going off in my conscious that said: look out, this could also be a trap. Joran is someone who plays, someone with lies & stories, who before had – as we aired in our show- fabricated a couple of  tasteless pictures of the missing Natalee, making it look like she was standing on the photo with Joran. I thought that someone like that is capable to set up his enemy as well.
Kees agreed with me, but on the other hand: what was the risk we were taking? If it was true what the man claimed, it was interesting, and if it wasn’t true – and we were being fooled- it was interesting either way because it would give us an insight into Jorans’ diversionary tactics.

A few days later the friend stepped into my office. Pretty small, a bit bald, a beginning tummy, but powerful. He gave a firm handshake and said his name: ‘Patrick van der Eem’. The first thing I noticed was that he was quite a bit older than Joran. I had  imagined the friend of a 20-year old a bit different. The second thing I noticed was a big scar at the left corner of his mouth, that looked like a badly covered zipper which could widen his mouth a few extra inches if desired. It was a kind of scar what kept your attention when you were talking with him and where your thoughts would wander off to what might have caused it. The third thing I noticed was that he had an Antillean way of being & ditto accent. This immediately placed him a bit closer to the drama that happened on Aruba with Natalee.
We sat across each other in the nice leather chairs that were in my office, they once belonged to John de Mol when he was owner / director of Endemol. In these chairs million dollar deals had been made with big names within the television world and now I use them to make  victims, witnesses and tough guys feel a bit more relaxed in an informal setting. Often visitors have the tendency to sit by my desk and I usually point them to my white chairs around my coffee table and say: “Let’s sit there”. A lot of people see that as a privilege, I know, like: this busy man is taking the time for me… It’s got little to do with a privilege but everything with interview psychology.
This trick didn’t have any or barely any effect on Van der Eem. What followed was hardly something you would call a relaxed conversation. The way he looked & his movements – quickly and long stirring in his coffee- I could notice he was a bit nervous but didn’t want to come across that way. He didn’t sit comfortably in the chair as well, like many of my visitors, but sat in it with caution. Apparently to cover his insecurity a bit he opened the conversation as follows: ‘Listen carefully!’ Then he remained silent for a bit.
While he was silent Kees & I had eye contact for a split of a second. It was the kind of a split second that was a enough for two people that travelled half the world together. It stood for a reserved hmmmm…
‘I got something that you want,’ Van der Eem firmly continued, ‘but I’m not going to give it just like that’. I have a few conditions that need to be met, because otherwise it’s off & I’m gone before you know it’.
Listen carefully! It was said like an ultimatum instead of a request; and if were talking about interview psychology then this was an opening that would have been described as daring. Anyhow, as a crime reporter with 30 years of experience I have learned not to take that much value onto that kind of etiquette. Rude people turned out to be valuable informers while distinguished ones delivered nothing in the end.

The story of Van der Eem came down to the fact that he had met Joran van der Sloot a few months earlier in a casino in Nijmegen & formed a friendship with him since then. Joran looked up to him. They played poker together, cruised around in the car, smoked weed together & talked about women. Because both of them talked Papiamento & knew about the Antilles there was a quick connection between them. ‘Joran trusts me… and I feel he knows more about the disappearance of Natalee. He has insinuated that sometimes. If I want to, I will be able to get a confession out of him. He won’t talk to anybody but he will to me. I feel that. I know exactly how to handle that,’ Patrick said.
My  scepticism wasn’t gone with this. On the contrary. I had little faith in it. That had to do with the fact that Van der Eem was at least 12 years older than Joran & his  presumptuous tone about his contact with him. As if he only had to clap his hands to make Joran talk about Natalee, while the suspect had remained silent during questioning that was done under severe pressure. Were we being fooled? Did Van der Eem have a double agenda? Did he even know Joran or was he a bluffer that was out to get an advanced payment?
Van der Eem felt our reticence, got one of his two phones and asked: ‘Shall I give him a call?’ Kees and I nodded yes simultaneously. I was just about to ask him if he could proof he really knew Joran. A phone conversation could clear up a lot. Patrick pushed a speed dial button and a few seconds later it was unmistakably the voice of Joran van der Sloot that came through the loud-speaker: ‘He Patrick!’ And when Van der Eem asked him how it was going, we heard that played winy tone which we learned later on that the two of them communicated often with: ‘Ooooh Patrick, maaaan…I have lost sooooo much with poker, maaaan.’ Kees & I looked at each other again and Van der Eem probably noticed we were a bit impressed by this. This man was really in contact with Joran and as we heard seemed to be very close. After some talk about Joran and his driving lessons that Joran was going to take and making a plan for playing poker that night the conversation was ended and Van der Eem closed his phone with a triumphant look: ‘Heard that?’

In the hours that followed we tried to interrogate Van der Eem about himself & his background. The fact that he really knew Joran, didn’t mean he wasn’t playing games & I stayed focused on that. But we philosophised  as well about how we could form a possible collaboration. That Joran would confess to Patrick and that Patrick would tell us that was nice maybe but definitely not enough. Then we would end up with a did – did not situation. If Joran would confess that he knew more about the disappearance of Natalee and that he had been lying about the whole time, we couldn’t just trust Patricks testimony on that, we needed hardcore evidence. I foresaw that Patrick with that intriguing half moon on his face wouldn’t be the most reliable witness in the eyes of television watching people in the Netherlands. There had to be more than just his story.
‘We can only do something with it if we have Jorans’ confession on camera & tape,’ Kees & I said because of that. ‘If he will talk, then everything has to be taped and that won’t be easy.’

Of course Kees & I were curious about Patricks’ reasons for doing this. Why did he come to us? That wasn’t strictly out of love for one's fellow man. Van der Eem emphasized that he had already put a lot of time and money into Joran with their visits to the casino and that had to be returned either way. ‘For starters you will pay me 250,000 Euros because otherwise nothing will happen. I’m the only one that can make this happen. Without me you are nowhere,’ Patrick said with a tone of voice that could not be mistaken. Even though the phone conversation with Joran had gotten my interest, Patricks tone of voice annoyed me very much. Usually I look at Kees for a moment in such a situation to see how he feels, but now I reverberated back: ‘Well, then we’re quickly done, Patrick, because I’m not going to pay you that. No way! I don’t know how you think about this, but in the Netherlands the press doesn’t pay. We don’t know a chequebook journalism. There is no press medium that will pay 250,000 Euros, even if you had hardcore evidence that Queen Beatrix was involved.
Even before I was halfway through this story I noticed Patricks face turning into a irrated frown. His brown eyes narrowed. His voice became snappy. He put his coffee, that he had been stirring with a spoon as though it was cream, with a temper on the table and made a move like he was about to go. ‘Listen! 250,000 Euros is peanuts man, with what I’m offering you. Really pea-nuts! I am The Door to a world scoop and you’re moaning about a few hundred thousand Euros? Come on, man! Well, if you don’t understand that, I will just go to another!’
‘You should, ‘ I said, ‘but you’ll come away with a flea in one's ear. Nobody will pay such amounts in the Netherlands, not even one tenth of it. De Telegraaf won’t either. Try if you like…you’ll see that I’m right. Anyway: we won’t do it. And you can be The Door ten times, but that will stay closed then.’
I said this convincingly and knew that we would never pay a quarter of a million, or could pay for that matter. But in the mean time the possibility of this scooped provoked me that much that I dunned myself for not breaking this thin line with him. Possibly I could put the The Door on ajar.
Patrick sighed deeply. As if he was genuinely surprised the we were such journalistic dummies who had to be explained everything. ‘Then I will just go to America…’ he bluffed. ‘What do you think that Fox and all those others would pay?’ Are you crazy? This is a better story than you’ve ever had and you guys are being difficult over a bit of money’??? The atmosphere got a bit uncomfortable and I imagined that the scar in Patricks’ mouth corner was pulling more and more as a sign of annoyance. Or no, not really annoyance…more like a form of being worked up, that he didn’t have under control anymore.
‘Those Americans see you coming…’ I said. ‘What you don’t realise is that you need to get Jorans story on camera & tape and that isn’t an easy job. That’s one hell of a job, believe me, we’ve done it a lot of times. There is much that goes with that. And that’s our specialty. We’ve got the stuff, we’ve got the know how, we can make such a thing happen. Do you think the American will bring over a team just like that after you’ve made your call? Or are you telling me that you can do this yourself? What are you doing here then? No, you’re not fooling me. You’ll never pull that off.. No Patrick, we know exactly how to handle that,’ paraphrasing his statement about how he would get Joran to talk.

Enfin, that’s how it all started in my office, that day in the autumn. Because you’re reading this now you can conclude that Van der Eem & I have come to an agreement in the end, but that wasn’t easy. He will probably tell you more about that in this book. After he left, Kees & I talked for about an hour. We were pretty excited about the unexpected possibility that was given to us to expose Joran. We were able to hide our eagerness because Van der Eem made such ludicrous financial demands, but holy shit, imagine this would work, a taped confession of Joran van der Sloot? Then we would have pure gold, a world scoop like we never had before! This would even surpass Mabelgate, we knew, the notorious affaire with which Kees & I made the world press a few years earlier.
‘What does you gut say, Sgra?’ Kees van der Spek asked me. Kees and I call each other Sgra, a Limburgse derivation of Gerard. It is a crazy, but a cherished custom by us, that nobody understands & one I won’t explain further here. ‘My gut, Sgra, ‘ I replied, ‘is that this could be a super story but that this Patrick is an enormous pain in the ass. If we’re going to work with him, we’ll have lots to deal with, I’ll give you that. Boy, what a character..’ Kees nodded in agreement. In the few hours we talked to him Patrick seemed as someone that was compelling & stubborn, overestimated himself and who didn’t want to be coached, while from our point of view this last thing was a requirement to accomplish a hidden camera operation of this level.
‘Do you know what I think?’ Kees asked, and, without waiting for my answer, added; ‘I think he snores…that he uses cocaine or something. Didn’t you notice how hyper he was? That temper, compelling, commanding…ebbed away at the end, as if it slowly went.’ It was exactly what I thought. I had seen that kind of behaviour before with users. If it were true he was a coke user than that be an extra guarantee we would have a lot to deal with concerning this man. But the question was, could we walk away from a world scoop because someone used cocaine occasionally? And to ask the question is to answer it. Eventually it wasn’t about what Patrick would be saying but what Joran would say, we decided. ‘Even if Patrick needs to snore 10 times a day,’ we told each other prominently then.

In the weeks that followed, it turned out pretty quickly that our observation had been right. We got to know two Patricks. Good Patrick and Bad Patrick. A Patrick that was nice, clever, thoughtful & civil and a Patrick that was unreasonable, angry, rude & unbearable who literally called us his ‘bitches’ and tried to command us as such. He was ‘The Door’ to our future success, as he kept repeating, and we dance to a his piping. I couldn’t really place whether he acted like that because he just snorted or because he badly needed too, but in reality that difference didn’t matter. It was about the consequence. And it was always the same: a Bad Patrick that was unmanageable. In that situation, honestly said this happened quite often, Patrick pushed Kees and myself to the edge and a couple of times we were at a point to break it off. There have been moments where my blood pressure was just about boiling and I wanted to make him disappear into the ocean of Aruba myself: I could care less about a  world scoop. But when that happened the enchanting  Good Patrick always seemed to show up, who promised better times, who was kind and charming, who came up with clever ideas, who surprisingly showed a lot of insights in his shortcomings and lured us back to him. In my mobile phone there are quite a lot of sms texts of Patrick from that period, that give a pretty good summary of his character and behaviour. One moment he writes: ‘f*** you! If you don’t call me within 5 minutes, I will tell everybody what you’ve got: nothing! From now on I decide everything. Call me now!’ To write two hours later: ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T. You and me forever friends. I’ll will never behave that way again. Sorry’!The operation was on a loose end a couple of times because of these kind of things. Patrick might have been clever in a way that impressed Joran van der Sloot, he didn’t have the know how about making television and how to interrogate professionally of course. I put that mildly in the report later on by saying: ‘Patrick was of course no journalist or detective when he started this job.’ I left out that he was pretty stubborn. And just at this aspect Van der Eem wouldn’t take anything from us. Eventually that went better, but then there already had been some little mistakes in the taped car conversations with Joran. Listening isn’t one of Patricks’ best qualities and often when we tried to teach him about the importance of building up the questions, we had less risk in a Taliban mine field so to speak. Patrick then threatened to quit immediately, we were a bunch of amateurs and he could furiously  throw a bottle of soda on the floor.

The most important aspect with an infiltrator in a hidden camera operation is not only that he knows what to say but even more so understands when to stay silent. Because it’s of course the suspect that needs to talk, not the infiltrator. With previous hidden camera operations Kees & I had a tough job with that. The problem is that the infiltrator quickly realizes he will be a leading part in a  notorious television broadcast, and because of that he doesn’t only need to do us a service but he has to think about his rank and file. And in those situations Kees & I often hear suddenly how infiltrators try to be smart & sharp witted, because the people at home need to hear how incredible the real leading man is handling the situation. The consequence is that the infiltrator starts to brag, or wants to let the Dutch audience know that he’s not from the street & suddenly starts to use ‘fancy’ words which makes everything sound unnatural. The worst thing is when the infiltrator tries to be the spokesperson of the person that he’s trying to get to talk. And because we had had some experience with this aspect, Kees had shown Patrick a couple of tapes showing how it’s not done, examples of an infiltrator who didn’t let his ‘subject’ finish his sentences or who filled in his own questions. The tapes hadn’t even started playing, or Patrick informed Kees that he got it. The former infiltrators were losers, but he was Patrick, yeah, The Door, a thoroughbred amateur psychologist, the man of the street who we didn’t have to tell anything: when it came down to it he was the best of them all. What did we know, editorial folks, about Real Life where he, Patrick, was The King?!

I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that during listening to the first conversations between Joran & Patrick, Kees & I were almost having cardiac rhythm failures out of annoyance. It drove us crazy! Patrick blabbed through everything, gave answers to his own questions & a few times we even saw Joran breathing to say something important about Natalee and he couldn’t get it out because Patrick was talking. Kees & I reviewed the conversations in a ‘spotset’ at our office and we’ve cursed &  castigated Van der Eem a couple of times there. We yelled furiously quite some times, when he blabbed right through Joran: ‘Shut the f*** up, asshole! Just shut the f*** up…!’ But anyhow, that didn’t help anything, because the conversation was already taped. We had eventually thought of giving Patrick an ‘ear’, so we could  whisper into his ear during the car drives with Joran – read: to make him stay silent!  - but we didn’t go forward with that because the risk that Joran would find out was too big. Afterwards I gave Patrick, when he went to collect Joran for a new conversation, an A-4 paper with the following text: ‘KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT! LET HIM TALK!’.
Patrick persisted in the fact that Joran was used to a certain way of speaking with him and that this was a way that made him trust Patrick. A clever build up  questionnaire and a silent Patrick would only make him reserved or suspicious. Of course  that argument was pretty unanswerable. ‘What did Joran tell you when you came to his door last year, Peter?’, Patrick asked me sometimes. Patrick gave,  just like in the car with Joran, the answer to his own question: ‘He shut the door!’ Isn’t that so? He won’t talk to you. I got him to talk, so don’t tell me how to do it because with me at least he’s talking.

While I’m writing this down on paper, I realise that the reader must get the impression that the operation was an exhausting happening, to put it mildly, where the people involved behaved like enemies sometimes. Well, that is true. And I write this down because this book also claims to give a look behind the scenes, and nothing is more annoying when it’s a polished success story, where everyone is each other best friend. No, a hidden camera operation as this is playing sports at the highest level. A matter of relinquishing. A lot is given, but there is also a lot of demanding coming from both sides. An action like this is not a party nor a pleasure, but almost a punishment. We were  condemned to one another.
Patrick didn’t come to us because he thought I’m such a nice guy, he came to us because he couldn’t do it without our expertise and equipment. And in our turn we didn’t choose Patrick out of a big line of candidate infiltrators, from whom we could select on concerning journalistic skills en detective qualities. No, simply said: we had no choice. It was Patrick or nobody. The difference between a scoop or no scoop. And when Patrick called me or Kees there was always that moment of being startled: had he been snorted or not? That fact determined how the next half hour would go. But I have to say honestly – and that will probably also come forward in Patricks story- that there have been quite a few moments were our collaboration went smoothly, that we fell into each others arms, had incredible fun and shared emotional moments (like when we met Beth) and that I admired & respected Patrick for the way he handled certain things. Because yes, he can be very nice & clever. Otherwise – if it was only bad- the operation never would have succeeded. He did pull it off. And in his way he did get Joran to talk, let’s be honest about that. Patrick came through with what he had promised us. More than that. He gave us a world scoop. He was indeed The Door. A ponderous door… A man you love and hate. That’s just the way it is.

And vice versa he was of course right to find fault with us. Let I be honest about that as well. For example he accused Kees & myself of leaving in a hurry with the tapes after a ride, to look at them in our spotset and leaving him to his fate, while he had just had a nerve breaking ride. When the action progressed we also became more demanding and greedy. While we were  enormously happy with a 5 minute tape where Joran would say that he knew more about Natalee’s disappearance, later on with 5 hours tape of 5 different rides we still weren’t satisfied and continued to push Patrick to do more. In his eyes that was easier said than done of course: he had to do the rides, he had to seduce Joran to tell the story while we were sitting in a bar or restaurant waiting for the results; and subsequently moaning that he had forgotten a question or didn’t ask it in the right way.
Logged
klaasend
Administrator
Monkey Mega Star
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 74276



WWW
« Reply #23 on: July 29, 2008, 03:21:02 PM »

Posted at RU:

Quote from: GBMW
Hereby the preface of Peter R. de Vries; it's not a literal translation and there might be a few mistakes in it. Sometimes he used expressions or words I didn't know in English so I worked my way around it...but most of it is literally translated and I figured it's better than nothing...and to be honest I'm just glad it's finished now and I'm too tired / lazy (take your pick, LOL) to reread & fix up the grammar / words / expressions that I didn't know before. 

PART 2 (it's too big for one post)



Even after the world scoop it wasn’t easy to deal with ‘The Door’. After we had agreed not to do any press before the show aired, Patrick gave an interview to De Telegraaf. Sigh. In spite of our agreement that he wouldn’t text Joran any more, he still continued to do so. Pffff. And when we told him that he shouldn’t call Jorans parents, he still did. Moan. When we went to America for putting the story out there, he was missing on Schiphol, because he preferred not to go eventually. Deep sigh. At the last moment we got him aboard because press officer Peter Schouten practically blocked the airplane, he couldn’t get into America because of his criminal (drug)past. An even more deeper sigh. When he gave an interview on Aruba to a local reporter, he kept talking afterwards, while he was warned by us that he would be possibly tricked the same way as well. And while he chatted along, bragged, bluffed & made it seem like he directed the whole hidden camera action, the camera was still rolling…and I had to pull the chestnuts out of the fire in the Dutch press. Grrr. There have been moments where I thought to myself: why didn’t I kick that guy out of my office the first time he got in?

But hey, while I was talking to him about professional way of working,  it turned out that on the night we announced our scoop to the world that our website wasn’t secure enough and that a crucial article – that should have been published a few days later – was hacked and now on the street, the reason why a carefully worked out strategy didn’t work anymore. The pot blamed the kettle.


In fact this whole operation was like running the gauntlet. It seemed in the media – probably also because of us- that the action was quite glamorous, as a sort of journalistic young boy’s dream: Kuifje on Aruba. But as a programme maker you are factually playing chess on different boards, you have to take into account countless things, take in disappointments &  keep thinking ahead, while the operation has to be kept top secret. We didn’t only have to deal with Patrick, but also with Beth, with Joran, the police & LE, with SBS6, Endemol, the press, and so forth. It was a continuous wear and tear wastage, a collapsing of egos, interests & way of thinking. In the papers it was said that the airing of the show was probably my finest hour, but in reality I was empty, worn out & exhausted when it was finally aired and I realised that there would be a tsunami of press to follow.
The airing scored with 7,2 million viewers a record in viewer ratings, nobody anno 2008 would have thought that to be possible. I had guessed the half of that and that would have considered amazing already. This made press behave in ways we had experienced before. First they’re behind you and begging for scoops and news facts but when it turns out you can’t be everywhere and everyone the opposites are taking their thing, who point out that Joran was smoking weed during a couple of those car rides, so that his confessions are worthless all of a sudden… As if someone who smokes a joint suddenly starts to confess to an unsolved crime. In that case the Amsterdam police stations would be filled with people. And another thing: Joran has said something in his confession – mentioned a name- that isn’t correct…is the whole story then a fabrication?
Sometimes it seemed that there was a secret hope it wasn’t all true. A broadcast that got 7,2 million viewers was amazing, but to destroy a broadcast that got 7,2 million viewers is apparently  even better for some.

I’ve said it many times, and I will repeat it here again. Joran has on 5 different car rides, on different dates, sometimes with more than a week in between, confessed that Natalee died in his arms and that he disposed of her body. His story, with the body language going with it –‘she started shaking suddenly, man!’- confirmed the evidence & clues that the police had against him already. Joran didn’t become a suspect because of us, he was a suspect already. On top of that, Joran never took anything back, or said that he was just making things up. On the contrary, he only repeated and extended the confessions. In a serious matter, and sometimes even visibly emotional. Of course, he has smoked a joint sometimes, but there were also rides where that didn’t happen, or only after he had talked about Natalee. And it is common knowledge that a perpetrator who gives a full confession and is also fully co operating with the police does keep things to himself, lies or gives twists to certain things sometimes because this suits him better or because he’s trying to protect someone else. That doesn’t change the truth when it comes to  the  core of his story. And even more so: Joran didn’t tell his story when he was questioned by the police but to someone he, without a doubt, considered his best friend. Literally he told Patrick that there were only 2 people in the world who he trusted the most: the man who had helped him to dispose of Natalee’s body, and Patrick van der Eem.


The funny thing is that there are people & media who really have doubts about Jorans’ car conversations’ , but on the other hand have fully confidence in the taped conversations of the murdered businessman from Amsterdam, Willem Endstra. Those haven’t been recorded on video, but only exist on tape; with awful sound quality. Endstra had obvious motives to paint a negative picture of his opponent Willem Holleeder & to extinguish him, he has –proven- lied and did his confessions not in secret to his best friend but to the detective department who eagerly taped this. And yet, those quotes are hardly discussed. Because we don’t have any video, we have no way of knowing if Willem Endstra was stoned, drunk, something was edited out or not, etc.
What I’m trying to say is that people are using different measurements. What would have happened, I’ve wondered sometimes, if the media that are so critical right now, would have had a 5 minute tape of Willem Holleeder where he might have said: ‘Yeah, I’ve done it, I’ve lied about it, but I’ve blackmailed Endstra?’ I will take a bet that it would have been presented as  important news fact for a couple of days and that there would have scornful laughter from all over Holland if Holleeder would have claimed later on that he had smoked a joint before he said that. The same thing applies to the scenario of the famous handyman in the Deventer murdercase;  suppose he would have admitted likewise that he indeed had killed the widow Wittenberg in Deventer. One tape of a minute would have been more than sufficient.
But now, in Jorans case, there are lots of people that are willing to believe that he was just talking or that he was trying to impress Patrick van der Eem. Those people seem to forget that Joran isn’t some kind of unstable young man, like his family and lawyers are trying to make it appear. No, Joran isn’t an unbalanced kid who will tell a story just like that, how shocking & bizarre that story might be, because someone else would like to hear that. Joran van der Sloot is someone who had the discipline & was calculated enough to keep silent in intensive, well prepared hearings that lasted for weeks. Believe me: then you are pretty balanced.
That so called unstable Joran turns out to be way more balanced & tough than most people assume. Joran just made one wrong judgement call, and that is the fact he actually thought that Patrick van der Eem was his friend. A friend he could trust and whom he, with the privacy that comes along with sitting in a car together, could tell what really happened that night on the beach: that Natalee died in his presence, that he panicked, got help, disposed the body into the ocean & with several lies tried to deceive the world. The only way how he could get out of this was by saying he had a joint and that he was just chatting around.

Funny thing that a lot of presenters and editorial staff members acted differently behind the screen than before it. Behind the screen the complimented me with the show and they lacked words for expressing that Joran must be guilty as hell. They even went further by filling in names who supposedly was Jorans real helper. But when the camera’s rolled, very often their tone was quite different by asking critical questions and by doubting whether the confession should be looked at as trustworthy.  I’ve accused Patrick in this preface of having Jeckyll & Hyde behaviour, but certain tv presenters are also familiar with that. With Patrick it was caused by cocaine, with the presenter we have to guess for their reasons.
But anyhow, that’s how it seems to work in Hilversum and unintentionally – in other cases-  I might even co operate in this kind of behaviour as well. Worth mentioning in this subject is a text I got from an anchorman (GBMW: not the presenter) of Nova, after one of those shows. He wrote: ‘I admire your patience & with you are sick of that awful politically correct Dutch politics to defend Joran.’ As noted.

Patrick van der Eem also had the privilege to get to know the media as well after the show aired. He has become a known Dutch person. A situation he wanted somewhat, but one he dislikes as well now. It depends who you meet, Good Patrick or Bad Patrick. Van der Eem has discovered what it means to be in the spotlights. A lot of media wanted to know who the man was that tricked Joran. And even though Van der Eem made it clear in my show he didn’t have a past of a choirboy, his antecedent research was done all over & was presented like it contained amazing scoops. Sometimes it looked like Van der Eem had made Natalee disappear instead of Joran, but that’s also a press phenomenon in big cases.

By now a few months have passed since the notorious broadcast. The question might rise how things went on between Patrick and us. Do we keep in touch a lot, is there a connection that can’t be broken? Well, I’m usually very loyal & dedicated to people whom I owe something and most of the time I keep in touch & want to keep in touch with them, but honestly I have to say I hardly see or speak to Patrick anymore. And at the moment that’s fine with me. You could say that – from both sides- there is a certain degree of ‘satiation’. The Bad Patrick was shown a bit more than the Good Patrick. That doesn’t mean at all that I don’t want anything to do with him anymore. I’ve defended him when he was portrayed awfully in certain media with facts that are not important and if this happens again I will do so again. Like: stay the f*** away from our bad Patrick! I am and always will be grateful for what he did. That was, with all mentioned handicaps- a masterpiece! He might not have known where he got himself into and how he had to do it, he possibly underestimated it, sometimes did some stupid things and has said aggravating things, but he – cono mamaa!!!- did it, and how!

And finally something that’s really important: I’ve discovered many negative character traits , but no lies. Everything he has said turned out to be true. And when it comes down to it that’s the only thing that matters. We don’t have to visit each other on birthdays. We needed to get the job done. A very difficult one. And that’s why I know that Patrick won’t mind that I’ve told the truth in the preface. Even though that might have been the inconvenient truth sometimes… But the truth is also – or mainly- that he has given us a world scoop, who a reporter never or maybe once in a lifetimes gets (and with a guy like Patrick going along with it you can only handle it once in your life…).

Bad Patrick…you were Good, man!

Peter R. de Vries
Hilversum, 30 mei 2008
Logged
LilPuma
Monkey Junky
***
Offline Offline

Posts: 2922



« Reply #24 on: July 29, 2008, 07:48:06 PM »

Interesting stuff.  Great translation, also.  There were only one or two places where some Dutch phrases seemed to not translate well.  On the other hand, pulling someone's chestnuts out of the fire is pretty much the same in Dutch and English.  LOLOLOL 

Note to Peter:  watch your back.  You never know who those "higher powers" employ. 
Logged

Our deeds are seeds and by them, we plant the world we will walk through tomorrow
KarmaRoundUp
Monkey Junky
***
Offline Offline

Posts: 4912


Angels Are True


« Reply #25 on: July 31, 2008, 09:14:23 AM »

Thank you Klaas and thank you GB.Very interesting reading.....I now have more faith that Peter is not done with this.
Thank you Peter!
Logged

Karma Is Coming

Justice for Natalee Holloway!

Rest In Peace Sweet Angels

Help Light Lindsey's Way Home
Pages: « 1 2   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Use of this web site in any manner signifies unconditional acceptance, without exception, of our terms of use.
Powered by SMF 1.1.13 | SMF © 2006-2011, Simple Machines LLC
 
Page created in 6.143 seconds with 19 queries.