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Kidnapping of Freddy Heineken

Wikipedia

The kidnapping of Freddy Heineken, chairman of the board of directors and CEO of the brewing company Heineken International and one of the richest people in the Netherlands, and his driver Ab Doderer, was a crime that took place between 9 and 30 November 1983 in Amsterdam.

They were released on a ransom of 35 million Dutch guilders (about 16 million Euros). The kidnappers Cor van Hout, Willem Holleeder, Jan Boelaard, Frans Meijer, and Martin Erkamps, were eventually caught and served prison terms.

Before being extradited, Van Hout and Holleeder stayed for more than three years in France, first on the run, then in prison, and then, awaiting a change of the extradition treaty, under house arrest, and finally in prison again. Meijer escaped and lived in Paraguay for years, until he was discovered by Peter R. de Vries and imprisoned there.

In 2003, Meijer stopped resisting his extradition to the Netherlands, and was transferred to a Dutch prison to serve the last part of his term. The kidnapping and subsequent trials and extraditions drew national attention and received broad media coverage. Several books were published on the kidnapping and two movies were made. Several of the kidnappers would later become well-known figures in Dutch organized crime.

Kidnapping

Cor van Hout, Willem Holleeder, Frans Meijer and Jan Boellaard (nl) had been preparing the kidnapping for two years. Martin Erkamps was later involved. Several attempts to kidnap Freddy Heineken and his driver Ab Doderer at Heineken's home in Noordwijk failed when Heineken and Doderer did not show.

Subsequently they were kidnapped on 9 November 1983 at 18:56 in front of Heineken's office at the Weteringplantsoen (nl) in Amsterdam. They were imprisoned in a Quonset hut, belonging to Boellaards wood manufacturing company, at business park De Heining in Westpoort, in the western part of the Amsterdam harbor area. The hut was prepared in advance by the creation of a double wall on one end, with two soundproof cells with a hidden door. This made the 42 meter long hut shorter on the inside by 4 meters, which went unnoticed. The kidnappers took care of their prisoners outside working hours.

Books

Peter R. de Vries wrote De ontvoering van Alfred Heineken (1987) from the point of view of Cor van Hout, based on interviews with Van Hout and Holleeder in 1986, during their hotel arrest in France. Van Hout and Holleeder asked that the book would not be published till after their trial. In following issues, De Vries added several extra chapters about later events.

During the kidnapping and the aftermath, the Dutch magazine Panorama followed the events with several reports and pictures. In 2010, these reports were bundled and published in the book De Heineken ontvoering, by journalist Nick Kivits and kidnapping expert Sjerp Jaarsma.

Movies

On 27 October 2011, the movie De Heineken ontvoering by Maarten Treurniet had its premiere. It was written by Maarten Treurniet and Kees van Beijnum. The role of Freddy Heineken was played by Rutger Hauer, with Reinout Scholten van Aschat as Rem Hubrechts, Gijs Naber as Cor van Hout, Teun Kuilboer as Frans Meijer, and Korneel Evers as Jan Boellaard. Kidnapper Willem Holleeder filed a preliminary injunction requesting that the movie be forbidden. Jan Boellaard, Frans Meijer and Martin Erkamps also required from IDTV that the movie not be shown. The movie would not be accurate enough. The injunction and requests were unsuccessful.

The film Kidnapping Mr. Heineken by Daniel Alfredson premiered in the Netherlands on 8 January 2015. It is written by William Brookfield, based on the 1987 book by Peter R. de Vries. The role of Freddy Heineken is played by Anthony Hopkins, with Sam Worthington as Willem Holleeder, Jim Sturgess as Cor van Hout, Ryan Kwanten as Jan Boellaard, and Mark van Eeuwen as Frans Meijer.

The kidnapping of Freddy Heineken and Ab Doderer

Kidnappingheineken.com

November 9th, 1983

Alfred (Freddy) Heineken leaves his office building in Amsterdam with two women on Wednesday November 9, 1983. At about 40 feet away, his driver Ab Doderer awaits him in an armored Cadillac Fleetwood. Heineken Office 1983 When Heineken walks towards the car, he is overpowered by four armed men. The women try to intervene, but are held off with pepper spray. Ab Doderer leaves his car to help his boss, but he doesn’t stand a chance. Both Heineken and Doderer are thrown in the back of a van by the four kidnappers. The orange van leaves with the back doors still open.

The planning

Two years before the kidnapping the four friends Cor van Hout, Willem Holleeder, Frans Meijer and Jan Boellaard decided they wanted to become rich quickly. They wanted to do a kidnapping. During the preparation it was initially unclear who would be the victim. They had several candidates, including:

•Wisse Dekker (CEO of Phillips)
•Albert Heijn (CEO of AHOLD)
•Anton Dreesmann (Director Vroom & Dreesmann)
•Alfred Heineken (Major shareholder of Heineken)

The preparation required a lot of thought, time and money. The four friends invested 100,000 dutch guilders to pay for what they needed. Jan Boellaard possessed a 140 feet Romney Shed in the western harbor area of Amsterdam. They built two cells behind a wall with a secret door. From the workshop wich was located in the shed, you could not see the cells and nobody noticed that the room was now twelve feet shorter than before. During the kidnapping, when Heineken and Doderer were locked in these cells, people walked in and out the workplace without noticing anything unusual.

When the preparations were in full swing, Martin Erkamps was added to the team. He had a limited role in the kidnapping. He helped the kidnappers to steal cars that were used during the crime.

The money transfer was the most complicated part of the kidnapping. They came up with an idea to use pneumatic tube transport. That way they could stay at a reasonable distance while receiving the money. However, a test showed that this entailed a lot of risks and it was too difficult to achieve. Another option was to get the money thrown in the water by the negotiators so that the kidnappers could collect it using diving equipment. A problem with this method was the weight of the money. The millions of paper money would be hard to handle underwater. The weight of the money was a problem for the kidnappers. They didn't want to demand bills of 1000 dutch guilders to decrease the chances of getting caught afterwards. The bags with bills of smaller values would weigh at least 800 pounds total.

The kidnappers wanted the police to think they were German. They bought almost all the materials in Germany such a manufactured typewriter, A4 paper with a German watermark and all that was found in the cells came from Germany.

The kidnapping

Up until a week before the day of the kidnapping, the plan was to kidnap Heineken and his driver Doderer once they left the home of Heineken in Noordwijk. It turned out that Heineken had changed his routine because every time the kidnappers were in position, he did not show up at the house. The plans had to be changed. The kidnappers decided to kidnap them at the office of Heineken in Amsterdam.

After two weeks observing, the plans and escape route were clear. On the evening of November 9, 1983 the four friends got into position. When Heineken left his office and walked towards his car, he was overpowered by Willem Holleeder and Cor van Hout. Ab Doderer came to his aid, but was attacked by Frans Meijer. The three kidnappers dragged the two men in the back of the van. Jan Boellaard had the engine running and drove away with the back doors still open.

Heineken and Doderer were handcuffed in the back of the van. They were forced to put a helmet on with the visor taped so they could not see where they were going. Heineken knew immediately what was going on and offered the men to write a cheque while they were still in the van. The kidnappers didn’t respond to this offer.

A taxi driver had seen the struggle in front of the office and followed the van through Amsterdam. They eventually arrived at a bicycle tunnel, where the kidnappers had removed the poles earlier. This is where they switched to two other cars. The van blocked access for other cars which bought them extra time.

During the transition Willem Holleeder walked with his gun drawn towards the taxi. The taxi driver backed out and fled. The kidnappers continued their way to the western harbor area where the shed with the cells was located. They didn't encountered any police on their way. Heineken and Doderer got pajamas on and were imprisoned.

The two cells were hidden behind a wall in the shed. The wall had a secret door, which was almost impossible to see. Care took place outside working hours, because the shed was still being used by construction workers. Because of disappointing negotiations the abduction eventually lasted three weeks. Heineken and Doderer were chained to the wall most of the day. They slept on a mattress on the floor and had a chemical toilet at their disposal.

After 4 days, the kidnappers opened the doors of both cells. This is when Heineken found out that not only he, but his driver Ab Doderer was kidnapped as well. They were allowed to talk to each other a few minutes a day, but the two men spent most of the three weeks on their own.

The kidnappers and the police communicated by letter, coded newspaper ads or they recorded Heineken or Doderer on tapes which they used to give instructions by phone. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of 200,000 Dutch, German, French and U.S. banknotes with a total value of 35 million dutch guilders (22 million U.S. dollars).

The first attempt to transfer the ransom failed. The kidnappers demanded that the car with the ransom was a white van with two red crosses and left from a specific location. However, this failed because the van could not leave from that location without the press noticing. The second attempt was on November 28th.

The kidnappers demanded that the driver of the car with the ransom was alone and not followed. The driver was led to a chain of instructions. The kidnappers had buried these in plastic cups earlier. On the way the driver was instructed to transfer with the ransom to another car.

Eventually, at the top of an overpass, the agent had to stop. Through a radio, he was instructed to slide the moneybags down through a drainage channel. The kidnappers stood below the overpass and loaded the ransom into a Mercedes Hanomag and drove away. Earlier, in the woods near Zeist, they had buried several barrels in the ground. This is where they hid the money.

After an anonymous tip a SWAT team invaded the shed in the harbor area of Amsterdam on November 30th. At first they thought that they were misled but when the police found out that there was more behind the wall, they eventually found the secret door. Heineken and Doderer were finally freed after 3 weeks of captivity. According to the police, three of the five kidnappers were named in the tip. The police never revealed any further information.

The aftermath

Jan Boellaard and Martin Erkamps were arrested soon after the invasion of the shed. The other three kidnappers managed to escape. Frans Meijer spent several weeks in Amsterdam, but turned himself in on December 28th. Willem Holleeder and Cor van Hout fled to Paris. They stayed in an apartment several months but were arrested by the French police on February 29, 1984.

Since they were placed in one of the toughest prisons in Europe, they wanted to be extradited to the Netherlands as soon as possible. Their lawyers advised not to agree to the extradition. There was no extradition treaty for detention and extortion between France and the Netherlands at that time.

The two kidnappers could only be extradited based on written death threats. After a long extradition procedure, the Conseil d'État eventually ruled that France could not extradite or judge the two men. As they were given a residence permit, they stayed under house arrest in French hotels from December 6, 1985.

In February 1986, France wanted to transfer the kidnappers to Guadeloupe. But once on the plane, it turned out that from Guadeloupe they would fly to the Dutch side of Saint Martin. The kidnappers refused to fly to Saint Martin, which eventually brought them to Saint-Barthélemy. The population of this island revolted because they didn’t want criminals to be transferred to their island.

The population got so angry that is wasn’t safe for the kidnappers to stay on the island. They were transferred to the French side of Saint Martin, but they faced the same problems with the population here. At night they fled to Tintamarre. Tintamarre is an uninhabited island in the Caribbean and is located about three kilometers from Saint Martin. The next day they were brought back to Guadeloupe and from there to Evry in France where they stayed in hotels.

The Netherlands asked for extradition again. As a result, the French police arrested the two kidnappers, which brought them back to the tough French prison. Van Hout and Holleeder decided to resist the extradition no longer. In October 1986, almost two years after the abduction, they were extradited to the Netherlands.

Martin Erkamps was sentenced to eight years in prison in October 1984. Jan Boellaard was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Van Hout and Holleeder were sentenced to 11 years in prison in February 1987. Because the earlier extradition was withdrawn by France, they could not be brought to trial for the indictment 'written death threats'. This resulted in 1 year in prison less than Boellaard. The time they had been held in France, and the time that they had house arrest was deducted from their prison sentence.

Frans Meijer was given a psychiatric examination. He escaped from the mental hospital on January 1, 1985. Without his presence he was sentenced to 12 years in prison later that year. In 1994 he was found by crime reporter Peter R. de Vries in Paraguay. Meijer had started a family here. In 1998 he was arrested in Paraguay and 4 years later extradited to the Netherlands. After his release in 2005 he returned to Paraguay.

The ransom

When the kidnappers were on the run, they took 15 million dutch guilders out of the barrels wich they had buried in the woods. Three million each. About a week later, the police found the buried barrels and the rest of the 35 million guilders. During the hunt for the kidnappers, the house searches and arrests the police confiscated 7 million guilders. Eight million has never been found. Coupe Royale.

The kidnappers told the police that Frans Meijer had burned the money at the beach. However, there have been reports of Thomas van der Bijl (Who was murdered in 2006) that 7 million was buried in a forrest in Paris. According to Van der Bijl these millions were used to purchase apartment buildings in Zaandam and brothels in Alkmaar. Though what really happened with the money remains unclear.

Heineken rescued in raid by Police

By Jon Nordheimer - The New York Times

December 1, 1983

Amsterdam, Nov. 30 — Ten policemen raided an unguarded warehouse here today and freed the kidnapped brewery chairman, Alfred H. Heineken, and his chauffeur from unheated concrete cells in which they had been chained for 21 days.

The police later arrested 24 suspects, all Dutch citizens related to each other by blood or marriage, and said they were hunting for four others. The rescue of the two men, who were said to be cold but in good health, came two days after a ransom payment rumored to exceed $10 million was made on a road outside the central Dutch city of Utrecht.

At least part of the ransom was reportedly recovered in the homes of the suspects in Amsterdam, in suburban Zwanenburg and in Helder, a port 50 miles to the north.

They Recuperate at Villa

Mr. Heineken, who is 60 years old, and his chauffeur, Ab Doderer, 57, were wearing pajamas when rescued. They were given clean clothing and taken to Mr. Heineken's villa in Noordwijk, about 20 miles from here.

The two men were abducted by three hooded gunmen on Nov. 9 outside the headquarters of the Heineken brewing company in the center of the city soon after a luncheon Mr. Heineken had given for policemen who foiled an attempt to extort millions from his brewery. Mr. Heineken and Mr. Doderer were taken by panel truck to a west side industrial section, an area of auto wrecking and carpentry shops and other enterprises.

The police had been watching the general area since Nov. 16, when, they said, they received an anonymous telephone tip suggesting that they pay attention to people operating the auto- wrecking and carpentry businesses.

Suspicions that the two men might be held in the area appeared to be confirmed on Sunday, the police said, when one of the suspects ordered two meals to take out at a nearby Chinese restaurant and carried them to the warehouse. The police said they delayed raiding the warehouse out of concern for the men's safety, then decided to move in this morning after the payment of the ransom on Monday had brought no results.

The police said they entered the large warehouse, built like a Quonset hut, at 5:30 A.M. and at first found nothing. Then one of the raiders found evidence of a false wall.

Behind it were two concrete cells, one containing Mr. Heineken and the other Mr. Doderer. The prisoners were handcuffed and tethered to the walls by long chains that allowed them to move about the small cells.

Each had a bed with blankets, bottles of drinking water, a portable chemical toilet, newspapers and books. Their captors bought food for them, the police said, from Chinese and other takeout restaurants.

The warehouse was said to be operated by an auto-wrecking and carpentry concern. The police said 3 of the 24 arrested suspects and the 4 who were being sought were directors of the concern.

Junked cars were piled high on open lots covering several acres adjoining the warehouse and several others like it in the area. The warehouse is on a waterway to the main ship canal connecting Amsterdam and the North Sea.

Heineken Bolstered Business

The rescue ended 21 days of concern for the Dutch brewer, one of the wealthiest men in Europe, and his chauffeur.

Mr. Heineken was instrumental in building up a family business founded by his grandfather into one of the world's largest exporters of beer. The beer, in its green bottles, accounts for about 40 percent of the beer imported by the United States.

The beer was sold on a limited scale in the United States before World War II, but sales did not begin to climb until Mr. Heineken, then a young man just starting in the family business, went to New York after the war and walked the streets of Manhattan showing samples of his product to bartenders.

In 1960, Heineken hit a milestone by selling a million cases in the United States. Last year, 29 million cases were shipped there.

Mr. Heineken is married to the former Lucille Cummins, the daughter of a whisky-making family in Kentucky.

The couple owns homes in Paris, Cap d'Antibes and St. Moritz and has an extensive art collection, including many Picassos. They are friends of the Dutch royal family.

Mr. Heineken's fortune is estimated to be $500 million, most of it in shares in Heineken NV, the holding company that includes Heineken and Amstel Beers.

Maneuvers With the Ransom

A news blackout had been imposed on the case from the start, and the police had little to go on except a demand for ransom contained in a note dropped on the steps of police headquarters at The Hague the night of the kidnapping.

Investigators said today that instructions for delivery of the ransom were made by telephone on the fourth day of the abduction, but they could not be carried out because Dutch reporters had staked out the Heineken house and were likely to interfere with efforts to carry out the kidnappers' instructions.

New contacts were established, and after the kidnappers provided photographic proof that Mr. Heineken and his driver were alive, the ransom, consisting of Dutch, West German, United States and French currencies, was delivered Monday.

A lone driver carried the ransom package over a 120-mile route that covered most of this small nation before he was given final instructions for the dropoff over a walkie talkie. He was directed to Utrecht, the investigators said, then went to an overpass and put the ransom into a drain that emptied into the road below.

Time's up for man who kidnapped boss of Heineken

Andrew Osborn - TheGuardian.com

May 25, 2001

The Ronnie Biggs of the Dutch underworld who escaped to South America 18 years ago after holding the beer magnate Alfred Heineken to ransom for £8m is finally to be extradited to the Netherlands to serve out his 12-year sentence.

Franz Meijer, 46, has topped the country's most-wanted list since 1983 when he kidnapped Mr Heineken, the Netherlands' richest businessman and grandson of the original founder of Heineken breweries.

Meijer and four others abducted the beer boss in broad daylight in an Amsterdam street and held him and his chauffeur hostage at gunpoint for three weeks in an abandoned warehouse.

The gang came unstuck in farcical fashion, however, when one of the kidnappers phoned for a Chinese takeaway and unwittingly alerted police to the hostages' location.

Meijer escaped from custody in Amsterdam in 1985 and resurfaced in Paraguay a decade later, married with three children, the owner of a downmarket restaurant.

The infamous kidnapper's whereabouts was discovered when a Dutch journalist, Peter de Vries, tracked him down and confronted him outside his eaterie.

The villain, who claims to be a zealous churchgoer, was speechless for a few moments before recovering to say: "It is God's will that you are here. I have been betrayed, I knew this would happen one day."

But Meijer, who changed his first name to Francisco to cover his tracks, has not had to endure a hand-to-mouth existence in the meantime. He escaped from Amsterdam with more than £2.5m in ransom money and has allegedly tried to buy his way out of trouble in the past by offering to bribe the head of Interpol in Paraguay.

He is also alleged still to be pulling the strings of many of the Netherlands' underworld figures and the Dutch police suspect he has had a decisive hand in most of the country's unsolved crimes in the past 18 years.

Unlike Biggs, Meijer will not be coming back home of his own accord. He can expect to walk straight off a plane into a prison cell where he will continue his sentence for his pivotal role in the crime.

Attempts to extradite him have been held up by red tape and not helped by the fact that Meijer has been able to hire top lawyers to fight his corner.

The Paraguayan police first arrested him in 1995 only to have to let him go soon afterwards when a judge ruled that the proper arrest procedures had not been followed.

He was arrested again in January 1998 and has since fought tooth and nail to avoid extradition but has now exhausted every possible avenue of appeal.

A Paraguayan appeal court upheld the Dutch extradition order earlier this week and ruled that Meijer should return home to serve his sentence, a decision which observers believe he will now be forced to accept.

Only a last-minute ruling in his favour from the country's supreme court could quash the extradition order and there is no indication that any such move is under way.

Ever since November 9 1983, the date of the kidnap, Alfred Heineken has insisted on being accompanied by two private bodyguards at all times.

But even now it would seem that at least one of the kidnappers is reluctant to leave the 77-year-old president of the Heineken board of directors in peace. Media sources told the Guardian yesterday that he was occasionally followed and abused by one of the original five, Cor van Hout, who has served his prison sentence.

Freddy Heineken

January 5, 2002

Freddy Heineken, the flamboyant Dutch brewer who has died aged 78, secretly bought back his family firm on the stock exchange in 1954 and proceeded to turn it into a household name around much of the world.

Few thought that Heineken produced the world's finest lager - connoisseurs of Pilsner have long considered the Dutch brew insipid - but Freddy Heineken had a singular talent for marketing. His clever green packaging and imaginative use of advertising - which featured such slogans as "Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach" - ensured that Heineken became a hugely popular brand. By 1989, it was the third largest brewer in the world, and in guilders or dollars, Freddy Heineken could count himself a billionaire.

Alfred Henry Heineken was born on November 4, 1923 in Amsterdam. The family brewery traced its roots back to 1592 when a brewing company called the Haystack was founded. In 1864, it was bought by Alfred's grandfather, Gerard Adriaan Heineken, who used a revolutionary brewing process that had been developed at Pilsen using a virile yeast from a student of Louis Pasteur - the same yeast strain that is used by Heineken today. Within 11 years the flavourful lager had garnered an international prize in Paris.

By the end of the 19th century, Heineken was being exported to France and the Dutch East Indies, and when Prohibition came to an end in 1933, Heineken became the first foreign beer allowed into America.

Freddy's father, Henry Pierre, who had a weakness for alcohol, ran the company from 1914 until 1940, but then sold the family's stake in 1942. Young Freddy had meanwhile attended Kennemer Lyceum, before going on to further study in America.

While there, he wrote his father a prophetic letter:"I have my mind set on restoring the majority of shares in Heineken into the hands of the family," he reported. "It's not my plan to become very rich . . . but it is a matter of pride that any children I might have can inherit a stake in Heineken, like I did from my father and you inherited from your father."

At 18 he joined Heineken, shortly before his family stake was sold, beginning his career carrying sacks of barley. He later worked in the sales office in New York, where he became much impressed by the advertising on Madison Avenue. He also met his future wife, the daughter of a Kentucky bourbon distiller.

He succeeded his father as a member of the brewer's supervisory board in 1951, and after borrowing money, secretly bought back a controlling stake in Heineken in 1954. He was officially appointed to the Heineken executive board 10 years later, at which point he took charge of the financial side, as well as often taking personal control of the advertising campaigns. He became chairman of the Heineken holding company in 1979.

Freddy Heineken brimmed over with ideas, including one to build an underground railway system under Amsterdam's canals. However, his enthusiasm let him down when he came up with the square "World Bottle", which he claimed could then be used as a brick to help solve environmental pollution and help solve housing shortages in developing nations.

A cultured man, keen on music, film and architecture, he also earned a reputation as a bon vivant, with a penchant for private jets and fast cars. He was encouraged to keep a lower profile, however, after a kidnapping ordeal in 1983. Heineken, who had long lived in fear of such an incident, was grabbed with his chauffeur by three masked men outside the brewery's main office in Amsterdam. They were bundled into a minibus which escaped at high speed down a cycle path.

For 21 days they were held separately in the unheated cells of a deserted timber factory where their only human contact was a man in a balaclava who brought them coffee and bread in the morning and a meal in the evening. A reported £9 million was demanded.

When they were rescued by police, who also retrieved some of the money, Heineken announced that he had never been so glad to see 11 policemen all at once. Two men were later jailed for nine and 12 years, and eight per cent of the money was retrieved.

Heineken thereafter became something of a recluse. He was often asked whether he planned to write an autobiography detailing the inside story of his life; he would reply that he would consider such a project only when he started to experience unwelcome attention from creditors - his way of saying "never".

In 1996 a Dutch writer, Barbara Smit, attempted to do the job for him, publishing a book called Heineken, A Life in the Brewery. For nine months she studied the history of his empire, and met Heineken himself for the first time in September 1994.

"As things turned out", she recalled, "the introduction was very frosty indeed. Freddy was standing in a group of foreign media correspondents in the reception of the closed-down Heineken brewery on the Stadshouderskade in Amsterdam when he greeted me in his blunt, despotic style: 'We'll meet again in court', he mumbled.

"What happened the next moment was characteristic of Freddy. I was immediately invited 'for tea' at the Pentagon, his private office on the Weteringplantsoen. On the telephone the following morning, he said he would drop some drugs into my teacup and then undress me; but when I arrived on the day appointed, he proudly showed me around the building."

In the course of this tour, Heineken took Miss Smit to the bedroom suite at the back of his office, which boasted a four -poster bed, a shamrock-shaped jacuzzi, and a painting on the wall of a naked woman stroking a cat - the picture bore the crass title, The Woman With Two Pussies.

The writer met Heineken on five occasions, with the meetings lasting up to four hours. "Sometimes he clearly sought to impress me," she observed, "by conducting in my presence, for example, an utterly informal telephone conversation with Queen Beatrix on his birthday."

Miss Smit said that Heineken was often charming, even helpful - but that when she insisted that her book would be her own, and that he would have no part in the final editing process, "Freddy turned nasty". She concluded that this exhibited "the darkest part of Freddy Heineken's character - an unsettling symptom of power abuse".

In the event, Heineken's public opposition to Miss Smit's book caused a number of important sources to refuse to cooperate with her. Some went so far as to tell Smit: "Freddy will break you."

Freddy Heineken is survived by his wife Martha Lucille (nee Cummins) and his daughter Charlene, who takes over the family stake.