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The Festival Bar was an Amsterdam bar in the Paardenstraat that Nick Davies listed in 1998, with the Music Box and the Cupido, as one of three bars well supplied with boys. | 2026-05-15 | 2026-10-09 | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
The Festival Bar was an Amsterdam bar in the Paardenstraat. Nick Davies wrote in 1998 that it was one of three bars there, with the Music Box and the Cupido, "all dark, all smokey, all well supplied with boys from Poland and Romania and the Czech Republic," and that a transvestite serving drinks at the Festival Bar said he remembered a missing German boy coming in.1 In the same passage Davies named Karel Maasdam as the owner of the "Bell Boys" escort agency.1
Connection to the Rolodex Investigation
The Dutch government's 2013 summary of the Rolodex Investigation does not name the venue of the brothel it describes.2
Willems wrote that Henry Hans Holthuis, a Dutch figure investigated in connection with the Rolodex investigation, was associated with a university professor who frequented the Festival Bar, and that the venue was an intersection point between the commercial exploitation network around Maasdam and the broader social network of clients identified through the Rolodex investigation's client lists.3
Robert Jan Warmerdam, a witness whose testimony linked the Dutch networks to Belgium, testified in connection with venues including the Festival Bar, according to the Belgian parliamentary commission report. Warmerdam claimed knowledge of both Robbie Van Der Plancken and Marc Dutroux, placing himself and others in the context of venues used by the broader cross-border network.4
Context Within Dutch-Belgian Networks
The Festival Bar's documentation is significant within the vault's analysis of how organized child abuse networks operated transnationally across the Netherlands and Belgium in the 1980s-1990s. The venue represents a commercial node - an establishment from which exploited minors were made available to paying clients - as distinct from the private abuse parties and distribution networks (like the Zandvoort Apollo BBS) that characterized other nodes in the same network. The co-presence of Maasdam's Bell Boys supply infrastructure and the Festival Bar's client-facing commercial operation in the same Amsterdam milieu reflects the organizational structure of commercial child exploitation described by investigators and witnesses in the broader Dutroux-X-Dossier investigation.3
Footnotes
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Nick Davies, "Paedophile network trafficks young boys across Europe," nickdavies.net, dated October 1, 1998. https://www.nickdavies.net/1998/10/01/paedophile-network-trafficks-young-boys-across-europe/ ↩︎
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"Samenvatting van de aanleiding, het verloop, de resultaten en de besluitvorming in het Rolodex-onderzoek," December 23, 2013. https://eerstekamer.nl/9370000/1/j4nvgs5kjg27kof_j9vvkfvj6b325az/vjigib8p5szh ↩︎
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Willems, Jan. Wie beschermt het kind? ["Who Protects the Child?"]. VUB Press, 1999. ↩︎
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Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (Belgium). Parlementaire onderzoekscommissie betreffende de wijze waarop het onderzoek naar Marc Dutroux werd gevoerd. Belgian Senate, 1997. ↩︎