Almost all the sons of Amsterdam’s most notorious crime bosses have ended up with criminal records and half have done jail time, according to research by Amsterdam’s VU University.

Researcher Meintje van Dijk used police, justice department and social work files to look into 25 crime families. The investigation focused on 44 children aged 19 to 33, with an average age of 23.

She found nine out of 10 sons had been in trouble with the police and half had been jailed for assault or possession of weapons. One had been killed in a gangland shooting.

‘This is a very high score and much higher than we would expect based on research into ‘ordinary’ criminal families,’ the Volkskrant quotes her as saying.

Spoilt

Daughters are less likely to get involved in crime themselves but often marry or have relationships with men with a criminal background. ‘If you look at it cynically, you can say the women from criminal families allow the men to get on with it and profit from the crime just as much,’ Van Dijk said.

‘Criminal parents take their children with them into their world,’ Amsterdam police spokeswoman Hanneke Ekelmans told the paper. ‘The children get completely the wrong idea of what is normal.’

Of the 44 children studied, 95% had spent time without their father because he was in jail, 90% had divorced parents and one in three had lost their father in a gangland killing.