Like big city cops all the way from Manhattan to Tokyo, police in once placid Amsterdam were being run ragged by teen-age punks. Dressed in juvenile delinquency's international uniform—leather jacket and blue jeans—Amsterdam's longhaired nozem* liked to roar around the city's central Dam Square on souped-up motorcycles, scaring tourists, chasing pretty girls and disrupting traffic. Time and again police squads charged gangs of nozem with batons and sabers swinging; the nozem continued to flourish, and nozempie kijken—watching the nozem—became a popular evening pastime in Amsterdam.
Delighted with their growing audiences, the nozem recently began to extend their activities into one of Amsterdam's chief tourist attractions—the legalized red-light district, occupying a network of ijth century streets around Dam Square. While police fumed impotently. the nozem ranged up and down, heckling tourists on the prowl, making fun of the prostitutes, sometimes even smashing the big bay windows in which the girls display themselves. To avoid trouble, tourists began to stay away from the district; prostitution and pimping revenues fell accordingly.
Fortnight ago the Amsterdam underworld, outraged by declining dividends, took matters into its own hands, dispatched a flying squad of 50 musclemen, who set upon a gang of nozem out on a heckling foray and administered professional beatings all around. The same evening Amsterdam's police commissioner got a telephone call from the city's leading racketeer. Willem ("Fat Steak'') Wagenaar. Said Fat Steak: "If you can't keep order in our district, we'll take over. Keep your police at home; we'll fix the nozem." Bubbling with official indignation, the commissioner flatly rejected Fat Steak's offer. But last week idle Amsterdamers out for a spot of nozem watching found remarkably little to look at. Those nozem who did appear in Dam Square spent their evenings in subdued conversation—and in the red-light district there was not a nozem to be seen.
*From the Hebrew nezem, a ring in a hog's nose, and, by extension, a handsome fellow lacking brains, morals or character.