Cops and Robbers: we think we know how to tell the good guys from the bad, but when it comes to Cape Town’s crime scene, things are anything but clear cut. Controlled by gangs, fuelled by drugs and policed by cops that, all too often, get caught on the wrong side of the action.
Among the Cape Town cops who have consistently claimed that colleagues are trying to pin crimes on them are Major General Andre Lincoln (former head of a national police unit mandated by Nelson Mandela), Major General Jeremy Vearey (known as SA’s top gang buster) and Lieutenant Colonel Charl Kinnear (who was investigating some of the country’s most brutal underworld crimes when he was assassinated in September 2020). Colleagues and suspects alike pointed to all three as colluding with criminals. Who is telling the truth?
Journalist Caryn Dolley has tracked this tangled trail, following the corruption breadcrumbs, sifting through court documents, laying fact upon fact and exposing the depths and breadth of systemic corruption that was set in place during apartheid and has only become more entrenched during the first decades of our democracy. She has traced the rot from cops to underworld to politicians and back, exposing duplicitous networks that have for decades ensnared South Africa in an expanding cycle of organised crime and cop claim crossfire. At the centre of this crisis is the mounting collateral: the victims of Cape Town’s manufactured killing fields.
To The Wolves tells the true life story of how South Africa’s underworld came to be, what continues to fuel it today and how the deception and lies go all the way to the top…
The family-friendly restaurant in a mall in Cape Town’s northern suburbs is just about to start filling up, the shrieks of children already competing with clanging crockery, frenetic chatter and the takkie-squeaks of rushed waiters. It is a Wednesday afternoon; schools have shut for the day and the bustling restaurant is a cheerful refuge as the city outside braces for the slow grind of gridlocked midweek traffic.
In a corner a man and a woman talk to each other. They are seated at a table adjacent to a nearby playpen where two children are gleefully making the most of this midweek treat.
At 2:45pm two other patrons walk into the restaurant and choose a table roughly six metres away from the chatting couple. A waiter walks up to the new patrons’ table and they make small talk as they order drinks. Exactly seven minutes later the duo suddenly gets up; one pulls a firearm from his belt and starts firing bullets at the man and woman seated nearby. The man being targeted yanks out a gun of his own and fires back. Instantly the family restaurant is transformed into a horror scene.
Children scream, confused patrons duck and terrified waiters run for cover. In the ensuing chaos the fake-patron-now-gunman fatally shoots his accomplice. The man he initially targeted is wounded; the woman and children are luckily unscathed. The restaurant is now a murder scene, red spatters across the white tiled floor lead to a pool of blood and a body. Paramedics jostle around rapidly vacated tables.
A dour detective arrives and spots a fellow officer, a portly captain. The detective is curious about the captain’s presence because as far as he’s aware the captain is not authorised to investigate the case. But this captain and another cop get involved anyway, and later arrest a suspect. This suspect then makes an astonishing claim: that two Cape Town cops, working clandestinely with organised crime suspects, were involved in orchestrating the gruesome restaurant shooting.
Why didn’t Crime Intelligence foil the looting that mushroomed and is tearing up parts of South Africa? Police bosses say the unit did, but the reality is the country’s police intelligence component has been ravaged over more than a decade and claims of malfeasance are still seeping out of it.
Last week the Constitutional Court ruled that the former president will have to appear before the State Capture Commission. Zuma has now hit back, saying the commission, chaired by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, should have been named ‘Allegations of State Capture against Jacob Zuma’ because it is targeting him, a situation he says is reminiscent of apartheid.
The Western Cape’s police boss Thembisile Patekile announced in February that the Anti-Gang Unit had a new leader. When Daily Maverick asked who it was, the police provided the name of a person who the provincial government said had taken up a job with the City of Cape Town.
In the late 1980s, SA’s notorious Number gangs wanted the ANC and Nelson Mandela to know their history was also based on resistance. This emerged when axed top policeman Jeremy Vearey continued testifying in a major gang trial.
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