- (Note - There are some local terms here which need defining:-
The Scorpions - are President Mbeki's Elite Police unit. Popped, whacked
or Taken Out - To kill someone. The crime wave in SA helps to create a
climate where one can murder people and then it is always assumed to be
a criminal act. It is also a way of carrying out political killings without
people really noticing it. - Jan)
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- By Lin Sampson Sunday Times - South Africa 11-23-3
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- Hiring a hit man to whack someone is all the rage in
South Africa. Lin Sampson investigates
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- He leans back and does that trick with smoke, exhaling
through his mouth and inhaling through his nose. His nickname is Fruity
and, although he has spent his life killing people for a living, he looks
like a cream puff in nasty trainers with such elaborate fastenings they
might need a password to get into.
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- He is bald with a narrow, skeletal face and he might
be any age but tells me he is in his early 40s. He seems stripped of fat,
and if his personality was more pleasant, he might be good looking. But
his expression is horribly unaccommodating.
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- On his right arm he has a bandage which he winds and
rewinds as we talk. He wears a St Christopher medal round his neck as big
as a manhole cover.
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- His favourite word is "coo-rect", and he constantly
asks, "Do you follow me?"
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- Fruity comes from a well-off middle-class family and
has been privately educated. He fell into crime almost by mistake. "I
used to go to clubs a lot. One day someone gave me some dagga. I don't
do drugs so I sold it. Slowly, I was drawn into a whole drug network. I
began to know other drugs, where I could get them, how much they sold for."
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- Fruity yawns, revealing a gold tooth. "That first
month I made R32 000 and I was still a kid."
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- He soon got used to this rinky dink way of life, did
time, fell into the vice-like grip of petty crime and then seeking fiscal
salvation, opted for a few "pop" (killing) jobs. He says he has
given up this shadowy, criminal life with its ritzy perks. He says, "The
Scorpions have made life really unbearable for everyone." He has even
considered going back to a job as a salesman.
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- Or maybe join the Scorpions?
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- Coo-rect.
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- How much does it cost to have someone taken out? I ask.
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- "It depends entirely on the person's profile. If
they are high flyers, the risk is much bigger, you follow me? If it's just
a case of someone wanting her husband popped, you could be looking at around
R10 000. The more the person is known, the more the money." He says
he knows people who have popped someone for as little as R1 000.
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- However, Fruity says that he used to get more calls for
"putting on the frighteners. People who need to be really scared.
There's a lot of that around. Maybe money is owed or something like that.
This really works, but you need to be sussed. You need to know just how
far to go. You're doing frightening and you pop the guy, you're in big
trouble."
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- Frightening someone can cost as little as R2 000 and
can involve things like threatening telephone calls, following them, what
Fruity calls "finding the soft places".
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- "Everyone is vulnerable somewhere, if you're clever
you can do this with minimum hassle, even keep within the law, but really
make people feel uncomfortable."
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- Killing someone is more difficult. "You need real
expertise. You can't afford to do a botched job. What most experts do is
to really find out a lot about the person, where they go every day, how
their day is planned. A lot of people are whacked, but you might just think
it's been armed robbery or penetrating a house. You follow me?"
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- He adds, with the first smile of the interview, "It's
worth spending a bit of money."
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- Killing is like everything else, the more you pay, the
better the job.
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- "R100 000 is the minimum for a top job," says
Fruity. However, Fruity agrees that you can get it done for far less. "R200
is a bargain basement price," he says, "but although it will
get someone rubbed out it might get you rubbed out at the same time."
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- If I were a suburban housewife wanting to get rid of
my husband, how would I go about it? "The thing is to find one thread
connected to the network," Fruity says. "Members of the underworld
cling to each other like onions on a rope; once you've gone through one,
there's always another. In a place like Cape Town, the underworld is almost
incestuous. The more seedy clubs are a place to look."
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- How would we know if this person were any good?
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- "It is not," says Fruity, "the questions
you ask, it is the questions they ask you. A good contract killer would
want to know everything about the person and should, ideally, spend a few
weeks researching the subject. It's absolutely useless just turning up
one day with a gun and blowing his brains out. He should for instance know
whether there is big insurance on his life. You want elimination, you need
information, that's my slogan."
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- Contract killers usually work in syndicates - and according
to my sources they very often take it in turns to go to jail. "They
just come one day and say 'It's your time'."
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- Says Brava, who I met through Fruity: "Prison can
be cool. If you have the right connections it can all be laid on there
- even women."
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- It is well known in the dark seams of the criminal world
that people from a North African country (even mentioning the name could
get me into trouble) make the best hit men. I talked to one, who said,
"Yes, we often get hired to sort out problems. We are very quiet;
we just stand and stare. The problem goes away."
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- What happens, I asked, if the problem does not go away?
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- "Well, we are paid to do a job and the quicker we
do it the quicker we get paid. Half the money up front. Half after the
deed is done."
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- Everyone I talked to agreed that the relationship with
the hired assassin is crucial. But you'd be surprised how many people do
upset their killers or try to skim a bit of geld off the top.
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- "It is not," says Fruity, "a clever move
to get playful with a hired assassin."
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- In a week where Hazel Crane, wildcard socialite was knocked
off, allegedly by a hired hitter, who arose like a phoenix out of a pile
of rubbish on the side of the road and pumped four rounds into her in broad
daylight, it began to look as if the contract killing was the death du
jour.
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- It seems the hired hit man has never been in more demand.
Husbands get unwanted wives topped; wives call in a contract murderer rather
than go through the whole shebang of divorce; sons get rid of mothers and
sometimes mothers get rid of sons.
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- In the early 1980s contract killing in South Africa was
in its infancy. When Maureen Smith, whose father was connected to the underworld
in London, bribed the gardener to knife her husband, Roger, to death, and
her aunt, Daisy Sleet, came from London to lend a hand, it had a film noir
edge.
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- Smith and the gardener both got death, a sentence that
was commuted to life.
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- Some of the killings are so gruesome that they splatter
the brain with their bloody deeds and remain vividly in the mind for their
small, cruel refineries. In November 2000 Jerome Claasen hired three men
to kill his wife Tanya Sylvester. She was found face down in a bath. Jerome
had apparently paid extra for his wife to be raped.
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- The two hit men, Eugene Josephs and Julian Trout, both
24, were both sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for murder and seven
years for indecent assault. Claasen got life.
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- Some stand out as acts of near idiocy. Dr Caspar Greeff,
a dentist in Kempton Park, got a couple of guys to knock off his wife Estelle
after he had taken out hefty insurance policies on her life. He then called
in Slang van Zyl, famous sleuth, to solve the murder. Slang found the finger
of suspicion pointed to Greeff himself.
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- Last month Anna Myburgh, 68, was found with her throat
cut in her cottage in Gordon's Bay.
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- Three men were arrested, one of whom, 27-year-old Gerhardus
van Niekerk, made a confession revealing an alleged contract killing
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- However, it seems that in the great wave of crime that
threatens to engulf the country, a murder is a murder.
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- Chris de Kock, Assistant Commissioner of Police, did
say that he had noted a few contract killings, but said that the police
didn't have the means to track these sub-tendencies or new developments
in crime.
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- Peter Gastrow, director of the Cape Town branch of the
Institute for Security Studies, agrees that contract killing is a widespread
phenomenon, but said it was important to distinguish between professional
killings and the domestic kind, involving more personal passion.
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- The interesting thing about murders involving hired killers
is that many of the hirers seem to feel unfairly blamed.
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- Gastrow: "Because they are consumed by vengeance,
they don't assess the risks, there seems to be some subconscious belief
that because they didn't actually do the killing, they are morally less
culpable."
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- Maureen Muller's story is a cautionary one. Muller was
a middle-class housewife with a good job, two children and a husband who
was abusive. She and her sister, Faisa Allie, went shopping for a killer.
They contacted a prospective hit man who called himself Java. He contacted
his cousin Donald Ortell who eventually committed the murder.
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- Payment was R10 000 upfront, although Muller said she
had paid R70 000 to her sister who continued to pay off the hit man, claiming
he was threatening to kill her and her children.
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- Now all of them are behind bars. I visited Muller in
the Worcester Prison one chilly winter morning. She is a handsome woman
in her early forties who is paying dearly for her actions. "I know
I did wrong," she says, "and I am paying heavily for it. I urge
other women, who are in the same position as I was, to seek other options."
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- Once contract killing was an act that belonged to the
realms of detective fiction. Now it has become an epidemic and although
the boundaries might seem more fuzzy, hiring a killer, in the eyes of the
law, is the same as doing it yourself. It might be as well to remember
that quote from the Renaissance play the Duchess of Malfi by John Webster:
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- "When we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like
diamonds we are cut with our own dust."
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- Source: Sunday Times, South Africa http://www.suntimes.co.za/2003/11/23/lifestyle/life01.asp
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