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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In the 1990s deep-cover police agent RS536 took on the Durban underworld as part of a new organised crime intelligence unit. He rubbed shoulders with drug lords, smugglers and corrupt cops, and was instrumental in busting an international drug ring and foiling a bank heist, among many other dangerous engagements. But then, as the country's new democracy birthed a struggle between the old and the new guard in the South African Police Service, his identity and his life came under threat. In this action-packed account, Johann van Loggerenberg describes how, as a young policeman, he worked closely with the investigative team of the Goldstone Commission to uncover the 'third force' – apartheid security forces that supplied weapons to the Inkatha Freedom Party to destabilise the country. He also delves into how and why, at the height of state capture at the South African Revenue Service in 2014, he was falsely accused of being an apartheid spy, a lie that persists up to today. Here, finally, is the truth behind the deep-cover police agent RS536.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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COP
UNDER
COVER
MY LIFE IN THE SHADOWS
WITH DRUG LORDS, ROBBERS
AND SMUGGLERS
JOHANN VAN LOGGERENBERG
JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS
JOHANNESBURG • CAPE TOWN • LONDON
Contents
Praise for the title
Johann van Loggerenberg has written an insightful and refreshing book made all the more remarkable for what it does to that well-worn genre of South African writing: the spy memoir.
Whereas most spook accounts, with which South Africa is awash, are keen to show why the author was justified in following this or that ideology, Van Loggerenberg’s powerful book shows what spying for the public good might look like. Cop Under Coverillustrates in vivid prose that it is possible to break bread with criminals and know their personal quirks without losing sight of the fact that they are bad people intent on doing wrong – and, more importantly, without going over to the dark side yourself.
Here is an unvarnished account of someone who was prepared to go after the bad guys – using lies and obfuscation, for sure, but in the firm belief that there is a difference between right and wrong. While Van Loggerenberg may not perhaps have intended this book to be about the importance of an honest and professional public service, this is what he has given the reader.
As Van Loggerenberg discovered in his five years as a cop working undercover against drug dealers, treasonous policemen and bank robbers, the good guys lose more than they must; and the bad guys win more than they should, in this endless fight for the future of South Africa. But the fight is worthwhile.
What makes this such a compelling read is that Van Loggerenberg does not spare himself in this poignant story: from his account of the panic attacks generated by a body living constantly under extreme stress and his lament about a double life that rendered him incapable of maintaining healthy relations with others, to his crushing disappointment upon seeing corrupt policemen undo his painstaking work to curb organised crime.
Cop Under Cover is passionate but measured, sad but uplifting. It is a story of both South Africa as we do not want to know it, and of public service as we would like to see it. That is why it deserves to be read.
Jacob Dlamini, historian and author of The Terrorist Album
Dedications
To Gabriella and Nicole: I love you both unconditionally. You are my true purpose in life.
To my family: thank you for understanding, eventually.
To all who walked the path with me, both those who feature in this book and those who do not: I can neither confirm nor deny your contributions to my life, whether good, bad or mediocre. I must, however, mention Henry, Schalk, Klavier, Lang Man, Viool, Ferdi, Faan, Lindsey, Dolfie, Jan, Susan, Annetjie, Johan, Frik, Grobbie, Willie, Stuart, Martin, Michelle, Darlene, Dan, Ivan, Flint, Soks, Ricky, Steve, Douglas, Tim, Moe, Pete, Yunis, Shirish, Paul, Wa, Gav and Mo. I’m certain I’ve missed some, but you know who you are.
To all South Africans: may we one day become the nation we have the potential to be.
To undercover operatives in the employ of the South African government, past and present, and in whatever form – but only the good ones: respect your craft, because it comes with incredible responsibility, burdens and sacrifices.
To all ethical journalists and civil-society activists and groupings: keep on spying for the good. Carry on with your surveillance, your covert coffee-shop meetings, your source recruitment and debriefings, and your report writing. We need to know.
To all past and current South African activists: may you always be with us and guide us.
To RS536, my old friend: RIP.
Author’s note
‘He was a spy.’
It was a whispered accusation that would travel far and wide over several years throughout the South African Revenue Service, where I started working as a relatively junior official in 1998. It would develop different and sometimes opposing tails and slants: in one false version, I’d been a member of the notorious apartheid regime’s Vlakplaas hit squad; in another lie, I was somehow linked to the regime’s chemical and biological warfare programme. Sometimes I was – inaccurately – a former Security Branch operative or spy, and in other untruthful cases I’d recruited former liberation-struggle stalwarts like Pravin Gordhan, Ivan Pillay and Gene Ravele as spies for the apartheid regime.
Other iterations of the myths claimed the opposite: I’d allegedly been assigned to guard Ivan Pillay when he was arrested by the Security Branch, and Pillay had recruited me as a spy against the regime. I was sometimes a member of an ANC underground cell, linked to Operation Vula, smuggling freedom fighters into South Africa and maintaining communications between the leaders in exile, at home and in prison.
What all these whispers collectively said was that I couldn’t be trusted.
In 2013 and again in 2014 an advocate of the High Court would meet a journalist and state as a fact – falsely – that I was a former Security Branch man. In 2014 the Sunday Times, the country’s biggest-selling newspaper, named me in a headline as a ‘former apartheid undercover police agent’. This slanderous label would stick, and be endlessly parroted and repeated on social media, in wider and wider circles and to an increasing number of people.
By 2019 I was dishonestly being accused of having both plotted against Zuma when he was president, and worked with him in his defending himself against charges of corruption. I was also accused – untruthfully – of being involved in conspiring with the Police Crime Intelligence division of the time, under disgraced Richard Mdluli.
In the same year, Noseweek inaccurately reported that I’d ‘joined the apartheid police’s Republican Spy Programme’, which it called ‘one of the apartheid regime’s more notorious police outfits’, and stated that I’d subsequently led a ‘dangerous double life of safe houses, false names, lies and betrayal’.
In his now discredited report, advocate Muzi Sikhakhane stated in 2014 that a ‘witness’ – unnamed, of course – called the Republican Spy Programme ‘one of apartheid South Africa’s most effective operations to infiltrate apartheid’s political opponents, in the form of liberation movements’, with direct reference to me.
For many years I endured the ongoing trauma of being branded as dishonest, a rogue and an apartheid spy. My life has certainly not been uneventful or boring – but these endless whispered allegations and increasingly loud public charges were and are, as related in this book, without any foundation whatsoever in truth.
Every word in this book is fact, based on personal records kept over my lifetime: diaries, handwritten and typed official notes, floppy disks, stiffy drives, photos, videos, official transcripts, newspaper reports, eyewitness accounts, cassette tapes and microcassettes, court records, affidavits, and official reports and records. That said, it would’ve been an impossible task to describe all my work and doings in those early years in a single book; many of my stories could well make up books on their own. Given the limitation of the space between these covers, I’ve had to carefully select those anecdotes that would give as best and complete a sense as possible of those years.
In addition, many of these stories concern the activities and identities of informants and other sensitive information, and to this end I’ve had to select and write them in a way that preserves the security of those involved and remains within the bounds of what the law permits.
All this said, everything I relate in this book is the truth.
A note on the use of pseudonyms
In writing this book, I’ve taken care not to invade the privacy of, slander, humiliate or embarrass innocent people, and for this reason in certain instances I’ve replaced real names with pseudonyms. Similarly, some of the people in this book have paid their dues to society and subsequently altered their ways: to those who’ve done so, I’ve afforded privacy, dignity and their right to continue with their lives without disturbance. But where I believe dodgy events and people deserve open scrutiny in the public interest and in the interests of justice, I’ve taken the opportunity to set the record straight.
I’ve also had to consider what I wrote from a legal perspective: where I might be legally precluded from disclosing something, I erred on the side of caution, and, again, for this reason, I’ve sometimes used pseudonyms in the place of real names.
As it applies to others, I too have a right to privacy when it comes to my private life, and I insist on this right.
Prologue
Jay was lying on his stomach with his hands cuffed behind his back. His head was twisted to the side, his right cheek pressed to the cold linoleum floor of the small, sparsely furnished civil-service office. A large, stocky policeman was sitting on his back, while another stood with a foot on his neck. A third was prodding a broomstick through his shorts into his anus.
There were no sounds but for his gasps for air, groans and scuffling. It was midwinter but the sweat was pouring off him – he was running a high fever from a bout of flu he’d contracted a few days before.
He passed out. Again.
They’d come for him on the Friday night, late, around midnight. A few broke open the front door of the bachelor apartment while some came through the sea-facing windows. Jay woke to the loud noise and bright torchlights of a bunch of policemen with their handguns and automatic rifles pointed at him. There was lots of screaming.
They allowed him to put on a T-shirt and shorts, then they cuffed his hands behind his back and dragged him from the flat, down the stairs and through the main entrance. They threw him into the caged back of a yellow police van.
Blue lights flashing, they travelled from Durban in the direction of the Midlands. The temperature started dropping as they drove farther inland, and by the time they reached the Ixopo police station two hours later, Jay was shivering uncontrollably.
They yanked him from the back of the van, marched him down some passages and threw him into a cell. The door slammed shut.
It was dark, and he had to wait for his eyes to get accustomed to the lack of light to orientate himself. The room contained only two military-style coarse grey blankets. One was folded double lengthways, supposedly to serve as a mattress. He lay down on it clumsily, his movements restricted by the handcuffs.
Freezing and fearful, he fell into a delirious sleep.
As the sun shone its first rays through the cell bars that Saturday morning, the sound of rattling keys and voices woke Jay. He sat up expectantly. Perhaps now he’d be able to clear things up.
The door flew open, and two policemen came in at speed, each grabbing him under an armpit. Quickly and roughly, they hustled him out the cell and along a couple of corridors into what seemed to be an office of some sort. It was sparsely furnished with a light-wood desk and three chairs. As the three of them stood there, two more policemen entered, each carrying a chair. The last man in closed the door behind him and turned the key.
The five men each took a seat, forming a circle around Jay and making themselves comfortable. Jay, still dressed in only his T-shirt and shorts, stood shivering in the middle of the circle. Exquisitely aware that not a single living soul knew where he was, he decided to keep quiet and try to work out what was going on.
Nobody said anything.
There was a knock on the door and the cop nearest got up and unlocked it, letting in a big man carrying a flask and some plastic mugs. The door was locked behind him. The newcomer placed the items on the table.
By this time Jay had more or less worked out who these guys were. It was 1996, just a few years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, and the police force consisted of a mix of the old guard and the new. He was clearly dealing with the former here, the kind that didn’t bother to investigate crimes but instead beat and tortured confessions out of people.
Surreptitiously, Jay looked around the circle. Fat Cop was the chunky Afrikaans guy, probably in his early 30s. Smiley was a Zulu, looked to be in his 40s. Big Cop was English-speaking; he was about the same age as Fat Cop but had clearly spent much more time in the gym. Shorty, another Zulu, was probably the oldest of the group. Whitey, the last man to enter the room, was also Afrikaans and, judging by how the others deferred to him, seemed to be the most senior in rank.
‘Welcome to Murder and Robbery, Jay,’ Whitey said now.
The others laughed as if this was some kind of inside joke. The group of policemen seemed to know one another well.
Jay’s mind raced. This was clearly a conventional police station, not a Murder and Robbery unit office – there were no Murder and Robbery units any more, as they’d been incorporated into the newly established Serious and Violent Crimes Unit. He knew these units focused only on murders and armed robberies, and that some of them were known for beating their suspects and torturing them into confessions. Here comes trouble, he thought.
Big Cop suddenly stood up, strode over to Jay and pushed a forefinger into his chest. Stepping back, Jay tripped over a pair of carefully placed feet – Smiley’s – and fell backwards, his cuffed hands making him unable to break his fall. His head cracked hard against the floor and the wind was ejected from his lungs.
Fat Cop rolled the gasping prisoner onto his stomach and sat on his back, a meaty thigh on either side of Jay’s torso. He nodded to Shorty, who picked up a bucket that was standing in a corner and pulled from it a brown rubber cloth studded with tiny holes. It glistened wetly – the bucket was evidently full of water.
‘Now you’ll learn what it means to be tubed, big man,’ Fat Cop said jeeringly. He took the rubber cloth from Shorty and laid it over Jay’s face, then pulled it tight, making sure the rubber formed a seal all the way around.
Jay tried to breathe in but the wet rubber clinging tightly around his mouth and nose made it impossible; he couldn’t breathe out either. He felt panic and his body reacted instinctively, intent on ridding itself of its capturer and torturer, his torso convulsing and his limbs trying to lash out.
He felt Fat Cop’s massive weight bear down on his chest, the cop’s large thighs tighten around his ribcage. He felt feet on his arms and legs, holding him down. His body already stressed by fever and fear, he lost consciousness.
When Jay came to he lay with his eyes closed for a few minutes, trying to work out how much time had passed and establish his surroundings. He could hear distant voices, the occasional slam of a door, a revving car.
When he was certain he was alone, he opened his eyes and slowly sat up. He was back in his cell, lying on the bare cement floor. He was shivering violently and burning up – the fever had really got a grip now. Shuffling backwards, he reached out his cuffed hands for one of the military blankets, pulling it awkwardly around himself.
Keys rattled in the door and it swung open.
‘Ready for round two, big man?’ Fat Cop asked.
There were also rounds three, four and five that day. He was given no food or water, and when he inevitably soiled himself he wasn’t allowed to wash or given clean clothes.
Jay felt more than once that he was going to die; and at times he wished he would. And it wasn’t straightforward torture for information: the group of cops wouldn’t even give him an opportunity to speak before Fat Cop yanked the rubber cloth over his head.
By now, from the snippets of conversation he’d picked up during the torture, Jay had a rough idea of what this was about: a suspected drug dealer from Durban had been shot in a parking lot near North Beach, where Jay lived, in a drug deal that had gone wrong. But Jay knew nothing at all about it – not that the cops who’d kidnapped him had given him an opportunity to tell them this, or that they’d believe him if they had.
By Saturday evening, the torture had moved from tubing, which the cops evidently felt wasn’t producing the desired effect – whatever that may have been – and Jay was being hit with a baton and having the soles of his feet beaten with a piece of hosepipe. At one stage, a broomstick was stuck through his cuffed arms behind his back and this was balanced across two chair-backs; Jay hung like an unwilling trapeze artist between them, his weight pulling down on his shoulder joints causing tremendous pain. He could smell the alcohol on the cops’ breath.
By this time it was clear what his torturers wanted: for Jay to confess to the murder. But he knew nothing about it and the cops wouldn’t give him anything beyond the barest details. As the torture went on, and Jay was unable to give them what they wanted, it seemed to slowly dawn on them that they had the wrong man.
On the Sunday afternoon, the door swung open once again to reveal not Fat Cop but a uniformed policeman.
‘Come,’ the cop said.
Jay followed, dreading what lay ahead, but the policeman took him into a courtyard and pointed to a coiled-up hosepipe attached to an outside tap. ‘You can wash here,’ the cop said, unlocking and removing the handcuffs.
Jay shuffled to the tap and dropped to his knees, turning it on and pushing the end of the hosepipe into his mouth, allowing the cool sweetness to flood down his throat. It was the first water he’d drunk in two days, and he felt it returning life to his beaten body.
‘You’re free to go,’ the policeman said.
‘Who are these cops, sergeant?’ Jay asked.
The cop shook his head and rubbed his eyes. ‘Eish, let me not get involved,’ he said. ‘Just go.’
Word spread fast among the local detectives and their informants: Jay was crooked, but he was going to be a tough nut to crack.
To the criminals who infested the Durban underworld, the message was clear, too: Jay didn’t snitch. He could handle the boere – the police. He could be trusted.
PART I
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
Formative lessons in tradecraft
‘In every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.’
– John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
I was once a long-term deep-cover agent for the South African Police Service.
This didn’t happen as a consequence of careful reflection on options followed by a conscious choice. Rather, various incidents, events and circumstances in my life, from early childhood to early adulthood, contributed to a mixed bag of personality attributes that made me perfect for the job.
I was about five years old when my parents got divorced. Divorce was fairly uncommon in the Calvinist environment in which I grew up, and brought with it some shame, which I unnecessarily carried on my little shoulders. I’d just started school, and suddenly my life was thrown into the type of turmoil that required me to carefully observe the moods and behaviour of people, and keep an emotional distance to avoid hurt. I was also about a year younger than my classmates. In adult life, a year means nothing; as a child, a year is a near-lifetime of difference.
My dad, Johannes ‘Hennie’ van Loggerenberg, came from a privileged musical Afrikaans family. Prone to high emotion and bohemian in his outlook, he liked his wine or whisky and cigarettes. He could do sums in his head as fast as a pocket calculator, and he could play almost any instrument imaginable, but his passion and training was the piano. He started off as a teacher, but soon enough became a radio talk-show host, long before television was around, hosting a musical show called Skemerkelkie (Cocktail) for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. He had his own band that often did gigs at nightspots, usually on weekends and during holidays. He later wrote songs for well-known children’s programmes Liewe Heksie and Wielie Walie, and sat on the judging panels of various boeremusiek competitions.
My father eventually married Magriet Erasmus, an artist, sculptor and award-winning television producer. This union resulted in the birth of my little brother.
After he retired, my dad ran a music school until his death in August 2014.
My mother, Harriet Bisset, was part Scottish, part Polish, part Jewish. She’d grown up incredibly poor and had had a tough time as an English-speaking child at the only local school, which was Afrikaans medium. Despite this challenging start, and thanks to her intellect and non-emotive, cognitive approach to life, she became deputy head girl in high school and won a bursary to study at university, where she met my father. She specialised in languages and communication at varsity. She worked as a teacher and later in admin at the University of South Africa. She then joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, where she ran their internal and external newspapers, and later headed up the Department of Communications under Minister Pallo Jordan. A workaholic, she would at times hold down multiple jobs at once.
As children my elder sister, younger sister and I were raised mainly by Annah Mahlahola, my mom’s live-in housekeeper. Annah’s social circle included other domestic workers in the suburb, along with visitors from afar from time to time, ranging from farm workers to teachers, nurses and a few boyfriends.
So, in my world, during my formative years, on the one hand there was the rigid, thinking, unemotional, I-will-never-fail attitude of my mom and her circle of academics and people in the know, as well as a few interesting characters like Eastern Bloc citizens who’d defected, who were keen to debate and talk about the news of the day; and on the other hand there was my dad with his much more relaxed, heavy-partying, couldn’t-care-less friends who didn’t mind the odd joint, and to whom music, art and poetry mattered more.
And then there was also Annah’s love and teachings from a completely different world, with its own set of rules.
These were the primary influences in my life, and in time I would learn to slip effortlessly from one world into another. It was valuable early training for my future undercover work: effective tradecraft requires the ability to switch seamlessly between diverse environments.
I was born in 1969 in Pretoria and classified ‘white’, which meant I was guaranteed a decent education, unlike so many of my black peers who had to endure what was then called Bantu Education. In primary school I made up my own radio shows, scripting stories and using different voices and sound effects to accompany what I’d usually plagiarised from existing movies or stories. I also enjoyed making my own photo-books, recruiting friends as actors, using my Instamatic camera to string together a series of posed photos into a storyline of sorts.
I ended up boarding from the age of 15 at Afrikaanse Hoër Seunsskool, Affies, in Pretoria. This introduced a completely new type of freedom to me at a relatively early stage, as I had to negotiate aspects of my own life without my parents being involved on a day-to-day basis.
I was passionate about reading and I loved art. I enjoyed science, and won the national Young Scientist Expo in my Standard 6 (Grade 8) year, with a solar-powered cable-car system I’d designed that could be used in mines. I participated in rugby, tennis, water polo and athletics, but it was softball that I really enjoyed. I was captain of my rugby team one year.
But I found school in general, and most classes, boring. I became adept at reading the system and its patterns, and at making them work to my advantage. For example, at the start of the year, teachers required pupils to sit at a specific desk and put their name on certain lists for different classes, most consisting of up to forty kids: if I didn’t fill in some of those lists, I realised, in some cases I could go completely off the radar.
There were times when I was naughty and I often challenged authoritarian-type personalities, both teachers and older peers at school. Sometimes I slipped out at night from boarding school, going to a local nightclub, Jacqueline’s, and returning in the early hours of the morning. Alcohol and cigarettes came into my life fairly early.
I flitted between the usual cliques at school, sometimes hanging with the jocks, other times with the hip crowd, and then also with the naughty guys, having a secret smoke. While I had some friends, those relationships were quite superficial and I never felt I belonged anywhere or in any of the groups. I could move within them and be accepted, but none really pulled me in.
Years later, when I was in my 30s, I consulted a mental-health professional about some issues I was having as a result of some events in my childhood and early adulthood, as well as years of a self-imposed unnatural state of existence and the post-traumatic stress disorder that flowed from it. It was then that I discovered that I’d suffered from a mild form of bipolar disorder all my life. This fairly common mental affliction, which occurs to different degrees in different people, is marked by shifts in mood, and symptoms can include spells of an elevated mood called mania and episodes of depression. People with bipolar disorder may also sometimes have trouble managing everyday life tasks at school or work, or maintaining relationships. Surprisingly, there are also some benefits to it: an upswing can last quite a long time and during it the person may be very creative and have lots of energy, which brings great focus, attention and drive.
Tiny little signs that I had this condition were always there to see. Now I understand it and know how it affected me – and also how it benefitted me over many years of living under cover.
A dark cloud that hung over the heads of white schoolboys at that time was the dreaded Section 63 of the Defence Act of 1957. At age 16 I was required by law to register with the South African Defence Force (SADF), and as soon as I reached the age of 18 or finished high school, I was allotted for national service to become an armed soldier for a period of two uninterrupted years, following which I had to attend annual camps for who knows how long. If I was still a full-time scholar at age 18, I could apply to the Exemption Board for deferment, which meant I could delay it but not avoid it, facing an equal or longer prison term if I did.
Schools did these registrations for boys as part of what was known as the cadets programme. We were issued our own brown army outfits and berets with an army badge, which we were required to wear every Friday, when we were made to march in platoons, shoot at targets with .22 rifles, and attend all sorts of ‘orientation’ sessions.
This was intended to prepare us for the army. We needed to be ready to defend our happy, prosperous and contented nation against terrorists, communists and other bad guys who were completely beneath us, and who wanted to chase us all into the sea, murder and rape our sisters and mothers, and steal everything – and all of whom happened not to be white and were being fooled by the communist Russians. Once, for example, one of our teachers pointed to a black man working on a sports field at school, and told us that if we failed to defend the nation, we would one day have to say ‘Sir’ to that ‘boy’. The man was an adult, older than the teacher.
Not only were we indoctrinated by the stifling, patriarchal and institutionalised conservatism of Calvinism, we were also brainwashed to live in fear of the ‘swart gevaar’ (the black peril, or the country’s majority black population) and the ‘rooi gevaar’ (the red peril, referring to the communists). According to National Party propaganda, the African National Congress (ANC) was a terrorist organisation, a proxy for the communists who were trying to take over the world. We were most certainly not told who, for example, Steve Biko was or how he’d died; I didn’t know anything about the Freedom Charter or even much about Nelson Mandela. Until I left school, I was never told or taught anything meaningful about any of the liberation movements, their philosophies or the people behind them.
I’d also not heard of the End Conscription Campaign, which was launched in Cape Town in 1984 and campaigned against conscription laws, the war in Angola and the troops in the townships, and for voluntary forms of alternative service.
After I matriculated, I spent a couple of months in one of South Africa’s coastal holiday towns, getting pissed, trying to get laid but failing dismally, and generally misbehaving. I hitched home to my dad’s house some time in February 1987, unshaven and with long hair.
There, my dad handed me an envelope that contained a final warning that should I again fail to report by a given date to the Pretoria army headquarters then known as Voortrekkerhoogte, I should hand myself over to the Military Police for trial and detention, failing which an arrest warrant would be issued for me with immediate effect.
How not to counter-insurge
‘But can you tell me exactly for what criminal offence Nelson Mandela was convicted?’
– Henry Khumalo
‘Join the police,’ my dad suggested.
I’d just turned 18, and was battling with the notion of doing two years of national service as a soldier. My father’s rationale was that signing up with the police, which was a legal alternative to doing military duty, would prevent me from having to fight in the border war, which was then active between the SADF and the armed wing of the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), and was closely intertwined with the Angolan Civil War, which itself was used as a surrogate battleground for the Cold War by rival states including the Soviet Union and South Africa. I’d also earn more money as a policeman than I would as a troepie (soldier), which I could put away for my studies. I could even study part-time and do some good by catching crooks, I told myself.
I took my dad’s advice and, a few psychometric tests and a medical check-up later, I officially became police student-constable JH van Loggerenberg. I was told to report to the building that housed the Brixton Murder and Robbery unit – infamous for torturing suspects during investigations – to start my in-service training in the charge office that serviced the area. I’d be expected to work a week of day shifts, have two days off, and then do another week of night shifts, for the next six months or so, after which I’d attend the police college in Pretoria for six months of formal training.
I was also told to wear a jacket and tie at alltimes, and to have short-back-and-sides hair; no facial hair, tattoos or jewellery were allowed. The warrant officer in charge would brief me, and when he did so, I was required to stand to attention at alltimes. And I had to bring my own pen – black ink. I duly complied.
On my first day as a student-constable in training I arrived a bit early. I was told to sit on a wooden bench and keep my mouth shut. Soon enough, my shift arrived. It consisted of a big man, the warrant officer, who everybody referred to as ‘AO’ (adjudant-offisier, the Afrikaans term for the rank). AO was also in charge of Constable Edwards, a nonchalant English guy from Durban who loved to play pinball and surf, Constable Mhlongo, a black guy from the east of Johannesburg who was one of the most gentlemanly men I’d ever met in my life, and Sergeant Beaton, who, despite the surname, was as Afrikaans as they come and incredibly funny. This was the group of people I was to spend the next six months with.
The charge office – a service centre where the public could come and report crimes or incidents to the police – was split into two parts: one desk, facing the public entrance, was dedicated to white complainants, and the other to ‘non-whites’. AO sat at a big desk bang in the middle, with lots of files and thick notebooks and registers stacked in front of him, as well as the radio, our primary means of communicating with other charge offices and mobile patrols.
AO spent a lot of time showing us the ropes: how to run a charge office and how to do the required record-keeping. Being the student-constable, I serviced the public at both desks, regardless of the race of the complainant; the same went for Mhlongo. The irony of this seemed to escape all but us two.
Our first task was always to determine if what was being reported was, in fact, a reportable matter for the police – in other words, a crime or an incident. Sometimes people came to the charge office in the hope that the police would assist with private disputes, such as when one owed money to another. The reportable matters typically ranged from assaults and theft to break-ins into cars and homes, although the most common report was motor-vehicle accidents. For accidents, a standard form had to be completed, while other complaints were taken down by hand, with a black pen, in the form of an affidavit.
This induction period introduced me to the world of crime and victims of crime. We also interacted with victims of sexual, drug and alcohol abuse, and witnesses to murder.
By month three, Mhlongo and I were able to run the charge office on our own, with Edwards and Beaton driving patrols in the police van and AO taking increasingly regular breaks. When Beaton and Edwards took breaks, especially late during night shifts, I would drive the patrol van. I even made a few arrests of housebreakers and car thieves.
One evening a report came in of a body of a suicide victim in the local public swimming pool. I went to the scene with Beaton and Edwards to assist with recovering the body from the water. It was the first dead body I’d ever seen. I pretended it didn’t affect me, but of course it did. But as a young police official yet to experience the real world of policing, I wasn’t supposed to ask too many questions or share my feelings.
Another incident gave me insight into the strange inner workings of the criminal mind. A detective from the Murder and Robbery unit came in to the charge office one day, asking for an independent witness to attend a pointing-out of a brutal murder with his team. This process entailed the investigating detectives taking the suspect, who’d confessed, back to the scene of the crime, to walk through it and describe the sequence of events in detail. This would be meticulously recorded and used as evidence during the prosecution.
The young blond suspect seemed to relate to me and, on our way there, spoke openly of his crimes. I suppose he saw I was a greenhorn, more or less his age, and that we both spoke Afrikaans, and he didn’t see me as a threat. He was from the Free State, he told me, and had come to Johannesburg looking for better opportunities. But he’d left school early and hadn’t completed his education, and he’d soon found himself falling on hard times.
We arrived at a small house in the poor part of the suburb of Jan Hofmeyer in the middle of the day. It was the modest home of an elderly woman who’d lived there alone. The investigative team, the young suspect and I, along with a police photographer, filed in through the front door. I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see, and was horrified to discover the entire kitchen area covered with blood.
The suspect told and showed us, quite calmly, how he’d broken into the house and tied the old woman to a chair in the kitchen. He’d kept her hostage for an entire weekend, while he watched her TV and ate her food. In the end he’d killed her by hitting her on the head with a hammer several times.
The aspect of this confession that I found most odd was the fact that the autopsy showed that the elderly woman had been raped – yet, while the young man had been quite prepared to explain to police officers in minute detail the gruesome murder of the woman, he had refused to admit to raping her.
In July 1987 I arrived at the police college in Pretoria West to start my six months of basic training with a host of other conscripts.
I was assigned to Platoon 96, mainly with guys who’d excelled in rugby and other sports, under Lance-Sergeant Stony Steenkamp, who’d won the annual award for the most disciplined and best-performing platoon for several years running. I immediately attracted his attention, and not in a good way: not only was I was a few days late to check in (I’d had to testify in the Johannesburg High Court as a witness in two arrests I’d carried out during my time as a student-constable), I also lacked the regulation haircut and uniforms that everyone else had by that stage.
Steenkamp immediately gave me an ‘opfok’, a gruelling series of physical exercises over an extended time period, which led to my collapse. I was rushed to hospital, where my heart stopped and was restarted three times. I spend two weeks recuperating before going back to Platoon 96.
I found the academic classes interesting, with subjects like criminal procedure, criminal law, law of evidence and police administration – despite the fact that I often fell asleep in class on account of regularly having to do the graveyard guard shift from midnight to 2 a.m. as a punishment for some or other transgression. Practical sessions covered learning how to dismantle and assemble, clean and fire various types of firearms, a hell of a lot of marching around in circles, and physical-training exercises, including self-defence techniques and boxing. Then there was the endless washing, cleaning, polishing, ironing and bed-making, standing inspections and generally being messed around. We had little to no time of our own.
Asleep in class (I am front left).
I used to slip out of the college fairly frequently, usually with some mates, to go to nightclubs, and inevitably we were caught on a few occasions. I was formally tried for going AWOL three times and ended up paying a fine of R25 each time, which was docked from my monthly salary of R470. The last such trial was on the day our training ended, which culminated in a ‘passing-out parade’ in front of parents and friends of the newly minted police constables – I missed the entire thing and technically therefore never officially qualified.
Most of us could now select a unit we wanted to be posted to, or we’d be assigned to the police station nearest to our home. But some of us weren’t so lucky, and were assigned to ‘afgedeelde dienste’, ‘deployed services’, which was a euphemism for being sent to one of those units nobody wanted to join, usually the paramilitary-type anti-riot units. That’s how I found myself on a bus to a police training facility called Maleoskop in what was then the Northern Transvaal (today’s northern Limpopo). There’s no doubt in my mind that Stony Steenkamp had put forward my name for this particular posting.
At Maleoskop we were trained in the arts of ‘counter-insurgency’. Academic classes included map-reading and compass-guiding, we were introduced to yet another range of all sorts of weapons, teargas and explosives, and there was a lot of shooting at targets. The physical exercise never stopped – we were hardly allowed to sleep through a single night – and the food was terrible – all of us trainees looked pretty emaciated by then.
The course was something of a badge of honour to some, since it was tough and few people volunteered for it, but I saw it as a waste of time – it was playing ‘soldier-soldier’, which wasn’t what I’d expected or wanted to be a part of. Needless to say, I ended up doing a hell of a lot of ‘opfoks’, which mostly entailed my having to run up a long, steep hill, carrying full gear and backpack, a case full of ammunition and a heavy TR51 field radio. And, I should add, I never did learn quite how to ‘counter-insurge’ …
