Johannesburg

In many poor areas in and around Johannesburg, such as Alexandra township, youths formed gangs which engaged mainly in petty crimes. These gangs were often named after American movies or actors while gang members were sometimes loosely referred to by outsiders as tsotsis. They lived in communities in which there were high unemployment rates and which had been through many recent dislocations. They often emulated criminal groups which consisted of older members, but they were generally not well-organised and followed no particular structures. As individual gang members grew older, some linked up with more hardened criminal groups that engaged in criminal activities in an organised way.

One of the more notorious of these earlier organised criminal groups was the Msomi gang which operated from Alexandra. In the mid-1950s, it was responsible for an organised reign of terror involving numerous armed robberies, scores of murders, protection rackets and the fleecing of ordinary township residents. A senior crime reporter at the time compared the Msomi gang with some of the American gangs:

"The Msomi gang introduced a new era in our crime. Here were the first signs of organised gang activities, based on lessons from the American gang world. All the indications were there. Wealthy gang leaders — here we think of Shadrack Matthews who left an estate worth #23 000??? after the hangman’s rope had tightened around his neck — extorted huge amounts of money, often thousands of pounds, from poor defenceless residents every month and drove around in large twin-coloured American motor cars. They even had their own chauffeurs and bodyguards. Special sittings of their own underworld court were held weekly — usually on Sundays — where persons, particularly members of the Spoiler Gang, were summarily sentenced to death and later executed in a gruesome manner."13

This gang was properly structured with a strong leader (Shadrack Matthews), or ‘prime minister’ as he was called, which operated from their own gang headquarters and maintained very strict internal discipline. Their local rivals, the Spoiler Gang, which consisted of about 250 members, became the target of merciless killings and assassinations.

Another feared Johannesburg criminal mob of the early 1950s was the gang known as the Sheriff Khan Organisation. It was led by Sheriff Khan who was destined to become king of the South African underworld and who owned or controlled many illegal gambling establishments in and around Johannesburg.14 His organisation established its powerful presence in Johannesburg when the majority of the twelve members of the ‘Durban’ gang, together with some survivors of the ‘Y’ gang, linked up with him. These former two gangs had been involved in open gang warfare in the streets of Johannesburg. In addition to drug pushing and extortion, the gang excelled at shop and warehouse breaking which was performed after meticulous planning, masterminded by Sheriff Khan himself. They had their own vans to transport stolen goods to their own warehouse.

A feature common to both the ‘Msomi’ gang and the ‘Sheriff Khan Organisation’ was the close contact which they both appeared to have had with the police. Most of the members of the Msomi gang had acted as informers for the police prior to their arrests.15 After committing their crimes in Alexandra, one or more of them invariably approached detectives with information which tended to lead to an address of a member of the rival ‘Spoiler’ gang. When Sheriff Khan was caught by the Pretoria police in Fordsburg while robbing a warehouse, there was a flying squad car in attendance to ensure that no one disturbed him during the robbery.16 Throughout his reign of more than three decades as an organised crime leader, Sheriff Khan frequently appeared in court on charges such as extortion, bribery and murder, but he and his gang were usually acquitted. The unexpected lapse of memory of state witnesses or the lack of evidence was the cause of this.

Durban

Durban, the largest harbour city in South Africa, was also a haven for organised criminal groups, but there were not as many, nor were they as influential, as the gangs and criminal groups on the Cape Flats.

As was the case in most metropolitan areas, gangs in Durban started off as part of the street culture in some of the townships, particularly coloured areas such as Newlands East and Wentworth. These gangs also operated in their own defined territories, but in comparison to the Western Cape, they were far fewer in number in any given area. Only in certain parts of these townships did street gangs operate, and then not with the same degree of violence as on the Cape Flats. The sprawling black townships and squatter areas did not have street gang problems. While smaller gangs of black youths were involved in criminal activities, they operated on an ad hoc basis, were not territorially bound and generally did not exhibit the same structures or cohesion as gangs in other areas. Dagga was being sold and distributed on a large scale, mainly through shebeens. Supplies were easily obtainable from the Transkei and the KwaZulu-Natal hinterland, but no sophisticated criminal networks were necessary to obtain these supplies or to market the dagga in black townships.

However, Dagga did play an important role in the development of organised crime structures in the Durban area. Detectives maintain that the smuggling of ‘hard’ drugs such as LSD into the country, only commenced in the late 1960s. Even then, the export of compacted dagga and the smuggling of LSD, limited as it was, were mainly arranged by individuals who had established the necessary contacts abroad. The international demand for ‘Durban Poison’, the brand name given to top quality dagga which originated from Lusikisiki in the Transkei, was such that its export became a highly lucrative business. Small dagga syndicates were formed in order deal with such transactions in a more co-ordinated and sophisticated manner. By the early 1970s, these dagga distributors had become regular narcotics syndicates. In exchange for exporting compacted dagga to Europe and Australia, they also obtained LSD and other drugs, initially from France and Britain, which were then smuggled into the country through Durban.

Some of the avenues used to smuggle narcotics into Durban were yachts that arrived to moor in the harbour and crew members of large passenger liners. A well-known but small Durban-based syndicate, that specialised in these types of activities in the early 1970s, was headed by one Brasco. His syndicate consisted of himself and three or four assistants who master-minded the export and import of these articles. It had a wide network of contacts throughout the country that assisted with the distribution of the drugs. The police were aware of approximately seventeen small syndicates country-wide which operated as distribution channels for Brasco.

Unlike the Western Cape, Durban and its surrounding areas did not constitute a major market for imported ‘hard’ drugs. The city’s drug syndicates therefore used Durban as a transit point for further distribution mainly to Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Not all organised criminal groups focused on drug smuggling. Some, such as the gang known as the Young Americans, specialised in breaking into business premises. The gang, which consisted mainly of Asian and coloured youths, operated under the instructions of a well-known syndicate leader in Johannesburg.

Cape Town

The havoc wreaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the mass relocation of a large part of the coloured community from many parts of Cape Town, including District Six, to townships on the Cape Flats, had a direct influence on how criminal groups developed. Not only were communities and families torn apart by these moves, but many gangs and criminal groups found their members now living in different geographical areas. Some established gangs disintegrated, with members joining or establishing new ones. Some remained intact to re-establish their authority in the new areas.

These gangs in the Western Cape, the majority of which were operating on the Cape Flats by the 1970s, had varying characteristics and structures. Pinnock identifies four distinct, although sometimes overlapping, types of criminal groups operating on the Cape Flats. The first and most widespread type of gang was formed to defend itself and its turf from other gangs. The expansion of reformatory and prison-based gangs in the 1970s, which went on to muscle their way onto the turf of existing street gangs, as well as being responsible for the increasing violence in the area, called for the physical defence of terrain. Described by Pinnock as ‘defence gangs’,17 these groups also ran rackets, became involved in pay-packet robbery, housebreaking and theft of radios and firearms from motor vehicles. They tended to stick to their territory and would defend it with stolen firearms against incursion by other gangs, if necessary. These territorial skirmishes had the result of clearly delineated gang territories being established in every township on the Cape Flats.

A second category of gangs that was expanding on the Cape Flats during the 1970s was what Pinnock calls the ‘reform gangs’. These gangs shared many of the characteristics of the defence gangs. However, they were not formed on the streets, but in the reformatories and schools of industry. Although their ages varied from twelve to twenty years, they were more hardened and better disciplined because they shared the ‘brotherhood’ of some form of detention. Their gang leader was often an older man with prison experience. They became part of the ‘super gangs’ of the time, such as the Cape Town Scorpions and the Born Free Kids. Robbery and housebreaking were the main focus of these reform gangs and they often operated from a shebeen or illicit drinking house.

The ‘mafias’ were what Pinnock refers to as the third, and most interesting group of ghetto racketeers at the time. This category of gangs was much more complex organisationally than defence gangs or reform gangs and stemmed from large extended families which had been dislocated through forced removals and relocation to the Cape Flats. The resultant breakdown of social relationships caused some of these families to look for alternative forms of occupation including those that involved illegal methods. As a result, some of them transformed themselves into the ‘mafias’ of the Cape Flats. Well-known gangs such as the Mongrels and Cisko Yakis trace their origin back to former family networks. They were more close-knit and better able to organise than defence gangs or reform gangs. They specialised in bigger undertakings than other gangs, such as large payroll jobs rather than simple armed robbery, large-scale warehouse or shop thefts rather than housebreaking.18 They had greater access to capital and could finance the acquisition of drugs in bulk before reselling it to other gangs. These ‘mafia’ gangs were not territorially bound. They had cells in different areas and were therefore able to dispose of their illegally obtained goods in a wide area.

Many of the crime syndicates operating in Cape Town before the 1980s cannot be categorised as gangs. They consisted mainly of merchants who organised themselves for the purpose of securing the supply or monopoly of some illegal commodity. These merchant syndicates, the fourth form of criminal groups, were the most professional and profitable organisations on the Cape Flats. The acquisition and distribution of Mandrax developed into a major part of the activities of many of these merchant syndicates. Mandrax (methaqualone) had become an integral part of Cape Town’s gang culture. The Mandrax syndicates of the 1970s were mainly run by Asians. They accessed the supply routes from India and Pakistan for their supplies but never handled the drug themselves. The mafia or reformatory gangs acted as the middlemen, in turn redistributing to street merchants. Their transnational criminal activities yielded healthy profits for all those who were involved in the distribution network.

The dagga market was dominated by African syndicates. They linked up with rural growers in the Transkei and elsewhere and made vast profits — up to 3 000 per cent on the farm price of dagga — by reselling it to various distribution networks on the Cape Flats. They often supplied the ‘mafia’ gangs who, in turn, would act as retailers for members of defence gangs or reform gangs.