On 9 October 2008, Olivier and Jangjumrus were found guilty. Olivier was fined R120 000 or four years’ imprisonment, and Jangjumrus R80 000 or four years in ‘tjoekie’. It wasn’t long before they were out. They had a benefactor with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of cash.
Johnny takes a sip of tea but declines a scone. He sits on a couch, his head cocked to one side. He’s deaf in his left ear, the result, he tells me, of a landmine explosion in Angola when was a young troepie in the mid-1970s. ‘I was in a truck that got hit. I only have about 15 per cent hearing. That’s why I talk so loudly. Because I can’t hear you properly, I think you can’t hear me.’
For years, he says, he has been fascinated by Thailand. He spent some time there, met a Thai girltjie, did some diving and a bit of ‘piece work’. It was a place where he could escape the drudgery of life in South Africa. He still yearns for it. He’s bought himself a computer program that purports to ‘make you between 10 per cent and 20 per cent fluent in Thai in 120 hours’.
Lone men of a certain age, like Johnny – he’s fifty-four – flock to Southeast Asia. For many of these farangs, Thailand offers a certain, illicit allure. The impermissible easily becomes permissible and anything – absolutely anything – can be bought for a few hundred dollars, sometimes less. Some find solace in girls. For others, it’s boys or girls-who-are-boys or that little taste of brown sugar or hash or whatever the corner touts are pushing on that particular day.
Driven by a midlife crisis, a desperate bid to escape a desultory existence elsewhere, a desire to revisit a misspent youth or a myriad other reasons, for them, Thailand can be a seductively fickle mistress. Thousands flock each year to the seedy clubs in Bangkok’s Patpong Road and their earthly delights or the beaches and bar girls of Phuket and Pattaya.
The place gets under your skin and never really lets go. But easy dreams of hedonism all too easily turn into nightmares. AIDS is widespread. Drugs are readily available. You can see the living dead on the streets with their unkempt hair, skin burnished by the sun and booze, and ragged eyes that have seen too much. Invariably they’re clutching at some young thing with no future.
Back in South Africa, Johnny, always something of an outsider, found an acceptance in Johannesburg’s tiny Thai expat community. They’re a motley lot, numbering only a few thousand. The husbands are often white, middle-aged men; the women young. Some have made it in business or the restaurant trade or the airline industry. Far more are on the fringes: the strippers, hookers and masseuses. Used up in Thailand, they’ve been trafficked to South Africa to work in strip joints and massage parlours. Many are indentured to pimps and traffickers, who cover their passage to South Africa with a ‘loan’. The interest rates are extortionate and designed to keep them in hock.
‘She’ll have to fuck a hundred guys to get anywhere near paying her way out,’ a gangster I once knew leered, gesturing at a Thai woman waiting for clients in a strip club. He was wrong. It would have to be a lot more. ‘When Thai women come to South Africa and they stay for a long time, they’re not here on holiday. They work in certain places,’ Johnny says coyly.
For Johnny, the trouble started with ‘K.K.’ and a lost passport. One day in 2007, or early 2008 – he can’t remember exactly when – he gave a Thai woman a lift to the airport. Her flight was due in two hours. He was on his way home when ‘K.K.’ called. He explained that he was a Thai Airways manager. The woman Johnny had dropped off had lost her passport. Could Johnny look around in his car? Johnny searched everywhere but found nothing. The woman was booked into a hotel at the airport, and K.K. contacted the Thai embassy on her behalf. The following day, Johnny chanced on the passport. He called K.K., who told him the woman had received temporary travel documents and had already boarded the next flight.
‘You sound like a nice guy,’ K.K. said. ‘Next time you’re in Johannesburg, let’s get together. I play golf. Join me.’ When they did finally meet, it was K.K. who broached the subject of ‘business’. He had some friends who spoke little English and didn’t know their way around but needed local help. ‘I don’t know anything about business, but I can help with the talking,’ Johnny offered. K.K. had a house in Kempton Park, not far from the airport, and the Thais were staying there.
‘These guys were buying lion bones, known as “sets”, which they were exporting to Laos. I understood that the bones would be used for making some sort of muti … for use in their culture.’
That’s how Johnny first met ‘Jacky’ and the others.
The clear leader of the group was a man they all called ‘Chai’. His real name was Chumlong Lemtongthai. ‘He seemed to me to be a powerful individual … He spent most of his time in Bangkok and visited South Africa for stretches of two to three months at a time.’ Chai’s boss, Johnny discovered later, was someone called Vixay Keosavang. He was based in Laos and had never travelled to South Africa. Chai often had long video chats with him. One day he called Johnny over to say hello. Johnny saw a ‘middle-aged Asian man’ on the computer screen. The man greeted him, then resumed his conversation with Chai. They spoke rapidly in Thai and Johnny couldn’t follow what they were saying.
Johnny did his bit to help the Thais. ‘I assisted with certain aspects of seeking lion sets and would be paid an amount of about US$100 per set that I found and they purchased. This would be paid to me in cash, in rand. Chai would pay for these sets in cash and would only pay [the seller] once the sets had left South Africa, with all the relevant documentation. He would go to the casino near the airport … and draw the cash from a machine there. Sometimes he would draw hundreds of thousands of rand from the machine.’
They were doing a roaring trade. But they wanted more. And they wanted something far more elusive; something they called ‘bamboo’.
A passport may have led Johnny to K.K., but it was by pure chance that he eventually landed in the lap of Paul O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan attracts adjectives like flies. Over the years he’s been called an eccentric, a maverick, a vigilante, a crime crusader, a troublemaker, an opportunist and a publicity whore. Some have suggested that he should be South Africa’s next police chief. The ‘gangsters’ he routinely harasses prefer far less complimentary terms, laced with invective.
What O’Sullivan possesses – and it would be churlish to suggest it is merely the luck of the Irish – is an uncanny ability to sniff out big cases. He’s obsessive, working leads and a private network of informants for months, sometimes years at a time. Reluctant witnesses are browbeaten into submission. ‘I work on them psychologically,’ O’Sullivan says with a smile. Invariably his case files make their way to the police and the front pages of newspapers.
‘He’s an unguided missile,’ a senior police official once said to me in frustration after yet another of O’Sullivan’s investigations was splashed across the front page of a newspaper. ‘The problem is you can’t control him, but he gets things done,’ the man grudgingly conceded.
‘Most of what I do will never make the papers,’ O’Sullivan said to me one day when I visited him in his offices at Securitas, the private security company he worked for at the time. ‘It’s just too small. But then there are those special cases that I make my own,’ he added with an impish grin.
O’Sullivan boasts that he learnt his craft from ‘the best’: Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. He takes his cases personally – sometimes too personally. ‘Never piss in an Irishman’s beer and expect him to roll over and take it,’ he likes to say.
O’Sullivan has a genuine sense of outrage at the rot that has seeped into every level of South African society and has crippled and corrupted the South African Police Service and intelligence services. But often it is his theatrics that grab headlines.
In 2011, after orchestrating the arrest of a Czech fugitive and alleged ‘mob boss’, Radovan Krejcir – a man allegedly linked to several murders in South Africa and the Czech Republic – O’Sullivan turned up at Krejcir’s favourite restaurant. As reporters clustered for
soundbites around the table in the Harbour Cafe in Bedfordview, east of Johannesburg, O’Sullivan raised a pint of Guinness and proclaimed: ‘Czech mate, Krejcir, you will never sit here enjoying yourself – in fact, you will never sit and eat anywhere in South Africa – again.’
But two weeks later, out on bail, Krejcir was back at his table behind a sheet of bullet-proof glass he had had installed in a paranoid bid to thwart a supposed ‘Russian hit team’. ‘Saluté, Paul O’Sullivan,’ he said, lifting up a Pilsener Urquell. The hacks lapped it all up, regurgitating it for their readers to enjoy over cornflakes and Rice Krispies.
O’Sullivan made his name through his obsessive pursuit of South Africa’s national police commissioner and Interpol president, Jackie Selebi. The Irishman’s unstinting six-year investigation of Selebi unravelled a tangled web of organised crime and exposed Selebi’s involvement with drug dealer Glen Agliotti, known to his criminal underworld associates as ‘The Landlord’. In August 2010, Selebi was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment for corruption stemming from bribes he had received from Agliotti, a man he famously once described as ‘My friend, finish and klaar.’
O’Sullivan has paid a heavy price for his dedication to the job, both personally and financially – his marriage crumbled, his family was rushed into hiding in Europe and his considerable savings dwindled to almost nothing. He now lives in a modest face-brick townhouse, and he has worn the same fraying suit for nearly a decade, he likes to say. More often than not, he is pictured wearing the same olive-green and brown tie patterned with images of the Big Five.
May 2011
O’ Sullivan is in a funk. An abortive late-night raid on Krejcir’s Bedfordview home on 22 March has led to excoriating press coverage. I was with him for a while on the night of the raid, sitting at a table outside a News Cafe in Bedfordview. O’Sullivan, chain-smoking heavily, was co-ordinating snippets of information from sources and passing it on to the police. Krejcir’s movements were being tracked via his cellphone, its GPS co-ordinates triangulated and mapped. The signal was static and fixed on his house.
Krejcir was being sought for fraud. The cops also wanted to question him about the previous day’s drive-by slaying of his friend, Cape Town underworld boss Cyril Beeka. And there was talk of a ‘hit list’ hidden somewhere in Krejcir’s house.
The police’s Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation, known as the Hawks, were using the South African State Security Agency (SSA) to provide operational support. They no longer trusted the police Crime Intelligence unit, which was in utter disarray, riddled with nepotism and corruption. Hawks investigators had discovered that their phones were being tapped by their own spooks and information supposedly leaked to Krejcir. Then there was the problem of General Joey Mabasa, the former head of police Crime Intelligence in Gauteng, who had an uncomfortably close relationship with Krejcir. Krejcir’s wife, Katerina Krejcirova, shared a company directorship with Mabasa’s wife.
Later that night, members of the police’s Tactical Response Team (TRT) used an armoured vehicle to run down the gates of a house in Kloof Road in Bedfordview. I followed them in as they threw thunderflashes and used battering rams to smash their way through doors and security gates. Then they ran into the back wall. Krejcir’s four-storey mansion towered above them in the inky blackness. They had the wrong house. The TRT scaled the wall with ladders and stormed the mansion. They might as well have used the driveway entrance in Kloof Road – it would have caused a lot less damage.
Krejcir was nowhere to be found. His eighteen-year-old son, Denis, and a guest, Miloslav Potiska, were cuffed and taken away. Simon Guidetti, the owner of the house the cops had destroyed, sued for R1.2 million in damages. Denis Krejcir also filed a lawsuit. A general in police Crime Intelligence later claimed, when I spoke to him, that Krejcir had been in his mansion all along, hidden away in a steel-and-concrete safe room. Krejcir handed himself over to police three days later.
O’Sullivan has taken flak over the raid and needs to do some damage control. He is worried about what his kids might read. His reputation, he feels, has taken a knock.
Enter Johnny Olivier.
After the Delmas bust, Johnny had lost heart and cut all ties with Punpitak and the rest. He had been sacked from his job. His boss had not been amused when the Mazda Etude – a company car – had been impounded by the police. Johnny had packed his bags and gone to Durban to look for work. But work was scarce, and he soon found himself back in Johannesburg.
Johnny liked to spend time at the Emperors Palace Casino, near the airport in Johannesburg. He wasn’t much of a gambler, but there was something about the place that drew him back time and again. Two years after the Delmas debacle, in June 2010, he bumped into Punpitak and a couple of others at the casino. It wasn’t a surprise.
‘The boss, Chai, loved going there,’ he says. ‘He said it relaxed him. He could easily lose R30 000 or R40 000 a night and it would be a joke for him. I told them I’m not interested in their shit with rhinos. But they told me they were now only doing lion bones and asked if I could help them. I was short of cash, so I decided to do what I could … but made it clear I did not want to be involved in anything that might be illegal.’
As Johnny tells it, their assurances won him over. ‘Somewhere on the internet, I read that there was nothing illegal about trading in lion bones. The lions are hunted legally and the skins and heads go to the hunters. The rest is left over, and the farmers discovered they could make a buck out of the bones.’
Johnny went to work and later helped his contacts rent a house in Edenvale, not far from the airport, to the east of Johannesburg. It was to become their base of operations.
But Johnny’s relationship with his housemates, particularly with Punpitak, was strained. Johnny, a self-professed teetotaller, was offended by their propensity for booze and women. They were a ‘klomp dronkgatte’, a bunch of drunkards. Punpitak was also a layabout. He’d spend days in the house, watching DVDs and doing nothing really constructive.
The only one of them that Johnny harboured any real respect for was Chai. Chai spent money like water. ‘He’s actually a very nice person,’ Johnny says. ‘Person to person, that is. Outside of animals and wildlife. He can be very giving. Once, he won R43 000 [at] the casino and called up all his friends and took them to dinner at the Ocean Basket.’
Johnny often accompanied Chai on his spending sprees. He remembers a day when Chai picked up a fifty-four-inch Samsung flatscreen television, a Sony sound system with speakers that could blow your socks off, a leather lounge suite and mattresses for the Edenvale house. It was all paid for in cash. ‘Chai never had money on him. Peter always carried the cash in a black rucksack. The only time Chai had money on him was when he took R10 000 or R20 000 to go and gamble.’ To Johnny, Chai’s supply of money seemed ‘endless’.
One Sunday, Chai announced ‘out of the blue’ that he wanted to buy a Hummer. ‘I told him the car dealerships were all closed but, no, he wanted a Hummer,’ Johnny says. The Thai scoured the internet, until he found one for sale at R230 000. He had made up his mind.
Olivier accompanied two of Chai’s minions to Emperors Palace. They had been given a pair of ATM cards. Inside the casino they headed straight for a bank of ATM machines. ‘They drew and drew and drew. Every time they got R2 000 out, they folded the bank slip around it and drew again. It took a long time. We got out of there at 6 p.m. with massive packets of cash in our pockets. We were walking like cowboys. Jirre, I wish my bank card could do that.’
When they arrived at the seller’s house, Chai opened the Hummer’s doors, glanced inside and said: ‘I’ll take it.’
Johnny’s contempt for the others, tinged with the inherent racism of many of his generation, was growing. Their incessant partying grated on him. The drinking, whoring and endless karaoke was just too much. ‘They drank more than they slept. There were times when I came home and found condoms strewn outside, which they had just chucked out of the windows. Every night it wa
s parties and Thai girls and booze and thunderous music. They used to blow between R3 000 and R4 000 a night on girls. They bought litres of box wine and Jack Daniel’s.’
The landlady, an elderly woman, was at her wits’ end. Her tenants were a strange lot. She didn’t really know what they did for a living. Often they would disappear for days on end and then, on their return, would party until dawn. On one occasion she complained about the appalling stench wafting from the garden.
Johnny knew what it was, but didn’t tell her. The men had returned from one of their forays to North West province and had brought back a bloody hunk of meat. It looked like a trunk: long and pink, with grey skin pulled back. But it wasn’t a trunk. It was a rhino penis.
The Thais cut it up like you slice salami. They lit a fire in the braai, moered it on and sealed it with the heat from the coals. Then they took the charred flesh and spread it out on a grid in the garden to dry in the sun. For a while, one of the men used a branch to chase the flies away. He wasn’t very successful. ‘The smell was horrific. There were more flies than you would find at a sewage farm,’ Johnny says.
The slices remained there, decaying in the heat. The Thais clearly had no idea how to cure meat. The idea, Johnny says, had been to package it with droëwors and export it to Thailand. Fortunately they scrapped the plan and buried the penis in the garden.
One particularly raucous party kept the old lady awake until 3 a.m. Her grandchildren were visiting and had been petrified by the noise and the screams. She complained to Johnny, who confronted Punpitak. ‘I’d stayed somewhere else that night and come home in the morning. [Punpitak] still had a glass of wine in his hand. They’d been drinking Overmeer and Drostdy-Hof like water, and shot after shot of Jack Daniel’s.’ Punpitak’s breath stank of stale cigarettes and booze. Somewhat predictably, he blamed the noise on the neighbours.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 19
