The Lost Boys of Bird Island: A shocking exposé from within the heart of the NP government

by Mark Minnie

  ‘Is everything cool?’ is all he asks.

  ‘For the time being, mate. For the time being. Anyhow, let’s drink. I don’t want to eat right now.’

  John raises his glass to this. South Africans have a weird attitude when it comes to a braai. We like to get a few drinks under the belt before we start eating.

  * * *

  The following morning I’m all cock-a-hoop while travelling to the court building. But my mood is soon dampened.

  It’s approaching 9 am and there’s no sign of my suspect. The court session begins and I request that the prosecutor hold back on my case. He agrees and proceeds with other matters.

  At 9:45 there’s still no sign of my suspect. By 10:30 I’ve had enough. I tell the prosecutor to call my case. Fuck Dave Allen now. I will put his arse in jail. That will guarantee he’ll be here next time.

  The court orderly calls out Allen’s name three times down the corridor. But Uncle Dave’s a no-show. The magistrate accordingly issues a warrant of arrest effective immediately. Now I just have to pick him up.

  But first I stop by the office. I feel like cracking open a beer, but it’s too early. Plus there’s too many people around. I can’t be seen drinking at this time of day. And then Gordon pops in.

  ‘Max, I think you need to get to the mortuary.’

  ‘What the hell for? I’ve got a suspect to locate.’

  ‘That’s just it. Your suspect is waiting for you at the mortuary. Stone-cold dead, mate,’ he says with a smirk.

  ‘Fuck off. You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, Max. Word is spreading like wildfire. He’s well known in police circles. Better get down there and check it out.’

  I rush to the mortuary like a bat out of hell. This is not at all what I expected or wanted. If Allen’s dead, then I will be denied seeing him being sent to jail for a couple of years – my moment of retribution.

  At the mortuary I bump into Oom Sias, the mortuary assistant.

  ‘Got something for you, Max. Heard that he might be one of yours.’

  ‘Please don’t let it be him.’

  My voice is barely audible. I’m praying silently in deadly earnest.

  But my prayers aren’t answered. Spread out on the mortuary slab, attired in only his birthday suit, is the body of Dave Allen. A single gunshot wound right in the centre of his forehead displays the manner of his demise.

  I’m totally gutted. Now all of his victims have been robbed of justice. And I’ve been robbed too. I stand there, looking at the corpse and the wound. And then it dawns on me: something appears to be out of place.

  I’m assuming Uncle Dave would have held the barrel of the gun flush against his forehead before pulling the trigger. If so, then why aren’t there any gunpowder burn marks to the skin surrounding the point of entry?

  Very strange …

  CHRIS

  12

  Two suspect suicides

  It was 1987 and I had been back in South Africa only a few months after my little sojourn in exile.

  I had had an interesting time in London, but I was immensely relieved to be back in Cape Town, my favourite city in South Africa. I was sharing a house in Gardens with other journalists, and back working at the Cape Times, where editor Tony Heard agreed to re-employ me – despite the fact that I had gone into exile without informing him first.

  The mid- to late 1980s was undoubtedly one of the most eventful periods in South African political history. Marches, protests, running battles between township factions, clashes with police, and children killed in the crossfire of gang shoot-outs were almost routine events. We saw the tears flow. We heard the cries. We watched open-eyed while the prayers of victims’ relatives were being said. It was a time of tragedy. It was a time of hope.

  It was against this backdrop of revolutionary change and communities in crisis that I spent the most rewarding years of my journalistic life. There was a collective sense of excitement in the so-called left-wing journalistic fraternity. We were so sure of what was right. We were fearless. We did not question our duty to try to hold accountable the government of the day, and we fought bitterly when anybody tried to stop us.

  But immense pressure on the press is exactly what resulted when the body of a cabinet minister was discovered at his house.

  On 29 March 1987, a Sunday morning, news broke that South Africa’s minister of environmental affairs, John Walter Edington Wiley, had been found dead on a single bed in his beloved Noordhoek home in the Cape.

  Wiley had had a somewhat eclectic political career, and had party-hopped until he chose the ruling National Party as his final political home in 1980. Despite this apparent opportunism, Wiley’s career-long campaign against the abuse of marine resources was at times marked by bitter clashes with Nationalist ministers – even after he had joined the party. As it turned out, that particular passion would lead to his meeting a man who would drastically change the course of both their lives: Dave Allen.

  The relationship between the two men had first come to my attention after the shock discovery of Wiley’s body early that Sunday morning. The cabinet minister’s death made headlines as far as the United States. Even the Los Angeles Times reported on the event, suggesting that Wiley’s apparent suicide might pose an election problem for PW Botha and the National Party. The election was set to take place in two months.

  The opening paragraphs of the story, published on 30 March 1987, read:

  John W.E. Wiley, minister of environmental affairs and tourism in President Pieter W. Botha’s Cabinet, was found dead at his home outside Cape Town on Sunday, an apparent suicide.

  Wiley, 60, was found on his bed with a bullet wound in his right temple and a .32-caliber pistol at his side, according to the police, who said that ‘no crime is suspected’ but that their investigation will continue.

  The story went on to recount how President Botha had visited the tightly guarded home on the Sunday afternoon to convey his personal sympathy to the Wiley family. Botha later expressed his cabinet’s ‘great dismay’ at the minister’s suicide. ‘The devastating news of the sudden death of our colleague has shocked us to the hilt,’ Botha later said in a statement issued in Cape Town.

  The second-last paragraph of the Los Angeles Times article read:

  Concern was also quietly expressed Sunday in Nationalist circles about the stigma attached to suicide in this morally conservative and highly traditional society.

  It did not take long for a rumour to reach me that there could be a link between the minister’s sudden demise and that of Dave Allen just weeks earlier.

  Allen was a 37-year-old Port Elizabeth conservationist, diver and police reserve lieutenant, and also the son of veteran naval officer Charles Allen, a long-time commander of the SAS Donkin Naval Unit.

  Allen Senior’s distinguished naval career began on the General Botha training ship in the Cape, after which, in 1929, he joined the Merchant Marines before leaving ten years later to serve in the Second World War. His service later took him to the recaptured Libyan port city of Tobruk, where he was harbour master for two years. He also commanded the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Base in Port Elizabeth from 1954 to 1963.

  It was a pedigree to be proud of. But it was Allen Junior that Wiley had been close to since meeting him in 1977, through the younger man’s efforts to promote underwater and environmental conservation. Following that fateful meeting, the two men were said to have remained very close for nearly a decade.

  And then suddenly they died less than a month apart – both violently, of gunshot wounds. Officially, both had died by their own hands.

  After receiving the tip-off, it became my job as a reporter to try to trace the links between the two men. I tried to find out what had bound them in life and whether this had ultimately led to their deaths. In an attempt to discover the truth I spent at least seven weeks finding – and speaking to – some of their former friends, enemies, colleagues and associates in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Jo
hannesburg.

  One of those who confided in me was Allen’s brother, Geoff, who had been my colleague on the Rand Daily Mail, a left-leaning anti-apartheid daily newspaper in Johannesburg. Geoff revealed to me that his brother’s association with Wiley had been not only very close, but also very profitable. He told me that Dave had owned valuable guano concessions for Bird Island and for five islands off Namibia. In addition, Dave had recently obtained a concession for underwater farming, growing mussels and oysters, in Saldanha and Algoa Bay. This was all turning into a multimillion-rand export industry to the Far East. Allen had frequently given slide shows and lectures in parliament on conservation to John Wiley and other politicians.

  The two men had frequently visited each other whenever Wiley was in Port Elizabeth. Wiley’s office, I learned, had also been the first to telephone his parents after Allen’s death.

  I learned that Allen was found shot on Schoenmakerskop beach. He was dressed in a suit and several letters were found next to his body, which was found on the shore in the area of the Sacramento wreck, from which the diver had salvaged a cannon and where he first met Wiley.

  From Geoff I learned that the last person to see his brother alive had been journalist Robert Ball, who had spoken to Allen. Allen’s demeanour had worried Ball, who said his parting words to Dave had been something along the lines of ‘How do I know that if I turn my back you aren’t going to pull a gun out of your pocket and blow your brains out?’

  As far as I could ascertain, Allen had died of a head wound and had been found on the beach on 25 February just two hours before he had been due to appear in court. The information I had was that Allen had resigned from the police reserve on the day of his arrest. The police, however, were saying nothing.

  Following my long conversation with Geoff, I wrote an article, which appeared in the Cape Times on 30 March 1987, about how Wiley’s friend Dave Allen had also committed suicide.

  This article, my first report on Wiley’s and Allen’s deaths, did not mention that Allen’s arrest had been in connection with his allegedly having sex with underage boys.

  The editorial decision to omit this information could have been taken because of the Cape Times’ professed squeamishness about publishing details of people’s private lives (although the paper never seemed to baulk at doing this in the case of somebody considered ‘unimportant’). It reminded me of editor Tony Heard’s editorial outrage back in 1985, when I worked for The Star, the Johannesburg daily that published my story in which the private life of struggle icon Allan Boesak was laid bare alongside a dirty-tricks campaign run by the Security Branch to discredit him. But the decision to leave out details from the Cape Times story might also have been taken because the police would not confirm the reason for Allen’s arrest.

  Meanwhile, it was claimed that two ‘police colonels’ had visited Wiley on the morning of his death – and had imparted ‘sensitive information’ to him. And, although I don’t know where the allegation first surfaced, it was soon being whispered in some political and social circles that Wiley was told that he too had been implicated in child sex allegations along with Allen. But the police wouldn’t confirm this.

  The next piece I wrote appeared on page one of the Cape Times on 4 April 1987 and was headlined ‘Police probe Wiley death rumours’. This story reported that the connection between Wiley’s and Allen’s deaths was being investigated, but the police were still being coy, saying there was no evidence to link the two events. It was all speculation, the police said, and they suggested that the media wait for an inquest for answers.

  To muddy the waters even further, the media was openly speculating that Wiley’s death might ‘harm the government politically’, whatever that meant at the time. Moreover, the rumour that two police colonels had visited Wiley before his death refused to go away. However, no one would deny this either, at least not on the record. All the official police spokesperson would say was that the allegation or suggestion was wilful and malicious, a ‘slur’ on Wiley.

  If the police had hoped that this would be the end of the story, they were wrong. The rumours of dark secrets and dastardly deeds were not dying down.

  I started focusing my investigation on the conflicting accounts given by Wiley’s wife, Jeanne, and the police and others concerning the sequence of events on the morning of the politician’s death. By then, members of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) – the always fiery and always timeously opportunistic opposition party – had become convinced that there was indeed something ‘fishy’ about the death of the minister.

  My next story contained the PFP’s ultimately futile call on government to reveal what it knew. That article appeared in the Cape Times on 10 April 1987 under the headline ‘Wiley: Call on govt to come clean’. Opposition party members wanted to know why the police never officially denied that two police colonels had visited the Wiley home on the morning of 29 March. If there had been two such visitors, what was their purpose? Did they ‘impart sensitive information’ to Wiley on that day?

  The PFP also wanted to know if the sexual abuse charges had been withdrawn against Allen – and if so, why they had been brought in the first place. Further questions were asked about Allen’s guano concessions. Who granted them, and had they been fairly obtained?

  Meanwhile, speculation remained rife about incidents that allegedly took place at Wiley’s home on that Sunday morning and which could have triggered his apparent suicide. The police version of events was that Wiley’s body was discovered when his wife Jeanne, after fetching the morning papers from the local café, had found the house locked at 11:30 am.

  But when a colleague of mine spoke to Jeanne later, she said she had left the house at 9:30 am to ‘go and pick up some pineapples and get braai wood’ and that she had returned at 10:30 am. The only time that was not accounted for on the Sunday morning was between 9:30 and 10:30. My colleague also spoke to Delfino de Sousa, owner of the Noordhoek Supermarket, who said that on the day of Wiley’s death his wife had arrived at the café at ‘just about 9 am’, and had asked whether her husband had picked up the newspapers.

  For its part, the government was moving fast. On 11 April, the front-page headline of my story announced: ‘Police complete probe on Wiley’. The story began:

  Police have completed their investigations into the apparent suicide of Mr John Wiley, the Commissioner of Police, General Johan Coetzee, said yesterday.

  Unsurprisingly, Coetzee said there had been ‘absolutely no substance’ to allegations that the investigation would not be finalised before 6 May, when white voters were expected to go to the polls. He was adamant that the police investigation had been concluded and that all that was outstanding was the pathologist’s report. After that it would be up to the Attorney General to decide whether or not an inquest was necessary.

  Apart from noting ‘with regret’ that the Cape Times had ‘completely disregarded a request that newspapers should refrain from spreading unfounded rumours about Wiley’s death’, Coetzee also offered a belated official denial that the late minister had been visited by police officers on the morning of his death.

  * * *

  The more people I spoke to about Wiley, the fewer I came across who had any fond memories of him.

  Although people are generally loath to speak ill of the dead, those who used adjectives like ‘honourable’ and ‘above reproach’ in the same sentence as the name ‘Wiley’ were definitely in the minority. The late cabinet minister emerged quite strongly as a man lacking not only in professional and political probity but also personal integrity. Most of those I interviewed remembered Wiley as a businessman who ‘dishonoured agreements’, a politician who ‘went back on his word’, a man who ‘dropped friends’ and a father who ‘let down even his own family’.

  Finally, after I had held a series of interviews with a wide range of people, the Cape Times allowed me to go to Port Elizabeth to pursue the story further.

  I arrived there so focused on getting the story do
ne in the few days I was allowed away from the newsroom that I would not even have noticed whether the wind was blowing in the Windy City or not. All I could think about was meeting up with a source who was supposed to have all the ‘answers’.

  I don’t remember whether our meeting was arranged after he had made contact with me or whether I had approached him after being given his name by another source. Nevertheless, I was expecting valuable information from him because of his supposed inside knowledge of the fishing industry and National Party political personalities. However, I was not prepared for the startling claims he would make during the lengthy interview.

  What he had to share with me was shocking. As we were huddled together in a rather notoriously seedy bar, this inside source literally whispered to me that Dave Allen had taken young boys, classified as coloured, to Bird Island for sex orgies. According to the source – who told me that he moved among top members of the ruling party – Wiley and two other high-ranking cabinet ministers had accompanied Allen on some occasions. These jaw-dropping claims propelled my investigation onto quite another level.

  At that time, it was very rare for a member of the English press to have a ‘deep throat’ (informant) in the ruling party. This meant that officials from the governing party could rest assured that their nefarious activities – both political and personal – were most unlikely to be exposed. The officials were further protected from public scrutiny by a variety of laws and emergency regulations. If any loopholes could be found, there was always plausible denial. And for the really persistent truth-seekers, a range of more extreme measures could be deployed to ensure permanent silence.

  In other words, the old NP had the suppression of truth down to a fine art.

  Thus, I listened aghast as my NP source told me that one of the boys taken to the island for sex had ended up in hospital – after a pistol inserted into his anus had been discharged or fired.