Gangs

by Ross Kemp

  Saturday night in Pollsmoor is a cross between a rave, a Roman orgy and a barely contained riot. The prisoners watch rugby or some other sport in the afternoon, then, as evening comes on, start smoking crystal methamphetamine, or tik as they call it. As darkness falls and the chemicals start to hit, the noise levels go through the roof. I discovered this by standing in one of the prison exercise yards. It was like being close to an ugly football crowd, the ferocious din only slightly muted by the dead stone of the walls and the metal sheeting on the windows. I could understand why the neighbours might get upset. Fully drugged up by about 10 p.m., the gangsters switch the TVs to a soft porn channel. When this happens, the sex gets going. Afterwards, to come back down they smoke dagga – strong marijuana often laced with Mandrax or ‘buttons’ as it is locally known.

  How is it the authorities tolerate this? While the ratio of prisoners to warders remains as it is, there isn’t much else they can do. The soft porn, the drugs and the other ‘privileges’ act as a kind of collective tranquillizer. If the Number did not have their Saturday night specials to look forward to, there is every chance they would riot. And if three or four thousand of them did that, on past form a lot of people would get killed.

  ‘The Number don’t just control the other prisoners in Pollsmoor,’ Malgas explained, ‘they have access to illicit drugs, the best healthcare the South African prison system can provide, three square meals a day and a television.’ Not only that, the gangsters enjoy a respect and status inside Pollsmoor prison far greater than they could ever hope to come by in the outside world, where they are just random faces in the criminal crowd. ‘If they are not doing too well out on the streets,’ Malgas added, ‘some Number gangsters will go out and commit a serious crime to get back into Pollsmoor or another Number prison.’ Having learned about the Number’s Saturday night entertainment and the way they exercise total control over their slaves, bizarrely, the Number gang life on the inside is better than life outside.

  Although the vast majority are guilty of crimes that include murder, robbery and rape, almost all Pollsmoor’s prisoners go to church on Sunday morning. This is less in the hope of getting time off their sentences, and more for something to do while the 26s clean the blocks with disinfectant, bleach, mops, buckets and strong detergent after the riotous debauches of the previous night. Why the 26s? In the inscrutable inner workings of the Number gang, cleaning is one of their allotted tasks.

  By that Sunday, on our fourth visit, inmates and staff had realized we were trying to paint an honest if warts-and-all picture of life inside. Perhaps because of this, I was granted an audience with one of the highest-ranking 28 ‘generals’ in Pollsmoor. His name was John Mongrel. Mongrel’s face and body had the look of oak. He wasn’t the biggest gangster I had ever met, but a glance at his face told me he was the most evil. Mongrel looked as if he’d kill you without a second thought. Sentenced to nine years aged fourteen for murder, the general had spent nineteen years in Pollsmoor working his way to the top. The extra ten years he has so far served were for killing an inmate, the price of admission to the gang.

  Looking into his eyes made me feel as if no human being should be allowed to see and do what Mongrel has seen and done. I felt I was in the company of a walking corpse, a man who had done so many bad things to so many people he had lost all connection with any human feelings he might ever have had.

  Leaning forward, Mongrel clouded me in breath that could strip paint, a mixture of old ashtray, roadkill and ancient bodily fluids. It was like being in a block of poisoned air, making everything he came near wither and die. I was meeting Hannibal Lecter, only for real. And just like the fictional serial killer, Mongrel was scarily intelligent – the penetrating stare seemed to worm every last little thought from my brain.

  He told me about his initiation into the gang. ‘I went to the 28s. I was given a number. The other guy came, and I strangled him. Then I took the knife and stabbed him in his heart – two times until the blood came out.’ Since that first murder, Mongrel told me, he was the one who gave the orders inside Pollsmoor. Including orders to kill. ‘If there is a warder in the prison who is not right I tell the 27, “You are the 27 – here is a knife for you. You must kill the warder, or the major or the captain.” And the 27 tells me, “Salute, my brother. I am going. You can watch.” And then I go to the cell there, and I watch.’

  ‘What would happen,’ I asked, ‘if a 27 didn’t follow your orders?’

  The bright unyielding gaze hardened. ‘When they cannot stand for their duty, I kill them. We cannot stand for that.’ Mongrel’s rank gave him the confidence to speak openly about the Number where less senior members were too scared. I realized that this man had done far more than I would ever want to know.

  Maintaining the thousand-metre stare you get from killing lots of people, Mongrel said he was the spider at the heart of the Pollsmoor web. When he pulled a string, the Number soldiers jumped to obey his instructions – beating, stabbing, raping and killing. As for him, he took anything and anyone he wanted. ‘If a person comes in the cell and he is not the Number, my duty is to ask him what he is here for and how long. I tell him, “You sleep there.” And if he is not the Number, I have sex with him.’

  ‘How do you have sex with him? Do you hold him down?’

  ‘I hold him down. My face to [his] face.’

  ‘Does someone else help you hold him down or do you do it on your own?’

  Mongrel shook his head. ‘No, he’s scared for me.’

  I asked Mongrel whether the fact he had been having sex with men for nineteen years meant he was gay.

  He glared at me. ‘Not gay. I am ndota – a man.’ Ndota is Zulu for warrior man.

  ‘You’re the man, but what about the man that gets fucked? What’s he?’

  The expression of contempt he wore deepened. ‘He is a woman – a wyfie. A woman. I tell him, “You must wash my clothes.” He do it, I give him bread, food. I give him a bed and watch him [to make sure] he’s all right.’

  ‘Do you have a ladyboy in here now?’

  ‘I have one.’

  ‘How long have you been with that one?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘Three weeks. Do you change them regularly?’

  ‘Yes, I change.’

  ‘You just walk up to them and you go, “You will be my wife”?’

  ‘Yes. She comes sleep by me. By [in] my bed.’

  ‘If they don’t do that, what happens?’

  ‘I kill them.’

  Speaking with the kind of focus that can stop a truck, Mongrel told me how he turns an ordinary plastic toothbrush into a lethal weapon. ‘You heat the end of the handle with a lighter until it is long and pointed and then you leave it to harden. When it is set in shape, you take the pointed end and you sharpen it by rubbing it against a stone floor until it turns into a dagger blade. Then you go to kill with it.’

  The next bit is gruesome. While three other 28s hold him down, Mongrel sits astride his victim’s chest. Then, he pushes the point of the sharpened toothbrush in between the ribs just above the man’s heart, using both hands and all of his weight until it is wedged firmly in place. Then he stands, raises a foot and stamps down as hard as he can on the improvised dagger’s handle. The point is rammed into the heart until, as Mongrel put it with a smack of the lips, ‘the black blood comes out’.

  Mongrel told me what happened after he stabbed his first warder to death. Placing him in the ‘one-ones’, solitary confinement, they came for him in the night and set about him with shovels, beating him repeatedly over the head until he was unconscious. He made me put my fingers on the top of his square skull. The plates of bone beneath the skin moved in a spongy way that was both weird and unnerving. I snatched my hand away. After the beating, Mongrel said, the guards had put him on a starvation diet of millet and water for over six weeks. Granny’s birdseed to you and me, the human body cannot digest millet. You have to chew it over and over, pass it out in your stool, wash i
t with water if there’s any to hand and then eat the stuff all over again. The second time round, the grain gives you just enough nourishment to stay alive. Except that by then you may not want to.

  The scariest thing for me was his matter-of-factness, even when he was describing the most cold-blooded drawn-out murder. It’s rare you meet someone you know is capable of doing anything, however bad, to his fellow human beings. John Mongrel was one of them.

  One of the strangest things about being in South Africa was going back to my hotel after a day inside Pollsmoor. I kept noticing that in this country you are either fenced in or fenced out. Even my nice hotel – especially my nice hotel – was covered in a latticework of steel up to and including the window of my room on the first floor. The guests sitting next to me at breakfast didn’t just lead a different life to the inmates of Pollsmoor; they were living on a different planet. Entering Pollsmoor was like leaving the world I knew and going down into some evil pit. Coming back out to the light again was just as unreal. Mongrel wanted me to know in detail how he dominated his victims; the hotel guests wanted me to admire their big flashy cars or their big flashy mistresses or whatever else they owned that made them feel important. Many were mid-thirties Brits who had made their pile in the City of London and then retired to the sun and the promise of a perfect life to find themselves living in a gated community – with fences round it higher than those surrounding Pollsmoor and armed response on call 24/7.

  The Number is a prison gang but to understand it I needed to visit the place where almost all of its members had been born and grown up, the Cape Flats. With only a few ways in and out, the entire twenty-five by eighteen-kilometre area can be locked down by the police and the army at will. Much like Pollsmoor. A badly policed warren of ugly housing blocks, rock-bottom housing projects, shanties, shacks and cardboard tents, the Cape Flats is home to about two million of South Africa’s poorest people. Despite some government attempts to improve things, one in three of the shanties is still without sanitation, power or running water. Parts of it reminded me of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. My guide for this part of the programme was Kevin, a junior boss in the 5,000-strong Americans gang.

  Driving through this huge area, I didn’t need Kevin to tell me that the shanty towns and shacks of the Cape Flats are seriously infested with gangs. Everyone in South Africa knows about the Flats, and their fame – or notoriety – has spread around the world. There are some 200 gangs operating there currently, their territories often separated by nothing more than a single street. Like the gangs I saw in St Louis and Brazil, they spend a lot of their time fighting one another for control of turf. The biggest and best organized drugs gangs in the Flats are the Americans and the Firm, but larger gangs also include the Sexy Boys, the Junkey Funkeys, the West Siders, the Ghetto Boys, the Hard Livings and the Dixies.

  What do the Flats gangs have to do with the Number? When harder drugs like crystal methamphetamine began appearing on the market in the 1980s, the closed, inward looking world of the Number began to change. Easier to sell than marijuana and yielding a much bigger profit, hard drugs brought with them a whole new raft of Flats gangsters made rich by the trade. With much wider horizons and much bigger ideas, some of these outside gangsters started ending up in jail. Big men on their own turf, inside prisons like Pollsmoor the high flyers, as they call gang bosses here on the Cape, got a big shock. They had no power. Even worse, the Number viewed them as potential slaves. Rather than serve out their prison time as wyfies, the high flyers paid out huge sums of money to join the Number. As soon as that happened, the Cape Flats gangsters began to corrupt and undermine the Number code. To take just two examples, the Number excused them from brutal initiation beatings and did not require the high flyers to kill or injure a warder before joining. In return, the high flyers gave some of the Number generals access to and jobs in the drugs trade.

  Before the Cape Flats drug bosses started to join, the Number never ever operated outside the sealed world of South Africa’s prisons, but when the high flyers and their followers left prison, they took bits of the Number code they had learned on the inside out onto the streets. Changing the name of its leaders from high flyers to generals, members of the Cape Flats gang that calls itself the Firm, for example, have aligned themselves with the blood line of the 28s. For their part, the Americans, like Kevin, have adopted the rituals and beliefs of the 26s.

  Copying the high flyers and fancying themselves hard men of the Number, young Cape Flats gangsters took up and ran with its ideology. They were now ndotas, male Zulu warriors imitating the feared and respected Number prison gangsters. To these aspiring young bloods, everyone outside the gang on the Flats, every taxi and bus driver, every shopkeeper or citizen, was a frans: a subhuman to be beaten, murdered, raped and robbed. As the days and weeks go by, the gangs are extending their influence and reach across the Cape.

  A sad-faced loose-limbed thirty-two-year-old American gang member who was also a sergeant in the 26s, Kevin’s right eyelid was partially stuck open as a result of a wound he had come by from a burning tyre when he was young. He had served several years in Pollsmoor for various offences and took me to meet about a dozen of his fellow American gang members at a place they had nicknamed, with heavy irony, the White House. This was a low-ceilinged claustrophobic shed that had once been whitewashed. It was decked out with bits and pieces of US paraphernalia: photographs torn from the pages of magazines, posters and a small tattered Stars and Stripes. Inside were seven or eight men who had clearly been drinking and taking drugs before we arrived. The moment I appeared, they started on the tik.

  To smoke the tik, Kevin and his mates took a light bulb, heated it up and blew the glass until the bulb end ballooned out into a shape they called a lollipop. Burning a small hole in the top of this, the Americans carefully sucked a small amount of tik up from its bag with a straw, dropped the meth crystals into the lollipop, heated the bulb with a lighter and smoked the fumes. As if that wasn’t enough for a night out with the lads, between hits of tik the gang smoked strong marijuana laced with Mandrax – ‘buttons’. Taking the neck of a broken bottle, they scraped its edges until they were smooth, packed the neck with marijuana, crushed Mandrax buttons over the top, mixed it into the dope with a thin stick, set the whole lot alight and pulled hard. The idea was to rollercoast between a huge amphetamine high and a massive downer. It was as if they were hurtling in a high-speed lift to the fifteenth floor, swapping elevators and then plunging back down to sub-level thirteen.

  Consequently, these were not healthy human beings. Drug abuse had softened their facial bones, giving many of them a kind of budgerigar look. Still no more than twenty or thirty years old, most also had big boils on their faces and gums. In this close little room full of gangsters and powerful chemicals, I was keen to keep a clear head and ask at least a couple of intelligent questions but in seconds I started to feel the dizzying effects of the fumes.

  As the tik took hold, the Americans started talking. Many of the photographs on the walls were of black US gangsta rappers but that didn’t mean they liked black South Africans. One man, the most articulate of the group, said, ‘I’m not ashamed to be a Cape Coloured, but it seems to me we’re third now. You can count how many coloured people you find in parliament. The African people are the majority in parliament. When we went to school, every one of us had a dream. We wanted to become something in life. Now we’re getting lower and lower.’ Judging by the murmurs of agreement, that was the general perception. In fact, under recent so-called upliftment laws all South African employers must have workforces that are 50 per cent black, 30 per cent ‘coloured’ and 20 per cent white.

  By the time I finally got out of the White House I felt sick and zoned out from secondary inhalation. God knows what it is like taking a full hit of crystal meth and then dousing it with buttons and dope. No wonder these guys were unstable and prone to acts of random violence. After drinking about four or five pints of water, I fell into bed at seven in the ev
ening. It was eight o’clock the next day before I came round.

  As we got to know each other, Kevin introduced me to his sister Janice. Doing her best to raise her son and keep him out of the gangs despite having a gang leader brother, Janice was definitely one of the good guys. And that is something the outside world needs to know about the Cape Flats. Thousands of people there are trying to lead honest, productive lives. There are all kinds of self-help and community groups trying to improve things. It’s just that, with so many gangsters at work all around, living honestly is hard. After we’d been chatting in her mother’s clean, well-organized kitchen for a while, Janice told me why Kevin always looked so sad. ‘Thirteen years ago, Kevin came home one evening with a cocked gun – illegal of course. His six-month-old son found it in the morning. The gun went off and he died on the way to hospital.’

  When she learned of her child’s death, Kevin’s devastated wife left him and started dating a fellow gangster. During a hit allegedly intended for the new boyfriend, she too was shot dead. The people responsible have never been caught.

  I asked Kevin about his son’s death. At first he told me the gun had ‘been in the wrong place’ and tried to justify his stupidity: ‘Some guns don’t have safeties.’ But eventually his hard-man shell cracked and he began to cry. His son had been the light of his life, he told me with tears streaming down his face. ‘He was in my arms when he died.’ He told me how much he wanted to be reunited with his wife and son, and how he still believed in God. ‘I’ll be living in peace when I die because I’m ready to straighten my path for the next life. If God makes a promise he won’t break it. Even if I don’t meet them, I will be there with him. The best is your family and your relatives.’ With a mum who runs the local softball team and a sister who is one of the nicest people I have ever met, on the face of it my new acquaintance had had every chance to grow up straight. Until, that is, you discovered that his father had been a general in the 26s.