The Underworld Podcast - Cape Town's Bloody Mob Wars: The Steroid King, Dirty Cops, and Numbers Gangs

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It's also home to one of the most violent and tangled criminal underworlds on the planet, where drug lords, prison gangs, crooked cops, and millionaire businessmen wage bloody wars over everything from nightclub security to anabolic steroids. When South Africa's notorious "Steroid King," Brian Weinstein, is executed in his bed in 2017, the murder exposes a sprawling network of gangsters battling for control of the city. But the story only gets stranger as the men accused of arranging the hit start turning up dead themselves. This week, Danny and Sean dive into Cape Town's astonishing mafia wars, tracing decades of corruption, gang violence, international crime syndicates, and spectacular assassinations. And this is only Part One. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The new 2027 Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid. Consumer Reports top-rated subcompact SUV. Stop by your local Subaru dealership or visit Subaru.ca to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. Friday, August 18th, 2017, Cape Town, South Africa. It's the middle of the night in one of the richest suburbs on the continent and a man is asleep in his bed. It's an old money neighborhood he's living in. oak trees lining the road,

wine estates at the end of the block, walls that you can't see over. I mean, this is Cape Town. But it's the part of Cape Town they photographed for the brochures, the part with the vineyards and the shishi restaurants where annoying women on Instagram go out to dinner after quote-unquote roughing it while glamping in Kruger. The man's sleeping, he's exactly the kind of guy who lives here,

on paper, that is. Businessman, multi-million dollar income, big house, girlfriend beside him, and their two-year-old in the bed with them. But of course, he's got some other issues on different papers, for one, an Interpol Red Notice. And the DEA, they've also been after him. He's been fighting extradition for four and a half years since the police picked him up in January of 2013, and he's been winning.

He's in the business of anabolic steroids, and newspapers on three continents call him the steroid king. His name is Brian Weinstein. And unfortunately for him, he's been making designs on a bit more than just the steroid market. And the people he's been pissing off, they don't care how much weight you can bench press. They're going to come see you in a different way. The day before that Thursday, about 15 miles from his block, a group of men in the rough Cape Flats area sat down in a tire shop and started hashing out a plan. They're part of South Africa's absolutely brutal and insane cult-like prison gangs.

called the numbers game. This specific one, the 27s. If you missed our episode on them, we'll catch you up to speed later. All you need to know for now is that these men are meeting to make two decisions. Who is going to drive and who is going to pull the trigger? And one of the men in the room, he used to be the sleeping man's bodyguard. His brother also used to be one of his bodyguards. And that evening, the driver and the shooter meet up with the brother and swap cars with him.

He gives them the lay at all the house. He tells them how to get in. He used to own his own security company so he knows how these things work. And he gives them one final instruction. Don't hurt the woman. Don't hurt the kid. Around midnight, the shooter gets into the house. He makes his way to the bedroom, five shots close range, into the sleeping man.

The woman isn't touched. The kid isn't touched. They leave. It's a professional job done to plan. But still, the police are on it. Within a matter of months, they arrest the two bodyguards. and the driver. But these guys, they're hired hands.

It takes another three and a half years for the police to arrest the men they set paid for it. And over the next seven years, five of the men they arrest are going to be shot dead one by one before a judge can even rule on any of it. A prison gang boss in front of his own house, a week before a court date,

a man driving home from visiting a prisoner, 20 bullet casings in the road. The multi-millionaire crime lord the state says finance the whole thing in a mall parking lot, the day before he's due back in court, and his business partner, the king of the city's bouncers,

standing on a sidewalk on a Thursday afternoon, one by one, taken out as they await their own murder trial. South Africa's underworld has never seen anything like it. But this is a country that records 27,000 murders a year. In a city where one police precinct, one, logs 300 of them, where the army gets sent in and makes barely any difference,

where the guns the gangs use are sold to them by cops, and where a detective can have his cell phone track 2,000 times by the men he's investigating before they shoot him in his own driveway. It is, for all intents and purposes, a country becoming a mafia state. And this, the man in the bed, shot, is the murder that cracks all of it open. This is the Underworld podcast. Welcome back to the Underworld podcast, an audio visual program that takes the listeners on a journey through international organized crime, past, present, and future around the globe and back, hosted by two journalists who spent their careers traveling all over reporting on stories just like this one. Me, Danny Gold, and my British libertine partner, Sean Williams, who is now based in Argentina, where he is single-handedly trying to reignite a new Falcon's war.

especially when he's been drinking for at least five hours in Buenos Aires pubs. Yeah, we do not say the F word out here. You are definitely going to get me killed if anyone I know who listens to this. I don't know, what are our numbers like in Argentina? Probably pretty bad, so that's fine. But you have been getting drunk and picking fights in pubs related to that conflict from 30 years ago. I have picked one fight recently, but I'm not going to make my opinions known on this podcast. or maybe ever.

Things are heating up. Things are heating up in Buenos Aires. Anyway, quick catchup, Patreon.com slash general podcast. That's where we have

bonus episodes. And you can also get those on Spotify and iTunes. You can also just support us. You don't even have to listen to them if you don't want to. I mean, do you really want to hear

Sean and Dale's movie reviews? Maybe you do. I don't know, but you can throw some cash there. Merch is at underworldpod. com. Christmas is coming up, guys.

Hanukah, get yourself some presents. Email us at the underworld podcast at gemel. We've been getting some pretty cool emails, tips, stories, all that. Why not advertise with us to? Reach out. Comment on YouTube if you're watching it there.

Watch our like 70 second slot videos on all the socials where we post. All that good stuff. You guys know the deal. I can get right to it. Now, we are headed to somewhere. We probably should have spent more episodes on. And that is South Africa. How's the accent?

Is that up South Africa? Can you do better? Yeah, I don't know if I can. I'm just doing the exact same voice. Anyway, switching up to more serious things. South Africa has an extremely high murder rate, insane levels of violent crime, especially Cape Town, though Joe Berg isn't too far off. It's actually up there with like Brazilian and Mexican cities

where you have cartels and gangs that basically control the state or parts of the state warring over territory. That's how bad it is there. And I think though most people, when they hear this, they think about like brutal street gangs and prison gangs, not like sophisticated networks like or the brutal gangs like the numbers gang we did an episode on a few years ago

real dark stuff there in that one but fascinating but this episode this is about the more like organized crime element of Cape Town and they are pretty wild as you can tell by that cold open. I shouldn't mention two

the premier crime reporter in South Africa who covers this stuff is Karen Dolly and she's done I hope I'm pronouncing her name right she's done some incredible work I think she just had her fifth book come out on the subject. really in this deep. I mean, she's had death threat sent to her phone. She's got top-level gangsters who know her on a first-name basis. They leave her WhatsApp messages. Just a real kind of

old-school crime reporter, the kind that barely exists anymore. And a lot of what you're going to hear is based off her work. Also stuff from the investigative outfit at the Malangarian, handful of court reporters who have sat through all these trials. There's really good TV stations, too, that covered this stuff in South Africa. So a lot of really good sources there. But yeah, Karen Dolly, I think, just had a book come out on all this stuff, but I was not able to get a copy for this episode because it's not available in the States except for on Kindle. And I need a nice hard copy, you know, Sean? I do, I do.

I do love books. Books are good. Anyway, Mail and Guardian, just pick a name, right? Also, where was Totsie set? Do you like that? Do you like that bit? Just pick a name. Oh, yeah.

I forgot about that movie. Yeah, what a great movie. Yeah, this just made me re-think about it. it. Okay, okay. Because I kind of rewatched that train scene with the old guy, which is, I still think about that a lot, man. It's so, like, cold. It's like one of the most gruesome scenes. Anyway, I haven't seen that movie. I barely remember it, but I think that was like a street king, right? That might have been Joe Berg, I think. Yeah, it could be Joe Berg. I think, isn't it where he gets like, he finds a kid and then he has to look after the baby and, yeah,

it's pretty incredible. I don't know. Now I got to look up that movie when we're were done because I haven't thought about that movie in probably 15 years since it came out. There was a really good bunch of movies, I think, in that time period about, like, gangs in foreign countries, right? There was that one in El Salvador, Guatemala. What was it called? You know what I'm talking about? The Kid has to escape and ride the beast to get out.

Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Very similar sort of. There's a city of God as well, right? That's the Brazilian one. The city of God, though, was more like Brazil, like, big picture. These are more like lone stories of, but I forgot what the movie was called in El Salvador.

or Guatemala or Honduras, one of the three. But it's about like a young, well, you know what I'm saying? It's about like a young kid in that triangle, which is very similar to the way that worked. Anyway, I should note there are two massive criminal trials going on in Cape Town right now. I think a third might have just started

as we're basically recording this. And basically all the people mentioned in the story, the ones that aren't dead, are involved. So stuff is changing fast. There's some alleged here. There's some stuff back and forth. but like, you know, this could obviously all change based on testimony in this trial. Now, God, that was a long preamble.

Sorry, guys. Cape Town is a gorgeous city, but it has a split personality of sorts, right? On one side, you've got Table Mountain, sits over the bowl, kind of like a lid, Camps Bay and Clifton where the beaches are white, the apartments cost, what an apartment costs in New York City. And you've got those penguins, right? Who doesn't love penguins? You got wineries. You got Longstreet, which is the nightlife strip, a mile of Victorian balconies and bars and

where at two in the morning on a Saturday, the whole street is basically a block party. And you've got Bill Tong, man. Just sweet, sweet Bill Tong. I love Bill Tong. Have you been there? I was planning to live there for several months, actually, in 2018. I have.

I have for like a week. More marriage failed. Anyway. I've been there for a week in like 2007. It was beautiful. Like, great. I came on actually down the non-terristic coast. I think I came in off the western.

Eastern Coast by bicycle. But yeah, Cape Towns, Cape Mountain, all that sort of stuff is beautiful. Those are like the nice areas, right? But when you drive 20 minutes east, you hit the Cape Flats. And we got into that area a bit in the Numbers Gang episode, but the flats are exactly what they sound like.

They're a huge, sandy, wind-blown plane behind the mountain where you've got, you know, tin roof shacks, poor housing, drugs, poverty, alleys, gangs. There's a single police precinct there that has, 300 murders, and that's how a lot of them are. The Western Cape as a whole recorded 4,150 murders in the year to March 2020. That's like 10 times New York City these days, right? So 4,000 murders, I mean, it's nuts.

In July of 2019, it got so bad that the national government sent the army onto the flats. Actual soldiers for nine months, and the academics who went back and basically studied this, found that it didn't make that much of a difference in the murder rate at all. That's how crazy things are. That's how quickly life is taken. So how does a city get like this? It gets built like this. Cape Town is a port.

It's been a port since the Dutch set it up in the 1600s. And it's a place for ships to stop for water and vegetables on the way to Asia. And a port city on the far end of a continent with a harbor and a big poor population and a government that doesn't really care much about the population, that's where you get a ton of smuggling and organized crime. And then, of course, you have apartheid. Starting in the 1950s, the government used something called the Group Areas Act to decide by race, who was allowed to live where. In 1966, it declares District 6, a mixed neighborhood on the slope right under the mountain, a whites only area. And from 1968, it bulldoze it and forcibly moves more than 60,000 people out of the center of the city and onto the sand.

And that's where the flats come from. It's essentially like a government project. And the people who get dumped out there, the people the government calls colored, which is like a South African. term for mixed race, you have black, white, Malay kind of all combined together into this, I guess, race that they sort of created, no? Isn't that how you describe? Yeah, let's just, yeah, let's just describe this on the fly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'll do. That's good. Yeah. Well, so that's, that's this neighborhood, right? But you basically have their neighborhoods that they had lived in for generations, extended families, churches, mosques, the kind of guy in the corner who knew

your mother, all of that gets destroyed as everyone gets scattered across this plane where there's no jobs, no buses, and a vacuum of power. So what do the kids do? I mean, they form gangs. In the 50s and 60s on the flats, you get with the researcher and analyst Mark Shaw, who's another person who's done just incredible work on South African crime. He calls them corner gangs, which start out as community self-defense of sorts, but also the usual protection rackets, becoming like the street government where the actual government just doesn't care and isn't operating. And almost similar to how you have Jamaican gangs getting their language and some style and notions from American Western movies, these gangs pick up on stuff from American mafia movies. Yeah, this is sort of like, I guess, Patient Zero, like a perfect encapsulation of how gangs take root, right, from every angle.

It also reminds me of how those ice cream wars in Glasgow, they were basically birthed out of like bad economic and city planning as well. And this sounds similar only with apartheid, which is probably worse than Zodagh. called them. Yes. I think a lot of gangs start from situations like that. Vacuums of power, living situations that are set up in one way or another. I mean, favelas, like, come on. I think it's generally the genesis of a lot of those situations. Even Watts, like in California. One of the biggest gangs on the flats to this day is literally called the Americans. There's another gang called the Hard Livings. We're going to talk about them. And there's one called the sexy boys, which is a terrible name for a gang, but it's the kind of thing, a bunch of like

street kids who watch MTV in the 90s and don't speak. English is the first language. That's the kind of thing they would name their gang. We're going to be spending some time with the sexy boys. That was an opening for you, Sean, and I get nothing. Nothing in return. Oh, you will. You will.

Yeah, I'm sure. Now, the drug that really builds these gangs into something bigger than a corner isn't heroin. It's not crack like in the U.S. It's a prescription drug called Mandrax, which is otherwise known as metha-meatherloon, I believe, is the title. or in the States we say coeludes, which if you've watched Wolf of Wall Street,

those are the things that Leonardo DiCaprio, Jordan Belfort, is on and doing like crazy when he's wandering around with Margo Robbie. It looks like a really fun time, but it is banned in the U.S. I think it has been for decades. Always wanted to try it. I think I knew these women

that used to hang out with these rich guys who were like getting their own made by underground chemists. This was a while ago. And I've heard stories of more of that recently, but I've never been able to find it, which is shocking because you would think in a place like the States where there's a lot of money to be made and a drug that has this

like lore about it, somebody would be making it in an underground lab, but instead of just making you know, peptides. Well, I mean, you know, we get enough weird emails. Surely someone can tell you where to find the quailutes. That's true. That's true. Hit us up. The Underworld Podcast at gmail.com.

Let us know. Mostly past the fun stages of our life, but, you know, we'll take one on for the Patreon and see what happens. In South Africa, what you do with them, which sounds a lot less fun, is you crush up a little tablet. I think they're blue pills. They come in. You mix it with weed. You pack it in the neck of a broken bottle. Does not sound fun. Again, sounds very crack-hattish. And you smoke it. And they call it a white pipe, which sounds like a blast. Yeah, that sounds, why you got to ruin a good time? I mean, I'm guessing this isn't an upper then. It sounds like sort of purple

drank kind of knockout stuff. Yeah. It's a knockout. It's a knockout. It's a knockout situation. It gets really big in the 80s. And it's, like I said, it's a small little blue pill. So it's, they're called Buddens, very easy to sell, very easy to transport, easy to smuggle, even into prison. In 2002, the Mail and Guardian reports that more than 85% of all the mandrax consumed in South Africa was consumed in the Western Cape. And the precursor chemicals come mostly from India and China, where else, and the trade has never really stopped. And the buttons, they do something that nothing on the flats had done before, which is they create these big drug lords, which South Africa didn't really have before. On the flats in the early 90s,

these, one of the biggest operations was a group called the firm. The firm is built by a man named Colin Stanfield, who puts together a bunch of street gangs and corner gangs into one organization whose money comes from Mandrax and from Chabines, which are these sort of unlicensed bars. He has a nephew named Ralph. Ralph is going to come back around. But what you need to know is that this peer basically creates the first real, like not just a bunch of kids on a corner doing a little extortion of corner shops, but real drug lords. driving beamers, making six, seven figures. Now, the prison side of this, right?

We did a whole episode on the numbers gang, the 26s, the 27th, and the 28th. So this is a very short version. If you want, go back and listen to that episode. Don't do it while you're eating. It is some weird stuff. They are brutal. We also did a show when they sent the army in.

I remember doing a show all the way back in 2019. I think we did a Patreon bonus as well. So we started the podcast in 2020. So the 2019 episode probably might have been when you were on Quaila's you thought of it. So, but I did think you did, I do think you did one in 2020 or 2021. And you did one on the state capture there. Some of the more high level intertwined with the, you do that episode. The Guptas.

Yeah, interesting stuff. But the 20, the numbers gang, I think, was the beginning of last year. They are brutal. They are violent. They have these insane routines and customs where everything is dictated. like to the T of how they can behave and they are a force. And the gang is typically said to have formed in the late 19th century, early 20th century. It's not like, it's weird because there are three separate gangs, but they're also kind of

one gang. And they function under this whole umbrella. They have a system of operating with each other, which is weird and convoluted. Like the 26s can't talk to the 28s. The 27s are there to pass judgment. They fight violent, violent wars with each other. The whole thing is very much. messy, but listen to that episode if you want more details. I can't go into it too much here.

For today, all you need to know is this. The 26s is they handle the money. The 28th are the soldiers. And the 27s are these small, strange, like blood-olk gang in between them that act as like the judges. They are the real psychos. For most of the 20th century, the numbers are just a prison thing. You're a hard living or an American on the street. And when you go to prison, you take a number to survive. But in the 90s and 2000s, with the drug gang in that the drug game coming up, the walls come down. Numbers come out onto the flats. And now a street gang boss can also be a 28th general,

and a crew of 27s can be rented out outside as muscle. So two labels are going to matter, right? The 27s are the gang, the shooter and the driver and the cold open belong to, and the 28s are the gang that stands behind the firm, Colin Stanfield's old outfit. And the sexy boys and the hard livings, their street gangs, not numbers, though it's all kind of intermixed.

And I mean, if you're confused, don't worry. So am I? Or you could just, you know, press that 15 second back thing and just listen to this maybe five, 10 times. So you get it? Yeah, it's hard, you know, because I want people to understand this and we try to take out as many names and gangs as we can because I know it's hard to listen to this stuff and really process it at the same time when there's all this stuff floating around. But this is just a really complicated one. So we'll try to backtrack like that whole Netflix thing, how you're supposed to keep saying the plot of the movie every 12 minutes because people are just watching it on their phone. We'll keep trying to do that. But if we don't do a good job, email Sean. Don't email me.

You do not want to be getting your sexy boys and your 27s mixed up. That's not a place you want to be. Okay. So long background preamble, where does this all lead? First, you have Silvio Dante. He convinces everyone not to play Sun City so that in 1994, apartheid ends, Mandela is elected, the sanctions come off the country, and two things happen to Cape Town at the same time.

The borders open and every international criminal syndicate on earth comes to just see what's up and see if there's a new market. You've got Nigerian cocaine networks, Chinese triads who went after the Manjax trade and the Abilene poaching, Italians coming in, Russians, and at the same time, the nightlife in Cape Town explodes. The waterfront gets built, Longstreet fills up with clubs, tourists arrive by the plane load, and for the first time, there's real money in the center of town at two in the morning, both behind the bar and in the bathroom stalls. So Mandela brings all the boys to odd is what you're saying.

It's terrible. The flags, though, they still get nothing. Same gangs, more drugs, more money, now with cocaine, and by the mid-2000s, you've got Tick, which is crystal meth. By the mid-90s, people out there are so sick of it that a vigilante

movement starts out of the moss called people against gangsterism and drugs, Pagat. Pagat, though, like a lot of vigilante movements, are sort of gangsters themselves, and they start taking on the gang leaders around the flats. The Hard Living's gang at the time is one of the big gangs run by twin brothers,

Rashad, and Rashid Staggy. And on the night of August 4th, 1996, Pagad marches on the Staggy house with 2,000 people, many of them armed. Remember the Ireland episode about how like Martin the General Cahill, when the people in the slums of Ireland of Dublin started having those violent protests against the drug dealers? This is like a very similar situation.

Rashad Staggy pulls up to his own house into the middle of it. He shot, then firebomb. Someone throws like a, you know, a Molotov cocktail basically at him. He burns to death in the street. And while the crowd chants in a TV crew films it, and a photographer shoots photos, you can look up these photos that run in the newspaper around the world. He dies.

Some of the marchers there reportedly tell the paramedics, do not treat him. He kills our children. Rashid, the surviving twin, he goes to prison. He keeps running the gang. He comes out much later. He'll be back in the story, but that's a bit of an aside from our main story.

I just thought we should mention it because it's pretty wild. I'm guessing, I mean, it's hard to tell because South African names are absolutely crazy. But are these like South Asian guys? Are their connections between them and, I don't know, big gangsters in India or Pakistan at the time? I don't think so. No, I think they're what the South Africans call colored, especially because they're coming out of the flats, right? And that's a big colored area.

But yeah, Pagad goes after these guys, these street gangs. And it actually takes out not just them, but a couple of other of these little street corner gang bosses that are coming up at the drug boards. But at that same time, you have a moment for organized, much more organized, smarter crime to take over. And that's where we get the organized crime wars in Cape Town that we're going to talk about today, the ones this episode is about. They really start in the nightclubs and bars in the mid-90s, well, not really in them as much as just outside their doors. I've only been to Cape Town once many, many years ago, but one thing I took away from that was that it has just incredible nightlife. The city has this beautiful strip,

probably the most beautiful strip in Africa, and control that nightlife strip is very, very profitable for both drug sales and extortion. And the men who control both of those things are the bouncers, or rather the security companies that run those bouncers. And controlling those nightlife doors,

it translates into controlling the city's underworld. I feel like we need some Danny lore at this point. There's far too much of my own this past month. Okay. So when I was 23, I did a trip called a tour to Africa, which you can look up right now online. I believe the company is now called TDA International, started by my uncle in 2002, when he was

like in his 50s. He had done a lot of different things, a lot of different work in Africa, but nothing had worked out. So he had the idea to start the Guinness Bookerall Records longest bike race expedition in the world. And he did it. And it goes from Cairo to Cape Town. It's like four months on a bike camping along the entire eastern coast of Africa, basically, through Ethiopia, through Sudan,

when you could go through those countries. And a couple years into it when I graduated from college, I made a deal with him that I could go on it for free if I did some work around it. And I did that. And that's how I ended up in Cape Town. But I went down, I think we started in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia,

Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Benibia, Botswana, Zambia, into South Africa, four and a half months on a bicycle. I don't think I rode a bike for like 10 years after. I was just like I had enough. I don't think I camped either for five or six years afterwards. I was like, I've done this enough in my life.

I'm over it. But that is, that's some, damn. Does that count as lore right there? That does. Yeah, car to Cape Town.

Your uncle doing what, what, Cecil Rhodes never could. It's pretty incredible. Yeah. It was, I mean, I went from like,

you know, getting drunk in basements to that in, like, a period of six months. It was a very, very cultural sort of transition moment. But it was good. It taught me, when you go to Sudan, we have no idea, you never really been anywhere, really teaches you how to travel.

Did you go to the Murrowi, the ancient pyramid site in Sudan on the Egyptian border? No, because we were on the bike, though we came in in the north through, I think, Wadi Halfa. I believe that's what it's called. And like crisscrossed around. We didn't go through Darfur, went through Khartoum. I mean, I think it's crazy like my uncle manages all this stuff because every year they've got to change the because like, you know, new conflict breaks off or whatever. Smoldering rank.

He does it. He does it all over. They've got tours all over the world now. The man doesn't have a smartphone. He only has a, he only has a regular, like, he's just that kind of guy. Like, only has a regular phone. And like, you got to call his partner. Like, I call her to reach him sometimes.

And this man runs a global business in conflict zones with travelers. He's, I don't know, he's another type of guy. But yeah, look it up. Tour de Afrique, TDA International. If you guys want to have the adventure your lives. That was a little long. People were going to hate that, but, you know, it is what it is. Okay.

So we are talking about how the sort of street gang drug dealers are being taken out by this vigilante movement. And it kind of creates the doors to open for a new sort of gangster. And that new gangster is Cyril Beka. He grows up on the grounds of a reform school, not because he's sentenced there, but because his dad runs the place. So he grows up around boys the state had given up on. outside Cape Town, one of eight kids. My assumption is that it's not an easy environment

as those schools were brutal places. And he gets into karate really seriously, even trains in Japan, so he can really handle himself and he's been around tough people his whole life. And when in the mid-90s, the nightclub scene in Cape Town explodes, he uses that ability to move into the bouncer game

and starts really organizing. He kind of sees that the money isn't in retail sales in the flats. It's in the city center, where like the rich people go out, where the tourists come there. where they're buying expensive drugs, not like little pieces of crystal meth. The company he starts is called Pro Access, and by 1999, only a few years later, the police are in court trying to sort of explain what it is.

And the way a police captain lays it out is the model everybody else in this story copies for the next 25 years. It works like this, right? A club is doing fine, and then a crew turns up and the cops call the specific crew the Moroccans, because a lot of them are Moroccan, it's led by a pro kickboxer, and they just wreck the place, right? fights, stabbing, chaos. And the next day, a very calm man in a nice suit comes to see the owner and he says,

hey, you've got a security problem. I've got a security company and I can help you take care of this. If they refuse, the Moroccans come back. But if they sign on the dotted line, the trouble stops. And now the men on your door work for beak. And once they hold the door, the company can take over or control the drug dealing inside. You know, it's a pretty classic organized crime play, right? And sure, you get a few clubs.

that's one thing, but Beka ends up controlling about 90% of the spots in Cape Town. And with that empire comes all sorts of criminal dealings and violence. Like he goes on trial for murder with his manager in 2000, but he gets acquitted. I think it was the murder of a Chinese sailor, which sounds like a movie from the 80s. Beka walks, which is a thing you're going to see happen quite often in the city over and over when it comes to gangsters facing trial. Beka has one real rival on the doors, a bouncer boss named Andre Naudy, although I've heard it pronounced Naud and Nadei, but Andre Naudi is what we're going to say, whose company is called

Professional Protection Services and who gets pushed out to the northern suburbs, which is the less glamorous end of the town. He's what you expect a man at the top of like a bouncer crew to be, right? Big muscles, loves a good scrap, always sits with his back to the wall. Years later, reporters in a room with him and one of his old opponents from the beaker days, and now he brings up a night when the two crews fought so hard outside a club, they basically shut the streets down. And he says to the guy, quote, that was a good night, wasn't it? We all bled nicely. So he's, you know, a brawler through and through.

But Beka himself, there may be more to him than just being a simple gangster. One rumor says he's in good with like the mafia, the real mafia. Because in 1996, two years into democracy, Nosa Mandela's government sets up a special task force to go after Sicilian mafia financier. Financier? You say finance? Financier, I think. Financier. Anyway, who's fled Italy and set himself up in the Western Cape and who the Italians eventually convict an absentia of being in the mafia.

The units run by a cop named Andre Lincoln, who Karen Dolly will write a book about afterwards. And in 1997, that unit's report described Cyril Beka and his bouncers as, quote, soldiers for Lacosa Nostra around that guy, that financier. Financier. Financier. Financier. I should know how to pronounce that word. It's never proven in court, and the mail and the guardian at times claim the report doesn't really have a ton of evidence, but it sticks to him for the rest of his life, which is, I guess, if you're a gangster, kind of thing you want to stick to you for the rest of your life. Second rumor is a bit more out there, and the rumor in Cape Town is that for years, Beko works for the National Intelligence Agency, which is also like, it's like South Africa's domestic CIA. The agency denies it, of course, but in 2007, he turns up at the ANC's national conference, the one where Jacob Zuma takes over the party as part of the on top.

of one of Zuma's intelligence guys. Nightclub bouncer usually don't get invited to these things, but also like, I don't know, South Africa's police forces and national security are horribly corrupt, but at the same time, it's just like, are you going to be that obvious if you're working for them, just showing up? It's a confusing thing to understand. Maybe. Maybe you, you like don't expect people to be that tuned in in general, and you're like, screw it, who cares? The third thing is that in Joburg, where he moves to in the late 2000s, he takes a job as head

of security for a courier company and goes to work on the side as a security consultant for a Czech fugitive gangster who at that time is basically running the underworld in Joburg. Then the two of them have a falling out and after Bika is dead, which happens a little bit later, the police raid the guy's house and they find a hit list with his name on it. Yeah, I mean, I can totally believe that Jacob Zuma was working with a gangster like, clownishly corrupt leader. In fact, Jacob Zuma corruption charges is its own Wikipedia page. and that doesn't even cover him saying he can cure AIDS by him in a shower.

So I can believe that. Yeah, be too. Beka's also rumored to be involved in massive drug trafficking, illegal diamonds, and a spell of murders. While he's running the doors, there's a guy in the background whose presence in the underworld is starting to grow. And his name is Mark Lifman. Lifman is from Seapoint. It's a nice part of Cape Town. He's got a conventional family, two sisters, a businessman father, a mother who plays golf and bridge.

He goes to C. Point High, which is like, you know, decent high school, then the Army, then a technical college. And he starts off selling peanut clusters and coconut ice, which he makes as a kid in his mother's kitchen. And then pies. Yeah, classic gateway trucks. Right. Then he gets into running taxis, which is a popular gangster-infused industry, gambling, clothing, importing stuff from China. Then property, properties where he makes a serious money. You know, he ends up owning a strip club or two. He's involved in horse racing, even gets banned. for life over a race-fixing finding from 2001. 2005, he's arrested in charge with indecently assaulting seven boys and with the attempted murder of the man who was alleged to procure them. But in September 2009, he's acquitted on all those charges. His whole public act is that he's a businessman, property developer, you know,

wears good suits, slick back hair, sunglasses, kind of like a flamboyant looking guy. Says South African Security Consultant Ryan Cummings, quote, he was flamboyant dressed well and looked after himself. He did not cut the figure of a typical South African gangster. As I see it, Mark was a financier financier for the bosses. He is alleged to have played more of a

facilitator role, the money man. People who grew up around him, they say he comes across as a regular guy, but he has a volatile streak. And a guy who knew him in Joburg, put it more simply, quote, people were scared of him. When he spoke, people listened. And between 1999 and the end of his life, he gets arrested 12 times for assault, reckless driving, pointing a firearm,

intimidation, murder, never convicted of any of it. He would talk to journalists, which is something the gangsters in the flats, the more street guys never does, never do. He talked to Karen Dali on and off for years. And in 2018, he sends her a message and says, if I ever encounter a bad guy, I want it to be me. He was still sending messages to her the week that he died. Karen Dully is cool. Old school, man, like someone that, that, you know, reminds me of like a 60s, 70s, 80s, sort of like Pete Hamill or a Brezlin sort of character in New York, you know? So, Liffman, he's a gangster businessman of sorts, but he's somewhat above it all, kind of.

That is, until he partners with Jerome Boyson, otherwise known as Donkey. Donkey is from the flats and has a hard Scrabble youth. He spends about 20 years working as a building inspector for the city of Cape Town, like a regular municipal job on paper, while his brothers Michael and Colin are linked to a gang called the sexy boys. though eventually donkey himself is fingered as the head of the sexy boys making him, that's right, Sean, the sexiest boy. They run drugs, they got a big mandrax operation, they got hookers, just real street gang stuff.

Yeah, I'm not sure you can get away with the phrase fingered as the head of the sexy boys, but we'll move on, I guess. Yes. Donkey and Lifman link up because of the property business. Lifman buys some properties in a certain area and starts getting threatened by some other gangsters. he reaches out to Donkey for muscle, and they go into business together. The version Lifman himself gives to an author is that he was buying cheap houses out on the flats, and that's when he starts getting threats by the real street guys.

And Donkey, who at that point still has a city job, he steps in. Quote, Jerome and Mark were tight property magnates for a very long time. Using the sexy boys to strong-armed people at auctions to keep bids low. A retired police officer tells South African news site IOL. So that's the underworld right in Cape Town in 2011, at least for our main plan. players. Cyril Beka's on top. Andre Notties out in the suburbs doing his own thing. Liftman's got money. Donkeys got the muscle. And Beka has just come back from Joe Berg, and he's a new driver, which OG fans of the podcast are going to find very interesting. Monday, March 21st, 2011, Human Rights Day, which is a public holiday in South Africa late afternoon.

A silver BMWX-5 is heading west towards the city and has just passed the entrance to the University of the Western Cape. In the passenger seat is Cyril Bika. He's 49. He's just coming from Jerome Boyson's house. And on the way, that's donkey, and on the way, he's going to meet his brother. At the wheel is a man who introduces himself around Cape Town as Shasha Kovicchevich, a Bosnian businessman. At a set of traffic lights, a motorbike with two riders stops alongside the BMW. The one on the back opens fire, 17 shots.

Beka's hit in the chest and the arms and the head. Drivers hit two in the arm according to one paper. the chest according to another, and the car just keeps going and hits a lamppost, tears through the university's fence, and flips over into the bushes of the nature reserve on the other side. The first police who arrived have been called to a traffic accident, and they right away find that Bika is dead, but the driver survives. So Bika is dead, Cape Town underworld is about to change.

The driver goes to the hospital, and months later, when he's being discharged, the police take a closer look at the Bosnian businessman. And it turns out his real name is Dobrasov Gavrich. He's Serbian, and in January of 2000, he walked into the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade and shot dead Arkham. The most famous warlord of the Yugoslav Wars, the top of the Balkan gangster food chain, and the man we did our very first episode on. He had been convicted in Serbia in absentia and sentenced to 35 years. He'd been in hiding in South Africa since 2007, 23-year-old cop when he shoots Arkin. He vanishes on the Davis sentencing, gets himself a fake passport, travels all around South America, Cuba, Ecuador, and then he shows up in South Africa.

He's arrested just after Christmas 2011. He's been in South African custody ever since, nearly 15 years fighting extradition, and as of the summer, he is still fighting. Nobody has ever been convicted of killing Beka. The cop running the case named one suspect out loud in 2012, Jerome Boyson, Donkey, Liffman's partner, and the last man Beka visited, he has never been charged in that shooting. It's pretty crazy. So we've now been going so long with this show

that gangsters can consider themselves part of our law and vice versa. I mean, Arkhan, was that even pre-cold open? I'm too scared to listen to those first shows. Yeah, it was pre-cold open. I don't know. I think we just switched the cold open like six months in.

But I mean, we can redo it. It's a good episode. Maybe we should redo it. Straight to it. Yeah, sure. Just make it better. So yes, Cyril Beka is dead. The king of Cape Town's underworld is dead.

He'd been at top. He'd been on top of Cape Town for a while. He controlled all the doors, and now the doors are up for the taking. A couple of hundred venues, every one of them meeting men on the door on Friday night, and the men who've been fighting each other for those doors for 15 years, all realized the same thing at the same time. Within days of the funeral, because old manager, the guy acquitted alongside him in 2000 for that murder, picks up the phone and calls Andre Nottie,

Bika's old rival and says, let's sit down and work something out. They form up together because old operation, Nauti's suburban operation, and they bring in the Nigerian bouncer, the Congolese bouncers, the Moroccans, all the little crime outfits, and they folded into one company

called Specialized Protection Services or SPS. It launches in 2011, seven months after Beek has killed, 350 dormant on 146 venues, which by Nauti's own count was about 60% of the nightlife in the entire province. Livman is also involved.

He's backing it financially. Four years later, and that means donkey is involved as well. Four years later, they get charged with 300 different crimes against Naughty and Lifman over SPS, but the court throws out every single one of them. So that's sort of the alliance that's forming, right? Lifman's money, Nauty running the doors day to day. You've got Donkey and the sexy boys from the flats. And a fourth man, Donkey's brother, Colin, just out of prison.

And the police eventually called these guys the brother. From 2011, 2016, the Brotherhood controls the doors and with it Cape Towns Underworld. They are making money. And it was, by Cape Town standards, quiet, at least when it comes to the more organized aspects of crime there in terms of violence and murders and gang wars. Lifman, Mark Shaw wrote, saw himself as the new controller of the city center. And the reason he could run it without much actual shooting was because he has donkey and the threat of violence from the sexy boys who nobody wants to be on the bad side of. So there's not like particularly sophisticated stuff here, right? There's like a bunch of thugs and standover men working indoors.

I guess they're into drugs. Are they into other stuff at all? Is it really on those strips? Drugs, extortion, Liffman's doing all sorts of property stuff, city contracts, things like that. But yeah, it is this weird mix of where it sounds kind of thuggish, but also somewhat organized. Like Liffman is your typical gangster businessman, but maybe a gangster businessman like you have, you know, the guys in the clans in Berlin, as opposed to like a really slick, you know, operator. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sicilian mafia type in New York in like the 70s and 80s. Although I guess they were gangsters too in that way. But yeah, it's confusing for me to sort of understand because on the same level it sounds kind of small money and also very like haphazard and, you know, bouncers on doors. At the same time, they talk about it like it's very organized and there does seem to be some organized aspects of it. But yeah, it's a little, I don't know,

I'm seeing some contradictions. It's hard to parse a little bit. By early 2012, the cops have Lippman officially under investigation for organized crime. Him and Donkey, meanwhile, get themselves to sit down with the provincial minister in charge of community safety. 2014, Liffman turns up at an A&C rally in a Jacob Zuma t-shirt. He's in the papers as a property developer. The sexy boys are on the doors, and nobody's getting shot in the city center related to those crimes. Then in 2016, there's a fight at a bar.

And I feel like this is a common plot point or trope in serious organized crime stuff that we've done, right? Them getting into like internal wars over a stupid bar fight. Definitely not the first time this has happened in an episode. But these guys, you know, they just can't help themselves sometimes. May 20th, 2016, Cocoa Bar. Colin Boisen, donkey's brother, gets into it with a man named Kamal. Kamal is a 27s guy, the kind of man who knows which prison gangsters the call when situations get heavy. Guns come out.

And when it's over, Colin's complaint is. that Kamal brings in 27s into the club. Actual prison gangsters, including a man named William Stevens, who everyone calls Red, who is the leader of the 27s on the outside. Colin doesn't want this happening. Sees it as sloppy.

It's going to lead to, like, really bad situations. You don't want prison gangsters inside your nice Cape Town nightlife. And he blames his brother because donkey is the one who been bringing the 27s into the business-ass-muscle

along with his sexy boys. And you can see Colin's problem, right? He's kind of got a legitimate complaint. The whole model, Bika built, was like, bouncer are in control, discipline men on the door, no chaos inside, keep the drugs inside orderly, and the club owner pays you for the quiet.

Once you've got 27 standing on the door, you haven't got bouncers anymore, right? You've got a prison gang, and it's going to lead to messiness, police. It's just a bad situation. Colin is the one running the doors. He's got his own doors to run, and now he's got his brother's gangsters in them.

And he, he says the others are stealing from him on top of it, so he's just not happy. Keeps going. November 27th, same bar. Another fight between Colin and Kamal. Two people hurt, one of them, Colin's bodyguard. And that, it seems like the brotherhood is splitting apart. Internal division, literal brothers are budding heads. Nowadays he plays the peacemaker.

He negotiates this term of Colin leaving. And by the end of November 2016, the brotherhood has split. Collins on his own. And Colin starts spending time with another gangster named Nafiz Modak, who has his own designs on the door and has begun a guy. to become a really big problem. Modak is 34 years old in 2016 and from a family that runs like a little corner shop in the flats. He has a history of like fraud, vehicle finance stuff, sort of gangster stuff, but like kind of

small scale at that point, but he was once linked to Beka. He has enough money that he travels in a convoy of cars with bodyguards. And Donkey, when he hears his brother is running with Modak, says out loud in a way that got written down that he can't kill his own brother, but he can go after Modak. But in March of 2017, Modak and Liffman end up at the same property auction in the northern suburbs. Both of them are in the property game, both bidding, and Modak says Liffman pulls a gun on him and puts it in his face. A month later, Modak makes a play for the doors, a hostile takeover, but not the kind where like you buy a board seat, right? A real hostile takeover.

The company is called the Security Group, or TSG, and it's Modak and Colin Boyson. And within a year, by Modak's own count, TSG has cut deals. with the owners of about 80% of the nightclubs in Cape Town, and of course, this is not going to go unanswered by the Brotherhood. They call a meeting at Red Stevens' house, Red the 27th boss from the Coco Bar fight, and a room full of his gang, and Kamal, who had been the one getting into fights with Colin,

and the talk is of Lifman really wanting to make a move and get his clubs back, by force and intimidation as soon as possible. Red says he can fill three or four taxes with gang members, he'll supply the guns, and Lifman says he needs at least 100, 200 men, that the work should be done over two days and that they need to be extremely aggressive and intimidating. Basically doing the old Moroccans sort of gangster move

where they go into the club, cause a ruckus, start fights, fight whosoever's on the door and take them back over. The night of April 8th, 2017, taxis full of 27s gangsters show up in the city center. They go to all the clubs with their guns. They start fights. They pull guns on people.

You know, the prison gangsters are basically doing what the Moroccan did 20 years ago, just causing a ruckus at all the bars and nightclubs that Modak and Colin Boyce in control. The next day, April 9th, about 100 of them gather at a McDonald's in C-point ready for round two. But the police show up, a couple people get arrested, and then shortly after that, the shooting starts. April 17th, 2017, a beach bar gets shot up by a member of the 27th, wounds two people,

bars stop getting shot up, there's retaliation time, they try to kill donkey and his team, a bunch of his guys get gunned down. He himself gets shot after getting lost in the flats, and over the next, year and a half, there's going to be five additional attempts to kill Donkey. Lifman allegedly puts a substantial bounty on Modak's head. And by then in 2017, the police are saying the brotherhood has a plan to kill Modak and seven of the other people around him, including Colin Donkey's own brother. So we are in the midst of a very violent gang war.

And from here on in, there are bodies on both sides. In June of 2017, the 27's fight general shot dead with a friend sitting in the car. The man who's now charged with that double murder is Colin Boyson. In September, a car donkey is in, is thought to be riding in, gets shot up. A man is killed, but it ends up being the wrong car and the wrong man. In October, someone gets killed at a nightclub in Stalingbosch. And four days later, donkeys at Cape Town International Airport at the drop and go, and a sedan pulls up and the men in it open fire and chase him into the terminal.

He's hit four times. A bystander takes a straight bullet. Word on the street is that it's payback for the hit from a few days earlier at the nightclub in Stalingbos. donkey goes to the hospital. Someone tries to finish him off there in the hospital so they need to move him three additional times. Somebody really wants him dead. And in December, the papers report a bounty on his head of $5 million,

which is about $360,000 at the time, which is a substantial amount of money anywhere. But in Cape Town of that period, that is a lot. So the war that's going on in Cape Towns underworld in the wake of Cyril because death is taking shape. Or it's already full on, basically. You've got two camps, right? On one side, you've got Liffman, Donkey, Andre Naudy, and the 27s. On the other side, you have the upstarts, which is Donkey's brother Colin, Modak, and their security crew, TSG. And it's for control of nightlife, the bouncer racket, extortion drugs, and obviously, definitely some personal stuff. So, apologies to anyone at this point, but to back up, the 27s are like the fruit loops, right? They're the trigger-happy nutcases. But do they... Yes.

So do they have any designs beyond being kind of bloodthirsty psychos for hire? Or is that their entire thing? I mean, they control the prisons. So they've got a lot of money and control in there. But no, they're pretty simple, I think, minded when it comes to the bigger stuff. They're happy to take, or I don't know if they're happy, but they're taking orders. They don't have the good organized crime. They're like, you know, reckless prison gangsters covered in tattoos.

They can't exactly be taking property deals and showing stuff up and stuff like that. No, I think their leadership at some point moves into that. But the average street soldier is not a guy wearing a suit able to go into like fancy places and deal stuff like that. Like they're hitters, you know? Does that make sense? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of names, but this is good.

Sorry. Into this ongoing gang war walks the man from the cold open with a plan to take over the one drug market in Cape Town. Nobody is really thinking to fight about. That is Brian Weinstein. Brian Weinstein is a South African, though he often gets described as Irish because he lived there for a while. and it's also the first place he gets in legal trouble. In July of 2007, he gets sentenced in Dublin for nine charges related to running a global steroid ring.

Richie ran over email. Again, you pep-dye dealers could never, the amount of resourcefulness, right? There's no fake before and after Instagram photos. He can't take credit cards. He's making it happen over email, like meeting guys on message boards. That is resourceful. His underground brand was apparently called Axiolabs, and it was huge in the global bodybuilding community in the 2000.

In 2012, a federal grand jury in Tennessee indicts him, alleging the equivalent of about $9 million in profit over five years moving roids, which for a drug dealer doesn't seem like that much, but I guess for steroids, probably pretty big. It's enough to get Indraple to put out a red notice, and the DA, of course, is on it as well. And in January of 2013, he's arrested in Cape Town and the U.S. requests extradition. He posts bail, about $55,000, goes home to the house from the cold open and starts fighting the extradition request. And he starts winning round after round of the legal battle. Four and a half years of it. In the meantime, he's still getting to some shady dealings. In November of 2016, he threatens to blow up a supplement shop.

And when the police pull over his BMW, which has no plates on it, they find 12 uncut diamonds inside. Yeah, I mean, look, if you're South African and doing crime, you can't go anywhere without picking up at least a few blood diamonds, right? It's like a standard. Yeah, you need some uncut diamonds for sure. He's also still in the steroid business in a big way. making millions, not like eight figures, but good money. The raw powder comes in from China, Greece and Turkey, and gets made into product in underground labs in South Africa. Weinstein doesn't control the entire steroid market in South Africa, but he starts wanting to.

He's leaning on the rival labs in Joburg and Durbin and Cape Town to get it, basically big-dogging them. By that point, he's tied up with some gangsters and has a head of security that is a member of the 27s, who, before Winston hired him, had worked for Mark Lifman as a debt collector. I mean, that's how, right, it kind of sounds like high school. All these guys know each other in the center of the city. They're all doing deals together. That's how small this world is, right? The Steroid King's bodyguard was the other side's bill collector.

But if he wants to do what he wants to do, he's going to need more soldiers. So he turns to Ralph Stanfield. We mentioned him at the top of the episode. Again, sorry, a lot of names. He's the nephew of Colin Stanfield, the man who built up that street gang in the 90s called the firm, the first real, you know, powerful street gang, who was also a serious mandrax dealer. Colin dies in 2004, and by the time our story gets to where we are, 2017, the police have Ralph down as the man who runs the firm now and as a boss in the 28th.

And he's also the one man in Cape Town, besides Modax crew, with enough soldiers to take on the brotherhood. And he and Weinstein, they get close. So am I making sense, Sean, or is this just all over the map? Are you able to follow it? I'm following. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good. I'm interested. Because here's where it gets more intertwined, right? Wainstein wants the entire steroid market. Stanfield in the firm, they want in on the nightclub Doors racket. Wainstein has some money.

Stanfield has the men, and together, the Stereoid King and the alleged 28's boss, they go to Lifman of the Brotherhood with an offer. We're going to give you $300,000. You're going to give us the doors, which again, seems pretty small, comically small. It just doesn't seem like anyone's making a lot of money here, to be honest, which makes me doubt a lot of the numbers. Like, I assume they're bigger.

Lifman, of course, he laughs them off. But keep in mind, he's currently in the middle of a war for those doors against Modak and Colin Boyson. But then the other thing to realize, right, this isn't really a fair offer. It's not meant to be. It's more of a threat. It's basically like,

sell us these doors or else we're going to come in and take them. Yeah. So these guys, I think we mentioned this, but they're not, these guys aren't getting into like buying skyscrapers

in downtown, Cape Town and stuff like this. They're kind of, yeah, it's really weird to kind of parse where these people are on the kind of scale, right? I'd say Lifman,

Liffman is definitely, like he's a property developer. He's definitely, I don't know about skyscrapers, but he's big in the property game, but I don't think Stanfield and Wainstein are, no. I think they have designs on doing so, but they're small scale compared to him. In the background, Liffman and Wainstein are already fighting about something else. They actually clashed, like we said, over property deals in 2016 and investments. But now the rest of the crew has an issue and it's going to grow bigger. The steroid dealers, Wingsstain was threatening.

The ones in Cape Town, they go to donkey and they say, you got to do something about this guy. And my assumption is that they were probably paying him a tax or maybe friends, I don't know. So in late May, Lifman, Donkey, and the 27s are starting to talk about taking out Weinstein. On June 29th, 2017, the dealers come to Donkey's house for a meeting, and they tell him Waynestein is a threat to them and their businesses, and Donkey tells them Waynestein is going to be taken care of. But remember, Waynestein has the backing of the 28s, and they are a serious threat. So the theory is, they decide to make a move on the 28th first. and on July 26th, 2017, in Johannesburg,

Ralph Stanfield is driving an Audi R8, which is nice little ride, and he gets shot up. Remember, he's the street boss of the 28s. So the move is, take out Winston's muscle first, but Stanfield survives and he drives himself to the hospital, and the Joe Burke police announced that a motive is unknown. Lifman, the state later says, paid $500,000 ran for it, which is about $38,000, and the hit fails,

and he's pissed that he had to pay that much. Weinstein is not a dummy. He figures it was Lifman, and Weinstein, who by now spent a year threatening every steroid dealer in the country, decides to answer. He plans to kidnap and kill one of Lipman's bodyguards. The plan fails, and there's a recording from that summer, played in court later of a phone call between Weinstein and Lipman with Weinstein screaming, I'm here in Cape Town. If I see you, I will destroy you. Do you understand me?

Which, either you're pepped up on steroids and raging or you think you have serious backing for threatening a guy who really does pretty much control. a large part of Cape Downs Underworld by name on the phone, like, or by name, I mean, in personal on the phone, like you've got to be pretty confident in your guys. So the brotherhood meets again, and they decide, we're going to kill Wainstein. August 17, 2017, they planted out in that tire shop from the cold open. Eventually, everything happens.

They kill Wainstein. The shooter and the driver and the bodyguard get arrested, and they all plead guilty. What's not proved at the time is any of the rest of it. Who paid? Why? Whether the doors and the steroids were even, the reason or whether Lifman and Weinstein had simply fallen out over the property deals and the money.

Eventually, the police charged 16 men were being part of the conspiracy that arranged the murder, but I don't think all of them are included in the actual murder charge. But among those charged is Lifman, donkey, Andre Naughty, Red Stevens, he's the 27s leader, a cop, a Russian, and a bunch of others. Always a Russian, just throw a dodgy Russian in for good measure. Wasn't Jacob Zuma in bed with Russian mercenaries too? Was it Wagner? I don't know.

There are some, I think, Russian and Ukrainian gangsters running around Cape Town at this time. I left out their name. It was too many names. So there are definitely other major players in Cape Town at this time. It just, there's, I didn't want to confuse you guys even more than I probably already did. So most of the guys I named, I think 16 that were charged, they get bail. But then one by one, they start dying or being killed. Five of them by the summer of 2025.

And in November of 2024, the man the state calls accused number one, who is Mark Lithman, walks out of a mall in a golf town on the garden route the day before he's due back in court and doesn't make it to his car because he's gunned down in that parking lot. That is part two's cold open and we'll get to that next week. Now the question is,

who is killing the killers, who has the means to take out the top gangsters in the city one by one as they're a winning trial and being watched by the police. And that, my friends, is coming in part two. Boom, cliffhanger, top stuff. Could you, just before we move on, could you just run the different numbers,

gangs by me one more time. Jesus. Yeah, you got the 26es, the 27s, the 28th. They do weird, sexual stuff. It's really disturbing. Listen to that episode. Sorry if this was confusing, guys. I know if we digressed into my lore a little bit, but I had to keep up with Sean somehow. We've got more.

I'll tell you about Moy Thai camp in Thailand for like 10 weeks in 2008, backpacking Southeast Asia. Yeah, there's more. We can do some more lore. There's some more lore there. But it doesn't beat getting divorced and moving to Oklahoma. or whatever else you did in Berlin nightclubs. But it's something, you know. I'll try to keep up.

It's much nice than my life. Anyway, yes, next week. See you. Next week, guys. Grocery Grocery Delivery with PC Express Pass. Shop online and get the same low, no frills prices delivered. Get your first year of PC Express Pass for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at no-frills.ca.