against Casper Jonker and the team that conducted the raid for having assaulted and intimidated his workers and maliciously damaging property, nothing came of them.
I also received reports that members of the private security firm FSS were accompanying these sorts of raids by law enforcement agencies, including some conducted by SARS. As a result I gave an instruction to all units that reported to me to not allow FSS to attend inspections and raids and to be wary of being directed by them, lest we be accused of advancing the interests of one group in the tobacco industry above or at the expense of another.
Another matter that came to my attention in 2013 was a criminal complaint registered by the tobacco manufacturer Carnilinx, alleging that members of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team and FSS had illegally entered its premises and unlawfully planted a tracking device on one of its trucks. Carnilinx director Adriano Mazzotti would explain to me later how he came to discover this device, which used a SIM card, and said he asked a private investigator to look into it. What the investigator found was that the device and its SIM card had been used interchangeably by both FSS and the government.20 Despite complaining about this to the Hawks, Mazzotti said nothing came of this case either.
After having left SARS, I came across an affidavit by the FSS whistleblower Daniel François van der Westhuizen, in which he related in 2016 how two years previously, at Rietvlei Dam resort, just outside Tshwane, members of FSS and of the Tobacco Task Team and even a few SARS officials had come together to have a party in honour of Niemann. With the braai fires ablaze, meat sizzling on the grills, and lots of booze flowing, there appears to have been no distinction between law enforcement official and private investigators – they partied together just as they worked together. According to Van der Westhuizen, it was on this occasion that members of the task team, an SSA official, two SARS officials and an FSS man, sipping at their beers, swore to each other never to utter a word about how they had illegally entered Carnilinx’s premises and planted the tracking device without the necessary authority. As one of the SARS officials remarked, if this ever came out, their jobs would be on the line.21
The Illicit Tobacco Task Team was never really in the news for the right reasons. They certainly did not have any great track record of massive busts or convictions of significant criminal offenders in the tobacco trade. They appear to have plodded along with the sort of raids carried out on ATM, small seizures of illicit cigarettes at ports of entries or incidental busts, as if these were the outcome of many months’ work and a specific plan of action. Usually these investigations resulted in the arrests of truck drivers or factory workers. Other than that, they seemed overly preoccupied with what SARS was doing and its own successes, and with finding ‘dirt’ on me and other SARS officials. They were much ado about nothing, I’d say. They were unceremoniously shut down, rather quietly, sometime in late 2014, with little or no success to their name.
3
Agent 5332
Before I describe some of the newcomers to the industry, who became locked in battle with the established players, I need to introduce a person whose name will crop up repeatedly in these pages. She is Belinda Walter, whom I first met on 4 September 2013. It was a fateful day for me in view of what would later transpire. I had no inkling of her existence at this time, other than a prior email exchange following a minor complaint she had addressed to then acting commissioner of SARS, Ivan Pillay, in which she described herself as the chairperson of the new Fair-Trade Independent Tobacco Association (FITA). Pillay asked me to meet with her and explain our response.
At this point in time I was a group executive in charge of tax and customs enforcement investigations, managing five investigative units at SARS and overseeing just over 85 big projects that were focused on what we called the illicit economy. Contrary to a finding by a subsequent internal panel tasked by SARS to investigate the relationship between Walter and me, I was in fact not alone when we met but accompanied by another SARS manager.
When we first met, Walter presented herself as an attorney who had just recently opened her own law practice in Pretoria, and who specialised in matrimonial disputes, trademarks and patents.22 She claimed that her role as FITA chairperson was somewhat of a sideline or pastime. I believed her. In 2015, however, she would make the startling claim under oath that she had initiated FITA in conjunction with the State Security Agency (SSA). ‘FITA was intended to be a conduit for SSA and law enforcement agencies to understand the tobacco industry and the smaller, local tobacco manufacturers and whether any impropriety was being conducted.’ If this story is to be believed, there is no doubt that there could have been no legal authority for the creation of FITA as a spying mechanism for the state. Again, if it is true, the members of FITA must have been completely unaware that they were being spied upon by their very chairperson.
Soon after our first meeting in September, Walter was assaulted at her offices by an unknown woman. Apparently, she received a call to come down to the lobby of the building to meet someone who wanted to talk to her. She had no reason to suspect anything and duly went down to meet the person. She apparently came across a man and a woman, neither of whom said much of any relevance, but then the woman suddenly punched her in the face and the two ran away. Walter reported the issue to the police and a few other people she knew. I came to learn of this incident by chance when another attorney sent me a CCTV photo obtained from the lobby which showed the face of one of the people involved and asked me if I perhaps recognised the person. This attorney then told me what had happened, and I was rather shocked at the event and offered to assist if I could.
Almost two months went by. On 22 October 2013, Walter texted me one evening and we had a friendly exchange of words. This culminated in her asking me out on a date. I had a social engagement that coming Friday evening with friends and I suggested to Walter that she join us. It was a jolly evening. From this day Walter and I began dating. It wasn’t an ‘affair’, as it was later labelled.
That same weekend, Walter and I went to a cheese factory outside Pretoria, near the Hartbeespoort dam, a place called Van Gaalen where they offer daily picnic baskets and an outside setting near a river. We were having our picnic when she became rather serious and said she needed to discuss something with me. I had no idea what was coming. We walked down to the river, and as we were standing there, she made a startling confession to me. She told me she was a spy, codenamed 5332, for the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, and that a few of the officials on the team had it in for me for some or other reason. She identified Chris Burger as her ‘handler’ and told me that, at our first meeting almost two months previously, she had carried a concealed recording device to capture our conversation. This was on the instructions of Burger, who believed I was corrupt. She made light of this by saying that Burger was rather disappointed with the recording because it didn’t implicate me. She also told me that before Burger became her ‘handler’, she worked closely with his predecessor, Ferdi Fryer, and another SSA operative known to me to have been involved in the tobacco industry, Graham Minnaar.
At first taken aback, I appreciated what I believed to be her honesty and thought that she was taking me into her confidence. She first proposed that I ‘play along’ and pretend that I did not know what she’d told me. She would in turn give ‘reports’ to Burger, and in doing so prove over time to him that I wasn’t corrupt as he believed. I had no appetite for such games and said so to her. I told her in no uncertain terms that if she did not tell Burger what she had disclosed to me, then I would. She told me she had been finding the role of spy increasingly difficult in recent times, partly because of things she attributed to Burger, which I won’t elaborate upon here, except to say they weren’t very complimentary. She said she had in fact intended to end her role as a spy in any event and asked me to allow her to do so on her own in discussions with Burger that following week. True to her word, or so I believed, she texted me days later, saying that she and Burger had parted ways. As far as I was concerned, that ended the matter. One side-effect of this was that I now viewed her in a different way. I saw her as one of ‘us’, civil servants who were trying to curb the scourge of crime in the country. In doing this, she had instantaneously won my trust. I would come to regret this later.
The very next day, a Sunday, we were having lunch at a restaurant called Papa’s in Hatfield in Pretoria. Walter dropped another surprise on me. She told me she was the attorney for Carnilinx, the independent tobacco