Graham Coetzer, Hunting with the Hawks: Untold Stories from the Elite South African Crime-Fighting Unit (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024)
THE FAMED Scorpions, the Directorate of Special Operations which fell under the NPA and combined investigative and prosecutorial capacity in pursuit of organised crime and corruption, were disbanded in January 2009. They had been far too effective in penetrating the rot at the heart of the ANC. Their successors were the Hawks, the Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation, falling within the police and subject to political control. Under their watch corruption has flourished and the State was, and remains, captured.
Much of Graham Coetzer’s book reads like a publicity release for the Hawks. While it addresses the main types of crime they tackle ‒ human trafficking, targeted assassination and murder, cash heists, illegal mining and poaching ‒ the main emphasis is on the scourge of organised crime. Natural resources are all too often the target. As Coetzer rightly points out, none of this illegality would be possible without insider assistance and widespread corruption.
Unfortunately, a great deal of the writing is lightweight and obsessed with personal appearance and dress. There is a great deal of padding and some of what is offered is trite beyond words: a police officer is quoted as saying that ‘the crime scene is where you find some of your first clues.’ Who would have imagined that? This might win a prize for vacuity and there is distressingly more in similar vein.
Fortunately, there are redeeming, more solid chapters. The best is probably on rhino horn poaching, giving valuable insights into operating methods and money laundering through casinos. It also reveals that our wildlife is being decimated in the interests of an Asian status symbol believed erroneously to be a hangover antidote. Pangolin and abalone also feed various Asian appetites. So much for the end of colonial rapacity.
Similarly, illegally mined gold ends up in Dubai. Coetzer provides interesting coverage of the zama zamas and the armed syndicates that mine not only at abandoned sites, but also via parallel systems in places that are still in legal production under licence. The police operation in the Free State that he describes in detail had to starve illegal miners up from underground.
Coetzer concludes with an account of the militarised violence that now enables organised crime in South Africa. This appears in extreme form in cash-in-transit attacks when armoured vehicles are blown apart in public places totally disregarding anyone in the way. The Hawks have their own highly trained SWAT team to deal with this. The consequence is that South Africa often appears to be embroiled in low-level civil war, a country now defined by a spiralling murder rate.