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

by Mark Minnie

  I return to my witness. He smiles when I stride through the door. It’s a good sign. He’s feeling comfortable now and trusts me. I turn on the recorder and nod for him to continue.

  ‘Where must I start?’ Igor asks.

  ‘You start at the beginning, son, the very beginning. And you leave nothing out. I want it all – lock, stock and barrel.’

  The lad sighs, then takes a deep breath and carries on with his story.

  When he’s done I turn off the recorder. This boy has been to hell and back, trapped in a sinister world, abused by adult men – and all of this happening in my hometown, Port Elizabeth, the ‘friendly city’ with the filthy underbelly.

  I promise the boy I will tell no one what he has told me. I know this isn’t strictly true, because once I have had his statement typed up I will need him to sign it in the presence of his mother or another legal guardian. He’s still a minor. But I will deal with that snag when I get to it.

  I walk the child back to his mother. He’s much calmer now.

  Then I immediately head for the hospital. I’ve got to find this Igor’s brother and check out the story for myself.

  5

  Wounded boy

  I detest hospitals. The corridors are dank and gloomy. There are no windows, so the cheerful rays of sunlight are kept out.

  Frankly, I am terrified of medical institutions. I reckon the only thing you get hanging around them is some disease you never had in the first place. I mean, it makes sense. You’re entering a space teeming with millions of germs, viruses, bacteria and infectious diseases. You’re bound to walk out with something you didn’t ask for. Two weeks later, next thing you know you’ve come down with some flesh-eating bug and in you go again. It’s a vicious circle. It’s best not to darken those portals in the first place. I reckon it’s a sneaky type of hospital insurance policy – one that ensures you have patients all year round.

  The trauma wing is less bleak. This ward is fitted with a sliding glass door leading onto a small patio drenched in glorious sunshine.

  It isn’t difficult to find my person of interest. He’s the only patient in the ward, not a nurse in sight. Just the way I like it.

  The boy appears to be heavily sedated or in a deep sleep. I check the clipboard hanging off the iron railing of the bed. The name on the admission sheet confirms this is who I am looking for.

  I quickly scan the information sheet. It’s Greek to me, and much of it is an indecipherable scrawl that would make sense only to the writer. The particular doctor who penned this patient’s record has done his profession proud. I do, however, manage to pick out a few terms like ‘rectum’ and ‘haemorrhage’. I am alarmed by what I think I have read, but I need to find out what happened from the boy himself.

  He’s asleep now and I’m reluctant to wake him. My finger is throbbing. I figure that since I’m in a hospital, I might as well seek medical attention.

  On my walk back to Casualty I no longer notice the gloomy passages. I am too busy thinking about the boy in the ward. A nurse trusses up my finger, telling me it’s broken and that I should try to avoid using it.

  Action and reaction. My slamming the ashtray into the ox’s face resulted in the concomitant reaction on the hand holding the makeshift weapon. I suppose no good deed goes unpunished.

  Back in the trauma ward I find the patient awake and eating lunch. It’s already 12:30. He’s sitting upright, his back supported by two pillows. There is a nurse in attendance, straightening already straightened beds. I suppose she has to keep busy.

  It turns out I know this nurse – intimately, in fact. Suzie looks up, recognises me and then drops her head in an effort to conceal a delightful cherry-red blush that spreads across her neck and face. She doesn’t ask why I am here. She already knows.

  The boy visibly tenses when he notices me, the knife and fork firmly clenched in his hands. The utensils seem to provide him with a sense of security. Or maybe Suzie’s presence helps him feel less apprehensive about my sudden appearance. But he’s clearly not expecting a visitor. He has stopped chewing and his jaw is visibly tense.

  ‘Hi, I’m Detective Sergeant Max. Your brother has spoken to me. He’s told me everything. Do you understand?’

  He stares at me. I am trying not to look like I’m lying. I mean, I don’t know exactly what happened. These things take time to uncover. But the boy says nothing.

  ‘Listen,’ I tell him, ‘I can only help you if you tell me what happened.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The people who hurt you. I need to know who they are.’

  He’s on the complete defensive now. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you,’ he says.

  I decide to push him.

  ‘I’m not sure that I believe you, son. The doctors say that you’re bleeding from the arse and they’re having difficulty stopping the flow of blood.’ I lean over and fetch the clipboard. ‘It says so right here. Look’.

  The boy looks alarmed. He’s at a loss for words. ‘Ah … er … ,’ he stammers.

  He’s rattled, poor boy, but I have to push home the advantage.

  ‘And your brother has laid a complaint with the police,’ I tell him. ‘So I have to investigate.’

  This is all bullshit of course, but I hope it will open him up. But he’s not budging.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he says.

  I decide to hold off. I’ll come back later and try a different approach when I think of one.

  ‘Okay, son. I’m only doing my job.’

  The boy flops back onto the pillows and closes his eyes as I leave. He’s obviously terrified. He knows stuff he shouldn’t, I think to myself. And my hunch is, the fact that he doesn’t want to give up the names of the perpetrators points to them having some status or standing in these parts.

  On my way out I stop by the nurses’ station. Suzie’s there. Her cheeks have returned to a normal colour.

  ‘What’s up with the lad, Suzie?’

  ‘It’s bad, Max. He won’t talk. The medical report says he’s been sexually assaulted. Looks like a foreign object was forced up him.’

  ‘My God. Anything else?’

  ‘Well, he’s HIV-negative, thank goodness. The results came through this morning. But we’re worried that if one of his attackers is positive, this boy will be infected. And he’s lost a lot of blood.’

  HIV and AIDS have only recently been detected in South Africa and the country is at the beginning of an unimaginable epidemic.

  ‘He won’t tell me anything either,’ I tell Suzie. ‘I don’t know how to get through to him.’

  ‘Bluff him, Max. Play the five-card trick on him.’

  ‘And how do I do that, Suzie?’

  ‘Oh come on. You’re an expert at that.’

  I go back to the patient. The boy opens an eye, then closes it again. He’s as defiant as ever. I try using a shock tactic.

  ‘Son, I’m leaving now. The good news is that you are HIV-negative. The bad news is that if the men who assaulted you are HIV-positive, then in six weeks’ time you are going to test positive. Your anus has been ruptured so badly that it is not impossible that you have been infected.’

  The blood drains from the boy’s face.

  I tell him about AZT, a drug the Americans have recently manufactured that delays the onset of AIDS. (The problem is that AZT is not available yet in South Africa. And if and when it does get to our shores, it’s going to cost a fortune.) And then I pull the five-card trick.

  ‘Look, if you sign a sworn statement, if you tell us who sexually assaulted you, when the treatment becomes available the state will give it to you free of charge. That’s the law. You can also sue the men who did this when I arrest them.’

  I leave my words hanging in the air and exit the room. I have no idea where this investigation is headed. It is tantamount to whistling in the wind. I have nothing. Will he fold or will he call my bluff?

  I wink at Suzie on my way out.
>
  * * *

  As I walk into George’s pub, a roar of laughter erupts. A few locals and George find the sight of my bandaged finger hilarious.

  ‘So, who the hell stuffed you up, Max?’ George quips.

  ‘That person still needs to be born, mate,’ I retort. ‘Listen, I saved you from taking a beating by that ugly mean machine, if you care to remember correctly.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, Max. And he’s even uglier now. No stuffing nose. I bet he sounds like a bulldog when he sleeps.’

  George fancies himself a bit of a comedian. More laughter echoes throughout the bar. Everyone’s in a good mood now. I decide to stop thinking about the boy and join the fun. Bernie emerges from George’s office and stares at my finger.

  ‘Broken, is it, Max? I told you so last night. You never closed an eye.’

  ‘And I’m sure you never closed a leg, Bernie,’ George wisecracks.

  More laughter, even from me.

  ‘Oh, piss off, George,’ Bernie retorts.

  I settle into a double J&B whisky, laced with plenty of ice and filled to the brim with soda water. That’s how I like it. I scratch around in my jacket pocket and remove a container of pills they gave me at the hospital. The label suggests ‘Do not mix with alcohol’, so I shove the pills back into my pocket.

  I’m well into my second whisky when something suddenly dawns on me: the brigadier and the feedback he expected from me this afternoon. The realisation sobers me up instantly, like a blow to the solar plexus. Panicked, I check my watch. I’m relieved to see it’s only 1:30. I’m still on schedule.

  I motion to George that I need to use the phone in his office. He nods. I dial the switchboard of our offices and the operator puts me through to the brigadier. But the phone just rings and rings. He must be out for lunch. Ah well, back to the bar.

  I’m on my third whisky when Bernie suddenly yells that there is a call for me in George’s office. Is it the brig calling back?

  I pick up the phone. It’s Suzie, the nurse.

  ‘Max, he wants to talk to you,’ she says.

  My tension instantly eases. The boy has folded and I’m elated. I am going to get the story and I sense that it is going to be a big one – a very big one.

  6

  Running out of time

  ‘I’ll tell you, but I’m scared. This is hard,’ the boy says to me when I walk into his hospital room.

  He leans back on the pillows and sighs. He is struggling to talk but the story gradually comes out, piece by piece. When he stops talking I switch off my recorder. Everything he has told me corroborates what his younger brother has told me. And there’s more. Much, much more.

  This is serious stuff. Men picking up and abusing children in the most appalling fashion.

  I thank him for being brave and hand him a form to sign stating that he has made the statement of his own free will. The testimony itself will be typed up later. He signs it because he knows now he will be entitled to get treatment for free should he test HIV-positive.

  I sense a feeling of relief on his part, and leave him to rest. On my way out I pass Suzie at the nurses’ station.

  ‘Hey, Max, I need to discuss something with you,’ she calls out.

  ‘Not right now, darling. I really need to register this case urgently. I’m running out of time.’ As an afterthought I add, ‘Can you ask them to test for Rohypnol? The boy was more than likely slipped a tranquilliser.’

  I dash off to the local cop shop, driving like a lunatic. At the charge office, I register a skeleton case docket under Act 41/1971 section 16: sexual offences committed against minors – boys under the age of nineteen. That is, statutory rape.

  I didn’t want this investigation. The powers that be threw it at me. This is not my field of expertise. I’m a narcotics agent. But stuff them all now. No one is going to take this case from me. It’s mine. I want to find the men who did this. I have to find the men who did this.

  I phone the hospital from the charge office and get put through to Suzie’s office. She picks up and I give her the police reference number of the case docket.

  I look up at the wall clock. Shit, it’s 5:00. The brigadier is going to blast me. I haven’t reported back to him yet.

  7

  Mr Ears

  I head back to my office so that I can listen closely to the recording of the older brother’s version of events. I will have to anchor my investigation on the evidence of both brothers. I don’t have anything else to go on at this point.

  I take solace in knowing that half a dozen cold beers are waiting for me in my mini fridge. Leaning back in my ultra-comfortable chair, I crack open a can. I’m quite chuffed with myself as I’ve accomplished a lot today. The beer is my reward.

  I eye the tape recorder on my desk, lean across and press Play.

  The boy explains that it all started years before, when a man who called himself Uncle Dave approached him while he was playing pool at the City Snacks Pool Den. I know the place. It is a popular hangout for pimps, sex workers and drug dealers.

  Of course, customers gather there too. It’s a perfect spot for paedophiles to pick out a young boy left to his own devices. The witness, who was then only fourteen, says he had never met this ‘Uncle Dave’ before. He knew all the other local moffies who would come to the den for a ‘quick one’ – a handjob in a car in a quiet back street. ‘We get R20,’ the boy says.

  The problem for the kid is that he has a drug debt. He owes the local dealer R5 for a bag of marijuana he had bought the night before. All such debts need to be settled within 24 hours. This I know. It’s my job to bust these guys.

  If you don’t pay, the dealer sends a heavy to rough you up. It’s the way it is and the way it has been for ages everywhere across the planet where crime thrives just below the apparently placid surface of everyday life.

  It is easier for the boys to ‘do’ a client when they are drunk or high. It doesn’t feel real and the boys forget about it quickly. But it’s a vicious cycle. Get out to your corner or the street or the pool bar, buy the dope, smoke it, do the client, get paid, pay the dealer. Repeat, over and over.

  The boy tells me he went with this stranger to get the dealer off his back. Uncle Dave is a nice guy, says the boy. He drove the boy to a secluded spot not too far from the pool bar where the child jerked him off. Then the man paid him and dropped him off back at City Snacks.

  I know lots of young boys like this. I have seen them while doing my undercover work. They are streetwise and often homeless. Many don’t have parents, or if they do, they don’t care. Many are addicts or alcoholics. That’s how you survive in a country filled with violence and prejudice. There are two sides of the war: those who are the victims, and those who are called on to do the work of the existing government. White men like me. We’re keeping it all in place in some way. It corrodes and perverts everyone.

  Underneath the bureaucracy of it all, the brutal law, I know we are all the same. But I don’t think about it too much. I just want to do my job.

  Uncle Dave clearly fancied the older brother because the boy tells me the man came back regularly for more ‘quick ones’. Soon the contact graduated from mutual masturbation to full-blown sex. The liaisons moved from the car to either a hotel or Uncle Dave’s house.

  And then comes the bombshell. The boy tells me he was taken to Bird Island for sex. Not only with Uncle Dave, but with other men as well.

  Bird Island is the largest of the Algoa Bay islands just off the coast of Port Elizabeth. Seal Island and Stag Island lie nearby. The islands are a well-known breeding spot for a variety of bird species. They are also conservation areas. There is a lighthouse on Bird Island built in 1898. Desolate and isolated, Bird Island is one of only six breeding grounds in the world for the Cape gannet.

  My ears prick up. This sounds more like an organised ring than an occasional casual pickup. Who are these men? I wonder as the boy’s voice hesitates on the tape.

  The boy says that Uncle Dave would regul
arly arrange for boys to be flown to Bird Island where they would ‘entertain’ men. For the kid, these trips were a bit of an adventure because the boys would be picked up in a helicopter. It was hugely exciting, he says, and once on the island the boys would be treated to a braai with plenty of meat and alcohol.

  When the boy’s younger brother, Igor, turned twelve, he too began to hang out at the pool den at the weekends. By then Uncle Dave was a known regular. Soon he was insisting that Igor accompany them on the pickups. The man offered to pay double, the older brother confesses. The deal, however, is that the man leaves the younger boy out of it. Uncle Dave agrees to this but suggests that the younger brother watch them having sex. And so they drove to the man’s home in Bendor Avenue, Schoenmakerskop, a picturesque suburb south-west of Port Elizabeth.

  The presence of his younger brother, the boy tells me, seems to affect Uncle Dave. He is more aggressive in his sexual approach. He forces the older boy to kiss him, which he says he hates. The sex itself he described as almost feral with the older man grunting ‘like an animal’. The anal sex was painful, the boy says, so much so that his anus was ruptured. But he claims that the payment afterwards, double the usual amount, made up for it.

  I am taken aback by the boy’s nonchalance, the matter-of-fact way he tells me this part of the story. He sounds numb as he recounts it on the tape.

  Afterwards, when the man had dropped both boys off at the pool bar, he had bought food for his younger sibling. ‘We had a foot-long hot dog with chips and salad,’ he says. The details of the meal are clearly important to him. It is not often he can afford to be extravagant.

  The older brother goes on to explain that as he grew older, Uncle Dave began to lose interest in him, preferring the younger brother, who had just turned thirteen. Uncle Dave began passing the older sibling off onto his friends.

  It is then that the boy first talks of one particularly vicious ‘uncle’, a man who all the boys reckoned was a sadist. I listen carefully, waiting to catch each detail. This man, the boy says, is well known because of his distinctive protruding ears. Because of this physical characteristic the boys call him Ore – Afrikaans for ‘ears’.