by Ross Kemp
I was just trying to get my bearings when a second man loomed up out of the darkness. This guy was very big. Really scary, wearing a frightening plastic mask. Like a cross between an African tribal mask and an ice hockey goalkeeper’s, it was a long white oval that covered his whole face except for the mouth. Dark, angry eyes gleamed through elongated slits that curled up and back in a teardrop shape. There was a strange green stylized cross painted in the top centre of the mask while the rest of it was striped with a red geometric design. He wore heavy-duty gardening gloves, and he was carrying the corpse of a dead American pit bull puppy in one hand and a red Bloods bandanna in the other. He looked both sinister and surreal, a figure from a horror movie involving chainsaws.
In a deep, slurring voice that sounded as if it had been slowed down mechanically to half-speed and then scrambled, the big, shambling figure said something about burying another dog the previous day. Wrapping its tiny body in the Bloods bandanna, he scooped a shallow grave in the loose dirt of the backyard, placed the dog inside and then covered it up. The ceremony complete, he turned and led me back inside to the room with the plastic chairs. The young bloke turned up again and ordered the older guys to ‘shut the fuck up’. We moved upstairs. Mask Man and his young apprentice sat down on a battered old sofa. I pulled over a white plastic chair and sat down opposite on the edge of the seat.
Leaning forward, I asked Mask Man how he had first become a gang member. As he rolled and lit a spliff he said, ‘Grew up all our life on the set, that’s what’s up.’ (By ‘set’ he meant a gang-dominated neighbourhood.)
I asked, ‘Was there pressure on you?’
As if things weren’t already bizarre enough, great clouds of smoke from the newly lit spliff billowed out from his mask, making it even harder to see him in the half light than before. ‘Never no pressure. The streets, that’s what’s it. Streets ain’t gonna feed ya shit.’
As my eyes grew more accustomed to the gloom I could make out bin bags filled with different types of marijuana on the floor in front of me, and small clear screw-top bottles like urine sample jars filled with a light yellow liquid. Mask Man called this water. I picked one of the bottles up, cracked the top and smelled its contents. ‘Smells like paint thinner. What is it?’
Taking the filter out of a cigarette and ‘loosening the square’ – shaking out some of the tobacco inside so that it soaked up some of the ‘water’ – he showed me why the man downstairs had relished his smoke. ‘Water is PCP, man. They loving it all the time for twenty bucks.’
PCP stands for phenylcyclohexylpiperidine. It induces dissociative anaesthesia – users know they are being touched, undergoing pain or having some other sensory experience but they can’t actually feel anything. Trialled by US surgical units in the 1960s, it was withdrawn after patients reported all kinds of terrible symptoms: feeling as if they had died, delirium, terrifying hallucinations, out-of-body experiences and slurred and scrambled speech. In its crystalline form PCP is often known as angel dust. In its liquid form I had just found out it is sometimes called water.
‘What about crack?’ I wanted to know. Mask Man reached down, undid his flies and started rummaging about in his crotch. This wasn’t quite the answer I had been expecting, but his underpants had more space inside them than the Tardis. I couldn’t believe the amount of drugs he pulled out of there, plucking out little packets and bags like Santa Claus pulling presents from his sack. One by one, very slowly and carefully, he laid them out like trophies on the floor in front of me.
I asked Mask Man how he protected his turf. Reaching down into the cavernous underpants for a second time, he pulled out what he called ‘my nine’ (9 millimetre), in actual fact a Colt .45 pistol. Working the slide and chambering a round, he cocked the hammer. ‘There’s one in there,’ he slurred in case I hadn’t noticed. Great – I was now sitting six feet from a very stoned gang leader with the hammer back on a pistol that leaves an exit wound in your back the size of a plate.
Mask Man delved down into the vast and roomy reaches of his underpants yet again and this time drew out a round block of brown heroin about the size and thickness of a pub ashtray. I couldn’t help wondering how it had managed to make the journey from the fields of Afghanistan to the back lots of St Louis and down into his pants. Catching my eye, he offered to sell me the entire lump for $75,000. I’m no expert, but I suspect this was a real bargain.
His sidekick, who had been quiet until now, suddenly piped up, ‘Your nine’s your best friend, man.’ By way of agreement, Mask Man kissed the Colt, and then just to make himself look even weirder put a red Bloods bandanna over his head.
As he kissed the pistol I wondered out loud, ‘Have you ever used it?’
With the hammer still back and the gun pointing directly at me, Mask Man said slowly, ‘This one got served to some players. They was playing a game, but they got played. But this is just a little toy.’
‘You have bigger toys?’
‘Yeeuh,’ he said in his thick Missouri accent. ‘Those big toys, they shoot lots of times.’ Waving the pistol in a way that was seriously scary, he turned to his young mate. ‘How do you use that?’
‘Bang, bang, bang, bang,’ said his buddy in a bored tone.
The weed was making Mask Man paranoid. ‘Spend time smoking weed… I’m nervous.’
Not as nervous as I am, I thought, as he laid the pistol on the ground, still with the hammer back and still pointing my way. Clearly Mask Man was a major dealer. There was so much stuff he seemed to have forgotten where some of it was hidden and began upending buckets of dog biscuits and animal litter to find it. I suspected the paper-thin cover for his dealing was the dog kennels downstairs. In the event of a bust you have to have a way of explaining your income – and the dogs would also help keep unwanted visitors at bay. Scrabbling in a bucket filled with dog pellets, he took out a big bag of weed and offered to sell it to me at a ‘special friend discount’. I thanked him and politely declined.
What with his paranoia and my own concerns about ending up with the puppies under a mound outside, I decided it was time to call it a night. Hoping I hadn’t offended him by not wishing to take a kilo of marijuana or some heroin back to the hotel with me, I got up to go. Before I left, he showed me how to do a Bloods handshake. The proverb warns, ‘Be careful of what you wish for; it may come true.’ I’d got what I’d wished for – I’d met the real deal, and the real deal was very, very scary.
It was time to say goodbye to St Louis. Echoing in my ears was the last thing Jason Hampton had told me: ‘There’s a war going on across the seas, but there’s a war going on in the United States every day.’ Having seen what I’d seen in his home city, I was inclined to agree with him.
5. Cape Town
Pollsmoor prison is an assault on the senses. What hits you first is the smell – a mix of fear, sweat and dirt, the hot, all-pervasive smell of one of South Africa’s most notorious maximum-security prison. Then there’s the noise – the background roar of thousands of caged men, cut through with shouts and screams.
Pollsmoor sits in an otherwise pleasant area of country- side some twenty-five kilometres from Cape Town. The road winds through a patchwork of vineyards, market gardens, upmarket housing and attractive open land. From a distance, you could be forgiven for mistaking the place for a large, horribly designed 1960s comprehensive school. Oddly, right next to it is a lush private golf course. But the closer you get, the worse Pollsmoor looks: a grim series of gaunt, three-and four-storey blocks pierced with rows of small, heavily barred windows, it shows a blank and forbidding face to the world. To make their time inside that bit crueller, none of the prisoners’ windows faces out towards freedom and the light.
Lulled by the sunshine drive through some of the Cape’s spectacularly beautiful scenery, now I’d arrived the reality of Pollsmoor hit home all the harder. Most visitors to the area were living it up, abseiling off Table Mountain, hiking up through the Tokai Forest to Elephant’s Eye cave or doing some
wine tasting at the Steenberg Vineyards, Africa’s oldest wine estate a mile or so away. Famous for its inhumanity, Pollsmoor was a bit of a short straw. The prison is where Nelson Mandela spent the last four years of his time inside and where he caught the tuberculosis that nearly killed him.
I was in Pollsmoor to find out what I could about South Africa’s most notorious and deadly gang, the Number or Numbers gang. The Number is one of the world’s most secretive and strange gangs, unique in that it exists only in South Africa’s prisons, above all, in the prison we were now entering. In reality five associated jails, Pollsmoor is spread over a huge site. On any given day more than 7,000 prisoners are banged up inside, more than twice the number it was originally built to hold back in 1964.
Senior Warder Chris Malgas, who escorted me into the prison, was my guide for the duration. He told me that the ratio of guards to prisoners is roughly 1:100. I stared at him. One guard to oversee every hundred of the world’s most volatile and dangerous prisoners? With such a dangerously low ratio of guards to guarded, the warders in Pollsmoor don’t even carry guns – the risk of inmates snatching them is too great. Unarmed, more than half the warders at any one time have been stabbed. One of the guards recently had his eye cut out; soon after that a gangster stabbed a trainee warder to death. There are no white warders or staff inside the prison proper – they are all either black or Cape Coloured.
As we followed the new arrivals in through the stringent security, the short hairs on the back of my neck began to rise. I felt a creeping sense of violence that increased with every step.
Malgas is an easy-going rugby fanatic. Like many of the guards, he lives on site with his family. In his quiet, contained manner he explained that all visitors, like all prisoners, are searched – if not quite in the same way. The warders are looking mainly for alcohol, knives, drugs and other prohibited items; the other day, Malgas said, a tennis ball full of drugs had been thrown over the wall. As the sniffer dogs did their work, he said that even for a prisoner being held overnight the chances of being beaten and raped by the Number are better than one in two. Not odds I would personally take.
‘There are three divisions of the Number gang,’ he said, ‘the 28s, the 27s and the 26s. The 28s are the foot soldiers. They are creatures of the night, interested in power. The 27s are the assassins – they kill the enemies of the Number not just here in Pollsmoor but in every South African prison. Every time they kill for the gang, the 27 assassins have more time added to their sentences. This means they live and die in prison.’
‘And the 26s?’
‘The 26s do fight, but they care more about money than power. They make income for the 27s and the 28s. They are confidence tricksters.’ He gestured at the milling prisoners. ‘You can tell the Number by their chappies.’
‘Chappies?’
‘Their tattoos. They cut them in with a razor blade and then rub black Bic biro ink in the wound.’ I saw that the men divided into those with tattoos covering their faces and their bodies, and those who had none.
By now we were in the squalid admissions yard. The guards made the new arrivals line up and strip naked. Then one after another they came forward, squatted on their haunches and bounced up and down. The warders scanned the ground beneath the bouncing men with an eagle eye. The sight was shocking and very humiliating. ‘Why are they making them do that?’
‘They are looking for the poke,’ Malgas said.
‘The poke?’
‘A plastic tube they insert in their anus. It holds things the Number gangsters inside the prison want – mostly drugs, weapons or money. It can also be something like a SIM card for a mobile phone. Often, these are items that have been ordered by a senior Number.’
‘Why would anyone want to stick a plastic tube up their backside and risk getting caught smuggling?’
‘On their way into prison the Number gangsters who are with a new batch of men approach those who are not in the gang. They tell them, “You will take this poke into the prison.”’
‘Where do they do this? In the prison van?’
‘In the van or sometimes in a police cell even before that.’ I glanced back at the guys doing the weird squat routine in the yard. ‘What happens if the guy won’t take the poke?’
‘If a man refuses…’ Malgas paused.
‘What?’
‘The Number tell him they will cut out his eye.’ He gave a grim nod. ‘Sometimes they do it – so the others will obey.’
‘So you either have a poke up your backside with drugs or whatever in it or the Number gangsters cut your eye out?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happens if the man accepts the poke?’
‘If he accepts the poke, then his troubles have begun.’
‘How?’
‘The Number claim him as a wyfie.’ A completely new word to me, Malgas pronounced it with a strong Afrikaans accent: ‘vyfie’. You didn’t have to be a genius to guess what it might mean but I asked anyway: ‘What’s a wyfie?’
‘A wyfie is a slave to the Number. The 28s use violence and sodomy to dominate the new inmates. A wyfie has to give the Number man who owns him sex when he wants it. He has to wash the Number’s clothes, cook his food, clean for him and do everything his Number master tells him to do.’
‘And if he doesn’t? If he tries to resist?’
Malgas shrugged. ‘If he tries to resist they will either beat him to say yes or they will kill him. A 27 assassin comes to kill him on the orders of the 28s.’ This sounded to me like a good reason for obeying, but at the same time part of me didn’t really want to believe what this man was telling me. Slavery might have been officially abolished in most countries, but if what Malgas told me was true, right here in Pollsmoor it was flourishing.
‘How many people say yes to the poke?’
‘Who can tell? But we find many while they are doing this.’ He gestured at the parade of men in the yard undergoing the humiliating ritual.
‘What happens if he gets the stuff inside the prison? Do the Number reward him or let him join the gang?’
Malgas was a kind and good-natured man. He didn’t laugh at my questions, only smiled. ‘If he does succeed in smuggling something in the poke, the new man is told, “Take what you have to Mr X on so-and-so wing, and he will look after you.”’
I could tell by the way he said ‘look after you’ that there was more to it than he was telling me. And it was bad. ‘How do you mean, “look after”?’
‘Sometimes the poke gets stuck inside the smuggler. To get it out, they hold him down and one of the Number hooks it out with a wire coat hanger.’ I stared at Malgas. All of this was horrible – about as bad as it could get – and it was happening in one of South Africa’s official state institutions.
I looked at the men in the yard with a new eye. Most looked terrified. No wonder: those not in the gang knew that from this moment on they were at the mercy of the Number – vulnerable to serial rape, beatings, robbery, enslavement and murder. As we watched the new men shuffle over to the desks for registration and their issue of bright orange prison clothing, I saw the knowledge of what they faced in their pinched, desperate looks. They wanted help. And they wanted out of there. I felt especially for the younger guys, the teenagers, who were in the majority. But I knew that for them there was no escape.
Nearly all of the prisoners in Pollsmoor describe themselves as Cape Coloured – mixed-race people who live mainly in the townships on the Cape Flats, a barren tract of land to the east of Table Mountain. This was where the apartheid regime had dumped many workers it evicted from their homes in the 1960s under race laws. Now, together with thousands of new immigrants, they make up nearly half Cape Town’s population.
Malgas told me that the Number call any prisoner not one of their own a frans, a word that means something like worthless or subhuman. As with the Nazis, this kind of labelling helps one group of humans persecute another. A frans either agrees to serve the Number as a wyfie or he fights. If he
fights, and by some miracle of strength, speed and luck survives the ordeal, the Number might invite him to join one of their gangs. If he loses, he is a dead man walking. It is the most extreme example of survival of the fittest I have ever come across.
Forced anal and oral sex? Enslavement? Serving some Number gangster as a kind of abject domestic servant? Judging by what I had found out about the gang so far, part of me thought death was a better option than ending up as a Number’s wyfie.
What would you do?
There was plenty more. Wyfies have to sit silent and facing the cell wall when the Number are present; they have to do what Number gangsters want instantly and without question, even down to cutting their toenails; and if a wyfie gets a parcel from a relative or friend, the Number grab the goodies. It is as if the world’s most extreme misogynists are acting out some ultra-violent, ultra-oppressive fantasy, only the victims are men, not women.
One of the biggest surprises was the military-style rank badges etched into the faces and bodies of the tattooed men I could see around me in the yard. They were very like the ones the British army uses, and included stripes on the arms for corporals and sergeants and crudely tattooed shoulder stars like pips for officers. There was something old fashioned about these tattooed insignia, as if they had been copied from British uniforms of about the time of the nineteenth-century Zulu Wars.
Spotting a man with four tattooed pips on each shoulder, which suggested he was a senior officer in the Number, I walked up to him. The prisoner was probably in his thirties, but the squashed, dissolving facial features that are the telltale result of crystal methamphetamine abuse made him look much older. Not a big man, the convict had a knotty physique and a blank, dead expression in his eyes that made him very, very scary to be near. ‘I Dig My Grave Evil One’ and ‘I Cry for Blood’ competed for space with dozens of other chappies and the scars of knife and bullet wounds on his face and upper body. Many Number gangsters cut a star-shaped tattoo into their forearms every time they kill someone; there were so many stars on his arms there was hardly any bare skin left. A large tattoo covered his back showing a man being raped – not the kind of thing you would expect to find on offer in your local tattoo parlour.