Deadly criminal truths revealed

HITMEN FOR HIRE Mark Shaw Loot.co.za (R189) Jonathan Ball

REVIEWER: JULIAN RICHFIELD

MARK Shaw’s book, Hitmen for Hire, is an in-depth look at South Africa’s criminal underworld. In it, the reader will encounter paid hitmen, informers, rogue policeman, criminal taxi bosses, gang leaders, and crooked politicians and businessmen and a society in which contract killings have become commonplace. You will encounter many familiar names along the way…

“Writings on the underworld in South Africa have only covered some parts of the criminal ecosystem, most recently the network that developed around the Czech gangster Radovan Krejcir. Yet the underworld has many parts, and the purpose of my book is to expose a wider cross-section of that ecosystem. If targeted hits are a measure of organised criminal activity, then the media has focused on a remarkably narrow slice of the underworld.

“I conclude by looking at what must be done to weaken the link between the social and political economy of the country and the commercialisation of assassination.”

It is a very dark world, and the tunnels explored do not seem to have any light at the end of them. But this book is serious reading and is not meant to be a thriller. It is a look inside a world and a lifestyle thankfully alien to most of us. Shaw’s extensive research and expertise make this sombre journey into the underworld quite fascinating, but its subject matter is sordid and serious and will not be palatable to all reading tastes.

Mark Shaw is director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime and senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s International Drug Policy Project. He was until recently National Research Foundation Professor of Justice and Security at the Centre of Criminology at UCT.