Lost bro of Bird Island
‘My desperate brother was easy prey’
● A few days before he died, Willem Smith wrote in his notebook: “Nobody will know except me and the Lord Jesus Christ … all the s**t I had to go through. The pain is excruciating.”
He was not referring to the cancer consuming his body, but to the sexual abuse he had endured as a boy at the hands of alleged paedophile Dave Allen.
Thursday marked 18 years since Willem died. He was 39.
And it was The Lost Boys of Bird Island, published two weeks ago, that reopened a wound for Willem’s brother Gerrit Smith and lifted the lid further on a sordid ring of paedophiles that preyed on poor, vulnerable boys in the Port Elizabeth area in the 1980s.
Allen is named, along with apartheid defence minister Magnus Malan, who died in 2011. One former minister is still unnamed. Allen and environmental affairs & tourism minister John Wiley died in apparent suicides in 1987 before they could be charged.
The men reportedly took young, mostly coloured, boys to Bird Island and sexually abused them.
The book, co-written by ex-cop Mark Minnie and former investigative journalist Chris Steyn, detailed the investigation into the paedophile ring, the attempts to stop it, and even attempts on the life of Minnie and people close to him. He lived in fear for much of his life.
“They are in the background. I know there is a plot to take me out,” Minnie, 57, apparently told his childhood friend and close family member Tersia Dodo last week, just days before he was found with a bullet wound to the head.
“If anything happens to me, don’t believe a word when you hear it is suicide.”
He never specified who “they” are, but Dodo is convinced it is the people who pushed him into leaving the police force.
On Tuesday, Minnie’s body was found on a friend’s smallholding in Theescombe, outside Port Elizabeth. Police have ruled out foul play, saying a suicide note has been found.
Dodo is anxious. She has received so many threats and insults over the phone since speaking out about Minnie’s death that she is moving temporarily from her home in St Francis Bay to an undisclosed address “where I know I will be safe”.
She said: “I have repeatedly asked the police to see the supposed suicide note. I may not be an expert on his handwriting, but I will know if the note is written in his voice.”
She said Minnie’s son Markus had been turned away at the mortuary when he asked to see his father’s body this week.
The family were going through “disgusted and dismal days” since Minnie’s death.
“The funeral will take place next week when everyone from overseas is here, so in the meantime we try to make sense of something that makes no sense.”
National police spokesperson Brig Vish Naidoo said this week the claims of abuse of boys on Bird Island were receiving the attention of police.
But he would not say whether the case had been reopened. “The matter is receiving attention, but details thereof cannot be provided at this very early stage, given the sensitivity of this matter,” he said.
Back in Mount Pleasant, in Port Elizabeth, Gerrit told the Sunday Times of the terrible secret he and his brother were forced to keep to protect his mother and five other siblings.
It was only this week that Gerrit shared it with his siblings — and only because his mother is in an advanced stage of dementia. “There is no way I would have told the story otherwise,” he said.
His mother had left his father and moved with the children from Garies in the Northern Cape to Sydenham in Port Elizabeth in 1975, when Willem was 13.
“The city was not good for him. Before long he had fallen in with the wrong crowd, started smoking dagga and stealing a car.
“One day Willem asked me for money, but I knew it would just go to drugs. That is when he broke down and shouted: ‘Do you know the things I have to do to get money?’
“For a long time I thought it was just one of those stories he made up to get money from me. But it turned out it was all true.”
The story Willem told was how Allen often picked him up and took him to a home in Schoenmakerskop, near Port Elizabeth. Sometimes four or five other boys were there as well.
Gerrit said: “You can imagine if you are so poor, living on the third floor of a block of municipal flats. Willem was the only one who ever asked about our father, asking often when he would come to see us.
“Then comes this very rich guy, taking you for drives in his fancy car, living in a big house, taking you out on boat rides. Willem and the other boys were easy prey.”
Gerrit said Willem, who had worked as a long-distance truck driver and had never married or had children, had never mentioned the names of other men, just Allen.
You can imagine if you are so poor, living on the third floor of a block of municipal flats … Then comes this very rich guy, taking you for drives in his fancy car, living in a big house, taking you out on boat rides. Willem and the other boys were easy prey
Gerrit Smith
Willem Smith’s brother
“I am forever grateful for this book. There is helplessness, a hopelessness, when you know there is no justice for you when you are poor,” Gerrit said.
“For my brother, and others like him, this might all change now.”
Maryna Lamprecht, commissioning editor at Tafelberg Publishers, said Steyn was more determined than ever to see that the victims mentioned in the book get justice.
“Because of the weight of the information in the book, Chris has sharpened her vigilance for a while now. She is taking all necessary precautions [for her safety].
“The first public talk where Minnie and Steyn were due to appear was the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September, in conversation with journalist Marianne Thamm. This will continue unless circumstances change.”
Lamprecht said although Steyn was still in shock over Minnie’s death, she wanted to see justice done.
In an earlier statement, Tafelberg said that in the week preceding his death, Minnie had said nothing to indicate that he might harm himself. “He was excited about the publication of the book and the disclosure of allegations which, according to him, had been covered up for 30 years.”
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● Mark Minnie, who has died in Port Elizabeth at the age of 57, lived in fear of his life after co-authoring The Lost Boys of Bird Island, exposing a paedophile ring involving senior apartheid cabinet ministers who raped young, mainly coloured, street children.
Named in the book, which he wrote with journalist Chris Steyn, were former defence minister Magnus Malan, minister of the environment and tourism John Wiley and wealthy businessman Dave Allen. Mentioned in connection with the ring but not named was a third apartheid cabinet minister, who, unlike the others, is still alive.
According to police, Minnie shot himself in the head while staying on a friend’s smallholding outside Port Elizabeth.
He was born on August 26 1960, grew up in Port Elizabeth and joined the police after matriculating in 1978. He intended studying law after a couple of years in the force but so enjoyed being a cop that he decided to stay.
After six months at the police college in Pretoria he was assigned to the special guard unit responsible for the security of apartheid government ministers.
A year later he was transferred to the uniform branch in Port Elizabeth, where he spent five years, the last two in the narcotics bureau.
During this time he became involved in investigating the paedophile ring when, in early 1987, his commanding officer told him to call a woman from his church whose 14-year-old son had something to tell him.
Minnie, known as “Mad Max” by his colleagues, and not only because his initials were MAD, was a tough customer who thought he’d seen and heard it all. But he was horrified by what this boy told him.
He’d been “to hell and back, trapped in a sinister world, abused by adult men”, Minnie wrote.
The boy said his elder brother had been sexually assaulted so viciously that he was in the trauma ward in hospital. Minnie went to see him.
What he heard filled him with a sense of outrage which never left him till the day he died.
He himself had been raped by two teenagers when he was 12, and abused by a vicious stepfather his mother had married after divorcing his own father, a violent drunkard, when he was six. The next time he saw him, and the last, was after graduating from police college when he was 18.
“I had no feelings for him,” Minnie wrote. His mother also divorced his stepfather, who then killed himself.
Minnie swore that he would find out who did this to the boy, and make them pay.
The boy told him that an “Uncle Dave” found him playing pool at a hangout frequented by street children with pimps, sex workers and drug dealers in close attendance.
He took him and other boys to different venues, including Bird Island, for sex with himself and other “uncles”. They were flown to the island in military helicopters, plied with meat and alcohol, drugged and raped.
One “particularly vicious ‘uncle’” was called “Ore” by the boys because of his protruding ears.
Allen was a police reservist and wealthy businessman well known in police circles and it didn’t take Minnie long to figure out this was the “Uncle Dave” in question. He raided his luxury house near Port Elizabeth, found a stash of child porn and arrested him.
En route to the police station Allen “sang like a canary”, naming Malan, Wiley and the third cabinet minister, who for legal reasons Minnie couldn’t identify.
In February 1987, just hours before he was due to appear in court on a charge of paedophilia, Allen was found dead on the beach near his home. He’d been shot in the head and the verdict was suicide.
But when he examined the body at the mortuary, Minnie noticed there were no gunpowder burn marks around the bullet hole, which there would have been had Allen pulled the trigger himself.
Several weeks later Wiley’s body was found in his Noordhoek, Cape Town, mansion, also with a bullet wound to the head. This was also pronounced to be a suicide.
Soon afterwards Minnie’s file with the information — including statements and tape recordings — he hoped would take Malan down disappeared from his office. He heard later it had been removed by two “highly placed officers” from Pretoria.
He was told the case had been buried on instructions “from the very top”.
Rapport newspaper revealed last week that president PW Botha had ordered the Port Elizabeth divisional commissioner to bring him the file. Minnie never saw it again.
He was transferred to the riot squad in Soweto. A shot was fired through his windscreen, just missing him, and his car went up in flames when his wife started it. He decided someone wanted him out of the way “permanently”.
He said it had all the hallmarks of the apartheid hit squad, the Civil Co-operation Bureau.
He told his commanding officer in Port Elizabeth, who agreed they were “warnings” that someone wanted to shut him up. He advised Minnie to take the hint.
He resigned from the police and worked as a paid informant for the narcotics squad, at one stage running an escort agency as a front. In 2007 he left SA for the UK, where he qualified as a teacher of English to speakers of other languages.
He worked for the British Council in China teaching English, lectured at universities there on the art of academic writing and prepared students for written exams.
But what he’d uncovered continued to haunt him, particularly the fact that “the children caught in this net had simply disappeared. Justice never served them.”
He returned to SA to finish what he’d started. His publishers put him in touch with Steyn, who’d also been investigating the paedophile ring.
In 1987 she’d asked to meet him in Port Elizabeth to compare notes. Minnie suspected her of working for the security branch and instructed two trained marksmen giving him backup to kill her if anything untoward happened to him. When she asked him about Malan he told her to get lost and they did not see each other again for 30 years.
It is believed he was continuing an investigation of, among other things, a state-sponsored unit he thought might have been involved in staging suicides in the apartheid era. Those who knew him best believe this is what happened to him.
Twice divorced, Minnie is survived by a son, a daughter and a stepdaughter. — Chris Barron