Glynnis Breytenbach on crime and her love for the law
Hardened crooks, gruesome accident cases and epic Ponzi schemes – former state prosecutor Glynnis Breytenbach has seen it all, as she reveals in this extract from her new memoir
WITH her infamous piercing stare Glynnis Breytenbach earned a reputation as one of the country’s most formidable state prosecutors. Outspoken and tough as nails, she was the star of the show in some of South Africa’s most high-profile fraud cases – such as the one against Pretoria businessman Albert Vermaas, who conned people out of hundreds of millions of rands with his Ponzi scheme.
In her new memoir, Rule of Law, the feisty legal eagle – now a member of parliament – shares a few of her favourite courtroom techniques and reveals how she can usually spot when a witness is lying.
WHEN I was a prosecutor I used to say I didn’t have a heart, I had half a brick. Or I’d say that I had the heart of a little girl – in a jar on my desk. It sounds callous but the law is there to prevent people from becoming wildly emotional. Lawyers and judges spend their entire lives having to be objective. We look at the facts, analyse the facts. There’s no emotion involved. You may have a personal view, but it’s irrelevant. That’s what a law degree teaches you: to look at the facts with a jaundiced eye.
There’s no room for emotion. It either is or it isn’t. There’s nothing in between.
For me, criminal law is the only law there is. Civil law is cr**. No one wins except the lawyers, although I admit that what I know about civil law would fit into a thimble. In my view, criminal law is the pinnacle of law: it’s not only for rich
‘For me, criminal law is the only law there is'
Glynnis Breytenbach with her German Shepherds on her smallholding near Pretoria. The feisty politician says she’s always preferred animals to people. people; it’s for all people. It’s the law that’s supposed to look after people who can’t look after themselves.
I went into law because I liked the idea that I could make a difference. I’ve always detested bullies. Criminal law, in particular, seemed to offer the opportunity to put bullies in their place on a daily basis.
As far as I’m concerned, all litigators are wannabe actors. All, myself included, have huge egos. Three-quarters of lawyers are so pompous, you can barely breathe.
Law is an odd profession. It’s all-consuming. It becomes your whole life, to the extent that it can be very hard to interact with other people outside of the law.
While you’re in court, you’re an incredible communicator but we become almost socially inept when we’re not surrounded by other lawyers, or talking about law.
In court, I had this rather rude habit of muttering insults about the defence, just under my breath but still loudly enough for them to hear. In spite of that I still have a lot of good friends who were on the other side of the bar. While you’re fighting, blood flows in court. But it’s not personal. When you walk out it’s over and you can go for a drink.
BLOOD AND GORE
I’m not squeamish and can recall only one case where the violence of a crime affected me. It was when I was at the attorney-general’s office in Pretoria. The culpable homicide docket was for a case that involved a bakkie carrying farm workers. The bakkie had left the road and gone through a fence. Some of the farm workers were killed, others injured.
One of the workers had been decapitated by the fence. There was a series of photographs in the docket. One of them was a faraway shot, and there was this thing in the road. The next photo was really close up, and you could see that the thing in the road was a woman’s head that wasn’t attached in any way or form to a body. I promptly threw up. And then I stapled the papers together so that whoever got the docket aft e r me wouldn’t have to see that without some warning.
I didn’t do those kinds of cases ever again. After that, everyone knew that I didn’t want to see those types of pictures. I’m not a sissy. I just reached a point where I’d had enough of blood and guts. I’d been there and got the T-shirt.
I found white-collar crime much more challenging. Murders are always the same; there’s always a dead body. Commercial stuff is always different.
I once handled a case where the entire cheque was fraudulent. Not just the amount – the whole thing had been manufactured by hand by a guy in prison. He’d literally made the entire cheque out of a piece of paper. He’d drawn in the graphics. He’d hand-drawn the computer sequence numbers. And it was unbelievable.
The only way they caught him was that he hadn’t allowed for the perforation marks – the line you see when you tear off a cheque. It got picked up when it went through the bank’s machine because it had no perforations.
It was a cheque for R100 000, which was a lot of money back then. It must’ve taken the forger forever, the craftsmanship was absolutely amazing. I saw so many scams over the years. Often I’d think, “This is so simple, why didn’t I think of it?” But I’m too doff.
There was another currency scam I remember well, one of the most astonishing cases I ever came across: the case of the “black dollars”. The conmen would come with a suitcase of newsprint, all cut to the size of banknotes, bundled with elastic bands, and dyed black. Pitchblack.
There’d be one little bundle of real money in there – South African rand, dollars, a mix of currencies. And a little bottle of solvent. Genuine banknotes are quite hardy. So the crooks would take the solvent and use it on the bundle of real money, and the black part would come off. It looked miraculous.
They would then explain that the money was black because it had been smuggled, and the black dye was the only way to get it across the border. But there was one problem, they said: they didn’t have enough solvent to remove the dye. They only had this tiny bit left, the tiny bottle in the briefcase. The ingredients were imported, very expensive . . . They just needed money for the solvent, they would explain. And people would give them money. And then the fools would sit there with a suitcase full of newsprint.
Those guys conned everyone, even university professors. One thing I learnt is, there’s no easy way to make money.
‘I can be quite aggressive. I started doing Goju-ryu karate so I could learn to control my temper’
(From previous page) Either you inherit it or you earn it. Or you steal it.
EPIC TRIAL
My longest case took me 22 years to finish. I started working on it as a junior advocate. By the time I was finished I was the deputy director of prosecutions.
It was an offshoot of the case involving Ponzi kingpin Albert Vermaas and involved Dr Eugene Berg, an advocate who’d set up the banking channels and structures for the fraudulent scheme. Berg was arrested in 1988 and charged together with Vermaas but he used every single trick in the book to avoid prosecution. At one point, he’d get postponements for a year at a time. First, because the Vermaas case – the main case, you could argue – had to finish. The witnesses had to testify. That took until 1997. Then Berg and his team started bringing applications for a stay in prosecution because of the delays in the court case!
Berg was eventually found guilty on 14 counts, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. But then he appealed, and so the matter continued. When the case turned 21 we held a birthday party.
Eventually, in late 2010, the appeal was heard by three judges who overturned Berg’s conviction on four of the counts but dismissed his appeal on the others. By then, Berg was already 64 years old and had been fighting the charges since he was in his forties.
Vermaas, his business partner, had already been released after serving 12 years of the 18-year sentence he’d received. Because of the impact of the length of the trial, part of Berg’s jail sentence was suspended, and the other part was replaced with a fine of R150 000.
To be honest, toward the end even I felt sorry for him. His financial circumstances had declined so greatly over the course of the trial. At one point I’d take lunch to him in court every day. But when we finally finished the case we had a big celebration. Dinner and plenty of drinks.
HOW TO SPOT A LIAR
In court, every witness is cross-examined. And I love cross-examination. It makes life worth living. Over time it became very clear to me that cross-examination doesn’t have to be cross. It has to be clear.
This is a mistake a lot of people still make. Cross-examination is about testing the witnesses’ ability to express what they’ve seen or heard, to test the veracity of their evidence. You test their ability to have seen what they claim they saw; if it was at night, if it was raining . . .
If the witness is lying, they’ll generally put their foot into it. If they’re telling the truth, then even the best cross-examination in the world will do nothing to them. It’s always a dead giveaway if the witness is not 100% sure what to say. If you’re telling the truth, it’s easy – you know exactly what to say.
You learn to cross-examine just as you learn everything else – with practise and experience. You may have basic skills, such as a good command of the language.
I also have a reasonably good grasp of body language. That’s important.
You can tell who’s calm, who’s confident when you’re hurting them, when they’re not so sure and start to lose confidence. If you don’t observe those things, it’s never a good cross-examination.
You can see it in people’s demeanour, whether they’re pretending to be confident or whether they really are. When you’re following a line of questioning,
their body language shows you when you start asking about something they want you to gloss over.
People give different signals. The eyes are a dead giveaway. It was why I grew my hair so long for my disciplinary hearing [Breytenbach was suspended from the National Prosecuting Authority as senior state prosecutor in 2012].
I was determined they wouldn’t be able to read a reaction from me. Mostly I was successful. But anybody who looked at my eyes would’ve seen exactly what I was thinking.
My eyes can spell “f**k you” a thousand times over. [She was eventually cleared of 16 disciplinary charges. She maintains they were trumped up against her because she refused to drop charges against the police’s then suspended head of crime intelligence, Richard Mdluli.]
As a prosecutor it also helps if you have a reasonable understanding of sarcasm. And a quick sense of humour. A lot of cross-examination is about who’s quickest on the draw. I know some people who are really good at cross-examination. Me, I’m not so good. Sometimes I snap at people. When they’re being obtuse, when they’re definitely lying . . .
There are always going to be liars. Every single accused lies. People try to be clever; they try to get away with being deceitful. And there are lots of people who lie and feel no guilt.
ANGER MANAGEMENT
I don’t generally dislike people I’ve prosecuted but there’ve been moments when my own temper threatened to expose itself.
I remember when I was cross-examining Berg, sometimes I’d get so cross. I shouldn’t have but he lied so much – right in front of me.
During the lunch break Berg was shouting at me, screaming, spitting in my face, and I was thinking to myself: I’m going to hit him.
But I reminded myself that I held a public office and picked up my briefcase and walked out.
As it turned out, the judge had come back to the courtroom because he’d forgotten his glasses, and he’d seen the whole thing. He said he was so impressed with me.
When I was prosecuting children’s cases I started doing Goju-ryu karate. I did it so I could learn to control my temper. You get to the point where you understand you’re not behaving rationally or
Sobjectively, and karate teaches you discipline. I did it for about two years, and other self-defence courses too, for various reasons. But I could see the effects of not being able to control my anger. I know I have a quick temper and can be quite aggressive.
I always used to drive 4x4 bakkies, but I changed back to a car because I realised I’d started using the bakkie as a weapon. When you get older, you just get a bit smarter. In 2014 Breytenbach resigned from the NPA to become a member of parliament. She now serves as the DA’s shadow minister of justice.