S. Africa’s Affluent Criminals

It was Sunday night, shortly before 9, and John and Liza Desilla were eating dinner in their elegant white-brick mansion in this well-to-do suburb of Johannesburg.

When police arrived later that night, John Desilla was slumped in his chair, four gunshot wounds in his head and neck. His wife lay on the floor, her body riddled with five bullets and her last bite of fish dinner barely swallowed.

The couple’s hysterical 25-year-old son, Jonathan, related the details of a crime that almost every white South African has feared in recent years: He arrived home to find a broken glass door, two black intruders in the dining room and his parents in a pool of blood. He fired several shots, but the killers got away with a handgun and some cash, he said.

“Johannesburg Couple Executed,” a front-page headline screamed last month as distraught neighbors complained about South Africa’s soaring crime rate and spoke of emigrating to faraway places.

A few weeks later, detectives visited Jonathan Desilla at the luxury private game reserve where his family had gathered to scatter the ashes of his parents. To the shock of his brother and sister, he was arrested and charged with homicide, recasting the suburban horror story as a possibly murderous example of a lesser-known crime threat stalking the nation.

More and more South Africans, usually well-off and white, are exploiting the country’s endemic criminality as a sinister cover for their own unlawful tracks, according to interviews with police and criminologists. Statistics are not kept on such crime, but authorities suspect that many of the wrongdoers are getting away with it.

“We visit a lot of crime scenes, and this was not the way a housebreaker operates,” said Capt. Jakes van Niekerk, the lead police investigator in the Desilla killings. “Unfortunately, similar cases appear. This is a normal thing.”

Since the advent of black-majority rule in 1994, complaining about rampant crime by lawless blacks has been a national pastime for white South Africans. The statistics are appalling: South Africa is among the most dangerous places on Earth. Its murder rate is eight times that of the United States, and both perpetrator and victim are usually poor blacks; a carjacking occurs, on average, every 40 minutes.

A recent survey by the New York-based business consulting agency Kroll Associates placed Johannesburg among the world’s most hazardous cities for visitors, sharing the unwelcome distinction with such places as Bogota, Colombia, and Algiers. Emigrating whites most often identify crime, not the loss of political power, as their primary motive for leaving South Africa.

But most white South Africans do not talk about the new class of criminals that the notorious crime wave has nurtured within the razor-wired walls of their neatly manicured neighborhoods.

Authorities say a growing number of whites is profiting from the country’s slide into what one insurance industry executive described as “criminal anarchy.” Prosperous people are finding the lawlessness a convenient alibi for everything from car theft to murder.

“The high crime rate provides a huge smoke screen and decoy system which enables people who have some kind of [criminal] intent to act on it easier,” said Alex Butchart of the University of South Africa, a psychologist who has researched violent crime. “It reduces the inhibition.”

Inept and corrupt police have made the smoke screen even thicker by contributing to a general belief that crime does pay. Not only are police routinely implicated in crimes and corruption, but their success in investigating cases is so dismal that a would-be criminal playing the odds could reasonably conclude that he would get away with almost any offense.

Only one in seven murders in South Africa results in a conviction; in half the cases, police don’t even collect enough evidence to make a referral to the prosecutor’s office. Rapists have a 1-in-16 chance of being caught and found guilty; the odds for armed robbers are 1 in 43 and for car thieves 1 in 87, according to a survey of crime data by the South African Crime Information Management Center.

“We are living in a sort of freakout situation, where there is a large form of opportunism,” said Wilfrid Schaerf of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. “We are experiencing the malaise that goes along with redefining the basic social contract, where we hand over power to the state and in turn the state protects us.”

Other countries are struggling with a similar erosion of state-guaranteed security, but the South African example has been propelled by what criminologists call the duplicitous moral tradition here.

‘A Warped Morality at Core of Our Society’

It is not surprising, they say, that some South Africans are following the unspoken criminal example of the former apartheid government.

“The security police used to routinely do something and blame someone else for it,” Schaerf said. “For the best part of our citizens’ lives, 40 years or so, the state had itself been criminal toward its citizens, not only the blacks, but it had lied to all of its citizens about the war on our borders, sanctions-busting and collaborating with shady figures in the international underworld. We have a warped morality at the core of our society.”

Although there is ample anecdotal evidence of a growing problem, police and insurance company officials say it is impossible to measure the amount of criminal fraud being committed by South Africans. Police statistics are not compiled by motive, and insurance companies are especially tight-lipped about revealing details or even confirming scams that could be mimicked by others. Officials from Old Mutual, one of the country’s biggest insurers, declined even to be interviewed on the subject.

Barry Scott, chief executive of the South African Insurance Assn., a trade organization of insurers, said that a membership survey conducted last year revealed that 35% of the total value of claims paid out by insurers was attributed to crime--up from an estimated 25% a decade ago. But there was no attempt to measure how many crime-related claims may have been fabricated or self-generated.

“Fraud by its nature is very difficult to detect,” Scott said. “If there is an increase in fraud, it is probably going undetected in many areas. . . . The industry tries to believe their clients because of the principle of utmost good faith. They don’t go out of their way not to believe a client.”

Interpol Addresses Car-Theft Ruse

One of the simplest and most common ruses in the new South Africa, police say, is “trading up” on high-priced cars by selling old vehicles in neighboring Zimbabwe or Namibia and then reporting them stolen or carjacked. Since not even 1 in 10 cases of car theft in South Africa is even referred to a prosecutor, swindlers are virtually assured of collecting an insurance payout.

The situation has gotten so bad that Interpol, the international police agency, will soon introduce a “vehicle clearance certificate” across southern Africa so that South African cars cannot be sold in nearby countries without the transaction being recorded back home.

“People are always staging crimes for their own personal gain and coming up with a story that is plausible in the local context,” said Victor Nell, who heads a World Health Organization-affiliated research project in Johannesburg on violence prevention. “People in South Africa who blame violent crime are being ecologically appropriate, the same way the color of my [Rhodesian] ridgeback [dog] blends in with the grass. The screen varies according to local circumstances.”

Even visiting tourists and businesspeople have picked up on the scams, filing police reports on muggings and break-ins that never happened.

In February, two Pakistani cricket players caused an international sporting row when their coaches claimed that the pair had been attacked outside a posh Sandton hotel on the eve of a match against South Africa. In fact, police and South African sporting officials suspect, the players were injured in a late-night barroom brawl, but the mugging tale was an easier sell both here and back home.

The next day, five tourists from New Zealand and Australia reported to police that they had been robbed at knifepoint in a trendy Johannesburg suburb of about $10,000 in cash and cameras. But after police found no evidence to support the story, the women admitted to detectives that it was a fabrication “purely for insurance purposes.” Warrants were later issued for their arrest, but the backpackers left the country before authorities caught up with them.

What appears to be a variation of the trend has even crossed the Indian Ocean to Australia, the favorite destination of many fleeing white South Africans. Cheryl Kennedy, a South African, recently filed for political asylum in Australia, claiming to have been the victim of racially motivated attacks. South African police say they have been unable to substantiate her account.

“I have had social conversations with people who travel, and they have heard people on the bus or train or plane discuss how they are going to make false insurance claims,” said Reg Crewe, director of communications for the South African Police Service. “I am not saying we don’t have a crime problem in this country, but there are instances where people take it out of proportion for their own purposes.”

Suspicions Aroused in Killing of Couple

Crimes of deception occur mostly in white communities, where the country’s concentration of wealth remains and criminals have more to gain. In the case of the Desilla killings, the couple--he headed a shipping company, and she worked for a prominent real estate firm--reportedly left behind a multimillion-dollar estate that, police allege, their unemployed son was impatient to inherit.

Police suspicions were further aroused when authorities discovered that the family’s watchdogs never sounded a warning and, more crucially, Liza Desilla’s undigested morsel of fish indicated that the couple were still eating after the supposed intruders entered the dining room. Both clues led police to conclude that the gunman was familiar to the couple.

“Money still plays a bigger role between white people than between black people,” said Van Niekerk, the police investigator. “The standard [of living] of white people is much higher.”

But wherever there is money, authorities say, the new crime problems follow close behind.

In March, Pretoria psychiatrist Omar Sabadia, an immigrant from India, was convicted of murdering his wife, Zahida, to collect her $600,000 life insurance policy after squandering his savings in gambling. Sabadia had claimed that the 29-year-old mother of three was killed by black gunmen when the couple were brutally attacked during a carjacking near their home.

The murder attracted international attention, particularly since it took place during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and it took so long for police to find Zahida Sabadia’s body; Muslims throughout the world were praying for her family.

But it was later revealed that Omar Sabadia had paid for the killing, which he arranged through one of his former patients. The psychiatrist also stabbed himself to feign injuries from the abduction and drove around Pretoria for six hours to further deceive authorities. In the weeks before the killing, he complained loudly and often about crime in South Africa, telling relatives he intended to return to India.

The judge in the case branded Sabadia “Lucifer,” and a crowded courtroom burst into applause when he handed Sabadia a 65-year prison sentence.

“He thought that she would be just another crime statistic and forgotten,” said Omar Ahmed, Zahida’s father and a former member of Parliament, who hired a private detective when he began to suspect his son-in-law. “There is so much violence in this country that we have become desensitized to it, and people see it as normal. It is like living in a state of war.”