My Global Hustle » Archive » TRAFFIC JAM: As Meth Trade Goes Global, South Africa Becomes a Hub By MARK SCHOOFS

TRAFFIC JAM: As Meth Trade Goes Global, South Africa Becomes a Hub By MARK SCHOOFS

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Welcoming a visitor to his apartment on the outskirts of this city, Igshaan “Sanie” Davids wore only silky maroon boxer shorts festooned with brightly colored ducks and the slogan “Totally Quackers,” his ample belly sloping out far beyond the waistband. Tattoos of the Statue of Liberty, the American flag and the U.S. dollar adorned his arms and back. Knife and bullet scars pitted his body.

Australian Customs Service

South Africa has become a smuggling hub for ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the chemical precursors of methamphetamine.

Mr. Davids is a leader of a Cape Town street gang called the Americans, South African law-enforcement officials say. The gang initiates its members with rites that twist the meaning of U.S. symbols. Its motto is, “In God we trust, and die we must,” members say. Their handshake ends by placing the right fist over the heart, in what they describe as a variation on U.S. citizens reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

“We’re businessmen, always rolling,” Mr. Davids said. These days, he said, about the best business going is tik, South African slang for methamphetamine. Gangs can obtain the drug or its ingredients from Chinese sources in exchange for abalone poached from South African waters, say South African officials and Mr. Davids.

The China-South Africa connection is one example of the unlikely alliances some dealers are making as the methamphetamine trade expands globally. South Africa has become a significant market for methamphetamine, with government statistics showing an explosion in the drug’s use centered in the Cape Town area. It is also an emerging smuggling hub as ingredients for the drug make their way from Asia and other places to wealthy countries such as the U.S., local and Western officials say.

While cocaine and heroin may come to mind more readily as drugs smuggled across continents, methamphetamine and its ingredients also travel circuitous routes, in part because the U.S. and other countries have revved up methamphetamine control efforts. Since 2004, U.S. state and federal laws have restricted the sale of cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine, a “precursor” chemical used to make methamphetamine. Mexico and Hong Kong have also cracked down on trade in precursors.

“We now see precursor chemicals from India and China being rerouted through new places like Cairo and South Africa before going to Mexico,” Karen Tandy, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a speech last year. Once in Mexico, the precursors feed the “super-labs” that make methamphetamine and supply American users, U.S. law-enforcement officials say.

South African smugglers have sent precursors to Russia disguised as luxury bath salts and to Australia secreted in bottles of chardonnay, according to government communiquÃ©s and officials familiar with the intercepted shipments. Cargo sent to Mexico from China via the South African port of Durban contained about 1,200 boxes of electric fans — which hid more than three metric tons of a methamphetamine ingredient, according to interviews with law-enforcement officials and a U.S. government statement.

South Africa has several attractions both as a market and as a trade hub for drugs. Incomes are higher than in most of Africa. It enjoys the banking and transport systems of a developed nation, with direct flights around the world and efficient seaports. Telephone and Internet service is reliable.

At the same time, the country suffers from an “overloaded criminal justice system, straining hard just to deal with ‘street crime,'” the U.S. State Department said in its International Narcotics Control Strategy report this year. Its long borders are porous, and crime syndicates from Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere have gained a foothold since the fall of apartheid.

Methamphetamine and its chemical cousins are used by 26 million people world-wide, more than heroin and cocaine combined, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. An estimated 1.3 million Americans reported using methamphetamine at least once in the previous 12 months, according to 2005 government data. Methamphetamine, a cheap and powerful stimulant that is usually smoked, gives users a surge of euphoria, confidence and libido. The U.S. government describes methamphetamine as an addictive drug that can cause mood changes, violent behavior and, with long-term use, permanent psychological damage.

One corner of the trade can be found in the Cape Flats, a vast and crowded patchwork of townships, slums, and squatter camps just outside of Cape Town. This is where the apartheid government once forced “colored,” or mixed-race, people and blacks to live, while the city itself, home to South Africa’s Parliament, was reserved almost exclusively for whites.

[I ]

Law-enforcement officials describe the “Americans” as the largest of the Cape Flats street gangs and Mr. Davids, who is colored, as a powerful gang lord. He regularly appears in gang stories in the local tabloids, often on the cover. Headlines or photo captions frequently refer to him simply as “Sanie” or “Sanie American.” In interviews, Mr. Davids at times declared he has abandoned all illegal activity and now earns his living through a construction business. But at other times he described in detail how he trafficked in methamphetamine, and when pressed on his largest current source of income, he said, “tik is bigger than everything.”

The Americans gang has its own interpretation of the American flag. According to Mr. Davids and other gang members, the red stripes on the flag stand for blood and killing, whereas the white stripes symbolize the clean work of making money. The stars stand for the gang’s “senators,” leaders in the Cape Flats’ many neighborhoods.

Recently, a man who gave his name as Nigel came to Mr. Davids’s home, sat down on his living-room sofa, and handed a wad of cash to one of Mr. Davids’s close associates. In return, while Mr. Davids sat across the room watching, Nigel received a clear plastic bag of a white crystalline substance, which he inspected carefully before putting it in an opaque plastic bag. An associate later identified the substance as methamphetamine.

Valuable Resource

The gangs have access to a valuable natural resource, the Haliotis midae species of abalone that teems along South Africa’s coast. Considered a delicacy and an aphrodisiac in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the shellfish can fetch more than $200 a pound in Asian retail markets, according to South African law-enforcement officials.

South Africa has declared the species protected and placed quotas on harvesting it. But poachers face little risk of getting caught and usually only small penalties if discovered. Law-enforcement officials say poachers even dive for abalone near Robben Island, about 7.5 miles from Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for most of his 27 years of captivity.

Cape Flats street gangs organize teams of divers, who can harvest a ton of abalone in as little as a day. That amount can fetch nearly $50,000 from Chinese syndicates known as triads.

In the 1990s, the triads began supplying the gangs with methaqualone, a sedative once marketed in the U.S. as Quaalude and known in South Africa as mandrax. As Mr. Davids tells it, in 1997 he gave his Chinese contacts samples of mandrax, which they chemically analyzed and then procured. By the next year, he says, the Chinese were flooding the market with mandrax, often trading it directly for abalone.

Today, triads based in Hong Kong are a major supplier of methamphetamine and its precursors, according to law-enforcement officials and some gang members. Along with South Africa’s national police, an elite investigative unit called the Scorpions, which reports to the national director of public prosecutions, pursues organized drug rings.

Mr. Davids says the triads sometimes barter methamphetamine directly for abalone. The transaction is convenient for both sides and hard to trace because no money is involved. Mr. Davids says if he has $43,000 worth of abalone and trades it for methamphetamine, he can turn around and sell the drug for $64,000. “For two days more work, I make an extra 150,000 rand,” or about $21,000, he says.

Mr. Davids’s life has been marred by frequent violence. He says gunmen tried to assassinate him last year while he was driving his children to school, an account confirmed by law-enforcement officials. He almost never goes out to movies or other entertainment, says his longtime girlfriend, Razia Abdullah. “He’s got a lot of enemies,” she explains. During his own rise to power, Mr. Davids says, he killed “about seven” people.

One of Mr. Davids’s older brothers was murdered, and his younger brother faces charges in the murder of two men last year. Mr. Davids and his brother’s attorney said a plea bargain was being negotiated, but the protracted legal trouble has not been cheap. Mr. Davids said he was funding his brother’s top-drawer legal team at a weekly cost of the equivalent of about $7,000, due every Monday.

Last year, South African police arrested a Chinese man, Ran Wei, who now faces trial for illegal possession of abalone. According to a person with detailed knowledge of the case, seized accounting records documented abalone purchases totaling about $35 million over less than three years. Mr. Wei’s lawyer, Michael Sun, says his client has pleaded innocent and denies wrongdoing.

“Abalone is quick money — I like it more than anything else,” says Mujahid Daniels. He and his brother-in-law, Raqeeb “Ricky” Oaker, are reputed leaders of Junior Mafia, another gang in the Cape Town area, but they couldn’t be more different from Mr. Davids. Also in their mid-30s, Messrs. Daniels and Oaker dress like models. They operate a trendy nightclub, Barmooda, where they say they don’t allow any illegal drugs. In an upstairs office, they monitor patrons on sleek computers hooked up to surveillance cameras. When they see someone suspicious — or an attractive woman — they click on the image to magnify it.

The Junior Mafia doesn’t have nearly as many members as the Americans, say law-enforcement officials, but its client base is wealthier. In interviews, Messrs. Daniels and Oaker denied being involved in illegal activity and said that, while they started the Junior Mafia, they aren’t involved now. Later Mr. Daniels acknowledged trading in abalone, and Mr. Oaker said he smuggles diamonds. Both men come from the Cape Flats and now live in a middle-class suburb called Observatory.

After two Taiwanese gangsters were murdered in 2002, Mr. Daniels was accused of ordering the crime, allegedly to avenge an attempt to kill Mr. Oaker. During the trial, two witnesses against Mr. Daniels were murdered. Mr. Daniels denied any involvement in the killing of the witnesses, and was acquitted of all serious charges in the Taiwanese-gangster case.

Mr. Daniels says “making your own tik and selling it” is one way to profit, but dealing in precursors to methamphetamine is also lucrative. “Whoever controls ephedrine controls the market,” he says. Speaking generally, law-enforcement officials say gangs may act as middlemen between foreign suppliers of precursors and South African labs that cook up the final drug.

South Africa’s pharmaceutical and chemical industries imported more than 17,000 kilograms of the precursors in 2005, the last year for which full figures are available, according to the South African Police Service. Some precursor chemicals get diverted to the illicit market, according to a report released this year by the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board. Mr. Davids says he works with crooked managers at some South African pharmaceutical companies, which he didn’t name, to obtain the precursors and supplies the chemicals at a profit to makers of methamphetamine.

Officials play down the diversion issue. Deven Naicker, national head of antinarcotics for the South African Police Service, acknowledges diversion takes place, but says it is “not to a very large scale.” Maureen Kirkman, head of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Pharmaceutical Industry Association of South Africa, says ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are “very tightly controlled.”

South Africa has mounted serious counternarcotics efforts. It has shut down large illicit methamphetamine laboratories, and it has operated a precursor chemical monitoring program since 1994. It is also the only country in southern Africa that participates in Project Prism, the international campaign to control specific methamphetamine precursors, according to Jonathan Lucas, who heads the southern Africa regional office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Mr. Davids says some methamphetamine he’s involved in trading doesn’t stay in South Africa but gets exported to Europe and America. Some smugglers hide the drug in decorative doors featuring African carving, obscuring the scent from sniffer dogs with coats of primer and varnish, he says.

However, the main shippers of drugs to other countries from South Africa are international syndicates, officials say. Three officials said a sophisticated ring is currently shipping precursors through South Africa to Mexico via other countries including the Congo. The shipments include chemicals diverted from a South African pharmaceuticals company and sent to the Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, packaged as legitimate cold medicine, two of the officials said.

In April 2006, a joint Russian-South African sting operation shut down a ring that allegedly sent more than 300 kilograms of ephedrine to Russia, often packaged with bath oils and soaps, officials in both countries say. South Africa wants to extradite an alleged ringleader, a Russian living in South Africa who is reportedly a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang, according to an official with knowledge of the case. The Russian denies wrongdoing, says his lawyer.

Alarming Problem

As traders use South Africa as a hub, the country is experiencing what officials call an alarming problem with methamphetamine abuse. A government survey in the first half of 2002 found that no one under 20 years old who was receiving drug-abuse treatment in Cape Town identified methamphetamine as their drug of choice. By the second half of 2006, 72% said it was their primary or secondary drug abuse. In the province that includes Cape Town, police cases involving methamphetamine soared to 2,628 cases in 2005 from 15 in 2001, according to a joint analysis by the U.N. drug office and South African police.

On a recent afternoon at Silver Spring High School in the Cape Flats community of Manenberg, vice principal Carder Tregonning said four of the day’s eight discipline cases were committed by students who admitted to smoking meth. One offender threatened to stab a classmate because he didn’t like him, while a 17-year-old student squatted over a trash can and urinated in front of her class.

Methamphetamine has also been linked to sexual behaviors, such as multiple partners and intercourse without condoms, that are especially perilous in South Africa, where an estimated one in five adults is infected with the AIDS virus.

In his own family, Mr. Davids discourages drug use. He recently came home with an over-the-counter urine test for methamphetamine, which he said he occasionally administers to his teenage son.