Why Was Israel's Most Wanted Mobster Hiding Out in South Africa?

JOHANNESBURG – "People always ask me, where have I seen you before? I tell them yeah, maybe on Interpol's most wanted list," joked Valentin as he drove through an area of farms, shopping malls and casinos dotting the landscape just outside the city limits.  

With his shaven head, heavy build and ACAB tattoos, Valentin, who is using a pseudonym because he is a fugitive on the run, looks like a thug. A producer of meth and cannabis in his home country in the eastern Balkans, he came to Johannesburg just before COVID, when the authorities back home started closing in on his illegal drug empire.

“I don't like it in Johannesburg. They talk so fast, and I don't speak very good English. But it's better than prison,” he told me as we entered the city streets.

The dramatic arrest of an alleged Israeli gangster in a well-off Johannesburg suburb on the 17th of November was a stark reminder that Valentin is not alone in choosing Johannesburg as a refuge from international police. In the early hours, a joint operation between Interpol and Israeli intelligence ended with officers from the South African Police Service (SAPS) storming a house in Bryanston, north of the city. Inside were eight suspects including one later identified as 46-year-old fugitive Yaniv Ben Simon, described as “Israel’s most wanted man”, and an alleged enforcer of jailed mobster Yitzhak Abergil. 

Ben Simon, who may have been living in South Africa for up to 15 years, has been the subject of an Interpol Red Notice – a request to law enforcement worldwide to seize and arrest an individual – for conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder since 2015. He’s accused of two attempted mob hits in 2003 and 2004 which wounded five people while working for Abergil’s Israeli crime organisation.

Abergil was given three life sentences at an Israeli court in June for drug trafficking and murder. Abergil’s Israeli mob organisation, which ran a major ecstasy smuggling operation in the US, exploded a car bomb in Tel Aviv in 2003, killing three innocent bystanders, in a botched attempt at killing rival Israeli ecstasy kingpin Ze’ev Rosenstein. Abergil was extradited to America in 2011 over the murder of an Israeli ecstasy dealer who had stolen one of their shipments, but returned to Israel three years later to serve the rest of his sentence and stand trial on further charges.

During the raid in Bryanston, police found an arsenal of weapons including five automatic rifles, seven pistols, around $40,000 (£33,200, €38,500) in cash, three stolen motorbikes, a signal jamming device, four drones fitted with cameras, three kilos of meth, and a “torture van” – a soundproofed delivery truck with a chair bolted to the floor. Ben Simon appeared in court for extradition hearings last Friday, and will also have to appear separately for drugs and firearm charges. Due to “strict security measures”, the media has been barred from the courtroom. 

Ben Simon is the latest in a long line of international criminals who have been drawn to Johannesburg and South Africa. Mobsters from across the globe have found a home here – experts say they are attracted by its reputation for corruption.

Before the arrest of high-ranking Brazilian gangster Gilberto Aparecido dos Santos, aka Fuminho (“Smoke”) in Mozambique in 2020, he was tracked to his base in Johannesburg, where he was living under the alias Luiz Gomes de Jesus. Fuminho is a member of Brazilian prison gang PCC (First Command of the Capital) , and broke out of confinement in 1999. He is said to be one of the PCC’s top drug traffickers.

Serbian gangsters, including battle-hardened veterans from the Yugoslav wars, have also ended up settling in Johannesburg. According to a report into the transnational nature of Balkan crime gangs, “there were at least nine murders and two assassination attempts in the Johannesburg area involving Serbians with backgrounds in organized crime or paramilitary organisations” between 2018 and 2020. The report said Balkan gangs have been attracted to South Africa because it is a key transit point in the global cocaine trade, a business in which these groups are increasingly involved.

Many of the slain Serbians were associates of Dobrosav Gavric. Gavric, an ex-cop turned hitman who assassinated warlord Arkan in a Belgrade hotel lobby in 2000, fled to South Africa in 2006 before getting involved in the local underworld. Gavric lived in Johannesburg under the new identity of ‘Sasa Kovacevic’ until 2011, when he was wounded in a hit on a Cape Town gang boss. He’s been fighting extradition to Serbia, where a 35-year sentence awaits him, ever since. 

Milan ‘Miki’ Djuricic, a co-accused along with Gavric for Arkan’s murder, was shot dead in a Johannesburg suburb in 2018, where he had been hiding with the help of a Belgian passport. Three months later one of his associates, Darko Kulić, a member of the Serbian Guard paramilitary group, was himself gunned down in nearby Randburg. In 2019, another friend of Gavric was mowed down by masked men with assault rifles.

Fugitive drug trafficker Nelson Yester-Garrido based himself in South Africa before the authorities eventually caught him in Italy in 2017. The former Cuban secret agent and Pablo Escobar associate  was arrested in Johannesburg in 2002 on an Interpol Red Notice issued by America, but extradition was ultimately dropped. In 2011 he was detained over a 166kg coke shipment discovered inside a shipping container in Port Elizabeth, on South Africa’s south east coast, but ducked charges after apparently no-one could be found to translate Brazilian court documents into English. 

Yester-Garrido remained in South Africa until his arrest in Rome and then extradited to the States, where he pled guilty to running a marijuana ring in Florida. While on the run, he appeared in the documentary film Operation Odessa, recounting his role in an outrageous plot to sell a Russian naval submarine to the Cali Cartel.

Johannesburg was also home for 10 years to runaway Czech crime lord Radovan Krejcir after his arrival in South Africa on a false passport in 2007. He was jailed in a South African court for 35 years in 2016 for kidnapping, attempted murder and drug trafficking.

So what makes South Africa such an attractive home for foreign narcos? 

After the fall of the Apartheid regime in the 1990s came globalisation and with it, the arrival of foreign crime syndicates, including the Nigerian Black Axe and Chinese triads, who supplied the raw ingredients for the now ubiquitous meth labs (locally-known as “tik”) around Johannesburg. 

According to journalist Caryn Dolley, author of new book Clash of the Cartels, Unmasking the global drug kingpins stalking South Africa, the simple answer is corruption. 

In June, former president Jacob Zuma was implicated in several “state capture” scandals, where the government was alleged to be doing the bidding of private interests such as the Gupta brothers, businessmen from India.

“Fugitives and criminals view South Africa as attractive for various reasons, including that its policing and intelligence structures were used for nefarious reasons under apartheid and during recent ‘state capture’ years. These structures have been manipulated for political reasons and greed,” she explained. “Crooks may therefore view the country as a soft target where they can easily cosy up to, or buy the backing of, corrupt state figures.”

One example of high-level corruption is former South African national police chief and president of Interpol Jackie Selebi, who fell from grace in 2008 amid corruption charges, including accepting payoffs from drug trafficker Glenn Agliotti, in the form of Louis Vuitton shoes. Another is Indian drug baron Vijaygiri ‘Vicky’ Goswami, who claimed a close relationship to the ruling ANC party and may have laundered his money through a connection to the Guptas.

“State capture is effectively organised crime and South Africa has been in the grip of captors in this dirty arena for decades,” Dolley continued. “Its police service has also remained fragmented since the mid-1990s when the country switched over to become a democracy.”

After Zuma was imprisoned on corruption charges last year, deadly rioting broke out across South Africa.

“Criminals undoubtedly sniff out the country’s weak spots as they shift and develop, like state corruption and political infighting,” said Dolley. “At the moment, there are factions within South Africa’s ruling party, the ANC. Political upheaval in South Africa probably provides a necessary distraction for crooks – within, and external to, the state – trying to operate discreetly.”

Niko Vorobyov is the author of Dopeworld. Follow him on Twitter @Narco_Polo420