Steeped in Blood (18 page)

These were insecure times for me. The state loathed me with a passion and never appointed me to act in any matter. They regarded me as someone who tried to pervert the course of justice. People like Lothar Neethling must have known of the involvement of the police in underhand activities, and he knew I would doggedly pursue true justice. I became ever more vocal in my beliefs and started tape-recording the policemen I spoke to. I would walk up to them with a microphone and record them
openly as I asked them questions, something with which they were extremely uncomfortable.

The state was not above eliminating adversaries. One particular incident severely rattled me. Shelona, our son James and I were on our farm for the weekend. While I was busy putting up a fence quite a distance from the farmhouse, a car pulled up and a man climbed out. As he swaggered towards me, I could see the bulge of a pistol on his belt. He was Afrikaans, and wanted to know where the owner of the farm was. When I asked for his name, he refused to give it to me. I informed him that the owner was not there. The man said that he had heard that the farm was for sale, to which I replied that it wasn’t, asking him where he had learnt that. The lady at the bottle store in town had told him, he responded.

As soon as the man left, I went to the only bottle store in town and asked the woman there whether she had discussed the sale of my farm with anyone. She denied having spoken to anyone about such a thing. I went straight back to the farm and relayed the incident to Shelona. We felt extremely uncomfortable and unsafe, especially because James was just a baby at the time. That evening, leaving the house lights switched on, we packed James into the car and drove to a friend’s house with our car lights off. We never went back to the farm, and we sold it years later. Those were very scary times for me, both personally and for us as a family.

Despite the fact that I was labelled an ‘ANC man’, I always tried to carry out my investigations with the utmost impartiality. In one case, two young activists were killed at Duduza in the East Rand. It was alleged that the police had murdered them by shooting them, and the community was livid. At the post-mortem, it was clear that there were hand-grenade fragments in their brains, but also interesting was that their hands had been blown off. The truth was that the security forces had infiltrated these ANC groups and tampered with the hand grenades, substituting the four-second
detonator with an instant detonator, so that when the pin was pulled out of the grenade, it went off immediately.

I was never there to favour one side or another – I was there simply to ascertain the truth. In this case, the two activists had not been murdered; they had died as a result of the hand grenade going off in their hands. I suppose it was a murder of sorts, but they should not have been tossing hand grenades around in the first place.

As time progressed, we seemed to be getting closer to the truth, but I was often on the wrong side of the fence. This caused me no end of worry. It would have been easy for the state to take me out at any point, and I do not understand why they didn’t – perhaps I simply didn’t cause enough damage. My personal safety, however, was a genuine concern of mine.

In 1988, I went to London on an Anglo American scholarship to study fingerprinting. I recall speaking to various individuals, particularly media people, about my concern for my safety. Their advice was to ‘hide under the light’, and that became my method of protecting myself – I worked on my public profile, making sure that people knew what I was doing and what I looked like, and I interacted with the media on a regular basis. This ensured that people knew about me, and would ask questions if anything happened to me.

I also made sure that I never went off on solo investigations without informing someone of my whereabouts. I remember one instance where I was asked by Geoff Budlender to go to a place where a witness said they had found a mass burial site. I knew that if I found it, I would not come back alive. I called Advocate van Nieuwenhuizen and told him that if I was not back by 3 p.m. that afternoon, he should send a search party. I called Helen Suzman and told her as well. Fortunately, in that case, the witness cancelled and we never went.

The 1980s were dangerous times, politically and personally. Fortunately, normality started returning to South Africa in the early nineties, and I began to feel safer in my ongoing quest for the truth.

‘Anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.’

– RICHARD RORTY,

American philosopher

Are they real or are they fake? That was the million-dollar question asked in 1987 in a huge legal wrangle over a collection of early Japanese stamps. My training and experience in the world of forensic science came into full force as I endeavoured to find scientific evidence that would answer this thorny question.

The story of the Japanese stamps started long before I became involved in the matter. A man by the name of Cyril Abrahams worked for Sterns, a chain of jewellery stores. He decided to start his own business, and obtained a significant overdraft facility with the then Barclays Bank in Pritchard Street, Johannesburg, to do so. After a while, the overdraft started reaching alarming proportions, and the bank manager contacted Abrahams to ask him to provide some security for the loan.

Abrahams went to see the bank manager, taking with him an A4 stamp collector’s book, filled with stamps. He explained to the bank manager that this was a valuable collection of early Japanese stamps, which would more than cover his overdraft facility. The bank manager accepted the book of stamps as security and locked it in the bank vault.

Abrahams’s overdraft continued to grow, to the point that it was well over a million rand, a significant amount of money, especially in the 1980s. The bank wrote Abrahams a polite letter asking him to settle the overdraft or reduce it to a more acceptable level. He replied that he was unable to do so, and correspondence travelled between the two parties as the bank became increasingly edgy about the risk they were carrying.

Finally, the bank decided to sell the stamps. After insuring the book of stamps, they sent them to Christie’s in London with a request for the stamps to be sold for one and a half million rand, from which Christie’s would take their commission before paying the bank the balance. Christie’s wrote a very polite letter back to the bank, saying that they thought the bank was being over-optimistic, as the stamps were all forgeries. The London art dealers estimated the value of the stamp collection to be about two hundred rand.

The stamps were sent back to South Africa, and the bank informed Abrahams that they were forgeries. Furious, Abrahams went down to the bank to examine the stamps. After taking a look, he declared that they were a clear forgery, and that they were not the stamps he had handed to the bank months before. According to him, there had been foul play. Abrahams started legal proceedings against the bank for one and a half million rand.

Representatives from the bank arrived on my doorstep in a state of considerable agitation. I examined the facts surrounding the case. When Abrahams had given the stamps to the bank as security for his growing overdraft, they had been valued by a stamp dealer, Tibor Major. As part of the valuation process, photocopies had been
made of all the stamps, page by page, which had been signed by both Major and Abrahams, agreeing that each page was a copy of the original stamps in the book.

Abrahams went to a huge amount of trouble to prove that these copies did not match the stamps in the book that the bank was now presenting as a forgery, implying that the bank had substituted the original stamps with worthless ones. His argument centred on the fact that, when you photocopy, there is an enlargement, which should be equal across the length and breadth of each stamp. He measured certain marks on the stamps and the copies, arguing that the ratios should be the same. Because there were differences in measurement, he claimed, these were not the stamps that he had given to the bank.

What Abrahams didn’t know was that photocopy machines don’t use a lens to copy entirely – they use a moving lens or a moving light to capture the image on a rotating drum, which determines the lengthwise magnification. The sideways magnification is determined by a lens and a slit. If these two are not exactly in sync, minute changes will occur. These may not appear significant, but will result in differences in measurement and a change in ratios. I had gone off to Rank Xerox and had spent some time at their plant near the airport so that I could fully understand how these machines worked.

Another important factor that had to be considered was the paper used to produce the photocopies. Paper is a living thing; it is made out of wood fibres that can swell and change in length and shape. Any printer will attest to the impact of humidity and other factors on the quality of printing. Accurate registration – the correlation of overlapping colours on a single image – is often difficult to obtain. This can sometimes be seen at the edges of a newspaper, where the colours are ‘blurred’ or imperfectly printed. When examining the photocopies of the stamps, I had to establish whether a change in the paper had resulted in the differences between the copies and the stamps.

During my investigation into paper and its potential pitfalls, I came across stamp paper, which is a very specific type of paper. At the time, the only company in South Africa that supplied stamp paper was Wiggins Teape, and I went to see them to learn about this specialised paper.

The key to this case happened quite by chance. I discussed the matter with various philatelists, one of whom told me about
Album Weeds
, a book written in 1905 by Reverend Robert Earee, a parson in England who was an avid stamp collector. His very authoritative book was still very relevant in 1987, and I scoured the world for it. Because these were pre-internet days, the task was not easy, but I eventually managed to locate a copy in England, and it was posted to me. I learnt some incredibly interesting facts from this book. I had noticed that each stamp had the same two symbols on it, and, intrigued by this, I found the explanation for it right there in
Album Weeds
.

The originals of the stamps were exceedingly valuable, and were prone to being forged. The Japanese did not take lightly to this practice: forgers had their heads chopped off if they were caught – there were no repeat offenders! So the Japanese forgers became cunning: they included a mark on the stamps to indicate that these were facsimile copies. These were the symbols that I had noticed on each stamp. On the originals of these stamps, there would have been no symbol, yet on the photocopies signed by Abrahams and Major of the book of stamps that Abrahams had handed in to the bank, these symbols were clearly visible. The stamps had been fake from the word go.

I then had to prove that the photocopies were, in fact, copies of the book of stamps handed to the bank by Abrahams. I used the process of comparison that you would use when comparing ballistics or fingerprints – I photographed each photocopy and each stamp, and compared the minute details on the stamp with the same minute features on the photocopy. For example, where the stamp
had been cancelled and there was a mark, this could be seen on the original and on the copy. The same holds true with small details of damage, which you ascertain by examining the gaps and the size and position of the damage. Stamps are not perfect, and I studied the printing on each stamp. In some places it was stronger, in others weaker and faded.

Exactly the same features could be seen on the stamps and on the photocopies. I also showed that there was no significance in the nature of the paper in this matter – the paper could not have produced that particular finding. Even though there were differences between the stamps, there were also many similarities, which will always be the case. If you take two photographs of a person, for example, there will be differences depending on the photographic process, the camera, the lens, and so on. These differences will be random. Certain features, however, will be the same – such as a mole on the person’s face, for instance – and these are more difficult to explain away when comparing the two photographs.

With an array of photographs as evidence, we proceeded to court. Since Barclays Bank was the plaintiff, we started. It was a hard-fought case, but very entertaining, and it was handled in a pleasant manner by Judge Johann Kriegler, a sharp man who quickly grasped the concepts and understood the evidence. I was cross-examined by Jonathan Hare, who is a judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal today – a real gentleman.

We won the case. Abrahams ultimately had to prove that someone had forged stamps of comparatively little value for a benefit that was not worth the effort – or, as Kriegler put it, that someone had gone to such extensive ends for a small crock of gold at the end of the rainbow that was not worth it. These were clearly forgeries – some stamps were worth a pittance. Why would anyone go to all this trouble? The originals were worth every cent that Abrahams had claimed they were, but Tibor Major had not realised that Abrahams’s stamps were forgeries when he valued them.