MICHAEL SCHMIDT: SA is a bolt-hole of choice for international crooks

The threat of the cold muzzle of the 9mm pistol against my cheek was unmistakable. And there was another pistol pointed at my photographer’s head. We were on a stakeout of one of the FBI’s “most wanted” — and this is what it had come to. 

It was as bizarre a case as it gets. SA-born Ann Phyllis Janks, née McCarthy, aged 54 in May 2002, faced extradition to stand trial for a 1985 conspiracy to murder a US attorney who was investigating the weird pink-robed, yet heavily armed, love cult that had been responsible for the worst-yet bioterror attack on American soil. 

That case is only one of many in which people accused of a wide variety of crimes and shady dealings — terrorists, mafiosi, gun-runners, génocidaires — have found a comfy bolt-hole in a country that has assiduously avoided going after visiting heads of state accused of crimes against humanity, such as Vladimir Putin or Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. 

The cult, headed by the charismatic self-styled bhagwan (guru) Shree Rajneesh, amassed a fortune of more than $100m and a fleet of pink Rolls Royces, while preaching a doctrine of sexual freedom and mysticism. 

McCarthy had graduated from Wits and gained an MSc in London, but had fallen in with the Rajneesh cult on a trip to India. She rose to become one of its leaders. The sect meanwhile relocated to small-town Oregon, where it established a compound and started armed patrols and meddling in county politics. 

In an attempt to knock non-Rajneesh voters out of action in a county election the cult used salmonella to taint salad bars in Oregon in September 1984, poisoning 750 people. Oregon attorney Charles Turner was already investigating the Rajneeshis for mass immigration fraud, and the FBI alleged that McCarthy and other leaders put together a hit squad to assassinate Turner.

Under investigation, the sect unravelled, Rajneesh fled back to India where he died in 1990, and McCarthy fled to Germany, where she married and changed her surname to Janks, then returned to SA when the FBI tried to have her extradited.

She had settled in Norwood, Johannesburg, where she practised as a child psychologist. But the FBI caught up with her again and it was on another extradition attempt that I was reporting. Janks had refused to allow me access to her office, so photographer Marianne Pretorius and I pulled up outside her house waiting for her return. 

It was then that the two gunmen surprised us, relieved Marianne of her cameras, and left with my car keys. There is no way I could claim or prove Janks was involved, but the timing was unnerving.

Janks — who staunchly maintains she was out of the country at the time of the Turner plot — appears to have defeated the extradition attempt and still practises in Johannesburg. 

But the FBI succeeded in the same year in another extradition of one of its most-wanted — someone I had been colleagues with, though I and even his close friends had no idea who he really was.

In September 2002, when the bureau arrested much-loved activist and writer John Pape, who co-directed the International Labour Research & Information Group in Cape Town, voices of support for him came from the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 

Bank robbery

But Pape was actually James Kilgore, the last remaining at-large member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which had kidnapped and turned American heiress Patty Hearst in 1974. Hearst’s autobiography revealed that Kilgore participated in an SLA bank heist in which a woman was killed. 

While the rest of the SLA were eliminated in shoot-outs with the police or captured and imprisoned by 1975, Kilgore spent almost three decades on the run. Extradited to the US, he confessed to his role in the deadly bank robbery and to an explosives charge. After serving a six-year sentence, Kilgore now works for the University of Illinois. 

SA’s remoteness, combined with its high-functioning economy and natural beauty, appear to have attracted its share of dodgy characters on the run — not least among whom is alleged Sicilian mafioso Vito Palazzolo, who settled here in the 1980s.

Though convicted in absentia in Italy for criminal association with the Mafia, in 2010 Pretoria denied Rome’s extradition request for the alleged Cosa Nostra treasurer because that particular crime is not recognised here. 

While Palazzolo openly charmed Cape Town high society, others who passed through the country were very much under cover. Take the case of a man I shall call “LW”, a Uruguayan whose career as a double agent within the drug cartels dates back to the Corsican Mafia in the 1960s. LW rose to become Pablo Escobar’s main money launderer — and a snitch for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. 

LW told me in an exclusive interview that SA’s easy-to-manipulate banking system had made it “the warehouse of Colombia”. He claimed he had been contracted in Cape Town in 2002 by a Pakistani national called Mr Bhat to move ₤1m from Barclays Bank in London to 10 accounts in SA under false identities for 10 Pakistani and Afghan men who were relocating here. 

Arms dealer

In 2004 the 10 men, having established themselves as “SA businessmen”, individually relocated to the UK. On July 7 2005 the London suicide bombings claimed 56 lives, including those of four bombers, and left 700 injured. LW believed the 10 Central Asians were responsible. 

I conjectured that the “Pakistani Mr Bhat” might well have been Tajikistani national Viktor Bout — at that point Africa’s largest arms dealer, who allegedly enabled Al-Qaeda to set up in Liberia under Charles Taylor in the 1990s.

Bout had never been connected in public to SA, but a National Intelligence Agency source told me he had in fact set up an air charter company near the Botswana border in 1997. It was impossible to prove SA was used by Bout to move the planners of the London bombings to the UK, yet LW’s story showed how the country could be as a transit point for criminal and terror networks. 

Then there is alleged Rwandan génocidaire Fulgence Kayishema, arrested in Paarl last month after evading justice for two decades. One of the last major suspects to be tracked down, he had been charged in 2001 for killing more than 2,000 men, women and children seeking refuge in a church during the 1994 genocide.

Unlike Palazzolo, Kayishema looks set to face the music in Arusha before being transferred to Rwanda for trial. 

• Schmidt is a veteran journalist and author.