In early 1990s, the police established the Organised Crime Intelligence Unit (OCIU) to investigate organised crime. This move gave detectives access to secret funding, safe houses, as well as agent and informant handling systems. A young Johann van Loggerenberg, who had just completed his national service in the police instead of the army, was approached to become a long-term deep cover agent for this unit. As agent RS536, he took on the guise of a drug smuggler in the Durban underworld and slowly infiltrated different crime syndicates. His transformation was so complete that within a few years he became one of the top five most wanted individuals in KwaZulu-Natal. At the same time, the information he supplied to the OCIU led to several contraband busts and criminal convictions. But then his cover came under threat. As a young policeman, Van Loggerenberg was given documents containing information on so-called third force activities - where Military Intelligence and the Security Branch supplied weapons to the Inkatha Freedom Party - which he shared with the Goldstone Commission. Disaster threatened when former members of the Security Branch, who had since joined the OCIU, got wind of this and accused him of being a spy. They threatened to discredit him to protect the old guard. In Cop Under Cover, Van Loggerenberg describes his life with killers, drug lords and corrupt officials in vivid detail. This portrait of the criminal underworld also reveals the price he had to pay to lead a double life and how the struggle between the old and the new guard in the police continued for many years into the new democracy.
CONTRIBUTORS: Johann Van Loggerenberg
EAN: 9781868428113
COUNTRY: South Africa
PAGES:
WEIGHT: 500 g
HEIGHT: 233 cm
PUBLISHED BY: Jonathan Ball Publishers SA
DATE PUBLISHED:
CITY:
GENRE: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs, HISTORY / Africa / South / General, HISTORY / Africa / South / Republic of South Africa, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Criminology
WIDTH: 152 cm
SPINE:
Book Themes:
Republic of South Africa, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Memoirs, Drugs trade / drug trafficking, Street crime, African history
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