After treating dishonesty as the norm for 50 years South Africa's furniture removers are finally getting what they deserve

Dear Readers,

Mel Potgieter a Stuttaford Director

          The question I want to ask all CEO’s of furniture removers is this: “Are any of you running an honest business?”

          What a shocker. Companies I exposed in the Financial Mail magazine in 1976 are now facing similar allegations before the Competition Commission. And this time it looks as though there is no escaping a very heavy fine.

            As an investigative journalist I probed the widespread tendering collusion among removers, which has cost the government and the private sector millions of rand.

          Significantly the FM never received any complaints about the accuracy of my report

          It’s disturbing, to say the least, that the removers association has been accused of turning a blind eye to the skulduggery that has been going on for all these years. Now the Chairman's own company has been proved to be involved.       

When I was on the FM it was so rife that Eddie Pettitt, President of the 127 member SA Furniture Removers & Warehousemen’s Association (SAFWA) from 1968-1971, when he headed Algoa Transport in Port Elizabeth, told me that tender rigging was “unfortunately accepted practice.”

          They hadn’t been able to stop it because neither the Department of Transport nor the Public Service Commission would back them. The head of the Military Police told me that SAFWA was also ignoring the racket.

          It was so acceptable that last year Peter Brauteseth a Director of Joel Transport told the Commission’s Tribunal that in his 25 year’s removal experience he had found tender covering to be a “sort of normal practice.” His firm was one of the 13 highlighted in my FM expose`.

          The way the swindle works is that when transferred employees have to get quotes to have their belongings moved the first removal firm approached will get all the ones needed from a friendly competitor ensuring that theirs is the lowest to get the job.

In my FM days it was known as the 3Ts as that was the number of quotes required by government departments. With competition effectively eliminated it ensured that removals were done at inflated prices.

        The Nationalist Party government of the day did nothing about this corruption even though there was considerable evidence to show it was going on.

It has taken years for our African National Congress rulers, who came to power in 1994 to get this scourge in it sights. But now it looks as though the no nonsense approach of the Competition Commission, which has the power to impose heavy fines, will finally stamp it out.

The Commission found that 3 500 relocation quotes were fixed between 2007 and 2012 with as many as 69 companies being involved. Raids were carried out at the premises of these firms.

Transgressors who co-operate with the Commission by telling all get a lesser penalty than those who try to bluff it out. It is left to the Tribunal to pass judgement on the intransigent ones.

The Commission has just charged the Cape Town based Stuttaford Van Lines with 649 counts of collusive tendering involving numerous government departments including the Presidency, Parliament, the Secret Service, the Police, the  National Prosecuting Authority, Revenue Services, the Reserve Bank, the Department of Justice, the Defence Force, the Public Protector’s office and state owned businesses and private companies.

This is a new record for this authority, being the largest number of charges against a single company in the history of its anti-cartel enforcement. It is pressing for the Tribunal to fine Stuttaford 10% of is annual turnover on each of the 649 charges.

It has so far concluded settlement agreements with 16 firms with Stuttaford not yet being one of them. The cases of 13 still have to be finalised.

Stuttaford promotes itself on its website as a super goody-good market leader that does all the right things.

          Under a large “Anti-Bribery & Anti-Corruption” heading it claims to be a member of the United Nations Global Compact initiative launched in 2000. This requires companies to embrace a set of values in the areas of Human Rights, Labour Standards, Environment and Anti-Corruption.

          It boasts that it is a certified member of Fido Fame and it adheres to its Anti-bribery and Corruption Charter. “This,” it goes on “is customised to the removal industry and guarantees a common understanding on the topics of bribery and corruption. We adhere to the Charter’s principles and communicate this to our staff, clients and agents.”

          Founded in 1857 Stuttaford tells us, “As one of the first removal companies in Africa to get Fame accredited, we have continually lived up to our reputation as Africa’s most superior removal company.”  

          This is what my FM inquiries revealed about “Africa’s most superior removal company.”

          I canvassed 17 removal firms in what was then the Transvaal and Free State and told them I needed three quotes.

          Eight offered to supply all three themselves and in all cases the firm contacted gave me the lowest price.

Stuttaford Van Lines arranged three quotes for a Mr Steele for a removal from Johannesburg to Durban after being told a company would be paying. They were Stuttaford R600; Petfords R630 and Express Transport R645. For another Johannesburg-Durban move Express quoted R685 with J.L van Nijmegen at R720 with Stuttaford’s price being R725. For the same job Morkel’s price, which I got completely separately, was almost half at R355.

          I then spoke to the Stuttaford regional manager in Johannesburg Dave Bradford, who was also on Safwa’s executive committee. I asked him if there were removal companies supplying three tenders and he replied: “I don’t know how they can do that because they would have to be in league with other companies. What you are suggesting is virtually a bit of cheating.”

          I showed him the two sets of quotes in which Stuttaford was involved and he said rival companies often phoned one another and asked for quotes. They gave the volume of the goods to be moved and then the quote was sent directly to the customer.

          He denied there was any price ring in the removal business. 

          After my FM disclosures appeared the Public Service Commission sent a circular to all government departments informing them of the FM’s findings. According to a spokesman department heads were told that “immediate steps should be taken” to stop the abuse of the tender system.

          Had anything been done then Stuttaford and various other firms would not now be facing possibly huge fines that might even put some of them out of business.

           The new name of SAFWA, which was founded in 1959, is the Professional Movers Association (PMA).  

   

          The corruption picture has become even more tainted by the fact that Crown Relocations, headed by the PMA’s Chairman Ian Pettey, has just pleaded guilty to being involved in 81 cases of cover pricing for various government departments. The Commission fined it R840 873, the equivalent of 7% of its 2013 turnover.

          His company is part of the Hong Kong based Crown Worldwide Group.

The PMA’s Code of Ethics requires members to have “a commercial reputation beyond reproach” and Stuttaford is one of them.

          One wonders just how culpable some of the people are in the various government departments mentioned by the Commission, such as the Defence Force, the Police and the National Prosecuting Authority.

In the FM I included details of the comical interviews I had with Col Piet Prinsloo, head of the Military Police at the time and his deputy Major Gert Pretorius at their Pretoria headquarters. The way they kept contradicting each other indicated that something very wrong was going on.                                                                    

The Military Police had investigated the 3T scam because the Defence Force was involved. It was suspected that government officials might have been bribed. But they had not been able to get a single cartage contractor convicted due to lack of evidence.  

In his office Pretorius told me that in their last investigation they discovered that a Pretoria removal firm had given about R5 000 (A lot of money in those days) worth of liquor to Defence Force personnel the previous Christmas.

Then, when he took me into Prinsloo’s office next door, the Colonel said somebody had spoken out of turn as the amount had never been established. Pretorius played it down by saying it wasn’t much as not more than two bottles per person had been given to certain members of the Force.

Our conversation became even more ridiculous when Pretorius said their investigation, which began about 10 months earlier, was continuing. But Prinsloo denied this saying it had been dropped, “Not because there was any pressure on us, but because we didn’t have the staff to carry on.”

Pretorius said he had obtained considerable evidence against a Pretoria company but it was still getting a lot of business from the Defence Force. When I asked why this was he replied: “I don’t know. I’m afraid some very high up authority must answer that question, which is also a question I would like to ask the Chief of the Army; the Chief of the Air Force and the Chief of the Navy.”
According to Prinsloo removal firms had carved up the government work so that they each had their own section from which they got business. “We have gone a long way in curbing this practice (the 3Ts) which got out of hand. All of a sudden one of these contractors starts again with their funny business. It takes a couple of months before we hear about it and then we just clamp down again.

 “In our own way we have saved the Defence Department quite a lot of money by telling head office who to supply with tenders and who not to supply,” Prinsloo added.

Judging by what the Competition Commission is now uncovering and what my inquiries revealed they were not at all effective.

And it’s extremely suspicious that all those government departments continued to be duped for, on the face of it, as long as most people can remember. 
         Unfortunately it’s not the Commission’s job to deal with them.

Regards,

Jon, a Consumer Watchdog of long standing, who does his best to cut his removals to the minimum.

                              

PETER BRUCE & THE JOYS OF JOURNOS MAKING THEIR OWN HEADLINES

Dear Peter Bruce, Tiso Blackstar (formerly Times Media) Editor at Large,

          I see you have been having fun with the Guptas. As a journalist the joys of exposing the crooks of this world are never ending now that they can easily hit back via the internet.

          Unlike writing for a newspaper they don’t have to worry about whether what they tell the world is true or not because it’s so difficult to track them down.

          Of course my blog is not in the same league as the publications you write for, but I have taken my share of crooks to task over the years.

We are never too old to learn and your experience has taught me a few things that I hadn’t thought of up to now.

          While you have been accused of cheating on your wife the wide boy I wrote about was not quite so direct when he implied that I was a paedophile who had been jailed for “spreading child pornography.”

          Having smeared me like this in a post he emphasised that whatever the truth people always believed the worst. He then went on to say “that was just a story, but it happened to someone you know.”

          His purpose was to try and show that what I had written on my blog about his criminal activity was an equally fabricated story. Unlike your case where the author was not identified he openly headed his attacked on me with: Kevin Cholwich Labeled (sic).

          After you wrote some not too complimentary things about that immigrant Gupta family, who has capture the imagination of South Africans in more ways than one for years now I see they set up a website to get their own back.

          As you wrote in your latest Business Day column they had you secretly followed and took pictures of you and your wife walking the dogs as well as when you went to a business to order custom made collars for the animals.

          “When the owner walked me back to my car and gave me a goodbye hug they photographed that too,” you told us. That it seems was their basis for saying you had been unfaithful to your wife.

          But if you don’t mind me asking Peter who gets a “goodbye hug” from the “dog collar lady” as you called her unless she happens to be a close relative or…..

          Anyway I can tell you now that after reading about your experience I have stopped hugging our 23 year old, blonde model-like, dog parlour owner every time I take our two poodles in for a cut.

          You never know who is waiting round the corner with some high tech camera ready to catch that compromising moment.

          Also if we go for a walk with our grandchildren I keep well a way from them. My wife can be holding their hands on one side of the road while I just wave to them from the other side.

          You can imagine what my friend Kevin or others I have upset might do with a picture of me looking lovingly down at my six year old granddaughter, especially after the seven year prison sentence Kevin claimed I had been given.

          What got up his nose was a post I wrote in May 2012 in which he was mentioned:noseweek exposes dearjon. A shortened version of it appeared in Noseweek South Africa’s only investigative magazine. Cholwich and his partner in crime Francois Buys had just been exposed on Carte Blanche, the TV investigative channel, as having defrauded numerous people out of a total of more than R100-million with a variety of scams.

          Buys was the only one of the two who had the guts to appear on the show to answer the allegations made against them. The experience evidently proved too much for him because he hung himself a few weeks later. And you don’t do that if you are innocent.

          By coincidence the main thrust of my post was about how I had tried unsuccessfully for years to get the Sunday Times, a paper in your media stable, to stop carrying get-rich-quick advertisements, many of which turned out to be promoting the scams run by Cholwich and Buys. As long as their advertising kept coming in this paper that is promoted as being an expose` publication conveniently ignored their dodgy activities.

          In a different series of posts I also upset the smooth talking Kevin Pearman by shining a light on his shady investment scams. He managed to briefly con Cell C and Telkom into allowing him to sell their services through a network of agents with the only winner being Pearman. He also used the Blue Bulls rugby club logo to promote a scheme that offered unbelievable interest returns. People who invested hundreds of thousands lost it all.

          At one stage Pearman employed Cholwich to sell for him.

          For a long time after my last post about Pearman’s shlenter deals I got anonymous calls on my land line in the earlier hours of the morning. And in an email I saw he blamed me for Buys’ suicide.

          For two years I wrote a hard hitting column Business is Business in the Sunday Times in which I took big business to task for behaving badly. But that was in a different era.

          Things are a lot worse now that anger, spiced with all kinds of lies to attract the most attention, can be easily whipped up in seconds on the internet.

          When you get threatened by a Gupta linked mob surrounding your house journalism is getting more precarious than ever in this Wild South that we now live in.

          Now we have to convince people, especially our wives, close relatives and friends to forget about the old saying: "You can’t believe everything they write in the papers” and replace it with: “Don’t believe anything about me that they put on the internet.”

          You do have the advantage of having a big group behind you. Bloggers like me are on our own.

          Perhaps it’s time for all of us journos to go back to reporting on church fetes and bowls matches

          Happy hunting,

          Regards,

          Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman and Consumer Watchdog.

See these samples:Pay back money? Blue Bulls logo hijacked; telkom scuppers another pearman get-rich-scheme; Cell C conned

P.S. As some of my posts revealed the established media have a lot to answer for on occasions, so they can also be no better than the internet at times. It’s just that it’s a lot easier to find out where to deliver the summons.

P.P.S. Presumably your firm’s new name of Tiso Blackstar is to dispel any notion that it might be financed by that much maligned “white minority capital.”  

While 40 000 Blacks live in 'disgusting conditions' Cape Town keeps spending millions on a rubbish dump site closed 30 years ago

Dear Patricia de Lille, Mayor of Cape Town,

            While 40 000 Blacks live in what the Public Protector Advocate Busisiwe Mkhwebane described as “The most disgusting conditions I have seen in my life” your Council continues to squander a fortune on the site of a rubbish dump closed more than 30 years ago.

            This scandal is compounded by the fact that the Blacks live in the township of Masiphumelele, just a few kilometers away from the controversial dump site next to the popular surfing beach of Witsands. So they don’t have far to go to see how futile the Council’s efforts have been to try and keep the sand in place in an uninhabited wasteland of wind swept dunes.  

            Year after year your Council spends hundreds of thousands on trying to keep the sand in place above what is left of the rubbish. Your officials appear to be obcessed with the notion that our winter rainy season will result in the plastic and other biodegradable material being washed out to sea. So it has just started repeating exactly what proved to be such a failure last year and like last year the first winter storm has flattened or covered kilometres of nets that were erected a little over a month ago.

            That’s another R200 000 or more that has been blown away on top of the R6-million that has already been wasted on this dump over the years. This is all money that could have been used far better to upgrade the facilities at Masi.

            To add to that a huge bulldozer has just spent two weeks moving the sand about and, of all things in the middle of the worst drought anyone can remember, digging a river bed for the small stream that sometimes runs down from the nearby mountain to the sea towards the end of the winter months. At a hire fee of something like R1500 an hour that’s R100 000 or more added to the amount so far rubbished on the dump.

            About this time last year when the stream was running a few centimeters deep and about 10 meters wide an excavator was brought in to deepen it.  But as the sand that covers the area is the finest of powders the trench that was dug just closed up within hours, making this expensive exercise as pointless as everything else. And as soon as the winter was over the strong winds that are endemic to the area closed the river bed so completely that there was no sign of it ever having been there.

            Now this will happen all over again, possibly even before the winter ends because the sand has been piled so steeply on the banks that it is asking to be blown straight back to where it came from. 

The Council stopped answering my questions last year when
I asked it to explain how the contracts were awarded

          The pictures below tell the sorry story of one failure after another.

February 2016 Sand being dumped on area of exposed rubbish. This
was done again within a couple of months after the first lot
was blown away

May 2016 Rubbish exposed after twice being covered with sand and
having nets erected on it to keep the sand in place.

January 2017 The nets have all been blown away & the rubbish is
once more exposed.

April 2017 - Nets erected again this time right on top of the 
rubbish whereas before it was first covered with sand

June 2017 What's left of the nets after the first big storm of the winter

            I can only assume that there must be some reason that is not immediately apparent that would explain why so much of our ratepayer’s money is being repeatedly spent on very expensive methods to keep the sand in place, when they clearly don’t work.

August 2016 Stream being deepened                                              
                                         
                                         

Jan 2017 It's as if there was never a stream there the sand has covered
it so completely

May 2017 The newly dug river bed for the stream that may never come

May 2017 The bulldozer used to make a new river bed & to move the
 sand around 

            This terrible waste just goes on and on with a reckless disregard for the fact that you and your Council are entrusted to spend our money wisely.

            I appeal to you once again to stop this right now.

            Regards

            Jon, a Consumer Watchdog who only wishes his bite was a lot more effective than his bark.

  P.S. See :  cape town's money wasting department

*Note: The first five pictures are of one of the mostaffected areas. But there were other larger sections of the 19ha site further inland that also had nets trashed by the weather and on 14 June 2017 about half a dozen men were digging the nets up and re-erecting them. This was something that should have been done on an 
ongoing basis since the nets were first put up at the beginning of last year. But this was hardly ever done.

Should Margie Orford, patron of children's book charity Little Hands Trust & writer of school books use foul language on Twitter?

Dear Margie Orford,

         I’m all for freedom of speech but I am at a loss to understand why women, particularly female journalists, are so much more likely than men to use the word “fuck” in ordinary conversation and on Twitter in particular. It reminds me of a little kid in a supermarket, who thinks that by shouting out some swear word or other he will shock everyone there into giving him the attention he craves.

         Surely a woman in your position should know better. As an internationally acclaimed journalist; writer and President of  the South African arm of Pen, the organisation that represents writers of the world, it may be acceptable to some for you to publicly use this kind of language, although my feeling is it cheapens your standing.

         But is it acceptable when you also write school text-books and are patron of Rape Crisis in South Africa and the children’s book charity Little Hands Trust?

         I don’t think so, especially when, like the supermarket kid, you are so proud of what you did.
         Readers you be the judge. Here’s our Twitter conversation.

         Regards,

         Jon, the Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman and a Keep Twitter Clean advocate.

P.S. Margie perhaps you would like to be posted on my Sweary Woman’s Wall of Shame. You would probably be the most prominent personality there.
See also:wall of shame; sweary lady rebecca davis
P.P.S. I had a swift reaction to my tweet promoting this post.

     It had me trembling. It took me back to my school days. I imagined the stern telling off I would have got from the headmistress, if I had had one, for saying something like that.
     "Sorry Ma'am, it's just that the use of that word was forbidden in our home when I was growing up."

IT'S A PAYNE WHEN MUM EDITOR LETS HER RACIAL BIAS SHOW

Dear Samantha Enslin-Payne, Deputy Editor of the Business Times,

The titled of your column today (May 14) headed: Inequality: how can we face our children? should have read: How can I face my readers after this?

You wrote how difficult it was to explain to your children that the lives of Blacks in South Africa had hardly changed since the Black majority government came to power in 1994.

To back your line of thinking you quoted from the 2016-2017 annual report of the Commission for Employment Equity. As a journalist in your position I would have thought you would have analysed it in a reasonably unbiased way and not cherry-pick it to suite your own argument.

As this Commission is a Government organisation, one would hardly expect it to be anything other than very pro-Black. And that is certainly reflected in this report to a quite unnecessary extent. 

You quoted Tabea Kabinde, chairperson of the Commission as saying: “Whites, despite constituting only 9.5% of the economically active population, still took the lion’s share of top management positions in the private sector.”

Your story continues with: “Africans, who constitute 78% of the economically active population, account for 10.7% of management positions in the private sector compared to 72 % among whites.”  

Nowhere in your entire column did you mention anything about the colour of those employed in the public sector where a Black Economic Empowerment policy (old time apartheid in reverse) is the norm.

I can understand why you didn’t want to mention that because it pretty well blows your cause completely.

Tabea Kabinde

Perhaps you didn’t see or didn’t want to see that the Commission concluded that Africans hold 74.6% of the top jobs in Provincial Government and 76.0% of those in Local Government. “There is a 33.3% split between African and White males in National Government” we were told. Women evidently don’t count and if you look at a picture of the members in Parliament you don’t get the impression that there are an equal number of Blacks and Whites.

Can colonialism and apartheid be blamed forever for the slow progress of Blacks in our economy? Surely after 22 years of running the country the Blacks must take a lot of the blame for keeping the majority back with things like an appalling education system.

Also it evidently doesn’t bother you that we are still perpetuating apartheid style government by colour coding the entire population so that our rulers know who to give preferential treatment to. As you no doubt saw that report gives figures for Whites, Africans, Indians, Coloureds and Foreign Nationals, with only Blacks being classified as Africans when most, if not all the Whites, Indians and Coloureds were probably born in South Africa making them as African as anybody else.

Many of our problems with nation building will never come right until the Government leads the way by referring merely to “people” without classifying them the way it is doing.

Even though huge operations like the South African Broadcasting Corporation, South African Airways and the Post Office get bailout after bailout from the Government, they are still in deep financial mire.

The private sector has no such limitless backing, yet I defy you to name one large comparable company headed by a White that is in anything like the same kind of trouble.

Talking of the Post Office I am sure you know what colour the man is who has been brought in to save it. Significantly he was put there by our Black Government that wasn’t prepared to uplift one of its own by giving him or her the job.                                                    

There’s hardly anything run by the Government that is not suffering from terrible inefficiency and mind boggling graft. The railways are in a mess with Cape Town’s Metro rail inconveniencing thousands daily by having more delays than running time. Main line passenger trains are no better. They are guaranteed to stop for hours in the middle of nowhere so that passengers never have any idea when they will actually arrive at their destination. Numerous local councils are bankrupt with the Police Service and Eskom’s hierarchy in disarray. Not to mention a President hiding under a huge cloud hoping nobody will notice what he’s been up to, while prominent members of his own party call for him to step down. And that’s just a rough sample.

Oh and whose fault is it that our country has been downgraded to junk status?

These are the areas that the Commission tells us are mostly headed by Blacks so surely we must thank God for that 9.5% of Whites who are keeping the most productive part of the economy on the road. Without them we would all be even further down the drain than we already are and nobody would have a job of any kind.

It would be just as futile then, as you have done, to blame colonialism or apartheid when we know perfectly well what the real cause is.

If your column is an indication of what you are telling your children I think you are misleading them. You neglected to put things fairly in perspective by giving both sides of the story like every cub reporter learns to do at journalism school.

Unfortunately the way things are heading that small percentage of Whites, who are our life line at the moment, might soon disappear altogether. Then we’ll have to see if we are any better off with top management in the private sector being 100% Black. But it will be one hell of a gamble judging by what has already happened in the public sector.

The papers are full of stories about the rich planning their escape to other countries if radical economic transformation means having their properties seized and riots get completely out of hand. The ‘rich’ they are talking about are almost certainly 100% White.

I hope I haven’t whitewashed the seriousness of the situation.

Regards,

Jon, the Poorman’s Press Ombudsman.

P.S. You are in good company when it comes to understanding the Black and White complexities of our employment situation. Advertising in your own paper for a Municipal Manager the King Cetshwayo District Municipality had this to say:

The Municipality subscribes to an Affirmative Action Programme, which is non-racist, non-sexist, non-discriminatory and based on merit.

P.P.S. For readers who don’t know Business Times is the business section of the Johannesburg based Sunday Times. Its Editor Bongani Siqoko certainly hasn’t let the country’s history hold him back. And presumably he’s in that 10.7% of Blacks who have made it to top management in the private sector.

VAN BREDA MURDERS - INCREDIBLE SIMILARITIES TO A SENSATIONAL AMERICAN CASE

Dear Readers,

Henri 

          While the scenes of these two horrific crimes were some 13 000 km apart separated by nearly half a century, and the precise details might have been different, they have an eerie sameness about them that certainly makes one wonder how this could be possible.

          In 2015 20-year-old Henri van Breda was the only person to survive virtually unscathed when his father Martin 54; his mother Teresa 55 and his brother Rudi 22 were butchered around 3.0 am in their luxury town house on the De Zalze Winelands Golfing Estate near Cape Town. Both his parents, brother and sister were hit on the head repeatedly with an axe and Marli 16 had a gash across her throat leaving her close to death. However she recovered after being hospitalised for months, although she still suffers from retrograde amnesia and prosecutors are hoping that her memory of what happened will eventually return.

The Van Breda family in happier times

          Henri, who had a history of drug abuse, had razorblade-like cuts on his chest and a knife wound to the left side of his chest. Medical reports described them as “superficial” and “self inflicted.” All he required was treatment at the scene.

          In 1970 27-year-old Dr Jeffrey MacDonald a Princeton-educated, Green Beret army surgeon was the only person to survive virtually unscathed when his pregnant wife Colette 26 and daughters Kimberly 5 and Kristen 2 were murdered in their home near the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina. Colette, who was expecting a son and her girls, were stabbed multiple times with a knife and an ice pick and were also clubbed on the head.

          Macdonald’s wounds were not severe. He was taken to hospital with minor cuts and bruises to the face as well as a stab wound to the left side of his chest which punctured his one lung. It was described as a “clean, small sharp incision” and he was released after a week.  

          One of DStv’s true life crime channels IDx has been showing The Accused Jeffrey MacDonald in South Africa in the last few weeks. 

          Almost two years after the killings when Van Breda appeared in the Cape Town High Court accused of the murders he claimed his family was hacked to death by a masked, axe wielding man wearing a balaclava, who entered their home in the early hours of the morning. He was in the toilet at the time playing games on his phone. The court was told through his lawyer that he saw the silhouette of the man hitting his brother and father and heard him laughing. His mother and sister were attacked in another room. Henri managed to wrestle the axe from the man who then stabbed him in the side with a knife before knocking him out. Inexplicably when he came round he waited four hours before raising the alarm at the high security complex after first trying to contact his girlfriend. Both the bloody axe and a knife from the kitchen downstairs were found in the apartment. 

          At 3.42 a.m. dispatchers at Fort Bragg received an emergency call from MacDonald who reported a “stabbing.” When four military police officers went to his house in Castle Drive they initially thought they were going to settle a domestic dispute. They found the front door locked and the house in darkness. After no one answered the door they went to the back of the house where they found a door wide open. Inside they were confronted with the gruesome scenes in both bedrooms. 

Colette was lying on the floor in her room with her husband’s torn pajama top draped over her chest. He was found wounded next to his wife. He told investigators that after one of the children had wet his side of the bed he had moved to the living room couch where he fell asleep. He was awakened by the children’s screams and as he got up three men, two white and one black attacked him with a club and an ice pick. A white woman with them was chanting “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” His pajama top was pulled over his head in the scuffle and he used this to ward off the thrust from the ice pick. Eventually like Van Breda he was overcome by his assailants and knocked unconscious. The blood covered murder weapons, an ice pick, a paring knife and a length of timber ripped from Kimberly’s bed were found outside the back door.

          Van Breda’s trial is continuing while MacDonald now aged 73 remains in jail after being sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in 1979.  Van Breda is out on bail of R100 000.

          MacDonald’s story has inspired books; a TV mini series and is the most appealed case in US history. As recently as early this year his lawyers launched another appeal as he has consistently maintained his innocence.

          MacDonald was found not guilty at an army hearing and given an honourable discharge. His father-in-law Freddy Kassab initially believed in his innocence. His undoing was when he made jokes; painted himself as the person who had been wronged and showed complete indifference to what had happened to his family, when he appeared on the The Dick Cavett TV show.

          Kassab was so incensed by his behaviour that he joined forces with an army investigator to file a citizen’s complaint to have MacDonald tried in a Federal Court. In 1975 MacDonald, who had returned to work as a doctor, was arrested and given bail of $100 000.  

          Investigators concluded that an enraged Macdonald killed his wife during an argument and disposed of the children as they could have been witnesses against him. He then stabbed himself to substantiate his story that he was attacked.

          The living room where MacDonald claimed to have fought for his life against three armed assailants showed little sign of a struggle.

          They believed he tried to make it look like a Charles Manson type murder done by hippies by writing “Pig” in blood above their bed. Six months earlier in 1969 the nation had been mesmerised by the story of how the followers of cult leader Manson killed five people including actress Sharon Tate. They wrote the word “Pig” in blood on the walls where the murders took place.

          The prosecution’s reconstruction of what happened in the MacDonald home was fortified still further when they found a copy of Esquire magazine that contained a detailed account of the Mason massacre.

MacDonald as he is today

          In 1991 MacDonald became eligible for parole but refused to ask for it as he believed that would involved him having to show remorse for something he had not done. He finally applied in 2005 because he wanted to live with the woman he had married three years earlier while still in prison. But this was turned down.

He can’t apply again until 2020.

          At the parole hearing Kassab described him as a heartless psychopath who would never admit to butchering his family.

It remains to be seen what the verdict will be for the good looking Van Breda.

Regards,

Jon