In September 2005 Brett Kebble, a prominent South African mining magnate, was killed on a quiet suburban street in Johannesburg in an apparent ‘assisted suicide’. The top-level investigation that followed was a tipping point for democratic South Africa. It exposed the corrupt relationship between South Africa’s Chief of Police, Interpol President Jackie Selebi and his friend, Glen Agliotti, and revealed an underworld dominated by drug lords, steroid-fuelled bouncers, hit men for hire, an international smuggling syndicate, a dubious security unit moonlighting for the police and sinister self-serving sleuths abusing state agencies. It even cost the country’s most senior prosecutor his job.
Indemnified by an agreement struck with the state, Mikey Schultz, Nigel McGurk and Fiazal ‘Kappie’ Smith come clean to Mandy Wiener in exclusive interviews about the chilling events leading up to the night Kebble was shot dead and the life paths of the ‘bungling assassins’. Glen Agliotti, the man once accused of orchestrating the hit, has also provided Wiener with unlimited access to his story, as have other characters whose versions of the events are previously untold.
This true crime tale is set against the fascinating background of political interference at the highest level, a bitter feud between two arms of the country’s law enforcement authorities, a festering police service tainted by dirty cops and the shady relationships between the magnate and aspirant young political turks who were ready recipients of his largesse.
Killing Kebble is not the story of one murder. It’s a gritty, fast-paced chronicle of how one death blew the lid off Johannesburg’s underworld.
Mandy Wiener is an award-winning Eyewitness News reporter. She has been covering this gripping story for five years and has unrivalled access to the main role players.