AFTER I’D heard he’d been arrested for shooting crabs with a .38 special on a beach in Thailand in 2018, I thought about Lior Sa’at for the first time in a while. Then in 2021, the notorious Israeli gangster who terrorized the South African city of Johannesburg in the early 2000s, died in Vietnam.
The story is that he died alone on a gurney in the passage of the village hospital he had been admitted to earlier in the day with breathing difficulties. He was morbidly obese, and the nurses - terrified of coof - hadn’t removed the dirty jeans over which his gut spilled in wavy rolls. On his chest and shoulders hives had broken out which accentuated infected pustules littering his neck. No doctor visited him for over 5 hours. He’d been left with just an old oxygen canister - no painkillers, no IV, and he didn’t possess the energy to adjust an ill-fitting mask. Eventually, a doctor did get to him, noting on his clipboard a ‘smell of sulfur’ and ‘enuresis’. Under the former, the doctor had scribbled ‘brain trauma’ followed by a question mark. Blood was drawn from his limp right arm; once in the tube, it resembled the color of dark tea. Approximately an hour after the doctor had seen him, an orderly wheeling a stretcher past noticed that he appeared to be in a death spasm. Leaning closer, but not too close, the man heard what appeared to be small cracks coming from Lior’s chest, possibly his lungs filling to capacity with fluid. The orderly parked the stretcher then searched for a nurse, but Lior Sa’at, in all his piss and puss and shit, had already died. The nurses at the hospital wanted him ground to ash, quickly, but when Israeli authorities were informed of this, the scramble to avoid his body being cremated began.
Two days after I’d heard this story, I had a dream about him, and I coupled what I remembered to what I imagined.
In the dream he was in hell, obviously, and he was talking to his cellmate. He was telling this person - a slender white man with wispy blonde hair and a thin, pencil moustache who sat on the top bunk smoking, about his life, but not about everything, only about his life in Johannesburg during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Perhaps that was everything.
He told the man about a city disintegrating, rife with hookers and crack and elevator shafts in abandoned, slum buildings used as toilets. He said that he had gone to the suburbs that lay in the shadow of the city - partially under encouragement from Tel Aviv, partially of his own ambition - to frighten the life out of South African Jews - extort them, torture them and - should he deem it necessary - kill them.
He told the man that he went to South Africa because you could no longer torment Jews in Belgium. Antwerp was once the place to do this, but something had happened. He told the story of his childhood friend, Big Moshe, who had gone to Antwerp and for a while succeeded in extorting businesses owned by Hasidic Jews. But one night in 1991 Big Moshe and his accomplice Dror were walking home after they had lifted another 5000 francs off a kosher catering business when a man shouted out to them in Hebrew from across the road: “Hey Moshe! My dear Moshe! I remember you?! How are you?! Wow, can you believe it?!” The man crossed the road and walked toward them excitedly, smiling, with his right hand stretched out disarmingly. Big Moshe was caught off guard: an old friend? Someone from home? But it was happening so quickly he didn’t have time to think, so he just offered his hand, squinting his eyes. The man grabbed it, then quickly stepped to his side: in his left hand was a blade, and he sunk it deep into Big Moshe’s kidneys, then punched twice. Big Moshe fell to his knees almost immediately, and the man eased him down onto his back while looking around: “Shhh…shhh…shhh.” Dror, stunned, could only stare at the man. “Go back to Ramat Gan,” the man told him calmly in Hebrew, “tell your friends not to come.” Dror returned to Israel the following day as the man instructed and spread the word: “Mossad is there now.” So, Lior told the man, it was Johannesburg.
He told the man it was a place without rules or consequences. He explained how he was smart not to attract attention at first, and did so by selling t-shirts at flea markets. Patiently he absorbed stories and ideas from the others who came before; in those early days, he explained, he would laugh whenever someone whispered that he was part of the “Israeli mafia”. There was no such thing, just a group of sadistic criminals, some from the army, some from gangs - all unafraid of violence, gifted with an advanced sense of conflict born of war and panic.
He told the man about his first extortion attempt. Easy. Second, third, and fourth too, and soon he explained, he was driving the latest model BMW at full speed up and down Louis Botha Avenue, past the brothels and drug dens, intimidating other drivers by baring his thick arms out the window. On his car stereo he blasted the latest electronic dance music smuggled into the country from Israel by El Al air hostesses. He had taken steroids in his youth, many, and the steroids had taken his hair - but the look suited the vests and chains he was fond of. He told the man that soon he was shacked up with a “masseuse”, a local blonde woman not bothered about full service if clients were willing to pay. He didn’t mind either, keeping extra wipes and oils and condoms in the glove compartment of the BMW - alongside a stolen 9mm, its serial number filed off. And in the boot, a baseball bat.
He told the man about the first time he used the baseball bat. It was on a man called Shai Avissar. Shai had snatched the title of “leader” from the group of Israelis - but you can’t lead if others aren’t prepared to follow. The man before Shai was called Motti: Motti wound up dead, then it was Shai’s turn. Shai was dealing diamonds without a license, making too many threats and demanding too many favors. One idle Tuesday afternoon, a group of shoppers looked on as Shai was snatched off the street near Norwood’s Pick ’n Pay branch and bundled into a van. In the back of the van Lior beat Shai to death, then drove out of the city to bury him in a shallow grave not far from the infamous Vlakplaas apartheid torture camp.
He told the man that after he’d killed Shai, word got out - and now the Jews were terrified. They were always terrified, he explained, of the organized groups who hijacked vehicles and stole Rolexes, of the random acts of violence that saw little old Jewish ladies being raped and murdered by their gardeners or families chased by marauding gangs as they walked the street on Friday evenings. In the early days of his extortion game, he explained, he had made a number of telephonic threats to Jewish homes. At precisely the moment the family had gathered for dinner.
Then he told the man about the underworld that already existed in Johannesburg, and the inevitable crossover between what he wanted and those who thought the city belonged to them. Ecstasy had arrived in South Africa and was thriving. One particular model of organized crime emerged that intrigued him.
Most of the city’s nightclubs were under the protection of a notoriously violent cartel of bouncers. The cartel had an agreement with the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels biker gang: the bikers would cook the ecstasy, and the bouncers would sell it in the clubs they worked the doors and floors of. He described to the man the kind of people these bouncers were - whites from the south and the east of Johannesburg, the children of poor, itinerant immigrants or mechanics or tow truck drivers, who possessed no education, had grown up surrounded by racial and class loathing and whose values were shaped by the pursuit of respect above all.
The bond they shared with each other, he explained, was supposedly their strongest feature, but in his view, it was also their weakest. The brotherhood was based on mutual identity, tragedy, loss and most importantly, loyalty. They had given each other what they never had - meaning, a more-or-less sense of belonging. Absent of the same, Lior concluded that to take what they thought was theirs would best be accomplished by smashing the lock of the chain they protected it with.
He told the man about some additional complications. The bouncer cartel had an established, transactional relationship with the police. Murders committed at their hands would subsequently not be investigated, or stalled, or the dockets lost. One example was the case of one rival nightclub drug dealer, shot in the throat as he sat in his car in a parking lot. There was no justice for him. Other competing dealers and bouncers were killed, their bodies dumped in lakes or empty mines.
He told the man how his war with the cartel started. Just before the turn of the millennium, a warning came to his attention and with it, an opportunity. At that stage, he was interacting with the cartel, not intimately, but close enough to notice that one of its members became increasingly nervous whenever he saw him. Lior suspected he was talking to the police about him and his suspicions, he explained, were proved correct when he learned that some of the cartel members had led police to Shai’s body in the shallow grave at Vlakplaas.
So he pulled the trigger on his opportunity. Under fictitious pretenses, he lured the nervous man to a deserted petrol station northeast of the city in the early hours of a Monday morning. While the man was sitting in the car waiting for the rendezvous, Lior approached from behind, crept up to the window and shot the man in the side of the head. He described how he stood staring at the blood and hair and shattered glass, admitting that dying on a deserted road, at a paranoid hour, among the skeletal remains of a looted convenience store, was a hopeless way to end.
He told the man about events thereafter. Once the nervous man’s body was discovered, the cartel gathered at the morgue, where they were joined by the police. This signaled for the first time joint consequences and prompted hitherto unknown caution: as easy as it was to pull a trigger, it wasn’t actually necessary, so he explained how he started commissioning assassins he encountered, meeting them in the alleys of Orange Grove, the suburb poised to become one of Johannesburg's next Hillbrows. There were plenty of these ex-paras around - former soldiers from countries as far as Senegal to as near as Zimbabwe - battle-ready, violent, and better trained than members of the South African Defence Force.
He told the man that the execution of the nervous cartel member hadn’t conveyed the message he intended: stop talking to the police about me, I’m not scared of them, hand over your businesses, your networks - and ride off. Or else. So a year after he’d killed the man, he paid a bunch of black ex-paramilitaries to kill another member of the cartel and of all of them, it was this man he wanted to kill the most. He was the craziest.
He told the man that in October 2000, the crazy man was walking toward a nightclub the cartel sold drugs at called Bourbon Street. An assassin crossed the street and shot him three times - in his legs, chest and arms - but the crazy man survived. Already inconsolable from the death of one of their brothers, this failed attempt enraged the cartel.
6 months later, he explained, the crazy man had recovered but still walked with a limp. He was leaving another nightclub - this one called Gecko Lounge, in the Johannesburg suburb of Randburg, and as he walked outside from the club 3 shots rang out. He tried to turn back quickly but was shot again and collapsed. The fourth shot hit him in the back: he was dead before he arrived at the hospital.
He told the man that at this point it was suddenly hot. Too hot. A few days later he tried to cross the South African border into Mozambique but the police were alerted to his escape route and he was arrested. Despite his protestation that he had been illegally rendered, he was transferred back to Johannesburg and held in solitary confinement. Being locked up didn’t bother him. The prison officers were agreeably corrupt, and he paid them to provide him with kosher meals or KFC when he felt like it. For the two months he awaited trial he was treated well by both the officers and fellow prisoners he handed out cash to with abandon. Then came the day of his court appearance.
He told the man that he was climbing into the police vehicle that was to take him from the jail to the court when he noticed the investigating officer - a fat man who had initiated his arrest in Mozambique - talking to someone he recognized. This was danger: the person he saw, with bleached blonde hair and a thick jaw, was the cartel’s most fearless profile. He sat tapping his feet as the vehicle started snaking its way through the city’s lanes before it came to stop at traffic lights. He heard the roar of a motorbike engine, then the crackling and shrieking of tearing metal as the Uzi’s bullets flew into the back of the wagon. An awaiting trial prisoner sitting next to him - a young colored man booked for petty theft from a car - was cut to pieces, his lifeless, slender frame slumped on the floor. He told the man that as the motorbike sped off, he felt a burning sensation on his back thigh. A bullet had grazed his buttocks.
He told the man that he was eventually charged for Shai Avissar’s murder in 1999 and for the next 3 years he’d be held in solitary confinement again as the case labored its way through South Africa’s decrepit justice system. It was for his own protection but despite the attempt on his life he wasn’t convinced he needed it. Testifying against him at the trial would be Shai’s widow, a woman born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who had participated in Shai’s frauds, and was now romantically linked to a Polish gangster in Johannesburg who had built a counterfeit coin machine that was ripping off casinos across the country. The woman herself aspired to be a gangster who claimed to know the infamous Kray brothers of London’s East End - something later jeered as typical Johannesburg hubris - who had smuggled blood diamonds from Sierra Leone and the DRC and been a face in the country's infamous “Black Dollar” scam. He told the man that the woman was a close friend of Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife, that she had also - it was reported - profited handsomely from the sale of illegal hard-core pornography, striking deals with the owners of VHS cassette rental shops who would wrap the contraband in brown paper before sliding it across the counter to customers.
Here, he told the man, he required the kind of solidarity and brotherhood the cartel boasted, that was conspicuous by its absence from his own life. Other Israelis were involved in the widow’s coin scam too and on the periphery was one man just as feared on Johannesburg’s streets as Lior was. This man’s name in South Africa was Amir Moila or David Milner; in Israel, it was Amir Mulner. He was the son of an Israeli policeman, who had army expertise in building small and medium explosive devices - bombs that could fit neatly into a car seat’s headrest. Local prisoners he intermittently shared cells in Johannesburg with were mesmerized by his ability to create IEDs from empty bottles and pens and lighter fluid. Now Lior needed Amir, or David.
He told the man that it was now November 2003 and the widow was driving to court to testify against Lior with a companion when she stopped at an intersection adjacent to the arterial highway leading into the city. A man wearing a yarmulka was standing on the curb looking around, possibly lost. As the woman waited her turn to proceed, the man moved swiftly: from the bag he carried on his shoulder he pulled a gun and fired into the vehicle, hitting the widow in the temple and neck and chest and blowing the fingers off her companion. The widow was dead: Amir or David had given to Lior that which bound his enemies, something he’d never considered valuable.
He told the man that in January 2004, the investigating officer - the fat man he had seen talking to the flamboyant cartel identity the day the prisoner in the vehicle was killed in front of him - died of a heart attack. In this strange, mad place, where there were no coincidences, just illusions of, and no consequences, just bartering, the State against Lior Sa’at was withdrawn. He was free. In March that year - now a spectacle of media intrigue - he was escorted to the Israeli Embassy in Pretoria by 10 vehicles belonging to the Serious and Violent Crime Unit within the South African Police Service. After collecting his travel documents the convoy turned in the direction of Johannesburg International Airport.
He told the man about the journey to the airport. About how the convoy slowed as it approached the international departures terminal lane, and a few moments later he could see 10, 15 then 20 armed policemen holding rifles and wearing helmets and bulletproof vests at the entrance. The car stopped, he explained, and he was hurried through the terminal, where he could feel, he told the man, the presence of the cartel there. Yes, they were there, loitering, perhaps in the sunglasses shops or restaurant area, waiting for an opportunity to kill him. There were many policemen, sure, but there was also something else.
A sense of madness, he explained to the man - madness that makes a man too sad or angry to think or kill, that freezes then haunts him. When he was ushered into another police vehicle on the tarmac to be driven directly to the awaiting flight to Israel, he smiled back at the terminal, to the cartel.
A demon had come from elsewhere, a place they wouldn’t be able to find on a map, and taken from them what they thought they owned. It had broken hearts and friendships, taken an only child from a single mother, and left a trail of blood and bullet casings and hanging, spent oxygen pipes in hospital trauma units. The grief felt by those close to the two cartel members he had murdered was so intense that it would carry through decades of their lives ahead. Some would ink their skin with the memory of their fallen brothers. “I made them mad,” he told the man.
Then Lior explained how nothing else he did after that would ever light the same range of sensations. When he learned that others, in particular Eastern Europeans, had heard about the carnage and wanted scraps for themselves, he wasn’t jealous. Serbian paramilitaries, Bulgarian credit card scammers - even Slobodan Milosevic’s own son Marko - went to Johannesburg to further test South Africa’s addiction to impunity. Some would succeed, others would spend the rest of their lives in filthy jails. It didn’t matter. It had been done.
If there was one regret, he explained to the man, it would have been the years he spent back in Tel Aviv. He had linked up with Amir - now only Amir - who had returned from Mexico - where he had escaped after he murdered the widow. Amir expected loyalty for his role in Lior’s freedom - and begrudgingly, despite not knowing what it really was or how to give it, he lent his muscle as Amir fermented control of the underworld. When Lior and Amir were stabbed at the end of January 2006 in a hotel north of Tel Aviv during a meeting intended to iron out differences between underworld factions, he reconsidered his involvement. These people were different. They weren’t preoccupied by virtue or designs of. You couldn’t make them mad. They were their own demons. So he fled to China.
There was silence in hell’s cell, and the man on the bunk lit another cigarette, nodding his head. He looked down at Lior, smiled, then exhaled a plume of smoke: “I am Gaetan,” the man said in a French accent, “Québécois, flight attendant. And I am ze man who give America ze *Aids.”
*It was initially documented that Air Canada flight attendant Gaetan Dugas was the patient zero of the American HIV/Aids epidemic. In recent years, scientists have argued that HIV/Aids was around long before, and that Gaetan wasn’t patient zero but patient ‘o’.