On a typical Wednesday night of knocking over illegal brewing stands and closing down shebeens, Aaron Nicodemus went on a ride-along with the Hillbrow liquor control unit
Alexander “Big Alex” Kavouras plucks at two carnations with his thick fingers as police cart away R25E000 worth of his liquor . The flowers’ red petals litter the bar and floor of The Safari International Hotel like drops of blood. Kavouras, owner of The Safari, is taking the news of the second raid this month remarkably well. The safe at police headquarters is already filled with R80E000 of his alcohol.
It has been a typical Wednesday night so far for the Hillbrow police liquor control unit, knocking over illegal brewing stands and closing down shebeens. This time, though, they have chosen to tangle with Kavouras, one of Hillbrow’s most notorious and feared operators. The Safari continues to operate without a liquor licence, so police continue raiding it.
When they arrive police gruffly tell the customers to leave, “or you’ll be considered staff, and we’ll arrest you”. The music is turned off and the lights turned up. The place empties fast.
Almost immediately Inspector Vishal Maharaj is handed a silver cellphone by the hotel manager. Big Alex is on the line, and he is not happy.
Police representative Sergeant Kriban Naidoo quickly moves to escort two Mail & Guardian journalists out of harm’s way. “He’s been known to shoot at police officers, I’m afraid [of] what he’d do to journalists,” Naidoo says of Kavouras.
An alleged drug kingpin, Kavouras earlier this year walked away from charges that he killed two of his Safari employees and injured two others in an argument over disco equipment. Several witnesses, who had originally agreed to testify, disappeared and the case against him fell apart.
We head out of the hotel’s lounge and into the breezy night. A security guard patrols the entrance lazily with an aging shotgun. We smoke and talk about Hillbrow.
Over the course of our ride-along with the liquor control unit, police who patrol this section of Johannesburg have called it “Sodom and Gomorrah from the Bible”, “hell on Earth” and “the easiest place to kill someone in Africa”.
There’s a lack of respect for police, laments Naidoo. Even when criminals are caught the justice system spits them back on to the street the next morning. There’s little thanks for getting shot at, night after night. “My wife calls me three or four times a night, just to check if I’m OK,” he says.
Life is not pleasant for a Hillbrow constable on the alcohol beat. Officers pull out their guns four times on this eight-hour shift, once in response to nearby gunfire. They’ve learned to tell the difference between firecrackers and gunshots, between cars backfiring and bombs. Base pay for all constables is R30E000 a year, with excellent benefits, including full medical and in some cases, low-cost housing.
One of the officers at the station has a patch over his eye. What happened? “His wife attacked him with a knife. He lost the eye,” a policeman explains.
The Safari is a far cry from the other watering holes the unit has shut down tonight. One shebeen, a renovated garage with a pool table and festooned with Castle Lager streamers, drew the attention of police after neighbours complained about the noise. Most of the liquor was held in a locked bedroom, which police requested be opened. The owner argued they had no right, this is his home. After discussing the finer points of kicking down doors, an officer kicked the door open on his second try. The shebeen owner nearly cried when his five cases of beer were confiscated.
Police started the night off by breaking up an after-work drinking session in a Killarney park near the M1 highway. Ten men drinking home brew could hardly react before they’d been loaded into an armoured car, their concoction of “off-milk, stale bread and battery acid” merrily dumped onto the pounded soil. Each officer took turns trying to kick the empty plastic bins over the fence on to the grass leading down to the highway.
The Safari is another world. Its sumptuous surroundings – velvet drapes, animal skin wall coverings, African sculptures and polished bar – belie a certain seediness. Prostitutes swarm around the bar, and chasing them away on this slow Wednesday night has proven tedious and difficult.
It doesn’t take long for Kavouras to arrive at The Safari. Surprisingly, he drives himself. Pretending to ignore photographer Nadine Hutton snapping his picture, Kavouras resignedly lumbers into the hotel lobby.
Police have seized more than R25E000 worth of the hotel’s liquor that night, bringing the total for the month to over R100E000. The night would provide an odd scene: hotel employees, at Kavouras’s insistence, help police lug it out the door. Big Alex gives the raid his blessing.
Kavouras is in a good mood, despite the night’s events. He shakes my hand, and I notice how baby-soft his palms are. He motions towards the hotel bar, empty bottles askew, and says, “I’d offer you a drink …”
When he speaks, his voice is calm. “This hotel was in liquidation, and the owners didn’t renew the liquor licence. The hearing is on January 14,” he explains. He suspects these raids have something to do with his pending licence application.
Kavouras praises the Hillbrow police. His eyebrows dance above his eyes like caterpillars being electrocuted, in an attempt to telegraph his real meaning. “They’re doing a very good job, soon they will succeed in cleaning the streets of Hillbrow,” he says. I show surprise, and comment on his magnanimity.
The police are “entitled” to do the raid, he says. “They must do more of these type of raids. By doing these raids, they will kick the people out on to the streets, where they will do better things. Maybe they will walk in the parks or put their dogs out,” he says, now smiling.
“Obviously they have nothing else to do,” he continues. “The manner they come in here, kicking everyone out of this nice hotel, this isn’t the new South Africa. We try to keep this place as clean as possible.”
What happens to all the liquor? “Maybe some people will celebrate the new millennium with it,” he says, clapping me on the shoulder.
He grows pensive. “We’re still crawling in South Africa. When pure democracy comes to light, perhaps it won’t be a crime to sell a bottle of beer.”
Unlike those others caught with illicit liquor, Big Alex, his hotel manager and bartenders are not arrested. They are allowed to pay their bail to police on the spot.
Back at the police station, constables meticulously count every bottle of liquor and beer and mark it in a ledger. Most of the alcohol they’ve collected comes from the two raids at The Safari. Bottles are piled high from floor to ceiling, and the entire room smells of rotting alcohol. One bottle manages to escape the count under the coat of a constable.
In the past 18 months they’ve confiscated and destroyed over R1,8-million worth of alcohol from shebeens and hotel bars trading without licences. They pour the alcohol down a drain behind the station, and take the empties back to the distributor for redemption.
As the liquor count continues a white man enters the station. He’s oddly clad for a night in Hillbrow: a bright Hawaiian shirt, shorts, sandals. He places a loaded pistol on the counter, then a clip of ten bullets, then another. He wants to talk about how he shot out the windscreen of his white Mercedes after someone stole his cellphone. Police want to know why he’s so heavily armed.
“It’s dangerous out there,” he says. “You’d be crazy to drive around without protection.”