“We know of dockets that go missing, or are stolen, and we’ve never seen footage of it like I’ve experienced now.” These were the words of superintendent Vish Naidoo, South African Police Service (SAPS) spokesperson for KwaZulu-Natal, when Carte Blanche showed him undercover film of a “would-be docket thief” casually browsing witness statements and crime case evidence at the Phoenix and Durban Central police stations late last year.
The pictures were publicly aired on M-Net’s Sunday night investigative journalism programme in November 2004. Near the end of the 10-minute insert, after questioning senior officers and a disgruntled public prosecutor, presenter Devi Sankaree Govender returned to the informant known as “Devan”, who revealed that “the price tag on a disappearing docket ranges from R500 on a drunken driving charge to hundreds of thousands in high profile fraud cases.”
The allegation of police corruption was not denied by superintendent Naidoo. He admitted to the camera that he had personally taken calls from suspects that had been offered dockets, at a price, by members of the SAPS.
The insert, called “Stealing Dockets”, won producers Julie Kelly and Nicky Troll the Television General News prize at the CNN/Multichoice African Journalist 2005 awards. Govender’s presentation and interview technique may have been near flawless, but it was these two women who had put the entire piece together – everything from initial contact with the informant to the research, scriptwriting and camerawork.
“The informant was high up in the SAPS hierarchy,” says Troll. “He had decided he had enough. We were doing another shoot and he pulled us aside to come chat. He told us exactly where to go; the two biggest police stations, Phoenix and Durban Central. He gave us all the information on how much you could buy dockets for.”
Again, good informants are less than half of it. While “Stealing Dockets” stands out for having won the high-profile award, it was one more in a growing list of courageous exposés produced by the women. Another is “Licence to Kill 2”, a follow-up to a story Kelly had worked on in 2000 concerning corruption in driving licensing centres across South Africa. The piece, aired in March 2003, also used an undercover operative – this time to catch driving instructors taking bribes for licences at the Rossburgh testing centre just outside Durban.
To date, Kelly and Troll have worked together on 20 stories of this type, all produced under exclusive contract for Carte Blanche. The stories have taken them anything from 8 months – as with the licensing corruption piece – to a couple of days to complete. “Sometimes we get a story on a Tuesday and it’s on air on Sunday,” says Troll.
At 23, Troll has been with Kelly (35) since 2002, when she began as a trainee. She was asked to stay on at Kelly’s production outfit, First Edit, after completing her national diploma in journalism through Natal Technikon. “Nicky gave life back to our company,” says Kelly. “You know how it can get in journalism, sometimes you get tired.”
But of all their stories, and no matter how fatigued they might get, it’s probably the “Gumtree Gang” that Kelly and Troll will never forget. “It was the first time I realised how dangerous this job can be,” says Kelly.
A three-part story that the pair began working on in late 2003, the series uncovered the scam of a group of appliance repairmen located on Gumtree Avenue in Durban. What this gang did, according to the script of “Gumtree Gang 3”, aired in February this year, was “con consumers into believing they were accredited repairers by listing themselves repeatedly in Telkom’s White Pages under various well known appliance brand names.” They would then charge their victims exorbitant fees for fixing appliances, and “even charged for work not done”.
The script continues that the outfit were “guilty of sabotaging appliances, as we [Carte Blanche] found out when they put an old rusted heating element into our washing machine and they gave us the original working element back as the damaged bit.”
So, deciding to query one of the gang’s dodgy quotes face-to-face, Kelly, Troll, an “undercover customer” and three more members of the production crew arrived at the shop in Berea. One of the gang politely invited the crew inside, which was taken to mean he wanted to avoid a scene on the street.
Within seconds the crew were locked in a room and beaten with fists and metal pipes. “The one guy smoked the whole way through,” says Troll. “The other guy took out his false teeth and then started beating us up.” She adds that Kelly “went on filming right through.”
The script then explains that the crew managed to make it to the front gate, but the assault continued. “Furious that one of the cameras was still rolling, George [a Gumtree Gang member] attacked, chasing the Carte Blanche camerawoman up the road, before pinning her to a bus-stop pole. And when our fridge expert, Ben, tried to help, George hit him, splitting Ben’s head open.”
The Carte Blanche crew have laid a charge of attempted murder, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, and damage to property. “If the word goes out that you can beat Carte Blanche journalists and get away with it, then other journalists will become targets too,” says Kelly.
The SAPS, however, seem to have been far from helpful. According to Troll, the police on the scene initially refused to arrest the assailants, so the crew “stood there until they were put into the van.” Kelly explains that for months nobody heard from the investigating officer, and that, ironically enough, “there was information missing from the docket.”
The emotional toll only hit Kelly four months later. “I broke down one night while I was having a drink with a friend. It’s quite a strange reaction.” Kelly has two young children, which, she says, is worrying. “But they are so proud, and they are great little storytellers themselves, I might add. They watch my work and say, ‘ooh, mom, what a shocking shot’. My daughter asks, ‘mom, why’s that guy lying?’ They know, they pick it up.”
So there is no indication that Kelly or Troll will be looking for safer work any time soon. In Durban they’re known fondly (and sometimes not so fondly) as “the girls from First Edit,” a point Kelly brings up in response to a question about the advantages of being a female in this game. Troll expands: “People tell us stuff. It’s easier for women to win people’s trust. We tell stories well because we get close to the people involved.”