The Paparas hashish trial represents the first courtroom test of evidence and witnesses gathered under the Scorpions’ Bad Guys project, the investigation that ultimately led to the arrest of police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi.
Plea bargain deals have garnered an impressive array of accomplice witnesses — and two in particular will be crucial to the forthcoming case against Selebi:
Glenn Agliotti, the so-called ”Landlord”, smuggler and good friend of the national commissioner; and
Clinton Nassif, the security company boss and South Jo’burg hardman.
Key attack angles for the defence will be the way in which Agliotti and Nassif have attempted to downplay their roles — chiming with Scorpions’ prosecutor Gerrie Nel’s strategy of portraying accused number one, Stefanos Paparas, as the real kingpin.
Questions will be raised about whether Agliotti was really just a smooth-talking middleman — and not a criminal mastermind — and whether the hashish bust that netted Paparas and company was the only time Nassif was involved in a drug deal — as Nassif claims.
The answers will be important for this case, but critical to assessing whether prosecution deals with Agliotti and Nassif were justified in the interests of trying to nail Selebi.
Defence lawyers in both cases are likely to highlight contradictions apparent in the evidence available in the Paparas case.
For instance, in a statement prepared as part of his plea agreement, Agliotti goes so far as to claim that he was unaware of the ”Landlord” nickname and that this was a fiction created by Paparas and the man who blew the whistle on the hashish deal, freight hauler Anthony Dormehl.
He says they exaggerated his reputation to intimidate international drug smuggler Robert Lottman (alias Bob Curtis).
Agliotti says: ”I believe that Steve Paparas, Bob Curtis and Dormehl used the term ‘Landlord’ between themselves without my knowledge or approval, so much so that Dormehl and Paparas extorted the sum of R75  000 from Curtis, claiming that the Landlord needed this money for some or other reason which is not clear to me — This was clearly extortion as I never requested this — ”
But Curtis/Lottman, in his witness statement, paints a rather different picture of Agliotti. He says that in 2002 he, Paparas and Agliotti were involved in the export of seven tons of dagga to Antwerp, where it was stolen by crooked customs officials.
”This caused hostility between Agliotti and me. He accused me of selling the goods on my own and by doing so, ripped him off.”
Lottman says he arranged to have a meeting with ”the Landlord” about the missing money that was to have been generated by the Antwerp deal. He was picked up by Paparas and taken to a plot in Springs.
”Stefanos Paparas then got on a cellphone with Glenn Agliotti and reported to him that they had me on the plot. Agliotti then gave instructions that I was to be detained at the plot — ”
Lottman was locked in the back of a truck. Later he claims he spoke to Agliotti on the phone: ”I explained to Agliotti that I did not have money; that nobody received any money on the deal because the customs people stole everything. Agliotti then told me to get somebody who can bail me out with the money and that I was going to be detained until such time as he had his money.”
Lottman claims he later escaped and fled the country.
According to statements from both Lottman and Dormehl, Paparas later used the Landlord’s fearsome reputation to cheat Lottman out of money he had advanced for a subsequent hashish shipment.
Meanwhile Nassif, in his plea agreement, claims the assistance he gave Agliotti in relation to the final hashish consignment was ”limited and prompted by a situation enforced on the accused by virtue of a long-standing friendship”.
He claims Agliotti originally said the shipment he wished to store at Nassif’s warehouse, T-Bond, consisted of smuggled cigarettes, not drugs. Nassif says he did not want the drugs to be at T-Bond.
However, Nassif’s right-hand man, Mauro Sabbatini, has suggested in his witness statement that Nassif was ”more involved than he led me to believe” and that Nassif’s concern about removing the hashish from his warehouse emerged only after customs officials had started making inquiries.
Agliotti claims that when Nassif discovered the shipment was hashish ”he was not alarmed and said it was fine as long as we could make money out of it”.
Nassif’s long-time odd-job man, Mohammed Mazibuko, goes even further, alleging Nassif had instructed him to smoke a sample of the hashish to test its authenticity.
Whose hash was it anyway?
That’s the question defence lawyers for Stefanos Paparas, his elderly father Dimitrio and ”transport man” Stanley Poonin asked Bob the American during cross-examination on Thursday.
Robert Lottman, code name ”Bob” of the Scorpions’ operation Bad Guys, entered his second day in the Germiston Magistrate’s Court’s witness box after testifying on Wednesday how the accused allegedly helped him to transport, package and store a two-ton consignment of hashish en route to Europe.
Giving evidence, Lottman said his ”friends” in Pakistan asked him to help get the hashish via Durban to Antwerp in Belgium.
Advocate Sita Kolbe, for the defence, pointed out to Lottman that he had previously said in an affidavit he had ”purchased” the hashish.
On Thursday he denied this, saying the person who took his statement made a mistake ”or I had misspoken”.
He then denied knowing the drugs’ owners, but when pushed by Kolbe, said he knew only their faces and first names. ”I’ve known them for a long time,” Lottman said.
Kolbe wanted to know why he hadn’t provided this detail to the Scorpions. He wasn’t asked for it, Lottman testified. ”Why not? Isn’t that strange?” the advocate asked, to which Lottman responded: ”They [the Scorpions] were only concerned about arresting people here [in South Africa].”
This would please the Scorpions’ detractors, who have long argued that the unit was so hell-bent on getting to police chief Jackie Selebi that they let off other major international drug dealers in the process.
Kolbe also lashed out at the unit for not tracing the consignment of hashish from the Durban harbour. ”We have the country’s elite investigating unit investigating the matter, but they couldn’t even trace the arrival [of the hashish in Durban],” she said.
Lottman confirmed that he understood Glenn Agliotti, and not Stefanos Paparas, to be ”The Landlord”. — Adriaan Basson and Linn Davis
More Al Gore than Tony Soprano
If nothing else, Robert Lee Lottman aka Lesley Curtis aka Bob the American, smashed my idea of what a multinational drug dealer should look like.
Dressed in a blue striped Pringle shirt, tucked into black Woolies-style chinos, Lottman looked more like a private school dad at a school fete as he testified in one of the country’s biggest drug cases.
Operation Bad Guys aims to bring down a powerful multinational crime syndicate involving low-life figures, gangsters and a police chief.
Bad Guys has resulted in Lottman receiving a ”get out of jail early” card after he entered into a plea bargain with the Scorpions two years ago in exchange for his testimony against the man formerly known as ”The Landlord”, Glenn Agliotti.
On Wednesday morning Lottman stepped into the scruffy witness box of the run-down Germiston Magistrate’s Court to testify against his alleged fellow drug mates, Stefanos Paparas, his father Dimitri Paparas and Stanley Poonin.
Lottman looked immaculately — out of place. I started to wonder if I could be at the wrong trial. Surely this couldn’t be Bob the American?
Even when he started to talk, Lottman sounded more Al Gore than Tony Soprano. That was his tone, but the substance of what he told the court was decidedly Sopranos.
”I explained to him that I had some friends with hashish in Pakistan who wanted to ship it through South Africa to Europe. Steve said it was possible,” Lottman told magistrate Deon Snyman, who often looked like an amazed spectator of the drama playing out in front of him.
Even when Lottman testified how good the hashish he was trafficking tasted he remained as calm and composed as if telling his wife what a nice cup of tea he just had.
Referring to his ”colleagues” in the same ”business”, Lottman made the organised drug world sound like just another industry with the same issues of betrayal and trust ”clean” mortals struggle with daily.
No shoot-outs, cigars or screeching tyres. Very unsexy TV indeed. — Adriaan Basson