OFF THE WIREBy WARDA MEYER and INVESTIGATIONS STAFF 
The modus operandi used in the assassination of underworld kingpin Cyril Beeka last week was perfected by a Cape Flats gang over 10 years ago.
Beeka, 49, died in a hail of bullets from a passing motorcycle on Modderdam Road near the University of the Western Cape in the late afternoon of March 21. His killer has not been apprehended.
The police have meanwhile received information about a motorcycle being mysteriously resprayed at a tikhouse - the address and gang affiliation are known to Weekend Argus - shortly after Beeka’s killing.
Police investigators and Cape Flats residents recalled last week how, in the course of a gang war that tore through the Cape Flats in the late 1990s, street gangsters battling the 28s prison-based gang used souped-up motorcycles - with an assassin, brandishing a submachine gun, riding pillion - to perform hits on their rivals.
“Back then most of the attacks were perpetrated by members of (a particular gang known to Weekend Argus) on their ‘super bikes’,” a seasoned police investigator said.
“They were experts in executing drive-by shootings from their motorbikes.”
Bosnian businessman Sasa Kovacevic, the driver of the BMW X5 Beeka was travelling in, took a single bullet to the chest but survived. He has been discharged from hospital but has yet to speak to the media about the events of the day.
At the time of the shooting, Beeka was returning from a meeting with Jerome “Donkie” Booysen, one of three brothers who led Belhar’s Sexy Boys gang in the 1990s and earlier 2000s.
While former top dog Michael Booysen is in prison serving a life sentence for murder, a third brother Colin was recently released from jail.
A former employee of the City of Cape Town’s department of housing, Jerome Booysen in recent years came to light as a partner of Atlantic Seaboard millionaire businessman Mark Lifman, especially in property dealings, and was also associated with Ukrainian one-time professional wrestler and Beeka associate, Yuri “the Russian” Ulianitski. Lifman and Ulianitski were partners in Cape Town strip clubs and alleged brothels, notably The Castle in the city centre.
Ulianitski was killed in a yet-unsolved drive-by shooting in Milnerton four years ago.
Booysen said his last conversation with Beeka was friendly and about, among other things, property dealings and bar stools.
Last year when Ulianitski’s widow challenged the disposal of assets jointly held by her husband and Lifman, she called on Beeka to provide close protection and, according to gangland sources, a sustained standoff followed between Beeka’s muscle - drawn mainly from Pro Access Control, the bouncer company he launched and in which he continued to have an interest - and hard men allegedly connected to the Sexy Boys.
Mainly, however, the bad blood came from a series of gangland challenges in recent years to Beeka’s decade-long control over security and related rackets in Cape Town’s nightclubs.
After the emergence of Beeka’s Pro Access Control bouncer operation and connected guarding outfit Red Security in the mid-1990s, and in the face of mounting tensions with the Cape Flats and prison gangs, a Mafia-style gangland summit, documented by crime intelligence operatives, was called in the winelands.
The result was a carving up of turf, with Beeka acknowledged as “godfather” of the city’s nightclubs. As part of the trade-off, the Hard Livings, Americans and other Cape Flats gangs agreed to focus instead on their own territories, but with the proviso that they would be given exclusive control over the city’s drug trade - via “approved” dealers known to the bouncer network.
Around the middle of the last decade, however, particularly after the move of Beeka to Gauteng - in the face of investigations into his activities by the now-defunct Scorpions - this underworld arrangement came increasingly under threat. Initially the challenge was focused around a rival bouncer outfit, providing protection at clubs in Durbanville’s Edward Street and - much to Beeka’s chagrin - at certain venues in Sea Point.
More standoffs followed: Beeka and his private bouncer army on one side, and the rival bouncer outfit, allegedly backed up by the Sexy Boys, on the other. Tensions have continued to simmer, and in the last years of his life, Beeka was on a virtual treadmill between his activities in Gauteng and managing the situation in the Cape.
Recently, however, the stakes, sources close to Beeka said, rose higher.
Jerome Booysen, though this could not be confirmed by the time of going to press, is said to have acquired interests in a club in Manhattan Plaza, and members of the Sexy Boys are reportedly increasingly visible in the area.
To further thicken the intrigue, over the past two or three years, security analysts noted that the notorious Americans gang was moving in on Beeka’s traditional club heartland in Long Street.
And to make things worse, particularly via a chain of poolroom bars, Nigerian and Tanzanian entrepreneurs have been building their own lucrative drug markets. The result has been a noticeable spike in the availability of tik and other hard-edged drugs on the entertainment strip. - Sunday Argus
warda.meyer@inl.co.za
