Отрывок из книги
The layout of this digital edition of Gang Town may differ from that of the printed version, depending on the settings on your reader. The layout displays optimally if you use the default setting on your reader. Readers can experiment with the settings to have the book displayed differently.
You were ever present here.
.....
There are, however, groups of a different stripe also defined as gangs. The ruthlessness of just one of these was outlined in the National Prosecuting Authority’s case in 2012 against George ‘Geweld’ Thomas, a ‘shooter’ and head of a street faction of the 28s prison gang in Bishop Lavis. Thomas was imprisoned in 2008, awaiting trial with 18 others for murder, attempted murder, housebreaking, theft, drug dealing, unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition, intimidation and incitement to commit murder. The gang’s alleged focus was smuggling abalone and drugs.
According to the NPA, in the five and a half years preceding Thomas’s trial, which began in 2014, 21 people were killed at his behest, 12 of them state witnesses who agreed to testify against him. The ‘hits’ – many of them on a rival gang, the Clever Kids – were allegedly directed from his prison cell. From there, according to evidence and in defiance of prison rules on cellphone access, he made thousands of calls. Other deaths were inflicted upon members of Thomas’s own gang. These men were killed, it was alleged, to ensure their silence. According to a witness, in one of the hits before his arrest, Thomas sat in the back of an open truck with a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight and silencer while two henchmen in the front handed him ammunition as he fired at ‘enemies’. Prosecutors and investigating officers handling his trial were assigned bodyguards after receiving threats. Thomas, who had spent 21 of his 44 years in prison, told journalist Caryn Dolly he joined the 28 prison gang for protection but wanted to be a pastor.4 The presiding judge, Chantel Fortuin, said ‘the awful conditions in which he and 16 fellow accused lived before being imprisoned could not be used as an excuse for murder’ and noted that he used prison as his headquarters in a frenzy of killing. She handed Thomas seven life sentences.
.....
