OR Tambo International may be Africa's "biggest and busiest" airport for 19million travellers each year, but it is also turning into a corner store for hoodlums.
This week's audacious robbery of hundreds of millions of rands in foreign currency drives the point home. But the raid by a dozen or more criminals is only the tip of a large iceberg.
Alwyn Rautenbach, chairman of the air cargo operators committee, revealed that about 10 robberies occurred last year in the same area of the airport where this week's heist went down.
Four of those, he said, involved robbers in police uniforms, a modus operandi that echoes Tuesday night's raid.
Whether these heists actually involve police officers or whether they are criminals wearing police uniforms is still to be determined, but there is further grist added to this mill in the astonishing claims made in parliament last month by Independent Police Investigative Directorate boss Robert McBride.
He alleged police were at war among themselves for control of drugs confiscated from couriers travelling through the airport and said there had been instances of shooting between police and Hawks officials over it.
The picture this conjures is something that comes straight from a Quentin Tarantino script, but this is no movie.
That police officers may be involved in these crimes is worrying enough, but that's only one dimension.
As arguably the most important entry point to South Africa, security at OR Tambo must be paramount.
The area in which these crimes are taking place allows direct access to aircraft flying across the globe.
That's a gift, not only for heist gangs, but also for global terrorism and that's a risk too great to ignore.
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