Listen to the story, here:
Subscribe for free future episodes: iono.fm | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Player.fm
It was February 2014 and Hawks warrant officer Johan Combrinck received a tip-off through Interpol that Bulgarian men were constructing a large drug lab in a mansion in the Cape Town suburb of Durbanville.
On the evening of February 24 Combrinck parked his car opposite the house and conducted a stakeout.
The smell of sulphur hung in the air, a sign to Combrinck of the presence of chemicals used for processing drugs.
In the house, Combrinck could see movement. Then a man wearing a hazmat suit and gas mask appeared. It was the same equipment Combrinck and his men used to protect themselves from hazardous chemicals when they destroyed drug labs.
The next day Combrinck and his Hawks colleagues arrive at the house with a court order. They knock on the door. The man who opens it introduces himself as Asen Ivanov.
The Bulgarian national is the same man who smuggled a tonne of cocaine into SA through the port of Saldanha Bay seven years later.
The Hawks find bundles of cash, some of it in an Audi Q7. He claims to own the Audi, but a TimesLIVE Investigation would later discover that at the time the Audi belonged to another Bulgarian man called Momchil Pavlov, who had been a resident of SA for some time.
Pavlov, believed to be a middleman for the Bulgarian mafia in SA, has his own chequered history with the SA authorities.
It’s unlikely that Ivanov happened to be in possession of Pavlov’s vehicle without his knowledge.
Pavlov told TimesLIVE Investigations he is a car salesman and that the vehicle may have been in the process of being sold to Ivanov.
Car ownership records show the car was never transferred to Ivanov’s name, and instead was sold to an insurance company.
TimesLIVE Investigations would later also come to learn that Pavlov was in possession of a fake SA identity which the department of home affairs confirmed was linked to his biometrics on the home affairs database.
The link between Ivanov and Pavlov is significant because it draws a link between international drug smuggling and a Bulgarian syndicate entrenched in SA which police investigators previously believed to be mostly involved in large-scale credit card fraud, abalone smuggling and human trafficking.
In the third episode of the Cape of Cocaine podcast we uncover the Bulgarian mafia in SA and look at how an illegal drug operation in 2014 blossomed into a huge cocaine smuggling syndicate seven years later.
TimesLIVE
Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.