Hard-hitting book lays bare a dark network of paid killers in SA

Don't judge Marc Shaw's book, Hitmen for Hire: Exposing South Africa's Underworld, by it's slightly lurid, Carte Blanche-style cover - this isn't a sensationalist piece of true crime writing that takes its readers on a journey through the murky world of movie-style assassins.

Yes, there are interviews with several hitmen and even a hitwoman, but Shaw, who is the director of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime and a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science's International Drug Policy Project, was until recently the National Research Foundation professor of justice and security at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Cape Town.

His book is a research-based, criminological study of targeted assassinations in post-apartheid South Africa and the overlaps between their usage as a means for the enforcement of criminal power and the exacting of revenge and punishment in the underworld.

Based on 1,146 incidents recorded from 2,000 to 2016, the book paints a disconcerting picture of the prevalence of the use of hitmen across a variety of areas, from the taxi industry to political assassinations to the resolution of personal or family disputes and in organised crime.

What emerges is an overlapping network of nefarious figures who draw on readily available, sometimes oversubscribed, pools of men and women who make their living as hired killers.

As Shaw notes, hitmen are engaged in "an unglamorous pursuit" and because they live in a world of extreme violence, they may "also be as vulnerable as their victims".

These are not the international travellers paid millions of dollars and dressed in expensive tailored suits that the movies have accustomed us to but people "drawn from the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum", whose sometimes shockingly low asking prices have led to a market flooded with "inexperienced practitioners of violence" and the lack of atightly organised secret world that assassins occupy in the popular imagination.

Yes, you will find names such as Cyril Beeka, Radovan Krejcir, Victor Palazzolo and leaders of Cape Flats drug gangs in these pages but you will also find a disconcerting portrait of an underworld propped up by relations with corrupt police and other state officials, which has participated in the resolution of political infights and taxi disputes and has ensured that underneath the reconciliatory façade of post-apartheid South Africa is a dark and fear-inducing network that has ensured "the dark hand of assassination stalks the land".

Although some might believe assassinations belong to our past and associate them with the political killings carried out by the apartheid state on its enemies in the 1980s, the truth is they have become a horrible fact of our society and, with a market of buyers and sellers firmly established, it's hard to see how this can ever be reversed.

Perhaps the awareness of the phenomenon that Shaw's book provides is a significant step towards a resolution.

• This article was originally published in The Times.