The Most Insane Prison Gang Ever: South Africa's Numbers Gang
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August 1978 in South Africa. A jailhouse murder trial. The victim being a young inmate. The man had been killed in December of 1977. The night before he's killed, he's moved to a big communal cell in the prison. South African prisons are no joke, especially during the brutal apartheid era. Murder is dealt out like it's nothing, usually by one of the secretive factions of the so-called "numbers gang."

The 26s, 27s, and 28s run things inside through a rigid system of control where every aspect of a member's life is dictated through their archaic rules. And if you're not a member, you're a victim. They're actually three separate gangs, but also part of the same gang. It's weird and a little hard to parse.

This man moved to a communal cell. He's not a member. And the following morning, guards find him under his blanket, his throat slit, and his body disemboweled. Three prisoners out of the other 17 in the cell are found smeared in blood. Two of those three with finger injuries. Pretty cut and dry, no? But the two with the injuries plead not guilty, that they didn't do anything. They're sentenced to death.

As Johnny Steinberg writes in his 2005 book, The Number, the other 14 are questioned and give haphazard testimony about what's been going on in the prison, the brutal treatment they're receiving from the guards, and about how all the prisoners are going mad.

What actually comes out during the trial shocks the country. It turns out the three big prison gangs in South Africa who control every prison in the country had a joint council and decided an informant needed to die. Any informant, just to send a message. This young man was said to be spying on them, so he had to be killed.

All the testimony given by all the witnesses and other inmates during the trial, it's all been scripted and dictated by the numbers gangs leaders. They exercise total and complete control over everyone. They didn't just decide who was to die. They decided who would kill him, who would testify, what they would say, down to the word. So total is their control, so brutal the punishment for disobeying them, that everyone must listen.

It soon starts to become clear that this entire thing was a setup, so the inmates could get on the stand during the trial and treat it like a press conference to air their grievances. Before social media, in a state where everything was controlled, the witness stand was their only platform. This murder had signified the end of a three-year war in the prisons from 1974 through 1977, where the 26s fought the 28s for total control.

Technically, they're not even allowed to speak to each other, and the 27s must act as intermediaries and go-betweens. The three gangs had met in their council to end the war, and actually chose a prisoner at random as a sacrifice. And the two who killed them, chose them to take the rap? They were 27s, whose main purpose is actually to keep the peace between the 26s and 28s by, quote, "...righting wrongs," which usually involves violence."

The 27s had failed their mission leading to the war, so they had to make a sacrifice.

All of this is part of the insane arcane rituals that have governed South Africa's brutal numbers gangs and with them the entire prison system for nearly a century. And only in recent decades, with the drug game expanding like crazy, has that violence spread outwards to the streets. And with it, some of the secrets of the feared and brutal numbers gangs. This is the Underworld Podcast. ♪

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Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, a journey through the international underworld and the criminal elements that operate in it around the globe from past, present, and future, brought to you by two journalists who have reported on these issues and peoples for a long time in many, many places. I'm one of your hosts, Danny Gold. I'm joined, as always, by Sean Williams, who dropped a bombshell last week, which we'll get to in a second.

As always, first up, bonuses and support and ad-free episodes at patreon.com slash underworldpodcast. Or you can sign up on Spotify or iTunes. Email us at theunderworldpodcast at gmail.com. Merch at underworldpod.com. You know, shirts, mugs, and all that. We've heard all the complaining. We're going to have less ads.

And come Christmas, Sean is just going to have to explain to his child that the reason he only got a single sock as a present is because some guys who get a free show complained about having to listen to one more ad about, I don't know, a meal kit or whatever. So much. They complained so much and so annoyingly that we just gave in. So...

I don't know. Good luck, Sean. Hope he understands that. I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, he's going to learn about all kinds of cool things. Now I'm going to teach him freeganism, homemade clothing, how to make a home from scrap metal, how to process a divorce paper. Yeah, it's going to it's going to put his in his chest. Also, big story. Well, time to our last episode. I think it came out the night before the episode dropped.

Former President Duterte was rounded up and arrested by the ICC. Sean, I mean, you were just in the Philippines working on this story. Did you have any idea that this was coming? None. None at all. Which means possibly that it was kept a really good secret or that I'm not a good journalist. But I've got a dispatch out for New Lines Magazine from Davao, which is like the city where Duterte is from, if you listened to last week's show. And...

Everyone there was like, well, it might happen in like six to 12 months. If it happens at all, not sure they've got the metal for it. But he's actually, this is one thing that I don't think has been reported in the news yet. He's still running to be mayor of that city. And he probably will like,

run for that vote in may like in a in a cell in the hank which actually for the philippines is not the weirdest one because they've got a guy who's like a religious cult leader who's actually in prison right now and is running for office and that's not against the rules in the philippines uh so that is pretty wild america's america's greatest mayor buddy cianci

I'm pretty sure he either ran while he was still locked up or he had gotten off and then ran and won. That's good. And he's America's greatest mayor of Providence, Rhode Island. So, you know, we can't really criticize if Duterte is still running, even though he's being prosecuted for whatever. Crimes against humanity. Yeah. Speaking of crimes against humanity, I am back from Mexico, which was wonderful. Oaxaca. But.

Wild news out of there. First off, they found a death camp, which maybe we'll get into in a bonus. Really just horrific stuff. And also near where I was, nine quote unquote students got found murdered with their hands cut off, which gruesome. But a later story emerged that was actually it was a gang of thieves.

But had received permission to apply their trade in a vacation town an hour from where I was called Hulthalco. Permission from a guy who did not run that area. And the gangs controlling that area, I'm not sure which cartel or if they're just cartel affiliated. They make their money from the drug trade from retail to tourists. So they do not like people going in that area and causing mayhem, making it feel unsafe for tourists.

So they, um, unfortunately got, uh, got dealt with in a very rough, rough way. It is, it is rough out there. Yeah. So what you're saying is Sharia law is okay if it's in Mexico. Yeah. I'm just saying that, uh, you know, the, the, the cartels it's, they actually work very hard to, uh,

Keep the tourist areas safe. I mean, there's been some... Yeah, that's where they're making their money, right? Well, in retail sales, right? And they're washing their money, even though that area doesn't have a lot of resorts. That was the big thing with Cancun and Playa del Carmen and Tulum. There was some violence kicking off there seven or eight years ago, and it was unheard of because they don't want to threaten those areas. And then Acapulco, which used to be the tourist destination 20, 30 years ago...

fell prey to a bunch of different gangs because there was no controlling cartel and that sort of went downhill as well. But generally, both the government and the cartels want to protect tourist areas. So what I'm trying to say is,

Go to Oaxaca, man. It's awesome. I mean, the city, Oaxaca City is great. The coast is amazing. Puerto Escondido will probably be ruined within five years. So I would go there now if you can. I actually learned some interesting stuff about how things operate there as well. But we'll probably save that for a stash house bonus. All right. So you were doing a bit of journalism out there. I thought it was just you like petting the player pedals and doing drugs with college kids or something.

Didn't do drugs, did drink a lot of mezcal. So, you know, we do grow up. We do grow up. Okay. South Africa. I think it's the second episode we've done on them in four years. You know, the country has an insane crime problem, so we probably should be doing more on that. I've already got a few more lined up because it is, it's wild there. You know, Cape Town is frequently...

In the top 10 cities in the world when it comes to the murder rate. I think it's the only one not in Latin America or the Caribbean, if I'm not entirely 100% sure on that, but close. It's a great city, though. Have you ever been there? No, I'd love to go there. I actually was going to move there for like three months. Had a plan with someone in 2018, but then, well, yeah, I got divorced. Anyway, let's move on. Hey, it happens. I mean, I was there at the end of a four-month trip down the East Coast on the Tour d'Afrique trip.

Oh, man. Wow. Look that up. T-O-U-R-D-A-F-R-I-Q-U-E.com. Go on those tours or expeditions, I guess you would call them. It rules. But yeah, it's an incredible city, incredible nature, incredible nightlife, incredible people. But yeah, incredibly high rate for violent crime, the country as well.

Obviously, you've got the fallout from apartheid still having an effect. You've got incredibly vast and poor slums. You've got organized crime, significant corruption with police and politicians, drug transshipments point and big drug retail sales, lots of guns, street gangs, international mafia players, and all that. And I think in our first episode on South Africa, you covered all the insane political corruption, right?

Yeah, like the really high-end stuff that's kind of crippling the economy on the top end. But yeah, this is like another world, right? Yeah.

And of course, you have the prison gangs that emerged from the brutal world of apartheid-era prisons. I'm not going to go through the whole history there of apartheid and everything that comes with it. You guys know what it is. But one important thing to understand is racial distinctions in South Africa. Of course, black, white, easy. But there's another category called colored, and it's not like the outdated term in the U.S. It means people of mixed racial heritage, usually socialized.

Some Malaysian heritage, Indian, Portuguese, as well as black tribes and European sort of all mixed together. It is a distinct racial category there. I remember being there and having a little bit of a hard time understanding that. And the numbers gangs are primarily made up of so-called colors. During the apartheid era, they were separated from the whites and the blacks and suffered under the system, but were treated, I think, a little bit better than black Africans.

Okay, are we having fun yet with all this? We haven't even gotten into the sexual policies debate among the numbers gangs, but we're definitely going to get demonetized on this one. Yeah, I mean, I like where we are compared to any other podcast anyone listened to that says,

hey guys, the one thing you've got to learn about is racial distinctions in South Africa. Right. We are not going to go down that hole. No, no. This is specifically for the gang distinctions. But the numbers gang themselves...

It's one gang, but it's also actually kind of three separate gangs that have a whole system of operating with each other, which is weird and convoluted because it essentially seems like one big gang umbrella, but they've also fought incredibly brutal battles against each other. And the 26s aren't even allowed to speak to the 28s and vice versa. Those are the three gangs, the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s. The whole thing is messy, but we're going to start at the beginning before we get into the nitty gritty.

The gang is typically said to have formed in the late 19th century, early 20th century. Now, South Africa then is under British colonial rule until 1910, but it still has that very harsh racial segregation in that era. The country has a massive gold rush after gold is discovered near the city of Johannesburg in 1886, and you get everything that comes with a big mining discovery. You've got people flocking there from all over, lawlessness, labor camps for the poor miners,

And the whole region is being transformed as money and people pour in. Well, money pours in for some. The ones doing all the hard labor and not really profiting off of it, in fact, many were forced into it, are the black Africans and the colors. You also have tensions between the British and the Boers, who were the descendants of Dutch settlers and called Afrikaners. This actually leads to a war in 1899 that lasts for, I think, three or four years, yeah? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And if anyone like me would rather get their 19th century history through movies, there is actually, I think it's an Australian one called Breaker Morant with Edward Woodward. It was about one of Britain's first war crime cases. And it was during the Boer War, which, you know, it's kind of funny that the Brits took until 1899 to do a war crime officially. But yeah, it's a good film.

Yeah. Speaking of which, out of left field, but I was watching it all night. House of David, dude, if you want to learn some, actually, it's probably not biblically accurate, but great show on Amazon Prime, dude. I'm getting super into it, man. Anyway. I've never heard of it. There's my recommendation. So you have the emergence of the racial divisions and segregation policies that are going to lead into apartheid. Regulations so strict that blacks and colors are then thrown into an incredibly brutal prison system for minor infractions.

The Numbers Gangs form during this period of industrialization around Joburg and the city of Durban as well. Now, the Numbers Gang is particularly steeped in this sort of mystical, magical lore about its origin story that is wild and cult-like, but we're going to do the real story and then we'll get into the lore.

With the gold rush and all the people and money and industry flying around Joburg, bandits and outlaws start appearing, you know, just like in the Wild West in America. The most powerful of these gangs is called the Ninvites. They took the word Ninve like the city in Iraq and Ninvites is where that comes from. And it's led by a young Zulu man named Nangoloza Matebula. The Zulu, for those who don't know, they're a tribe or ethnic group and they've got a proud warrior history.

Uh, yeah. I mean, now Zulu, there's a good movie, but you know, it's nice that gangsters are getting steeped in ancient Babylonian history. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I don't think they, I think he was steeped in it. I don't think his followers were steeped in it too much, but most of this info, by the way, it comes from a book called the number by Johnny Steinberg. It's from roughly 20 years ago.

But it's the most in-depth look at the numbers. And it's just a fascinating book. He follows one guy through basically his entire life. He doesn't follow him. He meets him in prison, tells his story and everything else. And it's super in-depth, very hard to find, but definitely recommend it.

Non-Goloza is born in 1867. He lives on a farm with his family, but at 16, he leaves home to earn some money. He works some farm jobs, gets into a little bit of trouble, and ends up in Joburg when it's first becoming a mining town. This is 1888, two years, I think, after the gold supply is first discovered.

He gets involved with a small gang of robbers. There are others kind of just like him, cut off from family, young men, not willing to do the incredibly hard back-breaking labor for chump change. And he starts kind of gathering them into a loose conglomeration of petty thieves and robbers. By the early 1890s, there's about 200 of them.

And this guy, Nongoloza, he's not your average bandit. In the 1890s, he gathers a bunch of the sort of more premier outlaws together and he transforms them into something of a paramilitary force. They get organized, they get structure, they get training. He says in 1912, quote, I reorganized my gang of robbers. I laid them under what has since become known as the Nineveh Law.

I read in the Bible about the great state of Nineveh, which rebelled against the Lord. And I selected that name for my gangs as rebels against the government's law. He implements Zulu hierarchies and colonial military structures. You know, he's, he's called himself the king and he appoints a governor general. He has another guy. He calls a Lord. Then there's a thief government where people were numbered one through four. He has fighting generals.

judges, colonels, captains, soldiers, medics. I mean, you get it, but you'll see how this kind of plays itself out over the next 100 years.

So, weird aside, and this is going to become a serious point of contention later on in the numbers gang, but in the mining towns, there's a ton of prostitutes, since it was all, you know, young men away from their families, and a lot of the guys in the gang were getting wrecked by STDs, sort of like Sean's Berlin crew in the 2010s. They all see women as a source of the disease, so they banned the gang, the soldiers, from getting with women, and made it so youngsters being brought into the gang were

take on the older men in the gang. And this is the start of the numbers gang association with homosexuality in prison and the sort of laws that govern it. And we'll get more into that later. Yeah, quick tip. This is a friend of mine, obviously. A friend of mine told me this. If you are going to go to the clinic, don't pick the Nigerian lady who looks morally outraged by the idea of sex. A friend told me that.

Does the mother of your child listen to the podcast? No, not at all. The gang is around for maybe 20 years and they rob all the gold miners and vagrants in the area. They control the labor compounds where all the poor miners live.

They'd hide out in caves and they did go on these raids and they have this element of resistance against the oppressor. They do kill, you know, white policemen and the sort of, you know, bigger lords or masters, whatever you want to call it. But they also rob all the poor black and colored laborers as well.

Nangoloza becomes something of a legend and his lore grows with rumors that he has a vast underground city, that he was magic, that he wore, you know, these grigris or charms as they're called that made him bulletproof, which side note, when I was in the Central African Republic covering the war there in 2013, I bought some grigris from a local fighter that were supposed to make me bulletproof as well. And I haven't been shot yet. So, you know, there you go. Shout out to witchcraft. But what is a grigri? What does it look like? It

It's basically just like a charm. I think it's the word for charm, but you'll see them. Some of them can be with tape, but they're like little figures or beads or things of that nature. Okay, yeah. I don't know where the word comes from or whether it's only used there, but that's just what they were called. Some guy, I went to a witch doctor market in Togo, and a guy gave me a piece of ebony and said it would give me good sex for the rest of my life. And I kept it. So someone's, I don't know.

I'm not even sure where to go with that. Yeah, we're definitely not startups because I feel like there's a lot of directions you could have taken that. And I think just not taking it might be the best bit of all. All right, guys, let's talk Factor Meals.

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Hey everyone, it's Danny, and if you can't stop thinking about our recent stories on the Nazi drug kingpin or America's most dangerous prison gang, then you should definitely check out the brand new podcast Spotlight Snitch City, produced by the Boston Globe's award-winning Spotlight team. Snitch City brings you inside the secret world of police informants through one small city at the forefront of America's drug war, New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Over the last two decades, the 250-member New Bedford Police Department has been the poster child for informant misconduct, lies, deception, cover-ups of cover-ups. And in the last few years alone, officers have fabricated tips, carried on sexual relationships with informants, and even coaxed them to lie in court.

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From the two big categories, animal mutilations and human abductions, you have to conclude that genetic material is being harvested. Well, I reached for a rifle and I turned and looked and it was already moving away and it was descending the bluff. There's no way any human could have went down it. It was probably a 75 degree angle straight down almost. On Richard Serrett's Strange Planet, we're redefining reality.

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So in 1899, the war kicks off between the Brits and the Boers. And a consequence of that is that the freedom for blacks and coloreds gets restricted even more. They get cracked down on even harder. And these young men, they end up getting shuffled from labor compounds to work to prison over and over. They keep getting locked up for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. And this gang that Nangoloza has that

that some are starting to seem like a paramilitary force, they spread all over. The ninvities, whatever you want to call them. By 1908, there's 1,000 of them. I mean, brief shout out to the idea. Like, did we finally find a war that you can actually root for the Britain? Is that okay? Eventually, though, what about the Falklands, dude? Come on. Argentinians, we're getting a little... Oh, well, don't get me started. I mean, I'm moving to Argentina next year, so I'm going to get in all kinds of shit for that. You can't get involved.

Eventually, though, the authorities catch on to them and they get crushed around 1910. Nongoloza, he's able to slide away, but a bunch of other leaders get thrown in prison. They form offshoots. They build up as during this period. Again, you have thousands of these young men being thrown in prisons, usually for, like I said, very minor infractions. And it's the perfect breeding ground for gangs to shape up. In

Interestingly, their leader ends up becoming a warder, what South Africans call a prison guard, and renounces the gang before basically vanishing, knowing what happened to him, despite being seen as a god in the prisons. And he dies in 1948, a poor man. Yeah, that's pretty weird. Yeah. But the structures he built, all these positions, these judicial wings and divisions with soldiers and all the ideology, it still exists till this day.

They really sort of established these gangs to deal with the severe, brutal circumstances in these prisons. You know, it was apartheid and these prisons were completely locked off. The state controlled everything. And it was brutal on the outside. So you have to imagine what it was like in these prisons. And all three gangs, the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s, they tell these stories about their leader, Nangoloza. And they have this mythical cult-like lore, which we'll get to in a minute.

They differ, though, in what those stories sort of are and some of the details. But all of them has him as a godlike bandit outlaw who fought the battle against the whites and the government.

The actual mythical tale is lengthy and confusing, but I'll try to do an abbreviated version here. The gangs essentially treat this like a religion's founding, and this is their Old Testament, New Testament, Torah, Talmud, Quran, all in one. So in most of the tellings, Nangoloza is a migrant worker, and so is a man called Kilikijan, and they're looking for work in the mines...

When they meet an ancient nomadic seer, a man of wisdom. He tells them not to work in the mines because the conditions are so bad. And instead to rob gold from the whites and the migrant workers themselves. And he teaches them how to do it. And they each get some new recruits to help them and follow them. The two bandit leaders work separately. Nongolo's at night and Kilikijan during the day.

At one point, the seer tells them to go buy a steer at a farm, but the man at the farm refuses to sell it to them. So they kill him, and they steal the animal, and they chop it up, and the seer tells them to drink the blood.

It just got so, I was like, oh, this is actually sounding like a, you know, like a nice little fairy tale. And then that happened. Only Nongoloza is able to drink the blood. Killikijin can't. And the 27 say this is when Nongoloza gets diseased. While the 28 say that the fact that Nongoloza can drink the blood makes him like the man.

Also, they use the height of the animal to write down their laws, their gang constitution. Somehow it gets cut in half. I think the 28s only get half the laws or the 27s only get half. It's something like that. But it's all like this incredibly weird fable. Convoluted. Yeah. One day, both groups are supposed to work together. But Angoloza says he's sick and stays behind. And when the others return, they find him having sex with a man.

This causes this big split with the 27 saying it's wrong and the 28 saying it's okay because the minors are separated from the females anyway, so they're all doing it.

And this is when they kind of split. They go their own way. Nongoloza with eight men and Kilikijan with seven, which is supposedly where the 28s and the 27s come in. Yeah, surprising. Like the split in the German neo-Nazi movement. Not like I've been reading nonstop articles about that recently. Was Himmler okay because he was gay or was he bad because he was Nazi? I don't know. I'm confused about the moral of this tale. Is it drink blood and you'll turn gay? How does this have to do with what you're...

I don't need to know. I don't know. I'm just like, this story is quite strange. Yeah. Yeah, it is. At some point later on, both Nangolo and Kilikijan end up caught and in the same prison around 1907, 1908. While they're in prison, a group of six non-gang affiliated gamblers arrive in the prison. And these men are very talented hustlers, businessmen.

Both men want them to join their respective gangs. Nongoloza tries to get them into the 28s, but Kilikijan warns the men that if they join him, he's going to take them as sex slaves. So six gamblers, they decide to form their own gang. They're allowed to, and that's called the 26s. Is that we, everyone got it so far? Just about, yeah. Yeah, okay. So that's likely entirely made up, right?

Uh, yeah. I mean, is it, is it not true? Are we, is that, is that actually just a story? But it is the gang, it is the gang lore and the gang members take it very, very seriously. I think they believe that it's a hundred percent true. And the rules they have because of this, they're very archaic and they dictate literally everything they can and can't do in prison. Everything. It's legitimately the strictest code of conduct I've ever seen to the point where it seems like every facet of their lives is regulated.

And the numbers, they have very distinct divisions. The 26s, they're the money men. Their job is to scam, steal, deal, fraud, smuggle, do whatever they can to get money and goods in prison, tobacco, currency, food, and all that. They're responsible for gathering supplies, drugs, everything like that, and they must share it with the 28s.

They're not the warriors or the violent ones. They are not allowed to use violence. They are also not allowed and do not believe in having sex with other men in prison, which the 28s do. And that's a big dividing line. They're also not allowed to speak with the 28s and vice versa. That's for the 27s to do. The 27s are the intermediaries and they're also like the judges of both the 26s and the 28s. They set the rules. They pass judgment on who violated what.

They're supposed to be the most violent and they are the fewest because it's the hardest life. You have to take blood as they call it. You have to stab guards if judgment is passed down or you have to stab a random prisoner, which is kind of crazy. Like every judgment I read about or learned about with the numbers gang, it's like, okay, the punishment is you have to stab a guard. Okay, the punishment is you have to stab a different prisoner. It's just like that's always the punishment. It's just stabbing someone not in the gangs.

I believe you still have to stab a guard to become a member of the 27s, and you used to have to stab a guard to become a member of the 28s. But interestingly, a lot of these blades are different size. So a lot of the stabbing is done with blades designed to only wound someone, not kill. They're very shallow blades.

The 27s are said to be the most secretive. They are career criminals who end up having super long sentences since they're, you know, always stabbing people, both guards and other prisoners. They're also seen as the craziest, the lifers, and they're always the smallest because they're, you know, the ones always getting in trouble, getting sent to isolation or beaten by the guards, not getting food. So it commits them to a life in prison of being beaten and solitary, and only the most insane believers become 27s.

The 28s are also quite violent. And they're supposed to be the warriors who fight for the rights of the 26s, 27s, 28s, and prisoners, the prisoner rights. And think about it, you know,

Back when apartheid was still in session and you had some faction that had to fight the guards and do protests and do all that sort of stuff and they were going to suffer a lot too. That's where the 28s came in. This was and is still a really big deal. How little rights they had, how little rights they probably still have and how important it was to stand up to the prison system. And also that...

They have sex with each other, sort of. I don't even really know how to get into the details of this. So there are different lines or factions of the 28s. Or was, that changed. But in the beginning and for many years, there's the gold line or the blood line. Those are the fighters. Then there's the silver line. Those are the quote-unquote females. They get special treatment, they get better supplies, and they don't have to fight. But you know...

They have to do something else. Like crochet some nice shirt designs or run the prison library cart or something like that? So that's the silver line. And they're the sex sons or the wifeys. Apparently, though, it's regulated. It's non-penetrative thigh sex. And they need to be face-to-face under a blanket. And the judges are allowed to look and inspect. Oh, my God. Now, the 28s deny this.

They say the silver lines and the gold lines do not have sex together, but the gold lines have sex with something called sex sons, which are separate from the silver line, and the sex sons are not technically in the gangs. A lot of this is vague or debated or still very secretive. To enter the 28s, you used to have to commit an act of violence, usually stabbing a guard with a short blade. But the entrance test wasn't really about committing the act of violence. It's about what happens after.

You have to not cry out in pain when the guards beat you. And you have to survive the ensuing solitary confinement where you're pretty much starved and beaten and everything and not break. And when you get out of solitary, the senior members then take you one by one and teach you everything about the gang, which is a process that takes months. They have their own language called Sabella. There's an insane amount of rituals. And then there's all the biblical lore that you have to study and memorize.

Seems like there's another way to enter a 28 as well. Jesus. I mean, all right. That's not bad. There we go. That's not bad. There we go. There's such a strict amount of rules. Like it's a complete alternate society with originally enforced hierarchy. It kind of reminds me of the Russian Vory. Not like the new Russian mafia, right? But the one from a hundred years ago in the gulags were like,

You were forbidden from ever saying yes to an authority figure or having a normal job or doing work in the prison ever. And Misha Glennie, interestingly, writes about the numbers gangs in McMafia. He says, quote, "...successive generations of prisoners wove an elaborate history that contains most elements of religious mythology, including a prophet, arcane rituals, a sacred text, their own language called Sabella, and a priestly hierarchy of incomprehensible complexity."

Also, similar to the Vori, they're big on tattoos all over, you know, the tattoos telling their story on their body, everything like that. If you see some of these guys, if you Google image search them, you're going to see like completely covered like MS-13 style with these really intricate prison tattoos. One popular tattoo for the gold line of the 28 is weirdly a penis coming up from the waistline.

So you're saying like what smash mouth or in the 28th? Wait, is there a penis tattoo on smash mouth? I don't know. I just imagine that's the kind of like culture we're talking about here is like that kind of stupid rock band thing. Smash mouth rule, dude. I don't, I, you take that back, man. Where's that reference? The one, the one bit that went, where was that? Where is that reference? Like comparison cup? You're like, oh yeah, this reminds me of smash mouth. Like what does that even come from?

I don't know what's going on up there. Half the time we're doing these.

So these gangs, they're incredibly structured. Each day of the week is assigned. Like, you're just like, oh, the guys who did that song from Shrek. Like, this is what that reminds me of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Sure. The gangs are incredibly structured. Each day of the week, you know, everyone is assigned specific activities and functions that you do every single day of the week. For example, there are days dedicated to distributing rations, t-shirts,

Teaching stuff, hearing complaints. On weekends, the judges meet. On Saturdays, they pass judgments and hear grievances, while Sundays are reserved for recruiting newcomers, granting promotions, and holding celebrations. There's a meeting every day of two top 26s, 27s, and 28s, where they discuss the day's goings-on and what happens tomorrow. And the gangs operate through this strict hierarchy with various leaders and these structured meetings.

The leaders of the three primary numbers convene regularly with the 27 serving as the intermediaries. Remember, they can't talk to each other. And the bureaucracy within the system is completely overwhelming. I won't go too far into it because, frankly, it's pretty tedious. But one recruit explains, quote, the structure he is to join is called the four points of the twos. It is the lower tier of the silver line. One of its functions is the courts, which handle infractions committed by low-ranking silvers.

The five members of the twos ranked from most junior to most senior are the silver one, the silver two, the Goliath two, and it goes on and on and on, blah, blah, blah. It is actually incredibly boring, man, the rules. There's so much homework.

Every night, the first few months or weeks of prison, a new recruit has to spend with a different senior member who explains a different rule or function. It is the worst onboarding HR process I've ever heard of for any company ever. Yeah. Also, like if these gangs are going to basically kill each other over this kind of stuff, why are they now called the 26s, 27s and 28s? Like,

I get if you're all sex crazed killer psychopaths, right? Just at least call yourself the sex killer psychopaths or something like that.

Like, I don't know, the 27s just sounds like a AAA baseball team. Yeah, it sounds very basic. But remember, only parts of the 28s are sex-crazed psychopaths. The 26s and 27s do not abide by that. So it's also... My apologies to the 27s. It's also weird how they're sort of competing gangs, but also locked into the same structures and rules. But I don't know, it's very... Even reading about it and doing all this research and listening to all these interviews, there's a really good interview where...

I forget the name of the podcast with a guy. You can look it up called Witboy Welcome. W-I-I-T-B-O-I. Welcome is his last name. And he's like very, very clear and concise. Great, great speaker. Very elegant speaker. And he was in the gang for a long time and sort of goes through it. Not a lot of the details. He leaves some stuff out. But look that up because that was very fascinating. And he speaks very – I think he's an actor now, but he speaks about it so eloquently. Anyway.

It's really it is the secret of universe. And they're really I mean, there's, you know, some YouTube and podcast stuff now we'll get to it. But there still is a lot of secretive natures of this stuff.

The rules dictate every aspect of behavior. One guy gets smacked by a guard and the rule is he now needs to stab a guard because otherwise it brings shames on the 28th. So that kind of sounds like a lot of prison gangs. The guy then gets moved up a rank there and has to do three more weeks of studying. Also with the 28th, right, they're seen as like the most sort of macho. You need to really prove your violence before you move up ranks with them.

A guard describes the 27s as the almost religious. The inmates fear them, but they can be reasoned with. The same goes for the 26s, but the 28s, he says, they are like animals. When you get to prison, if you're new, the recruitment process starts and you have to choose which number to get in. And if you claim to be in one of the numbers already, you get tested.

You're asked who you are in Sabella. You know, if you're 28, you say you only work by night and you're a non-gozola or an Angoloza. If you're 27, you say you're, you're killing key gen and you work by day and you kind of have to go back and forth with a questioner telling the legend, answering all the questions and I'm satisfied. Then you get delivered to the leader of your respective gang.

So again, the same gang, but also not. The 26s and 28s, they go to war often. And the different lines of the 28s actually went to war against each other too. The Gold Line, the warriors, they were required to be these lean, sort of feral soldiers. And they weren't allowed to have meat, only bones, no nice clothes. They weren't allowed to have eggs or sugar either. They had to give it to the Silver Line who were allowed to have nice clothes and all that meat. But they were also being, you know, Silver Line had to...

Yeah, be the sex sons and I don't know. I don't want to get demonetized. Let's see if that sneaks under the radar. Yeah, okay. Let's see if that sneaks under the radar with all this other stuff. I mean, I guess listening to all this stuff, it really puts meat on the bones of the idea that a lot of this is just guys who are probably poor and bored and need a club, right? I mean, however...

horrible it is. They need structure around them. Yeah, I mean, join the Elks Lodge. Definitely structure, for sure, but this, I think, takes it to a whole other level. But I think this is the product of...

you know, generations and generations of probably some of the most brutal prisons the world has seen and needing to form a sort of structure to fight back in some way or have some level of control when you have zero. You know, that would be my assumption. Now, the 28th. Yeah, I guess I was going to say join a football club, but you're not going to fight apartheid that way. The 28th, they've always been the soldiers, the stabbers. That was their role. But a bunch of 28s get hung for murders in the prison one year in the mid 80s.

And they decide they need to slow down with the stabbings because it's just too hard, which they do. Then they start to feel they might lose their place or their respect and the silver line would take over.

And the Silver Line starts complaining that the Gold Line is not doing their jobs. The Gold Line complains about the Silver Line being greedy with the food. And the Gold Line now decides that they need to start getting the food they wanted again, the eggs and the meat and the sugar and all that. The Silver Line refuses, and the Gold Line then declares war on the Silver Line. The Silver Line, you know, they were seen as like soft, fat, weak, remember what their role is.

But they go on the attack and they stab the crap out of the gold line. The war spreads to all the prisons in South Africa. All the hospital beds in them are overflowing. Then the 27s, the judges, they tell the 26s to back the silver line in the internal war of the 28s.

The gold line ends up surrendering and the silver line lays out their terms. They close the gold line and they fill the ranks of the 28th hierarchy with silver line members. And then they decree that there's no more stabbings required to join the 28th. I think they basically do away with the gold line. I think now only the 27th require taking blood. But the new rule is that to join the 28th, the initiation, instead of stabbing, you need to have sex with a senior member.

Said one soldier, quote, we did the most stupid, corrupt, fucked up thing. We declared war on them for raping our junior members. And when we won the war, we raped in turn. We said you can only join the number if an officer Fs you. He also adds, we lived the life of animals in prison. So we became animals. Yeah, I think we're going to get demonetized. I hope our advertisers don't listen to this episode.

That year, 1987 becomes the dividing line for many of the 28th with some of the old guard also losing faith in the number saying it turn and twist it into a new thing. And as apartheid begins to crumble in the late 80s and then ends in the 90s and South Africa opens up to the rest of the world, things are going to change drastically.

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So, like I said, these gangs are very, very secretive for generations. There's a couple of academic papers on them, but this book, The Number by Johnny Steinberg that comes out in 2005, it really sort of brings to light and publicizes what they were about. Around then too, you had Ross Kemp, of course, doing a doc a few years later inside South African prisons.

And nowadays, you have these former members on the podcast circuit, right, on YouTube shows and all that, and there's more and more of them out on there. And a big reason for that is what happens next. And this has to do with South Africa's many, many super violent street gangs. And this is according to Mark Shaw, who is probably the go-to guy on South African crime, someone I should definitely interview, and the author of the book Give Us the Guns, which I used for part of this research.

A lot of street gangs in South Africa form under apartheid in the 50s and 60s. He calls them corner store gangs, right? Your usual, exactly what you're thinking, hanging out in the corner, kind of forming as like community self-defense of sorts, but also doing the usual protection rackets. And this sort of alternate form of government where apartheid left a vacuum in these neighborhoods and had no legitimacy and someone needed to fill it.

Also, during these decades, you had the South African government kind of forming these ghettos, right, bulldozing established areas and transporting people to live in different areas where they knew no one or where there were no homes before, like the Cape Flats, which stretch across Cape Town, which are now known for their many, many street gangs and their violence.

During the mid-20th century, the apartheid government used something called the Group Areas Act to forcibly remove non-white residents from more central and affluent areas, such as District 6, and relocate them to the Cape Flats.

This turns the area into like this densely populated and underdeveloped region, Aslam basically, with limited infrastructure, housing, and very few economic opportunities. And now I guess you see how we got the movie District 9, which was a play on that. Yeah, that was a weird one, man. Chappie. Remember that? Remember that guy? Was that that movie or is that a different one? Yeah.

No, wait a minute. Is chapping? Yeah, I think that is that. Yeah, I think it is that. Yeah, I think so. So these petty street gangs, they're forming up and almost similar to how Jamaican gangs got their language and some style and notions from American Western movies, these gangs pick up on stuff from American mafia movies. One gang of hustlers in the city of Durban calls themselves the Young Americans. They drive American cars, they dress flashy. Some of them move to the Cape and another gang called the Ugly Americans rises up to fight them off.

They eventually joined forces and we get a super gang called the Americans. They use a lot of US symbols, you know, bald eagles, Statue of Liberty, all that. And rising up to compete against them is a different super gang called the Firm, which interestingly uses a lot of British symbols and stuff like that. Nice. I like them. Anyway, as apartheid is falling apart, there's chaos and war in the country. The gangs are starting to get more opportunities.

And this is going to come back around to the numbers gang and the prisons. The Americans then are led by Jackie Lonte, who apparently is the guy who brings crack to South Africa after seeing it in Brazil. And he was fond of using the kids of rich Indian Muslim families as drug mules, who he would then also hold ransom.

He's like the George Washington of gangland here, a visionary. And he gets the Americans to be the main suppliers of weed and a drug called Mandrax, which is a pill that was super popular in South Africa and it was smoked. And here's a description, quote, Mandrax or methoqualone, a powerful sedative hypnotic drug originally developed in the 1950s as a sleeping aid and muscle relaxant, was widely prescribed under brand names like Quaaludes in the U.S. and Mandrax in South Africa and other parts of the world.

Side note, you know, I'm just really sad I never got the tricoilers because they look like a lot of fun. Have you ever? Yeah, I mean, yeah, Wolf of Wall Street made them look great. They just look like a good time. They sound like a good time. So those drugs are being widely prescribed. There's also illicit labs producing it. It gets super popular there, especially within the non-white neighborhoods. Some allege conspiracies involving the government allowing that to happen.

Mandrax kind of changes everything, right? It gets so big in the 80s and it was these small little blue pills. They called them buttons. So easy to sell, easy to transport, easy to smuggle, even into prison. And it creates for the first time in South Africa, they didn't really have this, drug lords, guys with money on the streets. In fact, Jackie was making so much money, he was driving a Porsche around during the apartheid era, which was unheard of for a colored or a black person.

So the drug markets start booming, and South Africa has its first street-side drug lords making bank. And the drug lords, of course, they're going to end up eventually getting sent to prison, just like Jackie does. Now, the prisons had never seen this sort of person before, right? Gang leader drug lord with major money and power.

The number gangs, they've never dealt with this before. And those small pills that are being smuggled into the prisons, of course, many members of the gangs, they're smoking it. They're getting into it. I mean, given what they're up to, probably wouldn't be the worst thing handed a bunch of quaaludes to these guys. Yeah, a little calm down a bit. And Jackie, he ends up being the first one of these drug lords to make this new deal with the numbers, with others following him.

He gets fast-tracked to high rankings without having to do any of the dirty work or adhere to the ancient customs and rituals because he's got the money. He basically pays for his top ranking in the numbers gang and also offers access to the drugs and jobs for the numbers gang members when they get out.

And Jackie has this bright idea of doing something that's also never been done before, which is aligning his gang, the Americans, with the 26s to serve as the outside street gang. You know, he also has some enemies in the 28s from the streets. He essentially does away with, like, generations and decades of the gang's strict rules. No one had ever bought their way in, and the gang had never had a presence on the streets outside. In the 28s, they eventually align with the other gang, the Firm. Jackie's

Jackie even kind of starts a little bit of a war between the 26s and the 28s who are at peace at that time and that continues on the streets. Jackie's gunned down in 1998, but this changes everything. Apartheid of course falls right before that. Drugs and contraband explode as the country of South Africa opens up to international markets. Guns and

end up flooding the streets, and the gangs take full advantage. The numbers had never been too much about commercialization or the outside world, but that changes as they're driven by, quote, greater business orientation. So you now have numbers gangs on the streets as the 26s align with the Americans, other little gangs, the sexy boys, the clever kids, and the 28s with other gangs like the Firm, the Hard Livings, and the Mongrels.

This, of course, pisses off the old guard of the gangs who see these rituals and everything kind of bastardize. And the old timers, as detailed by Steinberg, they kind of resent how this happens and how the street gangs bomb the streets.

bought their outside wars into the prison, how all the lore and all the traditions are sort of somewhat done away with. All my dear blood story's gone. I mean, look, the Numbers gangs obviously still exist. They still have their rituals. They still are in charge of all the prisons. They still have this sort of secretive nature and all this sort of rigid nature

systems of how they do things but this was like a big turning point and a big change and this continues to this day the street gang sort of intertwining with the numbers and organized crime mafia types and sort of warring all over the country it's kind of hard for me to differentiate or tell them apart of like when the street gang ends and when the numbers gang starts i guess you could kind of compare it a bit to how la m a operates with mexican gangs in california but even that seems like a lot easier to sort of distinguish hierarchies and how things work

For the purpose of this episode, we focus mainly on the numbers and how they came to be. But there's so much to be done with the last 20 or 30 years of gangs in South Africa and how this sort of system and everything has developed. And I definitely plan on doing an episode in the future on those street gangs, the Stanfelds, even Pagad, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, which was like a sort of Nation of Islam type militant gang that killed gangsters and became a gang themselves. There's all this crazy stuff going on.

Especially the last few years with the organized crime aspect of South Africa, Liffman and Weinstein, the killings going on there, witnesses, mafia stuff like the nightclub security racket that has seen some truly insane violence. Yeah, it's really, really crazy stuff. I mean, like I said at the top of the show, I did that thing on the Gupta family and the state capture. And some of that is seeped down to that.

nightclub security stuff. I think there was a case, you probably know better than I do researching this, but there was a case with a guy, I think he's on trial now or he just went down or something like that. But this is like the, the, the number stuff is like another world, right? You could see why people say apartheid never really ended. Yeah. I mean, in those prisons, it's, uh, it's, it's insane. I think the interesting thing too, was that, um,

I assumed it was going to be mostly – the gangster would be mostly made up of black Africans, but it's actually dominated by colored Africans. And it also switches between different prisons depending on the makeup and the ethnic makeup. But yeah, I mean it's a fascinating world. This is basically like an intro to it. We didn't get –

Don't have time to go super deep into it, but it's very confusing. And definitely that guy, Mark Shaw, is someone you want to look into his work on this if you want a deeper understanding. There's a journalist too called Karen Dolly. I want to say C-A-R-Y-N-D-O-L-L-E-Y. And she does some of the best work on the sort of organized crimes goings-on right now in South Africa. Definitely look her up.

She's someone whose work I want to use for sure in a later episode on this stuff. But much more of that in the future. I know this was a bit more of an educational type episode like we used to do instead of like a point A to point B story of a guy or a gang. So hopefully you guys enjoy the change up. Yeah, as always, patreon.com slash generalpodcast.

iTunes, support us. We have a bonus episode I should have gotten up a couple days ago on what Russian arson attacks. What was the thing you were talking about, Sean? Oh, yeah. It's some crazy story. It hasn't really been reported in the media yet about...

old Russians, pensioners, who are getting scammed into setting fire to places across like Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's pretty wild. So we'll get that up today by the time you guys hear this. And yeah, until next time, be safe and don't join any South African prison gangs because it sounds like a really hard life. ... ...

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