Cape Town - The last car underworld boss Cyril Beeka drove has had one hell of a journey over the past two years. And it’s probably quite confused about who owns it.
On Human Rights Day in 2011, Beeka parks the car, a light silver-blue Audi R S4, in front of the Buena Vista Social Club in Green Point, before meeting Serb assassin Dobrasov Gavric and a friend at Primi Piatti at the Waterfront.
Gavric and Beeka say goodbye to their friend, leave the restaurant and Beeka gets into the passenger seat of Gavric’s silver BMW X5, with the Serb in the driver’s seat. The two visit Jerome “Donkie” Booysen, the alleged leader of the Sexy Boys gang, in Belhar.
Shortly afterwards, Beeka is shot and found dead in the BMW X5. Gavric, also hit by
bullets, is airlifted to hospital.
During the drama after the Beeka killing, friends of Beeka fetch the Audi, still parked at the club in Green Point. The Audi, a 2006 model with 104 000km on the clock, belongs to a friend of Beeka’s who lent it to Beeka – who lived in Joburg at the time – while he visited Cape Town.
Subsequent to Beeka’s murder, his friend decides to sell the car. A car dealership owner who adores the car buys it for R200 000 cash, spending R50 000 to fix it up.
He fits it with four new tyres and four new rims which he sprays charcoal. He fixes the brakes and installs a new clutch kit he bought for R35 000. And for the next eight months, he drives the car every day. On weekends, he takes his girlfriend for joyrides.
But one day the owner is approached by a law enforcement officer who tells him the last man to drive the car he bought was Beeka, and that the car deal is suspicious.
“He told me: ‘Man, I can’t believe you haven’t been knocked off over that car!’ My hair was standing up. I never knew the guy who sold me the car was connected to Cyril Beeka,” the new owner said.
He and his girlfriend panic. They delete all the photographs of them in the car from their cellphones.
Next thing, the owner is visited by a man who collects vehicles on behalf of a bank. The debt collector tells him he needs to give the car back to the bank because somebody has a bank loan on the car – there is R306 000 outstanding on the loan and instalments aren’t being paid.
Soon afterwards, he is warned that the car will be “stolen back” by the man he bought it from. He starts hiding the car. But then the banks beat the would-be robbers to the chase and impound the car, leaving the owner minus his car and the R250 000 he spent on the vehicle.
A while after the car is repossessed, two men visit the owner and tell him they can get the vehicle back from the bank pound. “The one guy said: ‘Do you want your car back? I can go and fetch it right now’. I told him: ‘No, leave it’,” the man said. A few months later, the car “disappears” from the bank’s car pound – and miraculously reappears in the possession of Beeka’s friend, the same friend who sold the vehicle after Beeka’s murder.
The owner feels too “intimidated” to lay a charge against the sellers, and would rather take the quarter-of-a-million-rand knock, he says.
He’s “too afraid” of what might happen if he tries to challenge the people who sold him the car. “It’s a shocking scenario. In 12 years of trading, something like this has never happened to me. I only deal with franchises and wholesalers now.
“And this guy walks free like nothing’s wrong. He sells cars, gets duplicate papers for them, gets them back and sells them on again.
“I’ve still got the original papers. And a bank certificate saying the vehicle is settled in full,” he says, adding: “It’s my car and I loved my car.”
Weekend Argus