Perhaps the Spaldings gang boss might not have been convicted had he told the truth during the trial before the Supreme Court in Johannesburg. Instead, Vincent Stuurman refused to rat out his gang mates and that loyalty cost him his life.
In the early 1980s the Spaldings and the Fast Guns were the two main gangs in the slum officially called Western Coloured Township, or colloquially, just Western.
It resembled the Wild West at times.
Cameron Adams was convicted of two murders and Stuurman for his role in the second. Before being labelled a killer, Adams was known mostly for his ring abilities, a knockout artist who held the Transvaal middleweight title. His five-round war against Bruce McIntyre in December 1979 was named fight of the year. Had Adams been more disciplined, trained harder, jolled less and not slept so many nights in his yellow VW beetle, he might have beaten McIntyre.
He was training for a rematch against McIntyre when he was shot by Fast Guns members one evening in early December 1980. Four shots were fired and three hit him, two in the torso and one in the jaw, but he managed to flee, clambering over fences and through yards for about 1km before collapsing unconscious from loss of blood. Adams survived with one bullet still lodged in his jaw. He planned to go ahead with the fight, but never boxed again.
Western was burning at the time. Clive Jansen, a Fast Gun who the media speculated had been involved in the attempt on Adams, was shot and killed on Boxing Day 1980.
Victor “Vikkie Fly” Felix, who frequently hung out with the Spaldings, was found dead in Fast Gun territory. The bodies were piling up and everybody had had enough. The police station commander at Newlands asked Methodist minister Cecil Begbie to help, giving him a list of gangsters and their addresses.
Begbie was a stalwart in the area, assisting the homeless and running a meals-on-wheels programme. Almost every week he presided over funeral services for slain gangsters, all of them leaving behind grieving parents, spouses and children. Begbie set out nervously on foot, not knowing how he would be received by the warring gangsters. He first headed to Fast Guns' leader Richard “Fellas” Timmerman. The reverend asked if he’d be prepared to come to a church service on the next Sunday to mark a peace deal.
“Pastor, you’re not serious?” Timmerman replied, pointing out 10 bullet holes in his house, courtesy of the Spaldings. He, his wife, children and mother had had to dive for cover. “How can we make peace with them when you see this?”
But Begbie didn’t give up, challenging the gangster with Christian ideology, telling him Christ had died for situations like this so enemies could find peace. Timmerman relented and agreed. Then he walked across the township to convince an equally sceptical Stuurman, who was married with two young children. They signed a peace deal at Newlands police station and both gangs sealed it by going to church on the Sunday.
Adams, who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Kamal Malik, was also preaching peace, telling journalists in early February 1981 that he had forgiven the men who had tried to assassinate him. But he was the first to break the fresh pact. On February 16 1981 Adams shot dead Henry “Gumzo” Richardson at a shebeen in Polack Street. Adams claimed that Richardson, a Fast Gun, had walked up to him, gun in hand, and told him: “You’ve escaped death twice before, I’m going to get you the third time.” The boxer said he launched himself at his would-be assassin, fighting for control of the gun, but in the struggle the firearm went off and the bullet killed Richardson.
Adams was at the shebeen with some Spaldings that night, including Stuurman, and he knew they wouldn’t testify against him. But two unarmed policemen who were looking for a suspect at the premises offered a different version of the killing. They saw Adams dragging Richardson into the lounge, holding him by the chest. Then he slapped him a few times before pulling out a gun and shooting him at point blank range. A number of shots were fired and a woman was injured in the foot. By this point Adams had already had several run-ins with the law, starting soon after he won the provincial title on June 7 1980.
Charged with murder
The next month the body of Neville Waterson, a close friend who looked similar to him, was found murdered in nearby Riverlea. Adams was later charged. In August he was accused of stealing a hi-fi set worth R400 from a woman. In September he and a friend, Aubrey Dunbar, were accused of attempted murder in Pietermaritzburg. In October he was accused of obstructing police after he drove away from officers wanting to search his car. Adams retaliated with a claim of police harassment. In November he got into a fight with Charles Boais, another professional boxer, and a man named Harry Koch outside a shebeen. Boais, a featherweight, alleged Adams had assaulted him and pointed a firearm at him. When Koch tried to intervene, Adams hit him too. Adams countered that he had stepped in when they assaulted a woman. Later that month he was accused of abducting an Eldorado Park woman, raping her and keeping her in a flat against her will for three days.
After Adams was shot he claimed the Fast Guns wanted him to pay them a percentage of hi s boxing purses.
Adams wasn’t convicted on any of the charges listed above, and his family and friends argued that if those charges didn't stick, perhaps he was wrongly convicted on the murder charges.
The older generation of Westbury has a different theory about some of the dropped cases, however. Waterson had become a problem to Adams in some way, they believe, possibly agreeing to turn state witness against the boxer for a crime nobody is sure about. But Waterson wasn’t the only state witness he killed, according to this theory. There was a second one, Vikkie Fly, who maybe had knowledge of Waterson’s death and was co-operating with police. Vikkie Fly was dead by the time Adams returned to court on January 23 1981, when the charge was dropped.
Adams kills Richardson
Three days after Richardson was killed, Adams’s own brother Richard, a mortuary worker, was shot dead outside his flat in an attack where the motive wasn’t known. By this time Adams was on the run from both angry Fast Guns members and the police, with warrants being issued against him for missing court appearances.
It is said the Fast Guns feared Adams. Nobody could clear a street like the boxer — when he walked down it, everyone scattered. He was eventually arrested in Cape Town, but not before enjoying a break of a week or so in East London where he stayed with former ring foe Loyiso Mtya, who was oblivious to the fact that his unexpected guest was a wanted man.
In July 1981 Adams appeared in court to testify about the three men he had identified when he had been shot in December. He had told police he identified Tyron Dickson, Ivan Jacobs and Brian Metheus, but in court he refused to testify against them, saying he must have been high on drugs in hospital when making his statement.
Adams was in and out of court on various charges, the last being on August 5 1981. Just three days later he killed again.
He and Stuurman were in Ruben Street, Western, when they saw three men leaving a house. Farrell Adams and Andrew Mathews were old Vultures who had served time for the murder of Stuurman’s older brother, Desmond, the previous Spaldings boss, at Coronation Hospital in 1974.
The third man was Fast Gun Glen Nelson, a decent amateur boxer who had also served time for murder. Witnesses recounted how Adams and Stuurman started firing at them from across the road. Farrell and Matthews escaped by hurdling over hedges and across yards. Farrell testified that Stuurman had fired while driving the car, adding that since he had been released from prison he had had several run-ins with the Spaldings boss. Nelson, meanwhile, sprinted towards Steytler Street, a main road in Western. Adams followed, passing the entrance to a bottle store on the corner where, on Christmas Eve of 1974, a 16-year-old Stuurman had stabbed dead 15-year-old Freddy Hollander, one of the nine originally accused of hacking Desmond to death.
Nelson bolted up Steytler Street, Adams on his heels, firing his handgun. A few of the bullets found their mark and Nelson went down outside a shop owned by Dingaan Dickson, father of Tyron, the Fast Gun member Adams had initially implicated after being shot. The court was told how Stuurman then walked up to the felled Nelson, picked up a rock and threw it at the gangster’s head. Adams and Stuurman insisted they weren’t there at the time, but judge David Curlewis had too many witnesses placing them at the scene.
Adams claimed the Fast Guns had hired a hit man who looked identical to him to do bad things to implicate him. The imposter even wore tracksuit tops with his Kangaroo ringname emblazoned across the back. Curlewis found no extenuating circumstances. Adams and his mother, Marjory, insisted that he wasn’t a member of the Spaldings gang. His Spalding tattoo, he claimed, was from the sports club, not the gang. To this day there are people who insist Adams wasn’t a gangster, but there are some who say the boxer was indeed a Spalding.
Adams and Stuurman tried appealing and submitting new evidence. Attorney Joe Magua, who had played a key role in getting the death sentence of triple-murderer Tanse Leisher commuted, and advocate Percy Yutar, the former attorney-general who had prosecuted Nelson Mandela, worked their case. Adams, in his revised version, admitted he had killed Nelson, but insisted it was in self-defence, claiming the Fast Gun was charging him with a knife.
Irwin Levers, a Spalding known as “Bob Marley”, had written under oath that he had thrown the rock at Nelson’s head, not Stuurman. And Stuurman had written an affidavit claiming that Adams had acted in self-defence at the hands of an aggressive Richardson at the shebeen in February. But Curlewis wasn’t convinced that the new evidence was legitimate, dismissing it as people willing to perjure themselves in attempt to save the two friends from the gallows. And yet it seems that Levers probably was being truthful.
Stuurman's hand was strapped
I found old Spaldings and Fast Guns who, in separate interviews, insisted that at the time of Nelson’s murder Stuurman's hand was strapped and his arm was in a sling. There’s no way he would have been able to lift the rock, nor drive a car while firing shots. Stuurman had been injured coming out of the old Lotus bioscope on Polack Street one night, getting chopped on the hand by a member of the smaller Vikings gang. His arm was in the sling when he accidentally killed his brother Lionel during an argument. The two had clashed many times, especially if Lionel was drinking and noisy and upsetting their mother, Mary, who was ill and walked with difficulty. If she found a party too loud, Vincent was the one who would kick all the revellers out. Everyone seems to agree that of her 10 children, he was the favourite.
On July 19 1981, just three days short of the seventh anniversary of Desmond’s death, Vincent and Lionel got into one last scrap at home. Lionel, also known as Troy, could box, unlike Vincent, who had the added disadvantage of an arm in a sling. He needed to get his brother off him, so he pulled out his dagger and flashed it at his throat, intending to leave a nick. But the blade went too deep, slicing an artery.
Stuurman escaped prosecution with his mother’s blessing, but he began questioning the gangster lifestyle. He became increasingly disapproving of Spaldings returning to the base after misdeeds to celebrate. He found more enjoyment in his children and his large collection of records, having a fondness for We’re All In This Thing Together by The O’Jays. But Adams, with a bullet in his jaw, was different. Those who knew him described him as being in pain, angry and wanting vengeance against the Fast Guns.
At one point Adams told another Spalding member to kill his own brother who was a Fast Gun. Stuurman intervened. “Vincent said ‘no, that’s not going to happen, I know how it feels. Rather let me do it.’ He regretted it ... He was really hurt.”
Stuurman no rat
It’s likely that Stuurman didn’t tell the court about his injured arm because he didn’t want to sink Adams’s alibi that they weren’t at the scene. He probably also didn’t want to rat Levers out. And maybe he assumed enough of the truth would come out to get him off, without him having to sink his mates. Adams and Stuurman were sentenced to death on February 4 1982, almost a year after the peace deal was brokered with the help of Begbie. The reverend believed the truce was officially over after Fast Gun Henry “Hauser” Ford was hacked to death in late November 1982. Ford was the one who had thrust the blade into the back of Abie Johnson in the first inter-gang death in 1972.
A youngster who made a pact to avenge Johnson’s death was one of Ford’s killers. Ford, he told the Sunday Times, was killed “on the battleground”. Ford was always at the forefront of these skirmishes, where armed bands clashed with pangas and axes for a few minutes. But Ford hadn’t been himself in the weeks before his death, wearing a fur coat in the heat of summer and urinating openly in front of women. Those who knew him believed he had been caught in a spell of dark magic. “Fellas” was killed soon afterwards, but not by a Spalding.
He was popular within the gang, always providing members with food and opportunities. But he was also antagonistic, goading members into fighting each other, claiming, often falsely, that one had said something about the other’s mother.
It was fun for many Fast Guns, but one day a youngster snapped, pulling out his knife and stabbing the gang leader in the neck. The killer fled the scene and immediately joined the Spaldings. Violence in Westbury has continued. Mary Stuurman buried her grandson, Sebastian Smith, killed in a surge of violence in late 1995. The 24-year-old was buried in the same grave as his father, Desmond Stuurman, in Newclare.
The body count hasn’t stopped.
Adams and Stuurman were hanged on November 20 1984, and as condemned men they were given paupers’ funerals. Their families were allowed to pray with the bodies at the prison, but couldn’t attend the burials. They were given the plot numbers afterwards and warned not to erect any kind of headstone at the sites. Stuurman and Adams, instantly recognisable in Western, now lie side-by-side in unmarked graves at Eersterust cemetery.
• The concluding instalment will appear on TimesLIVE Premium on Monday
Read the first three chapters:
- Chapter 1: Gangsters and boxers of Westbury | Til death did they part
- Chapter 2: Gangsters and boxers of Westbury | The first fight to the death
- Chapter 3: Gangsters and boxers of Westbury | Killing two Desmonds
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