BREAKING THE BOMBERS, how the hunt for Pagad created a crack police unit

272pp., illus., map, paperback, Johannesburg, 2023

Mark Shaw on how struggle veterans and the apartheid security apparatus worked together to break the Pagad death squads and how, out of the crisis the elite law enforcement unit, the Scorpions, emerged.

Pagad began as a community protest action against crime. However, it mutated into a vigilante group and between 1996 and 2001 was behind hundreds of bomb blasts - most infamously at the Planet Hollywood restaurant at the V&A Waterfront - and countless targeted hits on druglords and gang bosses.

 "Mark Shaw is the foremost analyst of organised crime in SA." Jonny Steinberg, author of The Number, Midlands and One Day in Bethlehem.

Mark Shaw is the author of Hitmen for Hire (2017) and Give US More Guns, how South Africa's gangs were armed (2021). He is Director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and former National Research Foundation Professor of Justice and Security at the University of Cape Town.