Hermanus
You can forget car-jacking, mugging and necklacing. In South Africa the worst crime problem centres on an oddly shaped bottom-dweller.
Known locally as perlemoen but elsewhere as abalone, the seawater shellfish has sparked a poaching and smuggling racket that is outgrowing all other crime in a country widely held to be the world’s most criminal. Poachers have been drowned by rivals, gun battles have erupted in supposedly sleepy seaside resorts, and customs officials have been bribed on an industrial scale. And the whole thing is being choreographed by Chinese triads.
The situation is so critical that a joint police, coastguard and army task-force has been set up under Operation Neptune to deal with the crisis. And a special abalone court has been convened near Cape Town to try nothing but cases connected with the shellfish. There are already enough outstanding cases to keep the court going for three years.
The problem for South Africa is that its abalone is not just the common-or-garden ‘pink abalone’ that is farmed by the ton in California and elsewhere.
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