07-05-2025
Lifman and ‘brotherhood' focused on bringing peace, not committing crime, argues lawyer
Intercepted phone calls of the late Mark Lifman's associates' conversations do not prove criminality, their lawyer argues.
The advocate submitted that they only show that they were trying to bring peace during a disruptive period in the nightclub industry.
Although Lifman was murdered last year, his secretly recorded conversations still loom large in the Brian Wainstein trial with regards to violence in some clubs in Cape Town.
The memory of Mark Lifman still loomed large during the trial within a trial in the Brian Wainstein murder case in the Western Cape High Court on Wednesday.
Lifman was assassinated in George last November, allegedly by two highly trained security company contractors.
Still, his voice lives on in the secretly recorded phone calls the State wants admitted as evidence of alleged complicity in a vast case involving a period of violent disruption in Cape Town's glamorous clubbing industry.
Advocate Amanda Nel, the lawyer for two of the 13 remaining co-accused, Jerome Booysen and Andre Naude, has been picking apart transcripts of some of the 38 calls that the police secretly listened in on between 2014 and 2017 during a drugs investigation targeting Booysen.
Nel contended that the conversations merely show Lifman and Booysen's attempts at bringing peace to a difficult situation involving Booysen's brother Colin and an alleged associate of Colin, Kamaal Naidoo.
Nel said the calls show that Lifman, Booysen and Naude were worried about being called gangsters and thugs, and their reputation as businessmen, and that they were not plotting any crimes.
She submitted that the calls do not show a pattern of criminality and gangsterism as alleged, just that they were trying to bring calm to the situation.
Nel said that in many cases, recordings of Booysen indicate that he only found out about fights and shootings after the fact - either from an associate who told him about it - and the first time he heard about the shooting at Café Caprice in Camps Bay, was when he read a report about it on News24.
READ | Booysen, Naude fight to exclude brotherhood's intercepted calls from trial evidence
With regards to Lifman, his calls were about trying to figure out how to resolve problems.
She said that there are also no calls by Lifman to Wainstein on the day before or after the murder of Wainstein in August 2017.
Nel said Lifman and Booysen also discussed at length what to do about the 'disruption' his brother Colin was bringing to their business interests, allegedly with Naidoo.
But they did not want Colin to get hurt.
The court has already heard that Naude was tasked with separating Colin from their 'brotherhood' for the sake of peace, and that Colin appeared to throw his weight behind Nafiz Modack, who was allegedly poaching the brotherhood's security contracts.
All of the accused in the trial have pleaded not guilty.
Booysen and Naude were shocked by the murder of Lifman, who the investigator described as a mediator between gangs and a financial advisor to them.
They have been attending as many of the court appearances of Lifman's alleged hitmen Gert Bezuidenhout and Hendrik Jacobs.
Bezuidenhout and Jacobs are expected to appeal the refusal of their bail in the Western Cape High Court on Thursday.
The trial within a trial continues.
