Cops and Robbers: we think we know how to tell the good guys from the bad, but when it comes to Cape Town’s crime scene, things are anything but clear cut. Controlled by gangs, fuelled by drugs and policed by cops that, all too often, get caught on the wrong side of the action.

Among the Cape Town cops who have consistently claimed that colleagues are trying to pin crimes on them are Major General Andre Lincoln (former head of a national police unit mandated by Nelson Mandela), Major General Jeremy Vearey (known as SA’s top gang buster) and Lieutenant Colonel Charl Kinnear (who was investigating some of the country's most brutal underworld crimes when he was assassinated in September 2020). Colleagues and suspects alike pointed to all three as colluding with criminals. Who is telling the truth?

Journalist Caryn Dolley has tracked this tangled trail, following the corruption breadcrumbs, sifting through court documents, laying fact upon fact and exposing the depths and breadth of systemic corruption that was set in place during apartheid and has only become more entrenched during the first decades of our democracy. She has traced the rot from cops to underworld to politicians and back, exposing duplicitous networks that have for decades ensnared South Africa in an expanding cycle of organised crime and cop claim crossfire. At the centre of this crisis is the mounting collateral: the victims of Cape Town’s manufactured killing fields.

To The Wolves tells the true life story of how South Africa’s underworld came to be, what continues to fuel it today and how the deception and lies go all the way to the top...

Here is the Cape Town underworld laid bare, explored through the characters who control the protection industry, the bouncers and security at nightclubs and strip clubs.

At the centre of this turf war is Nafiz Modack, the latest kingpin to have seized control of the industry, a man often in court on various charges, including extortion. Investigative journalist Caryn Dolley has followed Modack and his predecessors for six years as power has shifted in the nightclub security industry, and she focuses on how closely connected the criminal underworld is with the police services. In this suspenseful page turner of an investigation, she writes about the overlapping of the state with the underworld, the underworld with the upperworld, and how the associated violence is not confined to specific areas of Cape Town, but is happening inside hospitals, airports, clubs and restaurants and putting residents at risk.

A book that lays bare the myth that violence and gangsterism in Cape Town is confined to the ganglands of the Cape Flats, wherever you find yourself, you’re only a hair’s breadth away from the enforcers.

This is South Africa, home to cutthroat gangs and a lair to some of the world's most notorious drug lords who seem to view the country as a buffer from prosecution.

It's easy to see why politics has pummelled policing, first in the form of apartheid and then under Jacob Zuma's presidency when state corruption exploded, and intelligence structures imploded. Tons of illicit drugs are pumped across the borders annually. This bleeds into other crimes including terrorism, arms dealing, kidnapping and extortion. Add hardened homespawned gangs to this toxic mix, and the combination is lethal.

An array of local and foreign names surface when prodding this volatile matrix. Among them is one of India's most wanted, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar, accused of partnering with the Taliban, and self-confessed drug trafficking mastermind Vaygiri Goswami who claims to have helped finance the ANC. Then there is Brazilian tracking accused Gilberto Aparecido dos Santos, and Cuban kingpin Nelson Pablo Yester-Garrido, who purportedly had a soft spot for Nelson Mandela.

For true-crime diehard fans, this one is for you.