What they definitely won't teach you at Harvard Law

My very first encounter with criminal law was when my principal Kyriaco (Jack) Hajibey told me to go to the OK Bazaars, buy a bottle of Colgate Shampoo and pay for it at the counter nearest the door. As the clerk of this eminent attorney, of Cypriot extraction, who was I to argue?

It seemed a pretty mundane task and when I got back to the office he told me to give him the till receipt and the bottle of shampoo.

Months went past and I would have totally forgotten the incident but for the fact that he told me that I was going to be a witness in a court case. All I had to do was tell the court what I had done — that is, bought the shampoo and paid for it at the counter by the door.

Which I duly did.

Afterwards he explained to me that the accused had been arrested for failing to pay for a bottle of shampoo at the central tills, which the client claimed he was going to do at the counter by the door. All’s well that ends well, except that I had one problem: What would have happened if I had been arrested on the way to that counter?

Jack gave me a wry smile: “That would have been a problem, but what are the chances?”

Great comeback from a fabulous man with nerves of “steel”.

That would have been the sum total of my experience in criminal law if it had not been for my “tutor” on life — Warren “Buffel” Goldblatt. He does private investigations, security and allied work.

He used to send me different types of civil work until one of his guards was arrested for holding the whole of Topics, in town, hostage. The guard believed that his girlfriend was cheating on him, so he stormed her place of work, drunk as a skunk, and took the entire staff prisoner.

It took the cops hours to rescue the victims after cordoning off several blocks of town. They were, to say the very least, not best pleased with my client. Buffel, who today heads one of the country’s largest private investigation firms, told me not to use advocates — “You go in and argue the matter yourself.”

He even gave me the defence — temporary mental incapacity; that is, at the time of his commission of the deed he was unable to act, due to a number of factors including alcohol, jealousy and rage, other than which he was a great guy.

The court agreed with me and gave this genius a R200 fine for a minor alternative charge (early 1990s).

The client was ecstatic — I’ll never forget his incredible gratitude and those immortal words until my dying day: “Where’d you think I’m going to get R200?” If he thanks me tomorrow it’ll be a first.

When I raced back to tell Buffel, he was underwhelmed: “Of course, I told you you’d win.”

Typical Buffel — on one occasion I was called out to bail out a friend of mine, the late Gary Lazarus, Buffel’s partner, who had been arrested by the Rosebank police. This was at 1am. Gaz looked like a panda bear after being in a war with a Yugoslavian bouncer.

We first had to go to the district surgeon in Brixton for blood tests, after which he was locked up in the cells below the Garden City Clinic. I never got a wink of sleep, spending the rest of the night in the waiting room at the clinic. The doctors confirmed that he could not be allowed out for a bail application. So that was that — until I got the call from Buffel.

“Don’t be a doos, go and tell the magistrate you want bail in absentia.” When I told him it didn’t exist in these circumstances, he told me to go anyway.

So I arrived in Hillbrow court before His Worship Charl Benade (thank heavens) who duly granted me a bail I didn’t believe existed.

And Jack and Buffel were but two examples of how you cut your teeth in this game. The bulk of my practice has been the Zulu and Lebanese communities. As I said in an earlier post, I got my articles through Uncle George (Gogh) Michaels — the legend.

On one occasion one of my Zulus, Shadrack (not his real name), came to see me on a charge of murder. He was already out on bail and some of my other clients sent him to see me. He was accused of putting five bullets into his fiancée at point-blank range.

“Why’d you shoot her five times?” I asked him. (Meaning, why did you shoot her at all?)

“Because the gun only had five bullets,” was the frank response, and which earned him the name Five-Shots from then on. We used it so often that during the trial in Protea Court, Soweto, I inadvertently asked a witness whether he believed that “Five-Shots” was in his sound and sober senses at the time of the shooting. I was obviously not in mine at the time of asking that question.

I’m mad about my Zulus, who call me “dad”, because they give it to you straight. Subtlety is not high on their list of priorities. Often when I consulted with them it would remind me of Art Linkletter’s radio programme Kids Say the Darndest Things — and they did. They would often tell me that they would literally kill for me, which, considering the above, I never even joked about. I had visions of joking about my bank manager one day and attending his funeral in handcuffs the next.

Which takes us to a case I did for a Bulgarian who was ex-special forces. We had a five-day trial after which, as my present from a grateful client, I received confirmation that if ever I should need it, he owed me a kill. He was not joking either.

When I got home and told the government, she asked me why he couldn’t give me something I could use — like a clock radio.

As I said, they don’t teach you this stuff at Harvard Law School.