The Untouchables: Drug lords, dirty cops, and South Africa’s darkest secrets

The Untouchables: Drug lords, dirty cops, and South Africa’s darkest secrets

R340.00

The Commission, the cartel, and Caryn Dolley’s new book

For most South Africans, the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry has felt like watching a single scandal unfold. 

For investigative journalist Caryn Dolley, it’s the latest chapter in a story she has spent more than 20 years – and no shortage of personal risk – pursuing. 

The result is The Untouchables: Drug Lords, Dirty Cops, and South Africa’s Darkest Secrets: the A to Z of organised crime in South Africa, dang-near every name and how they’re connected, told with the pace of a thriller and the grit of two decades on the hardest beat in the country.

The new book from Maverick 451, shipping from 17 August 2026.

>> Join the exclusive pre-launch webinar with Caryn, Conrad Koch and Chester Missing on 22 July at 12pm. Free to attend. Register here.

Award-winning Daily Maverick journalist Caryn Dolley has spent years tracing the footprints of cops, gangs and kingpins in South Africa and across the world. Through examining police investigations, delving into court documents, interviews with countless sources, and painstakingly tracking arrests, she pieces together a horrific puzzle showing how different criminal empires have overlapped, merged and clashed in South Africa.

The Untouchables is her fifth book. She has published four books to great public and critical acclaim: Man Alone: Mandela’s top cop – exposing South Africa’s ceaseless sabotage in 2024, Clash of the Cartels: Unmasking the global drug kingpins stalking South Africa in 2022, To The Wolves: How traitor cops crafted South Africa’s underworld in 2021 and The Enforcers: Inside Cape Town’s deadly nightclub battles in 2019.

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Description

EVERY NAME. EVERY CONNECTION.

South Africa came to a standstill in July 2025 when KwaZulu-Natal police boss Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi put organised crime infiltration on record — and a bomb went off in law enforcement. Whatever his motives, what followed moved faster than anything South Africa’s criminal justice system had seen in decades.

Caryn Dolley watched without surprise.

The Untouchables is a journalist’s life work vindicated in real time: organised crime at an unbelievable scale, criminals who co-opted police and gutted the institutions meant to stop them. But this cartel is not new. Its predecessors built up the Mandrax routes that the apartheid state manufactured, that the liberation struggle used, and that democracy never dismantled.

The cast of characters in this book covers them all – alleged cartel members, accused cops, indicted politicians, and enablers across the private sector and security industry. From a Mandrax mastermind who rubbed shoulders with political heavyweights and a sharp-tongued businessman with a love of money now facing criminal charges, to gang bosses killed before they could talk.

These names were not secrets. Dolley knew them. Her sources knew them. The police knew them. The politicians knew them.

For years, they moved through the system with an invisible shield – not hiding, not particularly careful, just somehow immune to consequence. Untouchable.

Until now.

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