Mark Minnie (1960 – 2018)
Mark Minnie, born in 1960 in Port Elizabeth, was a police detective serving on the Narcotics Bureau of the South African Police in Port Elizabeth until 1992 when he left the police service under dubious circumstances. In his autobiography “Max: Fact or Fiction, you decide’’ (which was never published and of which both the investigator and Tafelberg Publishers had a copy) he tells all about his criminal life and how he became involved with one of South Africa’s most dangerous and notorious gangs in the nineties.
[It is important to note that Maryna Lamprecht, publisher of ‘’The Lost Boys of Bird Island’’, had a copy of ‘’Max: Fact or Fiction, you decide’’ BEFORE the eventual book ‘’The Lost Boys of Bird Island’’ was published. That was the original manuscript which ‘’developed’’ into the book ‘’The Lost Boys of Bird Island’’].
Minnie left South Africa for England in 2007 after he had falsified a degree certificate from the University of Port Elizabeth, which he purportedly received in 1991, as well as a qualification from the “Western Cape College of Languages.” Minnie used these falsified certificates to procure a teaching position in Beijing, China and was still employed there until his death in 2018.
In his original manuscripts, Minnie implicated himself in a series of crimes, including diamond- and gold smuggling, theft, fraud, smuggling of all kinds of things and legal defiance. His crime trail can be traced from South Africa to England, America, Thailand and Tanzania. Minnie used money that he had made in unlawful ways to open three brothels in Port Elizabeth, which eventually were shut down by the police.
Minnie enthusiastically had looked forward to receiving “well-deserved” public recognition and adulation for his “heroic” role in “bringing to book” three former National Party Ministers for purported sexual misdeeds. To that end he, Steyn and Lamprecht unscrupulously and fraudulently had filled and published an entire book with lies, untruths and fabricated events.
On the eve of his long-awaited “fame and fortune” he admitted to Steyn and Lamprecht that he had no concrete evidence against the three minister and suddenly found himself isolated by Steyn and Lamprecht, after Steyn had instructed him to clear with them first, whatever he wished to say to the media. Ironically, during the roller-coaster days of his, Steyn and Maryna’s reckless quest for fame and fortune, in uninhibited infatuation with Steyn and Maryna, he once even called them “two wonderful lasses”. Those days of imminent glory and stardom, suddenly became days of isolation, disillusionment and the agony of impending exposures of his fraud, lies and fabrications.
When the photo attached here was taken three days before he killed himself, he already knew he was going to commit suicide because he planned it well in advance. This was forensically proven by the investigator Wouter de Swardt.
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