In Valhalla Park, the talk of Ralph Stanfield’s trial is not about legal strategy. It is about survival. A resident of the area, speaking on condition of strict anonymity because of security concerns stemming from previous encounters with Stanfield and his family, said that while the alleged gang boss should be brought to justice, his arrest had led to “mayhem on the [Cape] Flats”.
“After he was jailed all hell broke loose. There are now shootings every day. Gangs are fighting for control of the 28s’ territory. Every day people are dying. Unfortunately, he is the only one who can bring jobs and now peace,” she said. She warned that the longer Stanfield stayed in prison, the more people would die. “Ralph being free means those who want control [of] our areas will no longer be able to get what they want. At least if he is out it will bring us some sort of peace.”
That uneasy calculus is the backdrop to a trial beginning this week in the Western Cape High Court, where Stanfield, the alleged leader of the feared 28s gang, and his wife Nicole Johnson will appear before Judge Babalwa Mantame. For the National Prosecuting Authority, it is a make-or-break moment: one of the biggest underworld prosecutions the province has seen, expected to run for months with dozens of witnesses testifying for both the State and the defence.
The case is the product of a nearly four-year criminal investigation into the couple’s alleged criminal empire, whose tentacles, amaBhungane has previously shown, have entangled both the private sector and government, making the two wealthy, powerful and popular. What began in September 2023, when Stanfield and Johnson were arrested at their Constantia home for fraud, robbery and car theft over their allegedly stealing their former driver’s BMW, quickly morphed into a far more sophisticated racketeering prosecution. The couple and their co-accused now face 41 charges under the Prevention of Organised Crimes Act (POCA), including murder, attempted murder, fraud, money laundering, robbery, possession of unlicensed firearms and ammunition, and theft.
The driver at the centre of that first case, a key witness, was shot in June 2024. His pregnant wife was shot and seriously injured in July 2025. They are not the only ones. Several key state witnesses have already been murdered or left seriously injured, and others have reportedly been intimidated into not testifying.
The human cost of the alleged enterprise is written into the State’s case itself. City of Cape Town housing official Wendy Kloppers was shot dead in February 2023 at the Delft Symphony Way housing project site, allegedly murdered by one of Stanfield’s current co-accused after the city refused extortion demands from 28s gang members that businesses linked to the Stanfield-Johnson Enterprise be cut in on the project. A week before her murder, three construction workers were shot and wounded at the same site. Similar violence occurred during Atterbury Property and Old Mutual Property’s construction of Cape Town’s King Air Industria, and during the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa’s reconstruction of the Central Line, until businesses and community organisations associated with Stanfield and Johnson became involved. On that project, Prasa told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts that 1,654 jobs were created through setting aside some protection services for small and micro enterprises and formal community involvement, with 300 community members involved in clean-ups.
The State’s theory is that the couple built their empire, dubbed the Stanfield-Johnson Enterprise, on a bedrock of crime and violence, or the threat of it. Through community organisations and businesses, they are accused of hijacking lucrative government and private sector construction and infrastructure projects using shakedowns, corruption and murder. Central to the case is a racketeering charge, under which prosecutors must show how, between 2019 and 2023 and disguised within a sprawling network of businesses, the couple used violence, extortion, corruption and questionable benevolence to build power and buy loyalty from government officials and communities alike. The enforcement grouping known as The Firm is alleged to have terrorised vast areas of Cape Town.
History, however, is not on the prosecutors’ side. Stanfield, whose self-given moniker is “the Baron”, has repeatedly slipped the law’s grasp. By 2007 he had already been acquitted of five murders, including of three children, one aged two, and arson. In 2017 he was acquitted again, of an alleged assault on a police officer who had raided his mother’s Beacon Valley house in 2015. Since 2014, when he and Johnson were first arrested in the dragnet of the now-infamous guns-to-gangs case, charged with fraud and corruption for allegedly illegally obtaining firearm licences and competency certificates from officers at the SAPS central firearms registry in Pretoria, charges have been laid, withdrawn in 2016, reinstated in 2018 and finally withdrawn in 2024. In 2025, prosecutors provisionally withdrew fraud and corruption charges against the couple and nine co-accused, including former City of Cape Town mayoral committee member for human settlements Malusi Booi, arrested in 2024 over a R1-billion city housing tender scam. The withdrawal was pending an additional investigation into newfound evidence. A credible source claims each failed prosecution has made Stanfield even more powerful.
The difficulty is compounded by the couple’s long cultivation of an image as victims of malicious persecution, whose only crimes are benevolence. In Bishop Lavis, a community policing forum member put it bluntly: “Unfortunately he is the only one who is seen to be able to provide jobs and food. He gives to people what government can’t.”
Other community leaders fear what happens if the couple win. “It will be a lot worse. Him getting out will not stop the violence. Already people who have been helping police have been killed. Their whole aim is to make witnesses too scared to talk,” one said. “They claim they are giving people jobs, but their community organisations are not. All they actually do is use them to get onto tenders, and when there is resistance people get hurt.”
Meanwhile, the institutional warning signs are stark. In October 2022, Western Cape judge Daniel Thulare, in a separate 28s case, warned that “evidence suggests that senior management of the SAPS in the province has been penetrated to the extent that the 28 gang has access to the table where the provincial commissioner of the SAPS in the Western Cape sits with his senior managers”. And in 2023, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime cautioned that POCA’s anti-gang provisions were “severely underutilised”, noting that over 20 years very few gang-related cases had been prosecuted under the legislation and that it lacks special provisions for gang leaders, who consequently receive low sentences.
For the people of the Cape Flats, the stakes are measured in lives. If prosecutors fail again, as GI-TOC has previously told amaBhungane, Stanfield’s power will be solidified as he climbs the ladders of corporate and political access and bounty. Whether the trial that opens this week can break that pattern, or whether the Flats will keep burying its residents while it runs, is the question hanging over Judge Mantame’s courtroom.