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> 11:04 – [O’Sullivan]“Who do you think you are talking to?”

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“The wrong guy: why Paul O’Sullivan won't back down” – “One of his [Paul’s] students in the late 1990s was a reservist called Cyril Ramaphosa” – Part 1

https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2018-03-31-the-wrong-guy-why-paul-osullivan-wont-back-down/
01 April 2018 - 00:00

Paul O’Sullivan is staring down the police, yet again. He spoke to us about how to clean up the justice system — and how to e-mail your wannabe assassin

This is the man who took on Jackie Selebi [Was he a scapegoat?  >>/17694345/,  >>/17694348/,  >>/17694353/,  >>/17694360/] and won. He took on the notorious Czech gangster Radovan Krejcir. He's not a diplomat.

"I just sent an e-mail to a person this morning," he says. "And it's a tease, really. I said: 'I know who you are, I know where you are, I know what you're planning to do. But I'm going to be quicker than you. I'm coming to kill you!'

"Now that might sound terrible, to send an e-mail like that. But this is the game I have to play. The person has set up an anonymous e-mail address to do the things he's doing. So we don't even know who it is - whether it's a man, or a woman, or a Greek or a Chinese or a Yugoslavian. Actually, we do. It's a Serbian.

"So I sent an e-mail like this, and this guy thinks: 'F**k this, I'm heading to the airport.' Gone!"
The Serbian beef is not new, says the Irishman-turned-South African. "We had three Serbs come here the year before last to kill me. We found out who they were, got the hotel they were staying in. I arranged for somebody to go there at 3am and stand in front of them while they packed their bags and got the next flight out."

O'Sullivan has been accused of being a vigilante. He also has an abrupt, bombastic style which is not everybody's cup of tea. He claims he reserves his aggression for criminals, whom he is forced to threaten in self-defence - because the justice system is so captured, so rife with crooks, that it offers him no protection.

O'Sullivan grew up in a very poor family in rural Ireland. He made a mint in property in London in the 1980s, before moving to South Africa in 1990.

The journalist Marianne Thamm spent a long time with O'Sullivan to research her book about his exploits, To Catch A Cop (Jacana, 2014). But even she could extract few revelations about his pre-South African life. His father was a stern man - a former colonial policeman, stationed in Palestine and Malaya, who told his son: "If a country is worth living in, it is worth fighting for." That stayed with him.

O'Sullivan ran away from home at age 14, travelled to the UK, and joined the army. He trained as an engineer, and spent six years working for the British government in counter-espionage and counterterrorism. He does not discuss what that involved. But he probably wasn't a stationery clerk.

Later, --he saved some cash during a stint with IBM--, and invested in property during the mid-1980s housing boom. He nearly got caught up in a tempting tax dodge by a crooked property speculator, who then threatened him for pulling out of the deal. Jack Slipper, a renowned former Scotland Yard investigator, was an old friend of O'Sullivan's father; he intervened to drive off the conman.