Renowned Cape Town bar Beerhouse is closing its doors after thirteen years due to extortion rackets.
In September 2020, Beerhouse owner Randolf Jorberg, the then chairperson of the Long Street Association, issued a rallying call to other business owners in the CBD to band together against “extortion, intimidation and racketeering”.
At the time, business owners believed the strong-arm tactics were an attempt by underworld bosses to make up cash lost from nightclubs which were closed during lockdown.
Jorberg said: “In the last days, many businesses that never had to pay for protection have been approached by (Nafiz) Modack’s gang to start paying him, asking for up to R20k a month.”
Jorberg received death threats and has since been living a nomadic lifestyle and announced Beerhouse’s closure on his social platforms on Wednesday afternoon.
Beerhouse wrote on Facebook the sudden end is indeed connected to the Carte Blanche exposé where Jorberg spoke out about the 2015 murder of one of his employees.
Jorberg said the extortion started in 2013, when a man from the ‘underworld’ visited the business on Long Street.
He says the kingpin pitched a proposal for a protection fee which Jorberg refused to pay, until one of his staff members was murdered in 2015.
“A man said if I pay them, I could call them if ever a group too big for our own doorman came in and behaved rowdy and I had to tell him that in two years of trade, the only time that my doorman had to deal with a group that is too big to handle was when he arrived with eight big men days prior.
“The danger they protect you from is themselves. That is what makes it an obvious extortion,” he said.
“I believe that is what killed him (staffer), my decision not to pay.”
He ended up paying R2000 per month, and said a “few hundred businesses in town” were paying protection fees.
A report released by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) this year noted key figures including MarkLifman, Jerome‘Donkie’ Booysen and Nafiz Modack as establishing security companies to operate in the city.