In blogosphere terms this is a relatively old blog and there will be no new updates unless something 'newsworthy' about this issue comes up.  I did update some text and photos 5/21/19 to show the duplex he lived at in Ft Lauderdale.

The material is good historically so if you are interested in the topic it is all awaiting your review.

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Andre Stander was a bank robber, a jailbird, and a Captain in the South African Police at the height of apartheid. In the late 1970s he robbed banks in his lunchtime and investigated crimes in the afternoon. Stander’s double life collapsed when he was sent to prison in 1980 but three years later he escaped and launched a new crime wave with a gang recruited behind bars. CHRISTOPHER OTHEN, author of 'KATANGA 1960-63: MERCENARIES, SPIES AND THE AFRICAN NATION THAT WAGED WAR ON THE WORLD'and 'FRANCO'S INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES: ADVENTURERS, FASCISTS, AND CHRISTIAN CRUSADERS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR' (amazon.co.uk or amazon.com), looks at the life and death of a criminal who always thought he was the smartest kêrel in the room. After you've read this check out my new blog for all kinds of cultural and military weirdness. christopherothen.wordpress.com/ Whiter Than White Robbing Banks in Apartheid Era South Africa with Police Captain Andre Stander and his Gang (1977-84) In a hurry? Read the summary here. Johannesburg. Late 1983. A blue Cortina XR6 Interceptor cruises the Braamfontein business district in the dry heat of a South African afternoon. It pulls up near a policeman who stands with a shotgun over his shoulder. Two well dressed men exit the car. One has blond hair in tight curls and a thin horseshoe moustache. The other is dark with thick rimmed glasses. They walk past the policeman and head towards a bank. The policeman ignores them and scans the traffic. Brigadier Manie van Rensburg, head of Robbery and Homicide, has ordered every policeman in Johannesburg to be on the look out for the Stander gang, a trio of escaped prisoners who have been robbing banks since August, sometimes four a day. The policeman with the shotgun knows what to look for. Screeching tires, slammed brakes, waving guns. He is ready for them. The two men enter the bank. The blond man scans the cashiers, a row of young women behind open desks. He selects the prettiest and approaches her. He smiles. She smiles back. “Can I help you sir?” she asks. He points a revolver at her. Outside, the policeman is still scanning the traffic. The Stander gang had better not try anything on his watch. The pump-action shotgun strap hangs heavy on his shoulder in the sun. Inside the bank the cashier is shoving wads of cash into a bag with shaking hands. The blond man continues to smile as he holds the revolver. His friend stands nearby with his hand in his pocket. It is calm and efficient. Other bank staff look across, unsure of what is happening. The cashier fills the bag and pushes it over the desk to the blond man. "Thank you," he says. He and his friend walk quickly out of the bank. Inside someone presses a silent alarm linked to the local police station. The two men walk past the policeman and climb into the blue Cortina. They drive smoothly off and merge into the traffic. Within a minute Andre Stander and Allan Heyl are gone. The first police sirens sound in the distance. Employees emerge from the bank and stand, confused and scared, outside. The policeman takes the shotgun off his shoulder and slowly begins to realise something has gone very wrong. Good Cop, Bad Cop Andre Stander never had much choice about being a policeman. His father was Major-General Frans Stander, a legendary figure in the South African police force. No matter how much the teenage Andre protested, the Major-General refused to accept his son did not want to follow in the family tradition. At sixteen Andre, then a lozenge faced boy with a shock of light hair and a rebellious cigarette permanently stuck to his lower lip, gave the old man his opportunity. The teenager failed his matric, the High School graduation exam. It was hard to fail. In 1963 a white Afrikaaner living a privileged life under apartheid was expected to sail through. Black South Africans were second class citizens by law, condemned to inferior education, medical treatment, and employment prospects. Whites like Stander lived on a honeycomb. They did not fail their matrics. Stander was always contrary. Or perhaps he was not as smart as he thought he was. Whatever the reason, the Major-General had the excuse he needed to get Stander into Pretoria Police College. His father’s name carried weight among the instructors and when Stander, an unenthusiastic student, graduated top of his class it raised a few eyebrows. He joined the regular police force and rose quickly through the ranks. The Major-General had got his way. In the late 1960s Stander married Leonie, a good-looking blonde. The marriage was troubled and in 1972 they divorced. He took up with Pat Amos, a student teacher, but had broken up with her by the time she had his baby. She named their son Ernie. Convinced by his friends to do the decent thing Stander went back. He held his son in his arms, looked into his eyes, and felt nothing. Stander left and never saw Ernie again. Instead he got back together with Leonie and they remarried. By 1977 the marriage was in trouble again. Stander was now a thirty-one-year-old Police Captain in Johannesburg’s Kempton Park Criminal Investigation Department. He had done well in his career, although jealous colleagues put this down to his father’s influence. Fellow policeman Chris Swanepoel had little respect for Andre’s abilities. “Sure he was a captain of the police but was he a brilliant detective? Rubbish, I say! When we were in the force together he couldn't even catch a cold...”. For his part Stander was contemptuous of his fellow policemen, regarding them as stupid, brutal, and incompetent. He was good at masking his emotions. No-one he worked with, not even best friend Carl van Deventer (a Bureau of State Security – BOSS - secret agent), realised the arctic scorn he felt for everyone around him. A South African police officer in the apartheid state, a man whose relationship was falling apart, a man who worked a job he hated. A man like a lot of other men. Then one day the firm outline that is Andre Stander blurs and turns to smoke. He becomes an enigma, a puzzle without a solution. Why? Because Stander decides to rob a bank. He gave out the morning assignments to his staff as usual then drove to Jan Smuts airport. He flew to Durban and hired a car. He put on a disguise (a wig and false beard) then drove to a bank. South African banks in the late 1970s were open plan with little security. The cashiers each sat behind a desk whose drawers were loaded with cash. There were no glass partitions. Perhaps a security guard half asleep at the door. Stander approached a cashier, sat down, and quietly pulled a gun on her. He asked her to fill a bag with money. Terrified, she did. Stander took the money, left the bank before anyone realised what had happened, got in his car, and drove back to Louis Botha airport, peeling off his disguise on the way. Then he flew to Johannesburg in time for an afternoon’s work. It was that easy. A Taste For Luxury No-one knows exactly how many Durban bank robberies can be pinned on Stander (there were other men with disguises and guns doing the rounds) but he flew in to hold up banks regularly for the next three years. He got away with around 100,000 rand. A white middle manager in a large company earned perhaps 2,000 rand a month at this time. Stander was rich. He opened a souvenir shop in Durban with his friend Carl van Deventer. Unknown to van Deventer he used it launder the stolen money. He bought a large house in Pomona, Kempton Park where he lived alone after Leoni left him for good in 1978. Stander escaped detection for so long because he knew police procedure, knew how long it would take them to respond to an alarm, and knew exactly how they would investigate the crime. The only concession he made to modifying his tactics after the first robbery was to steal cars rather than hire them. Nothing happened to make him change his opinion of the police as stupid and incompetent. He enjoyed the robberies, picking out the prettiest cashiers to rob, and getting a thrill from the power of pointing a gun. “He used to watch the faces of his victims,” said van Deventer. “He was laughing up his sleeve when he committed his robberies. There was an element of sadistic bullying.” At a party in late 1979 Stander, drunk, told van Deventer about the robberies and asked him to take part. He claimed he had a stolen car parked at Jan Smuts airport. When his friend refused Stander laughed off the confession as a joke. A troubled van Demeter approached his senior officer in BOSS. They investigated the car and found wigs, fake beards, a balaclava, and a false number plate in the boot. The car was staked out. On 3 January 1980 Stander visited the vehicle to remove some items and caught a flight to Durban where a bank was robbed. He was arrested in the Jan Smuts arrival lounge on the return trip with 4,000 rand and a revolver in his suitcase. On 6 May 1980 he was found guilty of fifteen counts of robbery at Durban Supreme Court. He got seventeen years, to be served at Zonderwater maximum security prison. Broers Behind Bars Why did Stander do it? After the trial he told his family he had snapped after duty at the 1976 Tembisa riot when Black South Africans in the township, north of Kempton Park, attacked police. He had shot an unarmed man (to others he would claim to have shot many more that day) and the horror of the moment unhinged him. It was a convincing story. The late seventies was when the previously monolithic apartheid system began to crack. The Black Consciousness Movement was gaining strength among South Africans, the Soweto riots had grabbed the attention of the world after police fired on a student protest, and black activist Steve Bilko became an icon when he was murdered in custody. By 1980, when Andre told the story, intelligent onlookers could see twilight approaching for white rule in South Africa. Stander was lying. He was not present at the Tembisa riot. “He was supposed to have shot 22 people”, said van Deventer, “but I never heard about it. Don't you think he would have told his best friend about it at some time or other?” The new jailbird was a charismatic, cold blooded charmer with the ability to tell people what they wanted to hear. As a corrupt policeman Stander should have suffered at the hands of both guards and prisoners but instead became a popular figure. The prison guards, brutal symbols of the apartheid regime, liked him. The other prisoners enjoyed his company. In 1980 George Allan Heyl was a troubled, aggressive twenty-eight-year-old three years into a sentence for robbing five banks in Pretoria. “The most negative, self-destructive misfit alive”, in his own words, came from a modest background. A good all-rounder at school, Heyl started a teacher training degree but dropped out. He hated apartheid, society, South Africa, and himself. By the mid-1970s he could not control his inner rage and began to steal cars. He soon moved on to other crimes. “I saw a bank with one teller in it,” he said. “The more I saw myself robbing the bank, the more it became a reality. I finally robbed the bank and because I was not caught, I tried it again. Justifications such as 'I didn't hurt anyone', 'I was not caught', 'I need the money to survive', make the wrongdoing seem like the right thing.” In 1977 he was caught and sent to Zonderwater. Three years later he met Stander. The ex-police captain flattered the younger man. “I’ve heard all about you,” he told Heyl. “I’m delighted to meet South Africa’s most notorious.” Heyl hated apartheid. Stander claimed he did too. He also claimed to share Heyl's admiration for Bob Dylan and the Rote Armee Fraktion, the German Marxist terror group. Heyl saw in Stander an older, more confident version of himself. “I hated the South African system,” said Heyl, “and, as we were both bank robbers and both set on a campaign of defiance, we were ideal company”. Heyl thought he had met a soul mate but observers felt Stander psychologically dominated the Pretoria bank robber. Even Heyl had to admit Stander was ice cold. “He was calculating. He was, I think, beyond emotion”. They became a trio with the addition of Patrick Lee McCall, a nervy and balding thirty-year-old car thief and bank robber with an impulsive streak. They talked constantly about escape. Come On Allan, Let’s Go! In the late summer of 1983 Stander and McCall began to complain about back pains. On 11 August they and five other prisoners were escorted to physiotherapist Amelia Grobler’s consulting rooms near Cullinan. In the waiting room Stander And McCall attacked the three guards, took their revolvers, and stole Grobler’s car keys. Out the door and gone. The pair rolled up at a nearby farm and took the owner and his teenage son hostage. The farmer was forced to call the police. A lone officer turned up in a van and was over powered. Stander stole his uniform and forced him into the back of the van with the other hostages. With McCall riding shotgun they drove off and hijacked another car, driven by Nakkie Fouche. She went in the back of the van and the pair drove off in her Opel. Stander and McCall spent two months holed up in Johannesburg avoiding the police search, although they ventured out once to rob the United Building Society and got away with 13,000 rand. They hid in a Holiday Inn posing as gym enthusiasts with squash racquets and sports bags before Stander rented a house on Sixth Avenue, Houghton, a wealthy part of town. He hired servants. The last place the police would look for escaped convicts was among the rich. On 31 October they headed to Olifantsfontein. After the escape Heyl had been interrogated and knocked about by the guards. He knew nothing. The prison authorities eventually accepted his innocence and allowed him to resume his routine, which included studying for a trade qualification. "I was doing a test at the Olifantsfontein trade test centre," Heyl said,"and I heard Andre saying, 'Come on Allan, let's go!' I looked up and saw the five guards lying face down with Andre and McCall standing over them with their guns drawn. We ran out, jumped into the Cortina, and drove off with me in the back." Stander and McCall gave Heyl three weeks of luxury at their safe house in Houghton, enjoying good food, servants, and alcohol. One morning Stander walked into Heyl’s room and tossed a black wig and false moustache on the bed. “Are you ready to start work, Allan?” he asked. The three escaped prisoners went back to robbing banks. Over the next two months they would hit twenty banks, on one occasion four the same day, netting over 500,000 rand. The raids were quick and clean with no violence. The three would enter a bank, select a teller and quietly order her to fill a bag with money before confidently strolling out. At least once the security guard held the door open for them as they left, unaware of what had happened. "There were rules: no shouting, no flashing guns, no planning and no designer violence,” said Heyl. “In fact the outstanding feature of all the robberies was that they went off so calmly that they were actually mundane. The object of the exercise was not to terrorise people, but to basically get in and out as quickly as possible, because we were in the process of robbing three or four banks a day." The Stander gang (or ‘Hopper Gang’ for their technique of hopping from bank to bank) found themselves on newspaper front pages day after day. The public began to cheer them on. Outlaws, bandits, three men against the world. Stander’s fake horseshoe moustache, caught on a security camera, became a real life fashion in Johannesburg. The gang were an embarrassment to the government. Brigadier Manie van Rensburg was put in charge of a special task force to stop them. Stander and his friends, Van Rensburg told the press, were on borrowed time. Safe Houses The gang lived in luxury. They had their house in Houghton with servants and a line of expensive cars (most stolen) in the garage. Stander was fond of yellow Porsches. They acquired another safe house in Linmeyer and later a third back in Houghton. They ate in restaurants every night, shopped in upscale stores for clothes and toiletries, and filled their kitchens with champagne. High class prostitutes trotted in and out of the safe houses. Stander, in particular, had an inexhaustible appetite for women. The police briefed journalists that in October, not long after his breakout, Stander lured a teenage model to the Kyalami Ranch Hotel, Johannesburg, on the pretence of being a photographer, and raped her. Some journalists, like Chris Steyn, a rare female hard-nosed crime reporter, thought this a smear to counter Stander’s growing popularity and refused to run the story. Others believed it and did. The public did not care and continued to see the gang as heroes making fools of the establishment. On the inside things were becoming shaky. Stander barely escaped arrest on several occasions, once jogging through a police stake out in the early morning and another time having to run from a restaurant when he was recognised by a fellow diner. McCall was twitchier than ever. In a raid on the Potshot gunshop in Randburg he shot and wounded the owner Marlene Henn, a severe forty something with a blonde beehive. Stander and Heyl started to carry out raids without him. When he did come along the tellers found McCall more frightening than Stander and his revolver. “These two men came in,” said Trix Style, a teller at the Trust Bank in Benoni. “One came towards me and the other one walked around the office and came into my cashier's cage and stood behind me. That was McCall. Stander put a big sports bag on the counter, took out a revolver and pointed at me and said 'Don't push any buttons or anything'. So they must have known exactly how the alarm and security system worked. Strangely enough I wasn't scared of Stander, who openly pointed the revolver at me. But McCall, who was standing behind me with his hand in his pocket, who I realised probably also had a gun, I was scared of him.'” The gang could still operate with panache. In January they robbed a bank directly below van Rensburg’s task force HQ. But they could sense time running out. The police released a good quality set of security photographs from a recent raid and the gang found their faces all over South Africa's newspapers. Heyl acquired a fake German passport and spent hours practising the accent. Stander obtained a bundle of forged Australian documents. The gang agreed South Africa was too hot for them and decided to try their luck in America. They bought a yacht, the Lilly Rose, in Cape Town and plans were made for Heyl and McCall, along with a hired crew member, to sail it to Miami. On 27 January Stander flew to Florida to make berthing arrangements using a fake Australian passport in the name of Peter Harris. Heyl saw him off at the airport. When he returned to the Houghton safe house a servant told him the police had been there shortly before asking for a ‘Mr Stander’. One of the call girls had recognised the gang from newspaper photographs and turned them in. Heyl drove off and phoned McCall to warn him but his fellow bank robber shrugged it off as a routine house to house enquiry and refused to abandon the hideout. In the early morning of 30 January 1984 police stormed the property. Stun grenades flew in through the windows. McCall, naked, ran through the house firing at the police then fled upstairs. They found him in a linen cupboard off the hallway. He had shot himself in the head rather than go back to jail. Don’t Go To Fort Lauderdale Heyl shaved his hair, sharpened his German accent, and booked a seat on a South African Airways jet to Greece where he went into hiding. Stander was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, his gang disintegrated and the money running out. In South Africa the police had discovered the other safe houses (where photographs of the girl they claimed Stander raped turned up) and seized the yacht. No going back. Stander rented an apartment and bought a used orange Mustang from gas station owner Tony Tomasello. On 10 February he was stopped by police after running a red light. On the run but still breaking the law. He produced a driving licence in the name of Peter Harris and claimed to be a forty-one-year-old Australian author. The policeman recognized the license as a fake and Stander was briefly arrested before being freed on $100 bond. He gave them his real address. The Mustang was impounded. That night Stander broke into the impound lot and stole his car back. In South Africa the police had discovered from the Lilly Rose’s hired crewman that the yacht’s planned destination was Florida. They passed Stander’s details to the American police and a photograph of the bank robber appeared in Florida newspapers the day after the red light incident. The Fort Lauderdale PD failed to connect him with ‘Peter Harris’. The penny only dropped when Tony Tomosello contacted them on 13 February and said Stander, who he recognized from the newspaper, had just left his Mustang at the gas station to be resprayed. The police staked out Stander’s apartment block. Tomosello was reluctantly dragged along. It got close to 10.30 at night and Stander had still not shown. Patrolman Michael Von Stetina was getting tired and bored on the perimeter of the stake out when a sunken-cheeked blonde man on a bicycle rode up. It was Stander. Von Stetina recognised him and called out. Stander dropped the bike on the road and ran. The patrolman, shotgun in hands, chased him. Stander fell over and got up with his hands in the air. “Okay,” he said, “I give up”. Von Stetina told him to get down the ground and moved in for the arrest but Stander suddenly grabbed the shotgun. In the struggle the gun went off and the South African gained possession. There was a confused chase which ended with Von Stetina backed against a fence and Stander aiming the shotgun. The policeman drew his .38 service revolver and shot Stander four times. Stander spent his last minutes bleeding out face down in the middle of the road, hands cuffed behind his back, lit by a searchlight on a police car. He died before the ambulance arrived. Stop The Violence Von Stetina got a death threat by letter the day after Stander’s death. He ignored it. Tomosello, who had a family, was less calm and sought police protection while he waited for the South African government to cough up the $64,000 reward it had promised him. The gas station owner was convinced Stander, who told him he was meeting someone at Shooters nightclub the day of his death, was in Florida with Allan Heyl. Heyl was actually sunning himself on the Greek island of Hydra when he heard the news of Stander’s death. Money was running short for last man standing. He traveled to England where he robbed a company payroll of 4,000 rand and headed for Spain. The Costa del Crime was not to his taste and he returned to England where he set up home as ‘Philip John Ball’ with a girlfriend in Surrey. An informer led the police to his door in early 1985 and Heyl got ten years in a British prison. In the mid-1990s he was extradited to South Africa and imprisoned on charges of armed robbery. Heyl returned to a country that remembered Andre Stander. In 1990 the hard rock band Jack Hammer recorded ‘Don’t Go To Fort Lauderdale’, a sympathetic song about the bank robber. Zambian singer Robin Auld performed ‘The Ballad of Andre Stander’ live. As apartheid crumbled in the mid-1990s and multiracial elections were held for the first time, the one time Police Captain was still the most famous bank robber in South African history. In 2003 an American crew under director Bronwen Hughes set up in South Africa to make ‘Stander’, a big budget movie about Andre starring Thomas Jane. Informed in part by Heyl’s version of events and the new atmosphere of the Rainbow Nation, the film showed Stander as a tormented anti-apartheid activist and Iggy Pop fan who took to crime because of his disgust with the system. The rape accusation and cold manipulation did not make the film. Even in death Stander cast a shadow. In October 1992 his former wife, now Leoni Venter, committed suicide in Pretoria afer a long depression. In March 2008 Marlene Henn, the gun store owner who survived McCall’s bullet, was murdered in a home invasion. Allan Heyl was luckier. Released from prison in May 2005 he forged a new identity as a motivational speaker. “Whatever you visualise you will realise”. He has made a career for himself and occasionally appears in the media to comment on crime. "We must stop the violence," is his mantra. He is clear eyed about the media’s love affair with the gang in their heyday. "The fact that Andre was a former police captain suited the romantic notion of good-turned-bad against bad. And that's where sensationalism became hysteria as never before or since." The dead man himself remains an enigma. Stander gave different justifications for his crime spree to everyone he met. In Heyl’s eyes Stander turned on society because of his disgust with apartheid. Brigadier Manie van Rensburg believed his quarry was motivated only by a love of money and luxury. To his family he was rebelling against the police career that had been forced on him. A hero? A rebel? A rapist? A former policeman who robbed banks and died in the middle of a Fort Lauderdale street waiting for an ambulance. A bad kêrel. Further Reading The South African press spilt a lot of ink over Stander while he was alive but there have been few post-mortem accounts. Journalists Paul Moorcraft and Mike Cohen produced Stander: Bank Robber (amazon.co.ukor amazon.com), a short biography, in 1984. Chris Steyn-Barlow (her married name) wrote Publish And Be Damned (amazon.co.uk oramazon.com) in 2006, an account of her time as a crime reporter that includes some interesting pages on Stande. The 2003 movie Stander (amazon.co.uk or amazon.com) gives a sanitised version of events but has been well reviewed. The transcript of a Carte Blanche documentary on the gang can be found here and there are a few others around if you look hard enough. South African and American newspapers, including the Daytona Beach Morning Journal and Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran stories on Stander. Other accounts, in varying degrees of accuracy, are all over the internet. The best is SA author Rob Marsh’s history of the gang. Mug Shot Andre Stander's mug shot, taken by the Fort Lauderdale Police after his arrest for using a fake driving license on 10 February 1984.

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    This blog is a work in progress.  The clippings here were from my file and I have added considerable other public sources to make up this blog site.  

 I lived in Ft Lauderdale before this took place, at 1025 NW 13th Street.  

Note this is NOT next door to Standers duplex at 1730 NE 13th Street, Unit B (right side) Ft Lauderdale, Florida 33304.
  
13th Street is an East/West street that divides at Andrews Avenue which is a North/South street. 

I lived on the NW side of 13th Street and the duplex was on the Northeast side of Andrews.  

27 blocks separated my house from his rented duplex.  I drove by that duplex 100+ times, never realizing that someday it would be an address where a South African bank robber lived (briefly).

Stander was using the name Harris, my last name is also Harris, no relation at all to him.

Here are 2019 'google Earth' photos of the duplex.  The door on the right side of the duplex was where Stander lived.

Newspaper articles from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida are here FYI:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Andre Stander

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Andre Stander (1946 – 13 February 1984) was a South African criminal and policeman. One of the most infamous bank robbers in South Africa's history, Stander distinguished himself for the audacious manner with which he carried out his crimes: he sometimes carried out the crime on his lunch break, often returning to the scene as an investigating officer.^[1]

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1Biography
  • 1.1Police career
  • 1.2Stander Gang
  • 1.3Exile and death
• 2Controversy
• 3Biographical film
• 4References
• 5External links

Biography[edit]

Police career[edit]

The son of a prominent figure in the South African Prison Service, Major General Frans Stander, Andre was under pressure from an early age to pursue a career in law enforcement. He enrolled at the South African Police Training College near Pretoria in 1963, graduating at the top of his class. Shortly afterwards he joined the Kempton Park Criminal Investigation Department (CID).^[2]

In 1977, Stander flew to Durban and robbed his first bank. Between 1977 and 1980 he is believed to have stolen nearly a hundred thousand rand.^[2]

Stander Gang[edit]

The Zonderwater Prison, Cullinan, Gauteng

After robbing nearly 30 banks, Andre Stander was arrested and sentenced to 75 years in prison on 6 May 1980.^[1] However, since many of the charges in the sentence ran concurrently, he faced an actual sentence of 17 years.^[3] Stander met two inmates named Allan Heyl and Lee McCall.^[1] On 11 August 1983, Stander and McCall, along with five other inmates, were taken from Zonderwater Maximum Security Prison's premises for a physiotherapy appointment.

Once the prisoners were left alone with the physiotherapist, Stander and McCall overpowered her and escaped. The other prisoners refused to participate and stayed behind.^[4] Stander and McCall returned to Zonderwater on 31 October 1983, in order to spring Allen Heyl from the facility where he was taking a trade test. From that day until the end of January 1984, the three began robbing banks together, under the nom de guerre of The Stander Gang (a term coined by the news media).

McCall was killed on 30 January 1984 in a Police raid on the gang's hide-out in Houghton. Heyl fled to Greece, then England, then Spain and eventually back to England, where he was caught, tried and sentenced for robbery and a related firearms charge to nine years. After serving his time in the UK, he was extradited back to South Africa where he was sentenced to a further 33 years in prison. Heyl was released on parole on 18 May 2005. While police were closing in on McCall in South Africa, Stander had been in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, trying to arrange for the sale of the gang's recently purchased sailing yacht, the Lilly Rose, that they planned to use for their final getaway once they had acquired enough money.

Exile and death[edit]

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While Stander remained in the United States, international arrest warrants and all points bulletins were issued for his arrest. Trying to make the best of the situation, Stander created the false identity of an Australian author named "Peter Harris" and forged a driver's license. Afterwards, he visited a used car lot and purchased a Ford Mustang from a dealer named Anthony Tomasello. On 10 February 1984, police pulled Stander over while he was driving and arrested him for driving an unregistered vehicle. Being relatively unknown to the American authorities at that time, Stander presented his false ID to the police, who recognized it as a forgery and subsequently seized it (adding driver's license forgery to his list of offenses) but believed his story about his identity and released him.

Once released on the same evening, Stander returned to the police impound lot where his seized Mustang was being kept, broke in and stole the car. On the following morning, Stander returned to the same used car lot where he had purchased the vehicle and asked the same dealer, Tomasello, to have the car re-painted in a different colour. However, Tomasello had just read about the Stander Gang in a local newspaper. He told Stander that he would help him, got his information, and as soon as Stander had left, Tomasello called his lawyer. On his lawyer's advice, Tomasello called the local police.^[2]

Based on Tomasello's information, a police tactical unit surrounded the apartment that Stander had been using as a hideout, but Stander was not there. He had acquired a bicycle to use while his car was with Tomasello to be repainted. He had left the apartment on the bicycle and returned only after the police had surrounded it. As he unknowingly rode up to the apartment complex, officer Michael van Stetina (who had been posted on the perimeter) recognised Stander and attempted to stop him. Stander tried to get away, but as Stetina prevented his escape a struggle for the officer's shotgun began. The gun discharged and Stander was hit; he fell onto the apartment complex's driveway, bleeding profusely. Stetina immediately radioed for an ambulance. Although officer Stetina tried to administer first aid, Stander's wounds were too extensive and he bled to death before an ambulance arrived.^[2]

Controversy[edit]

After his first trial, Stander claimed that his disillusionment with police service stemmed from a prior incident when he and his fellow officers shot and killed over twenty unarmed black residents of Thembisa during the 1976 Soweto uprising. However, Stander was not present with the police contingent at Thembisa when the alleged shooting took place.^[2]

Other accounts have suggested that Stander, who completed his national service in Angola during the South African Border War, may have also been bored with civilian life and craved the excitement afforded by a life of crime.^[5]

Biographical film[edit]

• Interest in Stander was first revived in 2000 with the play Stander by acclaimed South African playwright Charles J. Fourie in his one-man play featuring Afrikaans actor Albert Maritz. The production of the play was performed country wide in South Africa and was hailed by critics. "Fourie's play Stander is a joyous celebration of some peculiarly local strengths and weaknesses, Sam Shepard revisited in Springs, and hot theatre!" - (Mail & Guardian).
• Stander was the subject of the 2003 film Stander, starring American actor Thomas Jane as Andre Stander.

References[edit]

1. ^ Jump up to:^a b c The police officer turned bank robber at CNN
2. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Othen, Christopher Whiter Than White
3. Jump up^ Marsh, Rob. "The Stander Gang". Rob Marsh. Archived from the original on 8 May 2011. Retrieved 11 May 2011.
4. Jump up^ The Stander Gang Archived 8 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
5. Jump up^ Stander's love child wants to know the truth

External links[edit]

• Whiter Than White - In depth article about Andre Stander's life and crimes
• Stander on Internet Movie Database
• Carte Blanche Interview with Alan Heyl, the last surviving member of The Stander Gang who was released early 2005
• Rob Marsh's Famous South African Crimes

Authority control	WorldCat Identities VIAF: 65429088 LCCN: n85037547

Categories:

• 1946 births
• 1984 deaths
• Afrikaner people
• Deaths by firearm in Florida
• People shot dead by law enforcement officers in the United States
• Police officers convicted of robbery
• South African bank robbers
• South African military personnel of the Border War
• South African police officers with criminal convictions
• White South African people

===========================================

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Stander ...Bank Robber

by Paul Moorcraft (Goodreads Author), Mike Cohen

 3.33  ·  Rating Details ·  3 Ratings  ·  1 Review

The story of the Stander Gang of bank robbers, led by former police captain, Andre Stander, and the problems they caused during 1983 and 1984.

Two were finally shot dead by police, one in Johannesburg and Stander himself in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The survivor was arrested and gaoled in the UK. In 1983, former SAP Captain Andre Stander, serving 25 years in prison for numerous bank robberies and Patrick McCall who had been declared an habitual criminal and was serving an indeterminate sentence for car thefts and frauds, escaped from guards while undergoing treatment by a physiotherapist, having been taken there from Zonderwater Prison. While on the run they sprung another convict, Allan Heyl, while he was under escort at a trade test centre. 

Between August 1983 and January 1984, the Stander Gang, as they became known, went on a spree of armed bank robberies, often hopping from one neighbouring bank to the next, accumulating many thousands of Rands in stolen loot. On the 28 January 1984 Patrick McCall was killed in a shootout with police in Houghton, Johannesburg. Andre Stander flew to Fort Lauderdale in Florida, USA, using a forged passport, where he was also shot dead by the police there. 

Heyl escaped to the United Kingdom where he tried to continue his career of crime but was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment. He was later deported to South African where he is still serving sentences for bank robbery and other crimes. This is the intriguing story of the Stander Gang. (less)

Paperback, 192 pages

Published 1984 by Galapago

Original Title

Stander

ISBN

0947020055 (ISBN13: 9780947020057)

Edition Language

English

Other Editions

None found

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Printer Friendly Version Dogfight Women's Boxing  Listen to full insert The Stander Gang - excerpt from Rob Marsh's 'Of Criminal Intent'  Stander Gang Allan Heyl: “It was a game of cat and mouse – a death wish, the ultimate act of defiance.' The gang gained a reputation for being polite to their victims and were called the “gentlemen robbers”. Stander Gang Date : 27 October 2002 Producer : Kate Barry Presenter : Ruda Landman Genre : Crime, Profiles [SABC News Archive] “Police are watching all airports in the country for the two fugitive bank robbers Andre Stander and Allan Heyl, amid fears that the pair may have already skipped the country.”  The Stander Gang were South Africa’s most famous bank robbers, becoming the stuff of legend. Their exploits gripped the country’s attention and were written about in countless articles and books. They also captured the imagination of crime author Rob Marsh.  Rob: “They took on the forces of law and order, they were successful; for a time they were the most wanted people in South Africa. They were in all the newspapers. I mean it was big news and they were doing things that, in one sense, some of us like to think that we’d like to do – in other words, get one over on authority.”  The members of the gang were Andre Stander a former policeman turned bank robber, Patrick Lee McCall a car thief and fraudster, and Allan Heyl a car thief and bank robber. It all began in 1977. As the son of a police general, great things were expected of Andre Stander when he joined the police. And he lived up to those expectations. At 31, Captain Stander was head of the CID in Kempton Park. No one knew that he was living a double life. Stander began a profitable sideline. He would catch an early morning flight to Durban, don a disguise, rob a bank, and then catch the next plane home to return to his police desk. In three years he stole over a R100 000. But when he boasted about committing the perfect crime to his best friend, Cor van Deventer - a Bureau of State Security agent - the game was up.  He was arrested and sentenced to 75 years imprisonment. In 1980 he was sent to Zonderwater Prison and it was here that he met McCall and Heyl. Three years later they escaped and went on a crime spree that enthralled the nation with its sheer audacity. Wearing outrageous disguises they would sometimes rob three or four banks a day. [SABC News Archive] “A total of R172 000 was stolen in three separate bank robberies in Johannesburg today. In all three cases, the robbers were three white males.”  It became quite prestigious to be held up by the Stander Gang, because they always managed to stay one step ahead of the police. But eventually their luck ran out. McCall was killed when the police raided the gang’s hideout. Stander fled the country and was killed in a shootout with an American policeman, and Heyl went on the run to Greece but was eventually apprehended and deported back to South Africa. It was the end of an era, but the legend lives on. They will be immortalised in a movie called “Stander” being shot in Johannesburg with an American director and cast.  The last surviving member of the so-called Stander Gang, Allan Heyl, is now middle aged and he’s spent 25 years of his life behind bars. At the moment he’s here – in the Krugersdorp prison – and if he isn’t granted parole, he will be here until 2010. He now teaches Biology, Afrikaans and Life Skills to other prisoners. Ruda: “What kind of man was Andre Stander?”  Allan: “He was calculating. He was, I think, beyond emotion, despised everything that the police force stood for. His colleagues will be very surprised to hear this. Nobody knows him better than what I know him, and I know for a fact that he hated his colleagues.” Ruda: “Why?” Allan: “He had no respect for them. He considered them to be corrupt, inefficient and brutal and savage. He was probably the ultimate Jekyll and Hyde.” Brigadier Manie van Rensburg was the Commanding Officer of Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad in 1983. He led the hunt for the Stander Gang. Ruda: “How did the Stander Gang manage to keep on evading the police?”  Brigadier Van Rensburg: “I think Andre probably had a big part in it because he’d been in the police a long time and he knew how they operated. He probably knew that all the robberies were unexpected, and he knew that the police wouldn’t be able to get to the scene that quickly.” Allan: “We just both realised that we could be extremely brazen, to the extent that we pulled up in front of a bank one day in Braamfontein and there was a policeman with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. And he was there looking for us, but looking for us in terms of what is portrayed in the movies – screeching of tyres, slamming of breaks, skidding – so he literally saw right past the blue Cortina, and right in front of him, under his very nose, we both got out of the car, walked into the bank, walked out and took our leave.” Perhaps somebody should tell Hollywood how it’s really done.  In the movie, shots are fired during a bank robbery - but in reality this never happened. In fact, the gang gained a reputation for being polite to their victims and were called the “gentlemen robbers”. Trix Style was working at the Trust Bank in Benoni when she was held up. Trix Style: “These two men came in. One came towards me and the other one walked around the office and came into my cashier’s cage and stood behind me. That was McCall. Stander put a big sports bag on the counter, took out a revolver and pointed at me and said ‘Don’t push any buttons or anything’. So they must have known exactly how the alarm and security system worked. Strangely enough I wasn’t scared of Stander, who openly pointed the revolver at me. But McCall, who was standing behind me with his hand in his pocket, who I realised probably also had a gun, I was scared of him.” As soon as they left the bank, Trix pressed the alarm button. Ruda: “But obviously by then the bank had raised the alarm – so the police would be looking for you?” Allan: “That was the whole idea.” Ruda: “How do you mean that was the whole idea?” Allan: “It was a game of cat and mouse – a death wish, the ultimate act of defiance. What you are doing is so fundamentally anti-everything that society stands for – it’s a feeling of such brazen cheek. Obviously there was fear, a little bit of anxiety, but with time it almost started becoming like a game, and we were playing with people’s lives. And notwithstanding the fact that we never, ever intended to kill anybody, we should have been at all times aware of what possibly could have gone wrong.” And things did go wrong. [SABC News Archive] “Escaped convicts Andre Stander, Patrick Lee McCall, and Allan Heyl are believed to have been involved in a hold-up in Randburg today, at which an employee at a shooting range was shot in the shoulder. Police said two armed men went inside the building holding the Potshot Shooting Range and fired one shot. A bullet struck Mrs Marlene Hem, who is reported to be in a satisfactory condition. The robbers then took six firearms and ammunition before making their escape in a white Cortina XR6.” Ruda: “Allan, you actually did that shooting.” Allan: “No I was present when it happened. It was McCall. Look, we were in a state of mind of complete insanity. Normal people don’t behave like that. Normal people don’t escape from prison and then go on a robbing spree.” Over five months they robbed 27 banks and stole almost R700 000 in cars and cash. Ruda: “What did you do with the money?” Allan: “Living on the run is pretty expensive, and we had two houses in Houghton, with servants, motorcars – most of which were stolen – reasonable clothing, eating out every night.” They also bought a luxury yacht. Ruda: “And the girls?” Allen: “Now the girls, that’s another story. I said to him, ‘It took three years to get out of Zonderwater – do you realise that you are bringing women to the safe house?’” Ruda: “What was his response? How did he motivate it?” Allen: “You must understand that normal rules never applied to Andre.” For example, Stander never acknowledged his illegitimate son. Ruda: “Did he ever talk about that – that he had a son?” Allen: “He told me that someone told him to go and feel the child and he would know instinctively. And he took the baby and he hugged the baby, and said he felt absolutely nothing.” But it was Stander’s weakness for women that led to his downfall. The escort agency girls gave the police the address of the Houghton house. Allan: “I arrived at Andre’s house after seeing him off at the airport the day before, only to have the servant come running out of the servant’s quarters area. He said ‘Mr Roberts, the police called here and they were asking me if three men lived here, and they mentioned names like Stander’. And I said ‘I know what this is all about, I’ll go and see them now’ and I reversed out there and I departed.” He phoned McCall and told him not to return to the house. But McCall ignored the warning. In the early hours of the 30th of January 1984, the police stormed the house. The Special Task Force threw stun grenades through the windows and the sharpshooters also did some damage. It was all over very quickly. Lying in a linen closet in the passage they found the body of Patrick Lee McCall. An inquest ruled that he had shot himself in the head. Ruda: “And then how did you get out of the country?” Allan: “Courtesy of SAA. I flew out from Durban, drastically changed my appearance.” Ruda: “What did you do? How did you change it?” Allan: “I made myself virtually bald, I drew a moustache, contact lenses, and I assumed this German accent which I had been practicing for weeks and weeks because I had this German passport.” Stander, Heyl and McCall were masters of disguise. In the pile of dockets that remain in the police archives it is almost impossible to recognise them. This talent enabled the gang to move freely around the country and overseas. Using false passports Stander travelled to America to await the arrival of the yacht, Lily Rose. On the 13th of February 1984 he was shot dead by police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His true identity was finally revealed when fingerprint records confirmed that the dead man was in fact South African fugitive Andre Stander. But here is his legacy. Pretoria gospel singer Ernie Amos was 21 when he discovered that Andre Stander was his real father. Ernie: “I’d expected that I’d get to know my father in times to come, and after that I knew that he’d been shot so I knew that he was dead, and that was a bit of a shock to me.” Ernie is now 30 and works as a pastor in a church in Pretoria. Ernie: “I think Christianity has helped me - knowing God, knowing Jesus. It’s helped me a lot, and getting to know God as my father in my actual father’s place.” He is excited by the making of the “Stander” movie and wants to write a song for it about Andre. Ernie: “Just maybe express forgiveness in my heart towards what he’s done, and not getting to know him, saying ‘I love you and it’s okay’.” And Allan Heyl has also found solace in music. Allan: “All my life I’ve wanted to play the violin, and I recently received sponsorship – look at this present I got. A thing of extreme beauty.” He’s been taking lessons for one month. Ruda: “If you get parole now, how are you a different person? How do I know that you’re not going to walk out of here and hit another bank? What has changed?” Allan: “Everything has changed. Everything. I am a fundamentally different person, and for anybody to deny that would be to deny redemption. I suffered from self-loathing, no respect, and I don’t care what anybody outside says now in terms of what I did in the past. That person does not exist anymore, to the extent that I can now live with myself, and I have developed self-respect. There is no way that I could have believed 25 years ago that I could have ever endured what I have endured. And I’ve endured it and I’m proud of myself for being able to have endured it. I’m terribly sorry for what I subjected my family to. I’m desperately sorry for what I’ve subjected other members in society to, and I’m also very sorry for what I subjected myself to. But if I had not gone through this, who knows what sort of person would have been released?” IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.  Back|Recent Stories|Search|Milestones|People|Places

TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2016

STANDER a 2003 movie with Thomas Jane as Stander

Stander (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stander
Theatrical poster
Directed by	Bronwen Hughes
Produced by	Hillard Elkins Martin Katz Chris Roland Julia Verdin
Written by	Bima Stagg
Starring	Thomas Jane Deborah Kara Unger Ashley Taylor David O'Hara Dexter Fletcher Marius Weyers
Music by	David Holmes
Cinematography	Jess Hall
Edited by	Robert Ivison
Production company	Grosvenor Park Productions Seven Arts Pictures Stander Productions The Imaginarium ZenHQ
Distributed by	Newmarket Films
Release date	September 6, 2003 (TIFF) August 6, 2004(United States)
Running time	116 minutes
Country	South Africa
Language	English
Box office	$31,651

Stander is a 2003 biographical film about Captain André Stander, a South African police officer turned bank robber, starring Thomas Jane who initially turned down the role.^[1] The filmmakers were able to talk to Allan Heyl, one of Andre Stander's accomplices who was still in prison; Cor van Deventer, his police partner; and the warden of the prison where Andre was incarcerated.^[1][2]

CONTENTS

   [hide] 

• 1Plot
• 2Cast
• 3Reception
• 4Awards and nominations (2005)
• 5References
• 6External links

PLOT[EDIT]

Andre Stander is an officer with the South African Police, newly married with a reputation as the youngest captain on the force, he and his partner are assigned along with other officers to riot duty in the wake of the Soweto uprising. In the chaos of one of the riots in Tembisa, Stander shoots a young, unarmed protester, which deeply affects him and causes him to become disillusioned towards the Apartheid system. One day on his lunch break Stander decides to spontaneously walk in and rob a bank. He thoroughly enjoys the rush and decides to embark on a spree of robberies, even responding to one in his official capacity as an officer. In the wake of these robberies, Cor Van Deventer, Stander's partner, leads a team assigned to take down the new bank robber. Eventually being able to see through Stander's disguises, Deventer's team finally makes the arrest. Stander is stripped of his position and sentenced to 32 years in prison.

While in prison Stander meets two other men, Lee McCall and Allan Heyl, with whom he quickly fosters a friendship. The trio have grand plans of what they will do when they get out, even saying that when they do they will come back for each other. After a year or so in prison Stander and McCall go to play a rugby game with other prisoners. During the game they feign serious injury and are taken to the infirmary, where they knock the doctor unconscious and relieve the guards of their weapons. Shortly after their escape Stander and McCall return for Heyl, the three introduce themselves to each other as their new assumed names and proceed to rob a few banks, purchase a high-priced safehouse, and steal a yellow Porsche 911 Targa.

As the robberies continue, the risks that come with it increase exponentially, as the so-called "Stander Gang" is being relentlessly pursued by the police task force under none other than Cor Van Deventer. After a gunshop hold-up that left a women shot as well as able to identify the gang, McCall dropping money on the way out of a bank, and McCall's unexplained shooting spree at another bank that lead to a police chase, the gang soon sees that their luck is running out as they become increasingly more reckless. Deciding it would be best to cut their losses and settle down Stander comes up with a plan to rob the exchange office at the airport and leave South Africa, using a combination of flight schedules and disguises to come up with the best plan. Hours before the robbery is to take place Stander returns to Tembisa to make his final peace with the father of the protester he killed, and is instead beaten with a club by the boy's father. As McCall becomes infuriated with the fact Stander didn't come to pull off the robbery, he and Heyl see on the news that if they were to have gone to the airport a large amount of police would have arrested or killed them, leading Heyl to say "Even when he's wrong, he's right."

In 1984, the gang begins to organize their exit strategy when Stander goes off to Cape Town to purchase a boat and Heyl plans to go to Greece. However, McCall's plans are cut short when a squad of police surround the safehouse. While driving to see McCall, Heyl tells Stander a story about his relationship with a black women. She had become pregnant (not by Heyl) and the two were living together, when police saw this they beat her to the point of miscarriage. Heyl thanks Stander for all he has done to help him and McCall get their revenge on the system, and how the last six months had been the time of him and his friend's lives. Meanwhile, back at the safehouse McCall scrambles for an escape, but realizing there is no way out he decides to grab two pistols and begin shooting at police. Stander and Heyl pull up just in time to see McCall gunned down by police. As they drive from the scene Stander and Deventer lock eyes, a police chase ensues and the Porsche is severely damaged, leading Stander and Heyl to steal another vehicle and drive off into the distance. Heyl and Stander part ways to go off and escape South Africa. Stander goes to the airport and is followed by numerous police where he is forced to show identification. Deventer frantically rushes to see if it is Stander, but stops when he finds out that it was a false alarm (due to Stander's use of a fake passport) and Stander is allowed to leave.

Finally arriving in Fort Lauderdale, Stander is unable to remain inactive for long when he hotwires a Mercury Cougar and runs a red light in front of police. Leading them on a short chase, Stander exits his vehicle and begins to disobey the officer's orders, prompting the officer's partner to grab a shotgun and threaten Stander with it. Stander disarms the partner only to be shot by the officer multiple times.

CAST[EDIT]

• Thomas Jane as Andre Stander
• Deborah Kara Unger as Bekkie Stander
• Ashley Taylor as Cor van Deventer
• David O'Hara as Allan Heyl
• Dexter Fletcher as Lee McCall
• Ron Smerczak as Cop

RECEPTION[EDIT]

Stander received mostly positive reviews from critics. Movie magazine Empire gave it four stars out of five saying "a star turn that shifts Jane up a notch or two and a career best performance". Nev Pierce of the BBC gave it four stars as well. It is rated Fresh at 72% on theRotten Tomatoes website.^[3]

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS (2005)[EDIT]

• The film was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Achievement in Direction.^{[citation needed]}

REFERENCES[EDIT] CLICK ON BELOW LINKS: 

1. ^ Jump up to:^a b Stander: An Interview with Thomas Jane
2. Jump up^ The police officer turned bank robber at CNN
3. Jump up^ Stander at Rotten Tomatoes

==================================== 

Robbing Banks in South Africa with Police Captain Andre Stander

JULY 4, 2016 / CHRISTOPHER OTHEN

Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion [oramazon.com]

and

Johannesburg. Late 1983. A blue Cortina XR6 Interceptor cruises the Braamfontein business district in the dry heat of a South African afternoon. It pulls up near a policeman who stands with a shotgun over his shoulder. Two well dressed men exit the car. One has blond hair in tight curls and a thin horseshoe moustache. The other is dark with thick rimmed glasses. They walk past the policeman and head towards a bank.

The policeman ignores them and scans the traffic. Brigadier Manie van Rensburg, head of Robbery and Homicide, has ordered every policeman in Johannesburg to be on the look out for the Stander gang, a trio of escaped prisoners who have been robbing banks since August, sometimes four a day. The policeman with the shotgun knows what to look for. Screeching tires, slammed brakes, waving guns. He is ready for them.

Bank Robbery, South African Style

The two men enter the bank. The blond man scans the cashiers, a row of young women behind open desks. He selects the prettiest and approaches her. He smiles. She smiles back.

‘Can I help you sir?’ she asks.

He points a revolver at her.

Outside, the policeman is still scanning the traffic. The Stander gang had better not try anything on his watch. The pump-action shotgun strap hangs heavy on his shoulder in the sun.

Inside the bank the cashier is shoving wads of cash into a bag with shaking hands. The blond man continues to smile as he holds the revolver. His friend stands nearby with his hand in his pocket. It is calm and efficient. Other bank staff look across, unsure of what is happening. The cashier fills the bag and pushes it over the desk to the blond man.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

He and his friend walk quickly out of the bank. Inside someone presses a silent alarm linked to the local police station. The two men walk past the policeman and climb into the blue Cortina. They drive smoothly off and merge into the traffic. Within a minute Andre Stander and Allan Heyl are gone.

The first police sirens sound in the distance. Employees emerge from the bank and stand, confused and scared, outside. The policeman takes the shotgun off his shoulder and slowly begins to realise something has gone very wrong.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Andre Stander never had much choice about being a policeman. His father was Major-General Frans Stander, a legendary figure in the South African police force. No matter how much the teenage Andre protested, the Major-General refused to accept his son did not want to follow in the family tradition.

At sixteen Andre, then a lozenge faced boy with a shock of light hair and a rebellious cigarette permanently stuck to his lower lip, gave the old man his opportunity. The teenager failed his matric, the High School graduation exam. It was hard to fail. In 1963 a white Afrikaaner living a privileged life under apartheid was expected to sail through. Black South Africans were second class citizens by law, condemned to inferior education, medical treatment, and employment prospects. Whites like Stander lived on a honeycomb. They did not fail their matrics. Stander was always contrary. Or perhaps he was not as smart as he thought he was.

Whatever the reason, the Major-General had the excuse he needed to get Stander into Pretoria Police College. His father’s name carried weight among the instructors and when Stander, an unenthusiastic student, graduated top of his class it raised a few eyebrows. He joined the regular police force and rose quickly through the ranks. The Major-General had got his way.

In the late 1960s Stander married Leonie, a good-looking blonde. The marriage was troubled and in 1972 they divorced. He took up with Pat Amos, a student teacher, but had broken up with her by the time she had his baby. She named their son Ernie. Convinced by his friends to do the decent thing Stander went back. He held his son in his arms, looked into his eyes, and felt nothing. Stander left and never saw Ernie again. Instead he got back together with Leonie and they remarried.

By 1977 the marriage was in trouble again. Stander was now a thirty-one-year-old Police Captain in Johannesburg’s Kempton Park Criminal Investigation Department. He had done well in his career, although jealous colleagues put this down to his father’s influence. Fellow policeman Chris Swanepoel had little respect for Andre’s abilities.

‘Sure he was a captain of the police but was he a brilliant detective? Rubbish, I say! When we were in the force together he couldn’t even catch a cold…’.

For his part Stander was contemptuous of his fellow policemen, regarding them as stupid, brutal, and incompetent. He was good at masking his emotions. No-one he worked with, not even best friend Carl van Deventer (a Bureau of State Security – BOSS – secret agent), realised the arctic scorn he felt for everyone around him.

A South African police officer in the apartheid state, a man whose relationship was falling apart, a man who worked a job he hated. A man like a lot of other men. Then one day the firm outline that is Andre Stander blurs and turns to smoke. He becomes an enigma, a puzzle without a solution. Why? Because Stander decides to rob a bank.

He gave out the morning assignments to his staff as usual then drove to Jan Smuts airport. He flew to Durban and hired a car. He put on a disguise (a wig and false beard) then drove to a bank. South African banks in the late 1970s were open plan with little security. The cashiers each sat behind a desk whose drawers were loaded with cash. There were no glass partitions. Perhaps a security guard half asleep at the door.

Stander approached a cashier, sat down, and quietly pulled a gun on her. He asked her to fill a bag with money. Terrified, she did. Stander took the money, left the bank before anyone realised what had happened, got in his car, and drove back to Louis Botha airport, peeling off his disguise on the way. Then he flew to Johannesburg in time for an afternoon’s work. It was that easy.

A Taste for Luxury

No-one knows exactly how many Durban bank robberies can be pinned on Stander (there were other men with disguises and guns doing the rounds) but he flew in to hold up banks regularly for the next three years. He got away with around 100,000 rand. A white middle manager in a large company earned perhaps 2,000 rand a month at this time. Stander was rich. He opened a souvenir shop in Durban with his friend Carl van Deventer. Unknown to van Deventer he used it launder the stolen money. He bought a large house in Pomona, Kempton Park where he lived alone after Leoni left him for good in 1978.

Stander escaped detection for so long because he knew police procedure, knew how long it would take them to respond to an alarm, and knew exactly how they would investigate the crime. The only concession he made to modifying his tactics after the first robbery was to steal cars rather than hire them. Nothing happened to make him change his opinion of the police as stupid and incompetent.

He enjoyed the robberies, picking out the prettiest cashiers to rob, and getting a thrill from the power of pointing a gun.

‘He used to watch the faces of his victims,’ said van Deventer. ‘He was laughing up his sleeve when he committed his robberies. There was an element of sadistic bullying.’

At a party in late 1979 Stander, drunk, told van Deventer about the robberies and asked him to take part. He claimed he had a stolen car parked at Jan Smuts airport. When his friend refused Stander laughed off the confession as a joke. A troubled van Demeter approached his senior officer in BOSS. They investigated the car and found wigs, fake beards, a balaclava, and a false number plate in the boot.

The car was staked out. On 3 January 1980 Stander visited the vehicle to remove some items and caught a flight to Durban where a bank was robbed. He was arrested in the Jan Smuts arrival lounge on the return trip with 4,000 rand and a revolver in his suitcase.

On 6 May 1980 he was found guilty of fifteen counts of robbery at Durban Supreme Court. He got seventeen years, to be served at Zonderwater maximum security prison.

Broers Behind Bars

Why did Stander do it? After the trial he told his family he had snapped after duty at the 1976 Tembisa riot when Black South Africans in the township, north of Kempton Park, attacked police. He had shot an unarmed man (to others he would claim to have shot many more that day) and the horror of the moment unhinged him.

It was a convincing story. The late seventies was when the previously monolithic apartheid system began to crack. The Black Consciousness Movement was gaining strength among South Africans, the Soweto riots had grabbed the attention of the world after police fired on a student protest, and black activist Steve Bilko became an icon when he was murdered in custody. By 1980, when Andre told the story, intelligent onlookers could see twilight approaching for white rule in South Africa.

Stander was lying. He was not present at the Tembisa riot.

‘He was supposed to have shot 22 people’, said van Deventer, ‘but I never heard about it. Don’t you think he would have told his best friend about it at some time or other?’

The new jailbird was a charismatic, cold blooded charmer with the ability to tell people what they wanted to hear. As a corrupt policeman Stander should have suffered at the hands of both guards and prisoners but instead became a popular figure. The prison guards, brutal symbols of the apartheid regime, liked him. The other prisoners enjoyed his company.

In 1980 George Allan Heyl was a troubled, aggressive twenty-eight-year-old three years into a sentence for robbing five banks in Pretoria. “The most negative, self-destructive misfit alive”, in his own words, came from a modest background. A good all-rounder at school, Heyl started a teacher training degree but dropped out. He hated apartheid, society, South Africa, and himself. By the mid-1970s he could not control his inner rage and began to steal cars. He soon moved on to other crimes.

‘I saw a bank with one teller in it,’ he said. ‘The more I saw myself robbing the bank, the more it became a reality. I finally robbed the bank and because I was not caught, I tried it again. Justifications such as “I didn’t hurt anyone”, “I was not caught”, “I need the money to survive”, make the wrongdoing seem like the right thing.’

In 1977 he was caught and sent to Zonderwater. Three years later he met Stander. The ex-police captain flattered the younger man.

‘I’ve heard all about you,’ he told Heyl. ‘I’m delighted to meet South Africa’s most notorious.’

Heyl hated apartheid. Stander claimed he did too. He also claimed to share Heyl’s admiration for Bob Dylan and the Rote Armee Fraktion, the German Marxist terror group. Heyl saw in Stander an older, more confident version of himself.

‘I hated the South African system,’ said Heyl, ‘and, as we were both bank robbers and both set on a campaign of defiance, we were ideal company’.

Heyl thought he had met a soul mate but observers felt Stander psychologically dominated the Pretoria bank robber. Even Heyl had to admit Stander was ice cold.

‘He was calculating. He was, I think, beyond emotion’.

They became a trio with the addition of Patrick Lee McCall, a nervy and balding thirty-year-old car thief and bank robber with an impulsive streak. They talked constantly about escape.

Come On Allan, Let’s Go!

In the late summer of 1983 Stander and McCall began to complain about back pains. On 11 August they and five other prisoners were escorted to physiotherapist Amelia Grobler’s consulting rooms near Cullinan. In the waiting room Stander And McCall attacked the three guards, took their revolvers, and stole Grobler’s car keys. Out the door and gone. The pair rolled up at a nearby farm and took the owner and his teenage son hostage. The farmer was forced to call the police.

A lone officer turned up in a van and was over powered. Stander stole his uniform and forced him into the back of the van with the other hostages. With McCall riding shotgun they drove off and hijacked another car, driven by Nakkie Fouche. She went in the back of the van and the pair drove off in her Opel.

Stander and McCall spent two months holed up in Johannesburg avoiding the police search, although they ventured out once to rob the United Building Society and got away with 13,000 rand. They hid in a Holiday Inn posing as gym enthusiasts with squash racquets and sports bags before Stander rented a house on Sixth Avenue, Houghton, a wealthy part of town. He hired servants. The last place the police would look for escaped convicts was among the rich.

On 31 October they headed to Olifantsfontein. After the escape Heyl had been interrogated and knocked about by the guards. He knew nothing. The prison authorities eventually accepted his innocence and allowed him to resume his routine, which included studying for a trade qualification.

‘I was doing a test at the Olifantsfontein trade test centre,’ Heyl said,‘and I heard Andre saying, “Come on Allan, let’s go!” I looked up and saw the five guards lying face down with Andre and McCall standing over them with their guns drawn. We ran out, jumped into the Cortina, and drove off with me in the back.’

Stander and McCall gave Heyl three weeks of luxury at their safe house in Houghton, enjoying good food, servants, and alcohol. One morning Stander walked into Heyl’s room and tossed a black wig and false moustache on the bed.

‘Are you ready to start work, Allan?’ he asked.

The three escaped prisoners went back to robbing banks. Over the next two months they would hit twenty banks, on one occasion four the same day, netting over 500,000 rand. The raids were quick and clean with no violence. The three would enter a bank, select a teller and quietly order her to fill a bag with money before confidently strolling out. At least once the security guard held the door open for them as they left, unaware of what had happened.

‘There were rules: no shouting, no flashing guns, no planning and no designer violence,’ said Heyl. ‘In fact the outstanding feature of all the robberies was that they went off so calmly that they were actually mundane. The object of the exercise was not to terrorise people, but to basically get in and out as quickly as possible, because we were in the process of robbing three or four banks a day.’

The Stander gang (or ‘Hopper Gang’ for their technique of hopping from bank to bank) found themselves on newspaper front pages day after day. The public began to cheer them on. Outlaws, bandits, three men against the world. Stander’s fake horseshoe moustache, caught on a security camera, became a real life fashion in Johannesburg. The gang were an embarrassment to the government. Brigadier Manie van Rensburg was put in charge of a special task force to stop them. Stander and his friends, Van Rensburg told the press, were on borrowed time.

Safe Houses

The gang lived in luxury. They had their house in Houghton with servants and a line of expensive cars (most stolen) in the garage. Stander was fond of yellow Porsches. They acquired another safe house in Linmeyer and later a third back in Houghton. They ate in restaurants every night, shopped in upscale stores for clothes and toiletries, and filled their kitchens with champagne. High class prostitutes trotted in and out of the safe houses. Stander, in particular, had an inexhaustible appetite for women.

The police briefed journalists that in October, not long after his breakout, Stander lured a teenage model to the Kyalami Ranch Hotel, Johannesburg, on the pretence of being a photographer, and raped her. Some journalists, like Chris Steyn, a rare female hard-nosed crime reporter, thought this a smear to counter Stander’s growing popularity and refused to run the story. Others believed it and did. The public did not care and continued to see the gang as heroes making fools of the establishment.

On the inside things were becoming shaky. Stander barely escaped arrest on several occasions, once jogging through a police stake out in the early morning and another time having to run from a restaurant when he was recognised by a fellow diner. McCall was twitchier than ever. In a raid on the Potshot gunshop in Randburg he shot and wounded the owner Marlene Henn, a severe fortysomething with a blonde beehive. Stander and Heyl started to carry out raids without him. When he did come along the tellers found McCall more frightening than Stander and his revolver.

‘These two men came in,’ said Trix Style, a teller at the Trust Bank in Benoni. ‘One came towards me and the other one walked around the office and came into my cashier’s cage and stood behind me. That was McCall. Stander put a big sports bag on the counter, took out a revolver and pointed at me and said “Don’t push any buttons or anything”. So they must have known exactly how the alarm and security system worked. Strangely enough I wasn’t scared of Stander, who openly pointed the revolver at me. But McCall, who was standing behind me with his hand in his pocket, who I realised probably also had a gun, I was scared of him.’

The gang could still operate with panache. In January they robbed a bank directly below van Rensburg’s task force HQ. But they could sense time running out. The police released a good quality set of security photographs from a recent raid and the gang found their faces all over South Africa’s newspapers. Heyl acquired a fake German passport and spent hours practising the accent. Stander obtained a bundle of forged Australian documents. The gang agreed South Africa was too hot for them and decided to try their luck in America.

They bought a yacht, the Lilly Rose, in Cape Town and plans were made for Heyl and McCall, along with a hired crew member, to sail it to Miami. On 27 January Stander flew to Florida to make berthing arrangements using a fake Australian passport in the name of Peter Harris. Heyl saw him off at the airport.

When he returned to the Houghton safe house a servant told him the police had been there shortly before asking for a ‘Mr Stander’. One of the call girls had recognised the gang from newspaper photographs and turned them in. Heyl drove off and phoned McCall to warn him but his fellow bank robber shrugged it off as a routine house to house enquiry and refused to abandon the hideout.

In the early morning of 30 January 1984 police stormed the property. Stun grenades flew in through the windows. McCall, naked, ran through the house firing at the police then fled upstairs. They found him in a linen cupboard off the hallway. He had shot himself in the head rather than go back to jail.

Don’t Go To Fort Lauderdale

Heyl shaved his hair, sharpened his German accent, and booked a seat on a South African Airways jet to Greece where he went into hiding. Stander was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, his gang disintegrated and the money running out. In South Africa the police had discovered the other safe houses (where photographs of the girl they claimed Stander raped turned up) and seized the yacht. No going back. Stander rented an apartment and bought a used orange Mustang from gas station owner Tony Tomasello.

On 10 February he was stopped by police after running a red light. He produced a driving licence in the name of Peter Harris and claimed to be a forty-one-year-old Australian author. The policeman recognised the license as a fake and Stander was briefly arrested before being freed on $100 bond. He gave them his real address. The Mustang was impounded. That night Stander broke into the impound lot and stole his car back.

In South Africa the police had discovered from the Lilly Rose’s hired crewman that the yacht’s planned destination was Florida. They passed Stander’s details to the American police and a photograph of the bank robber appeared in Florida newspapers the day after the red light incident. The Fort Lauderdale PD failed to connect him with ‘Peter Harris’. The penny only dropped when Tony Tomosello contacted them on 13 February and said Stander, who he recognised from the newspaper, had just left his Mustang at the gas station to be resprayed.

The police staked out Stander’s apartment block. Tomosello was reluctantly dragged along. It got close to 10.30 at night and Stander had still not shown. Patrolman Michael Von Stetina was getting tired and bored on the perimeter of the stake out when a sunken-cheeked blonde man on a bicycle rode up. It was Stander.

Von Stetina recognised him and called out. Stander dropped the bike on the road and ran. The patrolman, shotgun in hands, chased him. Stander fell over and got up with his hands in the air.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I give up’.

Von Stetina told him to get down the ground and moved in for the arrest but Stander suddenly grabbed the shotgun. In the struggle the gun went off and the South African gained possession. There was a confused chase which ended with Von Stetina backed against a fence and Stander aiming the shotgun. The policeman drew his .38 service revolver and shot Stander four times.

Stander spent his last minutes bleeding out face down in the middle of the road, hands cuffed behind his back, lit by a searchlight on a police car. He died before the ambulance arrived.

Stop the Violence

Von Stetina got a death threat by letter the day after Stander’s death. He ignored it. Tomosello, who had a family, was less calm and sought police protection while he waited for the South African government to cough up the $64,000 reward it had promised him. The gas station owner was convinced Stander, who told him he was meeting someone at Shooters nightclub the day of his death, was in Florida with Allan Heyl.

Heyl was actually sunning himself on the Greek island of Hydra when he heard the news of Stander’s death. Money was running short for last man standing. He travelled to England where he robbed a company payroll of 4,000 rand and headed for Spain. The Costa del Crime was not to his taste and he returned to England where he set up home as ‘Philip John Ball’ with a girlfriend in Surrey. An informer led the police to his door in early 1985 and Heyl got ten years in a British prison. In the mid-1990s he was extradited to South Africa and imprisoned on charges of armed robbery.

Heyl returned to a country that remembered Andre Stander. In 1990 the hard rock band Jack Hammer recorded ‘Don’t Go To Fort Lauderdale’, a sympathetic song about the bank robber. Zambian singer Robin Auld performed ‘The Ballad of Andre Stander’ live.

As apartheid crumbled in the mid-1990s and multiracial elections were held for the first time, the one time Police Captain was still the most famous bank robber in South African history. In 2003 an American crew under director Bronwen Hughes set up in South Africa to make ‘Stander’, a big budget movie about Andre starring Thomas Jane. Informed in part by Heyl’s version of events and the new atmosphere of the Rainbow Nation, the film showed Stander as a tormented anti-apartheid activist and Iggy Pop fan who took to crime because of his disgust with the system. The rape accusation and cold manipulation did not make the film.

Even in death Stander cast a shadow. In October 1992 his former wife, now Leoni Venter, committed suicide in Pretoria after a long depression. In March 2008 Marlene Henn, the gun store owner who survived McCall’s bullet, was murdered in a home invasion.

Allan Heyl was luckier. Released from prison in May 2005 he forged a new identity as a motivational speaker. ‘Whatever you visualise you will realise’. He has made a career for himself and occasionally appears in the media to comment on crime.

‘We must stop the violence,’ is his mantra.

He is clear eyed about the media’s love affair with the gang in their heyday.

‘The fact that Andre was a former police captain suited the romantic notion of good-turned-bad against bad. And that’s where sensationalism became hysteria as never before or since.’

The dead man himself remains an enigma. Stander gave different justifications for his crime spree to everyone he met. In Heyl’s eyes Stander turned on society because of his disgust with apartheid. Brigadier Manie van Rensburg believed his quarry was motivated only by a love of money and luxury. To his family he was rebelling against the police career that had been forced on him. A hero? A rebel? A rapist? A former policeman who robbed banks and died in the middle of a Fort Lauderdale street waiting for an ambulance. A bad kêrel.

This piece was originally written for my brightreview.co.ukwebpage. If you want to investigate Stander some more then journalists Paul Moorcraft and Mike Cohen wrote Stander: Bank Robber (amazon.co.uk or amazon.com), a short biography, in 1984. Chris Steyn-Barlow (her married name) wrote Publish And Be Damned (amazon.co.uk or amazon.com) in 2006, an account of her time as a crime reporter that includes some interesting pages on Stander. SA author Rob Marsh wrote a history of the gang on this website about crime in Africa. The 2003 movie Stander (amazon.co.uk or amazon.com) gives a sanitised version of events but has been well reviewed. 

For more warlike weirdness, you can buy my  books in paperback or ebook:

Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion [oramazon.com]

and

Franco’s International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War [or amazon.com]

==================================

	THE STANDER GANG 1983-84 Between October 1983, and February 1984, the Stander Gang, comprising Andre Charles Stander (37), Patrick Lee McCall (34) and Allan Heyl (32), were South Africa's Most Wanted Men. Their story is one of daring prison escapes, dramatic bank robberies and inevitably - violent death. In other words, the stuff of legend. It is not surprising, therefore, that for some people Stander, McCall and Heyl have become something akin to folk heroes. In reality, they were simply three hardened criminals on a desperate flight from justice. Andre Stander, the mastermind and driving force behind the Stander Gang, was the son of Major-General Frans Stander. As a police detective, and later a bank-robber, he was sometimes described as 'brilliant' although he was a less than-average student at school. He failed his matric and was pressurized by his father into joining the police force. Nevertheless, he excelled at Police College and was judged 'Best Recruit' in 1964. After graduating from Police College in Pretoria, Stander joined the regular force and was sent to Johannesburg. He rose rapidly through the ranks, and by the age of thirty-one held the rank of captain and was head of the Kempton Park Criminal Investigation Department. Despite a blossoming career in the police force, Stander was obviously a discontented man. To compensate for whatever was missing in his life, he took to robbing banks as a sideline. This started in 1977. On his days off, he would catch an early-morning flight to Durban, where he would don a disguise, hire or steal a car, and then set out for his target. At the bank or building society in question, he would hold up the teller at gunpoint, take the money, and then casually drive back to the airport. It was all very simple and professional. During the three years that Stander operated alone, he hit a string of banks and netted himself at least R100 000. In fact, he became so successful he couldn't keep his mouth shut and approached his best friend, Car van Deventer, who was then working for the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), and invited him to join the fun. “He admitted to me that the first few times were sheer agony,” van Deventer said. “But after that he couldn't stop. He began to enjoy himself. He used to watch the faces of his victims. He was laughing up his sleeve when he committed his robberies. There was an element of sadistic bullying...” Eventually, van Deventer approached a senior colleague and told him what his friend had said. Together, the two men went to examine a hired car, which Stander claimed to have stolen and parked at Jan Smuts airport. In the glove compartment they found a balaclava, a number of wigs, and a false beard and moustache. In the boot there was a false number plate and a roll of masking tape. They returned the items to the car and then staked it out. On 2 January 1980, Stander was observed removing a number of items from the car. The following day a bank was robbed in Durban. On 4 January, Stander flew into Johannesburg from Durban. In the presence of Major-General Kobus Visser, the commander of the CID, he was arrested in the arrivals lounge and escorted to the car. He had R4 000 on him, a balaclava, a revolver, and a false moustache and beard in his luggage. Following his arrest, Stander was remanded in custody. On 6 May 1980, he faced 28 charges of robbery at the Durban Supreme Court. He was found guilty on 15 charges and sentenced to a total of 75 years in prison. As some of the sentences were to run concurrently, he faced an effective jail term of ]7years. “I forced him to become a policeman against his wishes,” his father admitted after the trial. “He should have left the force years ago.” No one has been able to explain why Stander turned so suddenly to crime. His family claimed that his behaviour was in response to his experiences during the township unrest in Tembisa in 1976, when he was involved in a 'blood bath', but Carl van Deventer disputes this. “I don't accept that,” he said. “He was supposed to have shot 22 people, but 1 never heard about it. Don't you think he would have told his best friend about it at some time or other? If it had really happened...” Part of the reason may have been that Stander's marriage was also under strain during this time. He had first met his wife, Leonie, in 1967. They were married in 1969, and divorced two years later. In 1975 they remarried, but Leonie walked out on him in 1978. They were divorced for a second time in 1979. The most likely answer is that Stander simply enjoyed the thrill of robbing banks, which may partly explain the myth that built up around his name. And myth indeed it was. During the height of the search for the Stander Gang, an ex-colleague of Stander's, Chris Swanepoel, remarked to the press: “You know we read every day of the brilliant student who was forced on the road to robbery. Brilliant? How could he be brilliant and still fail matric? Sure he was a captain of the police but Was he a brilliant detective? Rubbish, I say! When we were in the force together he couldn't even catch a cold...” He was seen by many people as a 'gentleman robber', a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, but the police also alleged that he was a rapist. In October 1983, while he was on the run from the police, Stander lured a teenage girl to the Kyalami Ranch Hotel for a photographic session. She was to pose fully clothed and he claimed to be a reputable photographer. After the session, he raped her and then threatened to cut her to pieces if she told anyone about what had happened. It was only later that she discovered Stander's identity. Photographs of the girl were also discovered at one of the Stander Gang's hideouts. There is also evidence that Stander raped another teenage girl in a similar fashion. After his conviction for armed robbery, Stander was sent to Zonderwater maximum security prison near Cullinan. It was here that he met Patrick Lee MCCall and Allan Heyl. Both men were bank robbers, and McCall was also an expert car thief. On 11 August 1983, Stander, McCall and five other prisoners were taken out of the prison to see a local physiotherapist at consulting rooms near Cullinan. Stander and McCall had faked their injuries. The seven prisoners were accompanied by three prison officers. In the waiting room, Stander and McCall suddenly sprang into action, overpowered the guards and took their service revolvers. They then ordered Mrs Amelia Grobler, the physiotherapist, to give them the keys to her car. They sped off in the direction of Tembisa township. The other five prisoners, who had refused to have anything to do with the breakout, remained behind. About seven kilometres from Cullinan, Stander and McCall turned on to a dirt road. They eventually arrived at a farm belonging to Mr Martin Riekert in the Rayton district. They were greeted in the yard by Mr Riekert and his teenage son, Henk. At gunpoint they forced Mr Riekert to telephone the local police station on a pretence, whereupon Police Constable Mostert was sent to the farm. Stander and McCall were waiting for him. He was first forced to change clothes with Stander, and was then bundled into the back of his own van along with Mr Riekert and his son. With the three hostages locked in the cage of the police van, Stander and McCall continued in the direction of Tembisa township. On a secluded road not far from the farm, they stopped again. Stander got out of the van and flagged down the next car that came along - a silver-grey Opel driven by a 27-year-old nurse named Nakkie Fouche. Ms Fouche was bundled into the back of the police van along with the other three hostages. Stander and McCall then drove off in the car. The prisoners eventually escaped from the police van by kicking out the window between the cage and the cab, but by that time the two fugitives were long gone. After escaping from custody, Stander and McCall went to ground for a while. For two months they lived quietly in Johannesburg on money it is thought Stander had stashed away during his bank-robbing days. However, on 31 October 1983, the two men hit the news headlines again. At 10.30 a.m., they burst into the Olifantsfontein Trade Test Centre with guns drawn and released Allan Heyl, who had been taken there for a trade test. After forcing the two prison warders who were guarding Heyl and the three members of the Trade Centre staff to lie on the floor, they sped off in a Ford Cortina XR6 Interceptor. For the next four months, the Stander Gang, as the trio came to be known, were to be front page news. Ten days later, Stander, McCall and Heyl raided a gunshop in Randburg, wounding the proprietor in the process, and made off with an arsenal of heavy calibre guns and ammunition. Then, operating from at least three 'safe houses' in the Johannesburg area, the three men went on a spree of 'bank-hopping' robberies in which they hit a string of banks in quick succession, sometimes as many as four on the same day. Between mid-November 1983, and mid January 1984, the Stander Gang robbed twenty banks and stole over R500 000. On 19 January, alone, they netted R165 000 from three jobs! Nevertheless, the three men realised that time was running out for them. Indeed, Stander himself had come close to arrest more than once. On one occasion he had been in a video shop in Turffontein when it was raided by the police, but had not been recognized. On another occasion, he had been spotted by a police captain at a Maseru restaurant but had managed to get away. The answer was to go abroad and to this end the three men planned to buy a yacht, which they could sail out of the country. Towards the end a 1983, they saw just the vessel they were looking for at the Royal Cape Yacht Club in Cape Town. She was the Lily Rose and the asking price was R219 000. In January 1984, negotiations to purchase the Lily Rose began in earnest. It was also in January that the police received an important break when Stander, McCall and Heyl were photographed by hidden video cameras during a bank robbery. For the first time since the men had broken out of prison, the police had good recent photographs of them. Pictures of the three wanted men were published on 25 January. On 27 January, Stander flew to Fort Lauderdale in the USA using a false passport. His task was to arrange the sale of the Lily Rose. Back in South Africa, a tip-off following the publication of the Stander Gang photographs led the police to one of the safe houses in Sixth Avenue, Houghton. Much assistance in identifying the safe houses reputedly came from escort girls who had been employed by members of the gang and taken to their hideouts. On the day after Stander left the country, the place was staked out and in the early hours of 30 January 1984, a crack police squad moved into position with marksmen in bullet-proof vests taking up strategic positions. At 5 a.m. the silence in the neighbourhood was shattered by a loud-hailer. The message from the police was clear and simple: 'Get out of the house or we shoot.' McCall was alone inside, and he was determined to go down fighting rather than surrender. Darting from room to room, he began to shoot at his attackers. A tremendous gun battle followed, with the police eventually hurling grenades into the house and storming in. They found McCall sprawled naked in the hall. He was dead. Twenty-four hours later, the police discovered a second 'safe house' at Linmeyer due to the publicity that the gang was receiving. They also learnt of the scheme to buy the Lily Rose from a crew member that Stander and Heyl hired to deliver the yacht to the USA. On 5 February, the police flew to Cape Town and seized the R219 000 boat. A few days later, the police discovered a third hideout, again in Houghton, which had been hired on a one-year lease at R2 000 per month. In the garage were a number of stolen cars, including a yellow Porsch Targa which Stander himself was known to like. But of Stander and Heyl nothing was known. Both men had flown the coop. Stander was in America, and ten days after McCall had been killed, he made his own fatal mistake. On 10 February, Stander was arrested by the Fort Lauderdale police for driving an unlicensed vehicle - a Ford Mustang which he had recently bought from a second-hand car dealer named Anthony Tomasello - and for forging a driver's licence. The car was impounded by the police and Stander, who claimed to be an Australian author named Peter Harris, was photographed and released. That same night, he broke into the police pound and stole the car back again. The next morning, he took it back to Tomasello and asked him to have it re-sprayed. Unfortunately for Stander, that very morning Tomasello had been reading about the exploits of the Stander Gang in his local newspaper, the Sun Sentinel, just as 'Peter Harris' walked into his office. He put two and two together. The moment Stander departed, Tomasello got in touch with his lawyer, who advised him to contact,the police. That night an elite tactical impact team surrounded Stander's apartment. At 10.30p.m., Stander rode up on a bicycle. He was confronted by Officer Michael van Stetina, but attempted to escape. There was a brief struggle for Stetina's shotgun and Stander was shot. He bled to death on the wet driveway to his apartment block while waiting for an ambulance. * After the death of Patrick Lee McCall, Allan Heyl left South Africa and moved to the picturesque Greek island of Hydra. From Hydra he flew to England, where he made a payroll snatch which netted a mere R4 000 - he had expected the haul to top R300 000 - then he moved to Spain. He was later forced to enlist the help of a confidence trickster named Billy Williams. Williams, who was supposed to help Heyl reclaim money and valuables left stashed in Britain, first took all he could for himself, then went to Scotland Yard and gave the police details of his new identity, Phillip John Ball, and his address in the United Kingdom. The British press would later label Williams 'Supergrass'. Not long afterwards, Heyl was arrested at his girlfriend's mother's house in Surrey, England. In May 1985, at Winchester Crown Court,Allan Heyl was sentenced to nine years in prison for armed robbery and illegal possession of a firearm. Following Heyl's arrest, the South African authorities attempted to have him extradited to face charges in South Africa, despite the fact that no extradition treaty between Great Britain and South Africa existed. For a time Heyl's fate hung in the balance. In December 1986, this 'very complicated' matter was finally resolved when the British Government announced that Heyl was to remain in Britain. He was released in the mid 1990s and extradited to South Africa where he was imprisoned on robbery charges. Currently (June 2003) he is still in prison. Contents

Web Design & Artwork 2009

*  " He bled to death on the wet driveway to his apartment block while waiting for an ambulance."  

Several things here are not correct.

First the Officer is Michael Von Stetina, not Van Stetina.  While Stander did bleed to death in a driveway while waiting for an ambulance it was not in the driveway of his apartment block.

  

There was no apartment block.  Stander lived in a duplex at 1730 NE 13th Street and died at 1229 NE 17th Avenue.

  

Stander was initially stopped by Officer Von Stetina at a home in the 1200 block of NE 17 Terrace, but Stander "ran off, dropping a knapsack, and cut through several back yards until Von Stetina caught up with him on NE 17 Ave."

Stander was shot 2 or 3 times (accounts differ) out of four shots of a .38 cal pistol fired by Officer Von Stetina.

Misc:  At the time of the Feb 1984 incident Officer Von Stetina was in his 7th year on the Ft Lauderdale Police Department.  He continued to serve for at least another 5 years and was the subject of an article in the local Ft Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel below:

YOUTHS' ESCAPE SPURS POLICE REVIEW LAUDERDALE EXAMINING PROCEDURES FOR TRANSFERS TO DETENTION CENTER

Link to story:

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1991-11-28-9102190236-story.html

 

KEVIN DAVIS, Staff Writer SUN-SENTINEL Nov 28, 1991

FORT LAUDERDALE -- The escape of two youths being transferred to the Broward Regional Juvenile Detention Center has prompted police to review policies for moving prisoners and to ask whether officers can expect help from detention workers during emergencies.

Two of three youths who broke away from an officer just outside the center on Monday night are still being sought.

Officer Michael Von Stetina had driven the three youths to the center by himself that night. They all were wearing plastic flex cuffs and were seated in the back of the car.

The youths dashed away as Von Stetina began taking one of them out of the car.

Von Stetina reported that he yelled out to detention center worker Fay Barrett for help, but she did not respond.

 He was able to capture the 12-year-old, but the others escaped.

 Ron Fryer, director of the center, said Barrett, 42, was not supposed to leave her post and was unprepared and too old to be chasing escapees.

 "I don't think she should have run out there. She's not trained in pursuit," he said. "She also might have had other kids near the door."

Fryer went on to say that the escape was "not an escape from the detention center." He said that youths technically are not in the center's custody until they walk through the door.

Police officers usually drive the youths up to the door and hit a buzzer. A camera shows workers inside who is at the door and the officer can be let in.

Fryer said detention workers are supposed to stay at their posts but can use their discretion if help is needed by an officer outside. "We will assist them any time we can," Fryer said.

 Police spokesman Ott Cefkin said something should have been done.

 "The officer is trying to get some help and the detention worker is just standing there," Cefkin said. "I can't understand the actions of that particular employee."

 Cefkin said the Police Department needs to know whether more officers should be assigned to transferring prisoners.

"They might want to look at the issue of taking prisoners out of the car and what we can expect from HRS detention people," Cefkin said.

======================

I was using the Tor browser to see if I could pick up anything over and above the normal stuff that I have been seeing.

This is a site about firearms and while the name of the 'officer' isn't mentioned it is obviously von Stetina.  After reading most of the 5 pages there is no indication of the gun being sold.  Sorta a waste of time in that regard.

In my opinion von Stetina doesn't come off well for trying to sell that gun.

So anyway we know he was off the cops in Nov. 2012 and still in Ft Lauderdale then.

Use the link to go direct to the site, but go to page 1, the link takes you to page 5.

 

From 'Gun Site South Africa'.  https://www.gunsite.co.za/forums/showthread.php?28680-Andre-Stander-Handgun/page5 .