[imagesource: Facebook / South African Police Service]

A sizeable bust on a fishing vessel off the coast of Saldanha last year – some estimates put the value of the seized cocaine at upwards of R580 million – is the starting point for Cape of Cocaine, a podcast from TimesLIVE.

If you’ve ever wondered how the white powder gets from South America to Cape Town (and then Bree Street club bathrooms), this is required listening.

Having traced the fleet of “ghost ships” that traffic cocaine from South America to destinations around the globe in episode two, the third episode of Cape of Cocaine details how the Bulgarian mafia planted their roots in South Africa.

The story starts with a drug bust in February 2014 in Durbanville and a man called Asen Ivanov:

The Hawks find bundles of cash, some of it in an Audi Q7. He claims to own the Audi, but a TimesLIVE Investigation would later discover that at the time the Audi belonged to another Bulgarian man called Momchil Pavlov, who had been a resident of SA for some time.

Pavlov, believed to be a middleman for the Bulgarian mafia in SA, has his own chequered history with the SA authorities…

The link between Ivanov and Pavlov is significant because it draws a link between international drug smuggling and a Bulgarian syndicate entrenched in SA which police investigators previously believed to be mostly involved in large-scale credit card fraud, abalone smuggling and human trafficking.

Over the seven-year period between that raid and the bust in Saldanha, the Bulgarian mafia would expand its reach in the country and become a massive cocaine smuggling syndicate.

The episode is titled ‘Cocaine Inc: Chasing Ivanov, the Bulgarian mafia’s fixer’.