Yesterday the South African Police Service (SAPS) arrested National Coloured Congress (NCC) leader and Member of Parliament Fadiel Adams.

He was arrested by the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT), which is investigating politically motivated murders across the country.

According to the SAPS, Adams is accused of interfering with investigations into the murder of African National Congress (ANC) councillor and former ANC Youth League leader Sindiso Magaqa.

While Adams told the media that he would hand himself over to SAPS today, members of the PKTT arrested him at his residence in the parliamentary village in Cape Town before he could hand himself over.

He has since been transported to KwaZulu-Natal, where the Magaqa murder took place, and will appear in court on charges of fraud and defeating the ends of justice.

It is a jarring moment for a politician who built his public profile, in part, on his own admission that he once moved in the very criminal circles against which his party vowed to fight.

Born on 14 June 1976 in Lavender Hill, a suburb in the Cape Flats, Adams was the third of six children. His father was a builder and his mother was a seamstress.

Despite being a young school activist against the apartheid regime during his early years at Steenberg High School, he dropped out at the beginning of matric and turned to a life of gangsterism.

His uncle’s status as a "general" in the notorious 26s gang cast a long shadow over his upbringing, and Adams has been candid that the environment he grew up in played no small part in drawing him towards a life on the wrong side of the law.

“In Lavender Hill, you don’t expect to live long. I was a gangster, a shooter,” Adams said in a 2025 interview. “When gang violence starts, the shooters stand and fight.”

By the time he was 30, Adams says his life choices had left him homeless and addicted to drugs, a trajectory on which he would have remained if it were not for Raybin Windvogel, an attorney who provided guidance on how to escape a life of crime.

Following Windvogel’s intervention, Adams worked as a plumber and tiler in Mitchells Plain after getting clean. It was only in 2018 that he “accidentally” entered politics following clashes between coloured residents in Mitchells Plain and black residents in Siqalo, an informal settlement close to Mitchells Plain.

During the chaos, Adams’s brother was arrested, which was the catalyst for the formation of Gatvol Capetonians, described as a group of Capetonians fed up with black economic empowerment policies, poor service delivery, and crime.

Adams went on to found the Cape Coloured Congress in 2020 and was elected to the Cape Town City Council a year later during the local government elections.

With his sights set on entering South Africa’s Parliament, Adams changed the name of the party to the National Coloured Congress (NCC) to compete in the 2024 general elections. The NCC won two seats in the National Assembly and one seat in the Western Cape provincial legislature.

Adams’s political career has not been without controversy. He was twice reprimanded for making derogatory statements about opposition party members on social media, first against a City of Cape Town official in 2023, which the Equality Court deemed hate speech, and again in 2025, resulting in a 15-day suspension from Parliament.

More recently, Adams has frequently been mentioned during testimony at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry into KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s allegations of corruption and criminality in the criminal justice system.

Mkhwanazi alleged that Adams had leveraged his role as part of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police to obtain sensitive police intelligence information, which he was not authorised to view.

Adams told the parliamentary probe that the classified documents, which he says contained information about corruption by senior police officials and organised crime investigations, were “slid under his office door”.

He says he then acted on this information, opening criminal cases in Cape Town and Johannesburg without verifying it, arguing that he did so to ensure investigation and not to act as an investigator himself.

This sensitive information is linked to his alleged interference in the Magaqa murder case. Adams is expected to appear in court tomorrow.