Simon Mann, Mercenary Who Sought to Overthrow African Leader, Dies at 72

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/world/africa/simon-mann-dead.html

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Simon Mann, a British mercenary and former Special Air Service officer, knew the game was up when he spotted 10 men in cheap leather jackets, submachine guns strapped to their chests, in the dim airport hangar.

Instantly, steel cuffs pinned his hands behind his back. The men, Zimbabwean secret police, told him that the local crocodiles would finish the job for them.

Harare, March 2004: Mr. Mann’s elaborate plot to unseat the dictator of the small, oil-rich Central African nation Equatorial Guinea had come undone. The “whole [expletive] shambles,” as Mr. Mann put it in his memoir, “Cry Havoc” (2011), was over.

Yet it was the beginning of a kind of stardom for Mr. Mann, an Old Etonian, ex-Scots Guardsman, wealthy country squire and descendant of war heroes and team England cricket captains. How had he so spectacularly come a cropper?

That question fascinated Britain’s respectable and not-so-respectable press for years, as it sought to explain what it called the Wonga Coup — an epithet inspired by a jailhouse letter Mr. Mann wrote to his wife from Zimbabwe, pleading for a “splodge of wonga,” British slang for a large sum of money.

Simon Mann died on May 8 at his home in London. He was 72.

Mr. Mann died after having a heart attack while working out on a rowing machine, said Aleksandra Binkowska, the chief executive of Hydrogen Utopia, the energy company that employed him.