Gangs (16 page)

Earlier in the week, motorcades led by both serving Prime Minister P. J. Patterson and opposition leader Edward Seaga were fired upon, and a candidate for the People’s National Party, Jennifer Edwards, was shot at while campaigning in an area known as a stronghold for the rival Jamaica Labour Party. Edwards was then rushed by an angry crowd and slashed with a knife. She was forced to seek refuge in a safe-house until police could escort her from the area.

Elections in Jamaica are notorious for their violence, a legacy of the troubled 1970s when the two main political parties established their power bases in the ghettos of downtown Kingston, and reinforced the law with the use of hired gunmen. During the 1980 campaign, 844 people were killed in two weeks, most of them on election day. The battles occur because, particularly for the residents of the ghetto, voting a party to power isn’t so much about the broader issues of lower taxes or trade deficit as the specific personal matters of whether your home gets connected to the local water and electricity supply.

Local MPs fight for seats by guaranteeing the desperately impoverished substantial financial aid for their communities in return for their support. For those living in the ghettos it is a short step to taking up guns to ensure everyone within a certain community votes a certain way or, better yet, that all those in a neighbouring community also fall in line.

Such tactics have been and are effective because Jamaican election results are often incredibly close. In 1967 the JLP won with 224,180 votes while the PNP polled 217,207. The results continued to be neck and neck until the 1990s, which saw three straight landslide victories for the PNP. Although there has never been another bloodbath like that witnessed in 1980, scores of deaths accompany every election.

A month or so before I arrived the two parties signed a pact in an attempt to halt the killings, both agreeing not to campaign in six key areas that always attract trouble. The areas that would be free of campaigning included the ‘garrison communities’ from where much of the violence emanates. Known by their unofficial names, which include Tel Aviv, Dunkirk and Southside in downtown Kingston, the garrisons are also home to the drugs barons that control the trade not only in Jamaica but in the UK and beyond. However, the aggressive advertising campaigns by the two parties, possibly thanks to a lack of libel laws, soon made a mockery of this. The JLP’s snappy election slogan was: ‘The PNP can go to Hell’.

Tensions within these areas always run high but anywhere that two rival communities meet is a potential tinderbox, regardless of whether there is an election or not.

Take, for example, the slaughter at 100 Lane on New Year’s Day 2002. The whole of 100 Lane is considered a People’s National Party stronghold. Park Lane, on the other hand, is a JLP strong-hold, but the two are separated from each other by a narrow alley just a few yards long.

The attack was systematic and well planned. A gang of around fifty gunmen from Park Lane struck shortly after midnight. Dressed in trench coats, they first caused a blackout in 100 Lane by shooting out the local electrical transformer. Then, while one group set up roadblocks to prevent the police gaining access to the area behind and blocked access to the lane to keep them away, the other went from house to house killing in cold blood everyone they could find. No one was spared.

Andrea Simmonds, thirty-three, a barmaid, was executed by the sporadic spurt of bullets, her body forming a shield that apparently enabled her son, Sujay, eight, to survive. Eyewitnesses said her life might have been spared if it had not been for the angry order from a gunman who ordered one of his cronies to ‘shoot the gal’ after initially sparing her. As she pleaded for her life, dozens of bullets were pumped into her body.

The shooting went on for two hours, and when it was over, seven people were dead. The victims included two schoolgirls aged six and eleven, three women and two men. The toll would have been far higher but several of the houses had metal anti-burglar grids fitted to the doors and windows. Unable to get inside the gunmen simply sprayed their bullets through open windows.

The attack was said to be revenge for an incident a week or so earlier when a group of eight gunmen from 100 Lane, dressed in denim and military fatigues, murdered Glenroy Maize, thirty-two, a juice vendor of Park Lane, and wounded four others including a woman. That itself was in retaliation for a killing by the other side, all part of a bitter political feud that has been going on for years even though some of the residents have relatives in both neighbourhoods.

It was this same long-established political violence that gave birth to the Yardies. After each election gunmen loyal to the losing side would find themselves starved of funding and unable to purchase new weapons. The ruling political party would also have control of the police and order them to round up the other party’s gunmen. In order to escape prosecution or, more likely, being shot dead by a police execution squad, they fled, first to the mountains and then beyond.

America and Britain were their first targets. From the late 1970s hundreds of Jamaican gangsters, the vast majority of them loyal to the JLP (who had lost the 1976 election), set up home in London, Miami and New York, almost always choosing the ganja trade as a way of making money. Between 1974 and 1978 the amount of herbal cannabis seized in the UK averaged around 2500 kilos per year. In 1979 the amount more than doubled to 6445. In 1980 it increased threefold to 18,419 kilos. The vast majority of this growth has been attributed to the work of one man.

In Jamaica Robert Blackwood, also known as Bowyark and Rankin Dread, had been the right-hand man of a certain Claude Massop, a notorious Don who ran the JLP garrison in the Rema district until he was shot dead by the police in the late 1970s. Blackwood’s name had been linked to the murder of at least twenty-nine PNP rivals and a further four policemen, but bringing him to justice proved problematic. By the time one of the cop killings came to trial, three of the witnesses had been murdered and a fourth had ‘lost his memory’. The charges were dropped.

After Massop’s death Blackwood assumed control of the Rema district but after being involved in a shoot-out with two police officers he decided to ‘go foreign’, obtaining a false passport and fleeing to Britain under the name of Errol Codling in early 1978. Blackwood settled in London and, describing himself as a musician/record producer, first made his name legitimately, cutting a record, ‘Hey Fatty Boom Boom’, which reached the top ten in 1980. ‘I was famous. I had the Mercedes. I had the flashy jewellery and clothes. I had it all. And there were always girls. Sometimes I had a different girl every night,’ he would say later.

But Blackwood’s heart wasn’t in the music business and, after the glory of what turned out to be a one-hit wonder, he set about building a criminal empire. He opened a drinking club, ran a string of prostitutes, dabbled in counterfeit currency and funded a series of cannabis shipments to both Britain and America through a number of armed robberies. By the end of 1980 the ganja trade was worth an estimated $1.5 billion per year – more than the value of all Jamaica’s legitimate exports combined – and the Yardies were awash with wealth.

At first, the vast majority of the illicit cash that gangsters like Blackwood made was channelled back to fight future election campaigns, and this is believed to be the main reason the 1980 election proved so violent. This time the JLP and, soon afterwards, PNP gunmen followed their counterparts abroad. Politics were forgotten and gunmen from the two parties fought it out over the best drug turf. Between 1980 and 1985 at least 1500 Jamaicans were murdered up and down America’s east coast as gangs battled to control the ganja trade.

In Britain, the violence took longer to emerge and came not as a result of the existing trade in ganja but the growing trade in cocaine. The Colombian drug cartels had been expanding their operations in North America since the early 1970s and turned to the Jamaican gangs for help after experiencing problems in moving their product around.

In Britain, which, unlike America or Spain, had no sizeable Colombian community, the Yardies found themselves perfectly placed to form a strong link in the supply chain at street level. Men like Robert Blackwood soon switched to coke, and overnight drug-smuggling went from being a way of making a good living to a way of living like a god.

By early 1986 Blackwood was concentrating so heavily on cocaine that he had to buy his ganja from others. On one occasion he and four of his crew had made a deal with a Nigerian dealer named Innocent Egbulefu to buy £150 worth of cannabis. But Egbulefu wasn’t so innocent. The batch of dope he sold Blackwood and the others was made up of herbs and tealeaves. On 1 March 1986 the five men he had ripped off paid a visit to his high-rise flat in north London. They smashed their way inside and, after explaining their grievance, threw him out of the window. It all happened so quickly that when Egbulefu hit the ground, eight floors and ninety feet below, he still had the remote-control unit for his television in his hand.

It was the first UK death attributed to Jamaican gangsters but it would not be the last.

On 23 May 1986 Jamaican Derek Walters was standing in the doorway of the Old Queen’s Head pub in Stockwell, south London, when a man got out of a blue Mercedes, walked up to the thirty-one-year-old DJ and blasted him in the head with a shotgun at point-blank range. A few days later a doorman at Cynthia’s nightclub in nearby Brixton was shot through the head for trying to stop a gang of Jamaicans entering the club and shooting their real target – a rival coke-dealer. In early 1987 at a party in Acton, west London, ‘Sammy Dread’, wanted for at least three murders in Jamaica, blew the head off rival coke-dealer Alwyn ‘Shankie’ Alfred. As the gun went off the terrified crowd dived to the floor but those who were brave enough to look up as ‘Sammy Dread’ strutted out said that he was smiling.

In July of that same year, eighty-five representatives of US and Canadian law-enforcement agencies attended a conference in Miami to discuss ways of combating the Jamaican criminal gangs. Two detectives from Scotland Yard were sent along and reported back that the gangs now had several thousand members and associates, that politics, though still a factor, had taken a back seat, and that the gangs now had a single, well-defined business plan – to accumulate vast wealth through narcotics.

A specialist police initiative – Operation Lucy – was finally launched but it was already too little too late. Crack had arrived, the profits were higher than ever and, having been brought up in a society where violent death was commonplace, the Yardies had a willingness to show and use guns, both against one another and the police, that was completely unprecedented. The impact of Jamaican organised crime has been far greater than that of any other group in the UK. Since the first signs of Yardie activity surfaced here in the mid-1980s, they have carried out more than five hundred murders and five thousand gun attacks. If they are caught and sent back to Jamaica the problems begin all over again. Many of Jamaica’s worst crimes are carried out by so called deportees – men who have been kicked out of Britain or the United States for drugs offences or violent crimes and are sent home. The deportees wait around only as long as it takes them to get hold of money and a false passport to return to Britain.

What becomes increasingly clear is that much of the violence and corruption in Jamaica is inextricably linked to what goes on in Britain, and vice versa. The top Yardies make frequent trips back and forth and there are dozens of cases in which hitmen have travelled straight from the island to the UK, carried out a murder then flown back on the next plane. At the same time, and despite their power and wealth in Britain, the Yardies still depend on the support of those in Jamaica – the place the vast majority ultimately yearn to return to.

‘We know that the drugs barons are attempting to worm their way into the political process either at ground level or through other methods,’ Superintendent James Forbes of the Jamaica Constabulary told me, the day after I arrived in Jamaica. ‘You only need to look at the large number of drug couriers travelling between Jamaica and London to know there is a link. It is by no means farfetched to say that certain people involved in the drugs trade in London and the rest of Britain are both financing and having a considerable influence on activities back here in Kingston. They are using money made from the drugs trade to disrupt elections and ensure their favoured candidates are brought to power.’

On my third morning I call the Jamaica Constabulary press office for details of a fatal multiple shooting in central Kingston. The officer who answers barely misses a beat when she asks if I could be more specific. ‘We had quite a few of dem multiple ones last night, which d’ya mean?’ We finally agree that the particular inquiry I am interested in is a triple murder in the western section of the city that has only just occurred. I rush to the scene hoping to find out more details.

I arrive to find a small crowd gathered around some wasteland and make my way to the front. The bodies of seventeen-year-old Garthan Powell, Errol Thompson, twenty-four, and his brother Ian, twenty-nine, are lying together, grotesquely twisted, in the mud of a sewage ditch. Each one has been shot in the head, execution-style, and the two brothers had been blindfolded and bound before being murdered. A bloodstained vehicle was found nearby and the trio are believed to have been kidnapped from their homes the previous evening. No gunshots were heard in the area, leading many to assume they were killed elsewhere before their bodies were dumped.

A group of burly firemen appear and help to lift the bodies away. Some of the crowd recoil in horror when something falls out from one of the bright blue ponchos they have used to cover the bodies as they load them on to stretchers. I listen in discreetly as a woman in the crowd tells a young man that she believes the trio were killed by PNP supporters over the theft of a gun.