Gangs (17 page)

There are, on average, up to a hundred murders per month in Jamaica, the vast majority in Kingston, a city with a population well short of six hundred thousand. Later that afternoon it is the turn of Glenroy Harris. The men who came to kill him left little to chance. When the police arrived at the scene they found twenty-eight assorted spent shell cases and two live rounds scattered around the labourer’s body.

Eager to learn more about his death I persuaded a taxi driver to take me to the murder scene, Burke Road, in a ghetto in the west of Kingston. On the way we stopped at the local police station to get the latest information. When the desk sergeant learnt that I planned to visit Burke Road he was astonished that I didn’t have an armed escort.

As we passed through the garrison known as Tel Aviv, my driver, George, pointed out the spot where he saw a man killed the year before. ‘I heard this blam, blam, blam, and when I look round this man was lying on the ground surrounded by blood. He was trying to draw his gun but there was no strength left in his body. Some of these streets, outside election time you can walk down them but if you do that now . . .’ George paused, took one hand off the steering-wheel and slowly drew a finger across his throat. ‘I tell you, man, I am Jamaican, I was born in the ghetto and I love my country but me ‘fraid these people. Me nah trust them. They shoot you dead and then apologise afterwards.’

Every side-street in Burke Road was blocked by a barricade. Most had graffiti declaring the street’s allegiance to one or other political party. On the edge of Burke Road we stop to ask a woman selling sweets by the kerbside if she knew anything about the killing of Harris. ‘I heard about it. I know the man, knew him well. The way I understand it, they kill him for the ganzi.’ ‘Ganzi’ are the T-shirts in the colours of the two political parties. Harris, wearing his green JLP colours, was killed when he met a group of PNP supporters in orange.

When the woman learnt that I planned to walk down Burke Road and question the locals, she pleaded with me not to go. She then pleaded with my already nervous taxi driver not to take me. ‘You see that street now, pure gunmen living down there. Nobody else.’ I reached a compromise with my driver – he agreed to drive past the end of Burke Road so I could decide how safe it looked.

While the streets around were busy, Burke Road, two hundred metres of potholed Tarmac lined with ramshackle houses, was a ghost town. The silence was eerie. I decided to move on. Two hours later, a policeman was shot and killed at the junction of Burke Road and Spanish Town Road, just a few yards from where I had been, bringing to ten the number of murders on that one day.

The first thing visitors to the headquarters of the Narcotics Division of the Jamaican Constabulary notice is the lack of computers. Essential information such as fingerprint details and criminal records are still written by hand on index cards. The Jamaican Constabulary is woefully under-resourced. They are short of at least a thousand officers and recently suffered a 50 per cent cut in their petrol budget – paid directly by the Government to oil companies – leading to massive restrictions on the frequency of patrols.

From his sparsely furnished office Superintendent Gladstone Wright is the first to admit that he and his officers need help to tackle the increasingly sophisticated drug-smuggling centre that Jamaica has become.

‘The smugglers are becoming more dynamic and the trade is growing all the time,’ he said. ‘In terms of what is happening in Britain, the trade has escalated sharply since 11 September. The couriers who would normally be travelling to America are unable to get their drugs through because security at the borders has become so tight. Cocaine is stockpiling in Jamaica and that is no good for the dealers – there is no viable market for the drug here. So it is all being diverted to Britain.’

One month twenty-three drug mules were caught on a single Air Jamaica flight into Heathrow. A week later a further nineteen were caught on a BA flight into Gatwick. Both aircraft were targeted for checks at random.

Before 11 September, 50 per cent of all drugs intercepted from airline passengers arriving in the United States were seized from flights from Jamaica, despite such flights making up less than three per cent of US air traffic. As Wright believes, much of this activity is now being directed towards Britain, and as much as 65 per cent of all the cocaine in the UK is smuggled through Jamaica. (Crack itself is rarely smuggled. It is far more profitable to smuggle cocaine, then convert it.)

‘Becoming a drug mule is the most readily available form of employment in this country at the moment,’ he said. ‘It is a job that you do not need to be interviewed for or have any kind of qualifications, but you can earn more money than most Jamaicans see in a lifetime. The economy here is very bad at the moment and unemployment is extremely high. These people are easy prey for the dealers.’

The ‘body packers’ often prepare themselves for their smuggling trips by swallowing whole grapes. The money they are paid is directly related to the number of pellets they are able to swallow. On average a person’s stomach can carry up to five hundred grams of cocaine – fifty to a hundred pellets, depending on the size – but many will try to increase their earnings by carrying a good deal more.

The pellets are often dipped in honey to ease their passage down the gullet. The mules will take tablets to induce constipation during the course of the trip. In earlier years the cocaine was stored in condoms but the fingers of surgical gloves, which are made of latex and are sturdier, are the current material of choice. The cocaine is compressed and formed into pellets using a machine, which supposedly ensures an airtight seal.

Despite this, dozens of couriers have had to be rushed to hospital after becoming ill while waiting to board planes at Kingston. At least ten die each year as a result of packages bursting inside them. In April 2002 a Jamaican woman, known only by the nickname ‘Modern Girl’ due to her taste in designer clothes, was found dead near the M45 in Northamptonshire. Aged around sixty, she had been in the UK for less than forty-eight hours before her body was found. A post-mortem showed she had swallowed ten packets of cocaine and that one had split, causing a fatal heart-attack.

Those who swallow pellets of cocaine receive the most publicity but the smugglers are also using a wide variety of other techniques; some are highly sophisticated. Cocaine has been found sewn into the seams of trousers, suspended in liquids, concealed in the soles of shoes and hidden in the handles of suitcases. One woman was arrested at Norman Manley airport with half a kilo of cocaine woven into her hair.

Police and Customs officials in Britain and Jamaica admit that a significant proportion of mules do get through. Once they have cleared Customs in Britain they travel to prearranged addresses where they are given laxatives to help them expel the packages.

But, according to Wright, his officers do not even attempt to catch all the drug-smugglers before they board flights to the UK. ‘It is relatively easy to spot the novices. The people with cocaine strapped to their bodies look bulky or have an unusual gait, while those who have swallowed for the first time are often visibly nervous and panic-stricken. The problem is that we simply do not have the resources to deal with swallowers.

‘When we identify them they have to be taken to hospital and placed under guard until the cocaine passes through their system to make sure they don’t die. That can take around six days – in one case it was nearly fifty days – and we do not have the manpower to cope with that. We would never knowingly let someone board a plane whom we suspected of having swallowed cocaine, but I am certain that we could catch many more people if we had more resources to devote.’

The vast majority of drug mules are single, female and trapped in lives of poverty and desperation. A lack of state welfare means there is a daily struggle to feed, clothe and educate their children, and the fact that 22 per cent of women are unemployed means there is little money around.

There are cases of women who have become mules to pay for life-saving operations or medication for their relatives; others who simply hope to connect their houses to the local water and electricity supply. Some are forced into it at gunpoint. The families of those who are caught and imprisoned often find themselves the target of the gangs who want to know what has happened to their drugs. There have been incidents of families being executed by the drugs barons, who believe their shipments have been stolen by the mules.

The breeding-grounds for the mules are the shanty-towns on the edge of Kingston, where hundreds of single mothers struggle to raise families in dank, filthy one-room shacks made of little more than compressed cardboard. ‘If you had to live the way these people live you might well be tempted to take drugs to Britain too,’ says Olga Heaven, director of Hibiscus, a charity that aims to ease the plight of Jamaica’s most poverty-stricken citizens. ‘These are not professional couriers, they are women who have no other choices. These are first-time offenders who don’t drink, don’t smoke, God-fearing women who have never done anything wrong in their lives.’

Despite a series of high-profile commercials on television and radio and related poster campaigns, the message doesn’t appear to be getting across. ‘The problem,’ adds Heaven, ‘is that the money they earn from just one trip is enough to change their lives for ever. A lot of them get caught but enough get through and come back with the money for those who are on the fence to decide it’s worth the risk.’

The odds certainly seem to be in their favour. The entire Jamaican Narcotics Division is staffed by just 130 officers. By comparison, 150 detectives investigated the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando. Wright plans to expand the division to a staff of more than two hundred, but while having more officers will undoubtedly help, Wright acknowledges that the police themselves are part of the problem. Corrupt officers have been known to transport drugs in their own vehicles, to block off roads to allow planes to take off and land, and to turn a blind eye to shipments being smuggled out of the country in return for bribes.

In January 1999, 127 officers in the Portland Division were transferred after allegations that some had formed an alliance with members of a Colombian cocaine cartel. Eight months later the entire Special Anti-Crime Taskforce was disbanded after some of its officers were found to be selling drugs. More recently police officers have been caught selling gun licences to drug-dealers and helping smugglers to get hold of false passports for their couriers, enabling them to make repeated trips abroad without arousing suspicion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly when you look at the environment they have to work in – police officers and their families are regularly ambushed and murdered, often in the most barbaric way possible – Jamaica’s police also have a reputation for going in hard and shooting first whenever there is the slightest notion of danger. In 2002 the police shot dead 133 suspects and sixteen officers died in shoot-outs. Although many complaints were made that police often shot at those who were unarmed, no officers were charged with murder. In July 2001, a joint police-army operation entered the JLP stronghold of Tivoli Gardens, west Kingston, reportedly to search for an arms cache. In the brutal three-day orgy of violence that followed, twenty-seven people were shot dead, including one policeman and one soldier. Pictures of dead bodies stacked three and four deep at the morgue shocked even the most gore-hardened Jamaicans.

But there are, of course, many honest and dedicated officers. A veteran of eighteen years, Sergeant Adele Halliman has spent the last six years specialising in narcotics and is now Jamaica’s top mule-buster. Like Gene Hackman’s character in
The French Connection,
she believes a sixth sense alerts her whenever a courier is around: ‘I guess I have a gift. It’s hard for me to explain exactly how it works but I just get a sense when someone is carrying contraband, and I am never wrong.’ The day before I speak to her, Halliman arrested yet another British citizen, Michael Edwards, as he boarded a flight to London after a ten-day holiday in Jamaica. His luggage included a bottle of Sorrell, a local drink made from flower petals, which aroused her suspicions. ‘There was something about the colour that wasn’t right so I checked more closely. It turned out to be liquid cocaine.’

Halliman spends much of her time in the departure lounge of Norman Manley airport at the X-ray machines that scan every item of a passenger’s luggage before they reach the check-in desk. ‘It’s a lottery. Some people will bring through five pieces of luggage hoping we won’t have time to search them all. Others have just one piece because they believe they will look more innocent. We have even had people using their children in an attempt to distract us.’

Halliman feels frustrated because she says she hasn’t got the resources to do a more effective job, but this frustration pales alongside that which comes from seeing how the Jamaican judicial system deals with those who are caught. Sentences are remarkably light, especially compared with Britain where even a first-time mule can expect to serve a minimum of six years.

To see this for myself I make my way along to the dilapidated local courthouse at Half Way Tree where, although the air-conditioning failed years ago, protocol dictates that those addressing the magistrate must wear jackets and ties.

In the stifling heat of court number five one of Halliman’s colleagues, Detective Constable Conrad Granston, repeatedly mops his brow as he explains why he had immediate suspicions about Diane Haddow. After opening her suitcase, he found thirty-three plastic bottles of medicated powder. ‘I thought to myself this can’t be right, nobody should need that much. She told me her daughter suffered from a severe skin complaint and that she had bought it to treat her, but it still didn’t make sense.’

Granston cut open one bottle and found three pellets, each wrapped in black plastic. They contained cocaine and almost all the other bottles had similar contents. Haddow, a twenty-two-year-old from Tottenham in north London, was arrested at Norman Manley airport in Kingston as she prepared to board an Air Jamaica flight to London. In all, her suitcase contained around a kilo of high-quality cocaine.