Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

by Ioan Grillo

  The influence of this movie strikes me. It seems superficial, something that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, cartoon characters based on gangster flicks. But the dons had real guns, real power, and drove a real high level of bloodshed.

  Kami became one of their triggermen shedding this claret. As a teenager, he was doing well at school. But he needed to stand up for himself on the increasingly tough streets. When he was fifteen, he bought his first pistol from a Greek sailor off a visiting ship. By that time, Southside had become a laborite garrison allied to Tivoli. It was an especially violent area as it had frontlines to PNP socialist ghettos on several sides. Kami joined the gunmen defending these borders. They formed into a group called the Skull Gang.

  “We were laborite a hundred percent. I hated the PNP. If they dared come here to try and give out leaflets or look for votes, they were dead. If they even came close to our streets we shot at them.”

  In the sense that the gunmen fought to defend their neighborhood, it was classic gang mentality, guarding a turf from rivals. They also wanted to safeguard their families. If a mob came in, it could firebomb homes and machete residents. In Jamaica, these neighborhood gangs are also known as corner defense crews.

  However, these gangs had political affiliations. And there was money involved. Kami describes how his don carried wads of cash and would spread it around the soldiers. It began casually, some cash here and there, but then became more formalized with money paid out every week. A soldier’s salary wasn’t a great deal, but it provided a steady income for unemployed ghetto youth.

  Kami presumed the cash was funneled from politicians. However, while Jamaica’s parliamentary inquiry and almost all politicians acknowledge the don system, the financing has never been thoroughly documented.

  It is also widely alleged that political parties provided firearms to their loyalists, but again there is little solid proof to show that. Either way, Kami says the don had his hands on plenty of guns and ammunition for his troops, and the battles with rival garrisons became more intense.

  “We had crazy gunfights, block to block. This was when I first killed people. I didn’t feel bad about it because they were firing at me. I wasn’t up close executing them or anything. It was a fair fight.”

  I ask Kami if he was trained to shoot. He shakes his head. The gunmen teach themselves, learn through experience, he says.

  “You might practice firing at cans or bottles. But you really learn on the street. When the fight breaks out, you see who has got the nerve to shoot and who hasn’t. There are a lot of kids here who just naturally have that killer instinct.”

  One of these thugs with a killer instinct was Lester Lloyd Coke, a bulky roughneck over in Tivoli Gardens. Kami met Coke through a mutual friend, Vivian Blake, who he used to play cricket with. Blake and Coke would later go on to form the Shower Posse together.

  Being big and broad, Coke was known as “Jim Brown” after the American football player who starred in The Dirty Dozen, which was a big hit in Jamaica. Jim Brown was several years older than Kami and already had several children. One of them, born in 1969, was Christopher Michael Coke, alias Dudus, the future President.

  The street fighting heated up steadily during the seventies as Prime Minister Manley launched Jamaica’s great experiment in democratic socialism. Manley was born into politics, the son of PNP founder Norman Manley who governed Jamaica when it gained independence from Britain. The family is of mixed race, known in Jamaica as mulatto, a group associated with privilege over the majority of Afros in the Caribbean. However, Manley preached that the elite had to be shaken up for an egalitarian society to be born. As Manley explained to U.S. TV host Gil Noble:

  There are tremendous social pressures in Jamaica. Like almost all countries that had a long colonial experience, Jamaica is a product of that experience, and reflected at the time of independence sharp class divisions, a very small and highly privileged elite…. The attempt to build an egalitarian society begins with the dismantling of the citadels of privilege.7

  While an intellectual, educated at the London School of Economics, Manley used populist gestures to win poor black voters. He flew to Ethiopia to visit Emperor Haile Selassie, an icon for many Jamaicans. Selassie gave him a staff of ebony with an ivory handle; Manley held up the staff on his 1972 campaign trail, and it became known as the “Rod of Correction.” The rod gained him Rasta support, inspiring a reggae record and promoting the myth that Manley was a reincarnation of Joshua, freeing the enslaved.

  “We’ve come too far, we’re not turning back now,” Manley chanted at a campaign rally, as he banged on the orator stand like it was a drum. “We have a mission now, and I say to you, my friends, together we are going to march forward under God’s heaven, building democratic socialism.”8

  Winning power, Manley turned his ideas into social change with far-reaching reforms. He taxed the wealthy and redistributed land; introduced a minimum wage and free schooling to tertiary level; empowered unions and took royalties from American and Canadian companies mining Jamaica’s bauxite, a mineral used in the car industry. Manley’s leadership inspired. But the radical reforms also divided. Ghetto supporters rallied around him and pledged to fight for his cause. Wealthy plantation owners and businessmen accused him of being a raging communist. Manley retorted that if they didn’t like it, there were five flights a day to Miami. Thousands took up the offer and fled.

  Tension increased as Manley got friendly with Castro in Cuba, 230 miles over the Caribbean. In 1975, Cuba sent troops to Angola to fight the U.S.-backed army of South Africa. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Jamaica to ask Manley to condemn Cuba’s involvement. Manley was loath to help apartheid South Africa. He told Kissinger to shove it.

  “Now there are certain people in the world who ask why are we taking this risk to anger the United States of America and the answer is this,” he chanted in a speech following the meeting. “We are not angering the United States of America. They are angering themselves.”9

  “We have that friendship with Cuba as part of a world alliance of third world nations who are fighting for justice for poor people,” he said in another speech.10

  As Manley veered to the left, the fighting in Jamaica’s ghettos became increasingly ideological. PNP gunmen claimed they were defending Jamaica’s revolution. Seaga told his laborites they were fighting a communist plot that would drag Jamaica into the abyss. The blood-soaked garrisons had turned into a minor Cold War battleground.

  As corpses piled up, mutual accusations sharpened. Seaga claimed Manley was a puppet of Havana. Manley countered that laborite thugs were supported by a CIA campaign to destabilize Jamaica.

  “Here is how destabilization works,” Manley told a rally. “The secret group that is trying to mash up the country will go in among the youth and find one that looks like a leader … and sell the idea of starting a bitch of a street fight.”11

  This accusation that the CIA backed the laborite shock troops has far-reaching implications. This was the force that would become the Shower Posse, commit wanton murder across the United States, and lead to Dudus’s Presidential Click. However, the charge is tough to prove.

  The gist of the accusation is that the CIA carried out a “destabilization campaign” similar to those well documented in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973 to get rid of leftist rulers. According to this theory, the agency cooked up media stories trashing the Jamaican government, bolstered the opposition, and armed political gunmen. Laborite thugs unleashed violence that hurt Manley and helped the opposition voting machine.

  Two former CIA agents came out supporting the claims. However, both had left the agency by the height of the Jamaican violence and become vocal critics of U.S. foreign policy on a range of issues. Philip Agee had left the CIA back in 1969. He went to Jamaica in 1976 and released the names of the nine alleged CIA agents he said were in the office working on the operation. (Agee later had a barrage of accusations thrown at him from being a double agent to
an alcoholic womanizer. He had his U.S. passport revoked and died in Cuba.)

  The other agent, John Stockwell, worked in the CIA until 1976, heading the agency’s Angola operation. After leaving, he visited Jamaica and said he saw definite evidence of a campaign.

  “(There was) every indication of a massive CIA operation going to destabilize the government and make the economy scream,” Stockwell said in a 1982 TV interview. “It was not published in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the big television networks didn’t do studies on it, primarily because even if the journalists of the big organs knew what was happening and might have wanted to, because of the secrecy, they couldn’t get the truth of what the United States was doing.”12

  Seaga fervently denies the CIA armed his supporters. It is likely the matter will only be settled if and when the CIA releases its files on it. But it is notable that many in Jamaica to this day are convinced that the CIA was involved.

  Likewise, there is much talk of crates of Cuban guns arriving, without hard evidence that Havana provided military help to Manley. However, it is proven that a handful of Jamaican militants did travel independently to Cuba and underwent guerrilla training. In his colorful portrait of Jamaica, The Dead Yard, Ian Thomson interviews one of the veterans who flew to Havana.

  “He went into woods, he waged mock war and, armed with M16s, Uzis and SLRs, crawled on his belly across semi-swampland,” Thomson writes. The trainee guerrilla then “accidentally almost killed one of the instructors with a grenade.”13

  Back in Southside, Kami says he wasn’t sure where all the guns were coming from. But they certainly had plenty of weapons by the late 1970s.

  “The guns got bigger. We weren’t just playing with pistols anymore. We had submachine guns and automatic rifles. Some people even got their hands on plastic explosives.”

  Tivoli lies on the docks where smugglers can bring in weapons on ships while drugs are smuggled out. The docks are one reason that Tivoli is such an important garrison; whoever dominates the Kingston waterfront controls a major trafficking corridor.

  Decades after this tumultuous period, Kami is still vehemently partisan. He spits venom at the mention of Manley.

  “That hypocritical son of a bitch. I would love to have killed him.”

  In fact, Kami says that he and his fellow triggermen really did try to shoot at Manley one time, but police guarding him saw them off. This sounds so crazy, I ask Kami to repeat it. He reiterates that he really tried to assassinate the prime minister. Looking up archive newspapers, I find that Manley indeed got pinned down by gunfire on several occasions, including in Spanish Town in 1980.

  Kami hates Manley so much because he blames him for the so-called Green Bay massacre in 1978, when soldiers murdered five Southside youths. Kami had grown up with some of the victims so he was particularly outraged. The pro-PNP soldiers were trying to get laborite gunmen such as himself, Kami says, but the victims were not involved in the political war.

  “They were good youth who died that day. That was an evil treacherous thing the soldiers did.”

  The massacre was one of the most cold-blooded of Jamaica’s political violence. A man lured the victims to the Green Bay army shooting range on the pretext of guard work. When they arrived, the troops opened fire on them.14 Various soldiers were charged, but after a delayed trial, a jury acquitted them.

  The soldiers may have been rogue elements rather than carrying out a hit sanctioned by the prime minister. But whoever gave the order, many laborites hated the Manley government more than ever.

  The Green Bay massacre also produced a curious side effect: The political gunslingers came together in a peace treaty. In a sudden moment of realization that poor blacks were murdering poor blacks in the power games of light-skinned politicians, the gangsters agreed to put down their guns. Key in the peace movement was the Tivoli don Claudie Massop.

  In the months following Green Bay, the political street fights virtually ceased. Taking advantage of this harmonious moment, Massop and others decided the truce could be enhanced by a music event, and organized the One Love Peace Concert. It was an extraordinary meeting of politics, gangsters, and music, only possible in Jamaica. Headlining the event was none other than the legend himself, Bob Marley.

  During this turbulent period, the Trench Town singer was at his most prolific. But like most Jamaicans, he couldn’t escape the violence. In 1976, gunmen stormed into Marley’s uptown house and shot him in the chest and arm. They also shot his wife, Rita, manager, and a friend. All survived following hospital treatment.

  Police never found the culprits of the Marley shooting, and the motive remains murky. The common explanation is that the gunmen were laborite thugs angered by Marley playing at an event organized by Prime Minister Manley, which was seen as a virtual election rally. Some writers speculate that Jim Brown, Dudus’s father, was even among the shooters. However, others say the whole thing was over a personal quarrel.

  Whatever the cause, it made Marley leave for self-imposed exile in London, where he recorded his landmark Exodus album. The Tivoli don Massop then personally flew to England to convince Marley to return to his homeland for the peace gig in April 1978.

  By all accounts, One Love was one of the most astonishing concerts in musical history. It filled the National Stadium, with tens of thousands divided into sections marked “togetherness,” “love,” and “peace.” It took place exactly twelve years after a visit to Jamaica by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. It began under a burning afternoon sun and finished during a full moon seen through clouds of ganja smoke. And the most prolific stars in the history of reggae played their finest performances.15

  As the concert heated up, singer Peter Tosh came on stage and launched into a tirade against politicians for driving the violence. Known for a more angry stance than his former band mate Marley, Tosh roused the crowd as Prime Minister Manley and laborite Seaga watched nervously from the side.

  “The little pirate dem come here and rob up the resources for the country. Because that is what dem been doing a long bloodbath time,” Tosh said in his booming, reverberating voice. “Eliminate all the shitstem that makes black poor people live in confusion. Cos hungry people are angry people. I am not a politician but I suffer the consequences.”16

  It was incendiary rhetoric. However, when Bob Marley stepped up, he switched from attacking the political leaders to inviting them on stage. As his band played a marathon version of his hit “Jammin,” he addressed Jamaica’s two political warmongers.

  “Mr. Michael Manley and Mr. Edward Seaga. I just want to shake hands and show the people that we’re gonna make it right, we’re gonna unite … The moon is right over my head, and I give my love instead.”

  As the crowd roared, Manley and Seaga stepped forward, and Marley joined their hands together. The result is a photo of Manley on the left, Marley in the middle, Seaga on the right, their arms raised and hands linked. It is an iconic image of music trumping war.

  But when you look at the photo for a while you see betraying details. Both Manley and Seaga are looking away with awkward expressions. If you watch a video of it, you see that after the picture, they pull away from each other hurriedly. They may have been up for a photo op. But they weren’t ready to bury their political war in peace and love.

  Among the thronging crowds, Kami also says that he was suspicious the peace would not last.

  “It was really weird. We had been fighting these guys a couple of months ago and then they were in the concert with us. I was amazed that no trouble started. It was a nice moment. It showed us how things could be in a better world. But this was Jamaica and you knew that shit would go down sooner or later.”

  The shit went down in early 1979 when police gunned down Tivoli don Massop, who brokered the peace treaty. The officers pursued him in a taxi, pulled him out, and shot him with more than forty bullets. Mourners carried Massop’s coffin through the slum streets and fifteen thousand from Tivoli, Southside, and other
ghettos wept at his funeral. Then bullets rained.

  The murder of a gang boss who fought for peace sparked the inevitable conspiracy theories. Did police kill him because they prefer gangs to be fighting? people muttered. Or was it all part of the destabilization?

  Whatever may have driven the officers on that fateful day, the street war returned with a vengeance. In Jamaica’s 1980 election year, raging street battles and mob attacks caused record homicides. In a horrific incident, political gunmen set fire to an old people’s home, a blaze that killed 153 elderly women. (A tragedy commemorated in the reggae song “Eventide Fire a Disaster.”)

  Amid the slaughter, Manley lost the election. Under his rule, Jamaica appeared ungovernable. But it wasn’t just violence that finished his experiment in democratic socialism. The exodus of the rich to Miami sucked wealth from the economy, and Manley’s closeness to Castro cost millions in U.S. aid. Shortages of flour, rice, and oil sparked runaway inflation and strikes.

  Promising a return to the growth of the 1960s, Seaga won a landslide victory. The representative of West Kingston, architect of the garrison, and idol of the laborite street fighters was at last in power. Taking office in the same year as Ronald Reagan he aligned himself with his ideological buddy, visiting the White House and getting Reagan’s blessing for his plans to bring American investment back to Jamaica.

  Some of Seaga’s constituents in West Kingston also eyed the business prospects of the United States. But rather than offering bananas and bauxite, they saw the potential for marijuana and crack cocaine. In carving out these markets, the scarred gunslingers of Jamaica’s political wars unleashed themselves on America’s crack-laden streets of the eighties.

  CHAPTER 20

  Kami entered America like a thunderbolt. He was in the United States less than twenty-four hours when he gunned down two men on a New York street corner.