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

by Ioan Grillo

  The technique could only move small amounts at a time, with three to four hundred grams in each package. So Dudus made sure plenty of mules traveled to keep supply up. Moving lots of small packages meant that if a mule was busted it would be less costly. Furthermore, a single plane could have many mules on board, and customs agents would never catch them all. If they caught one, agents would be busy while others waltzed through.

  Many of the mules were small-scale commercial importers, known as “higglers,” who had visas to go to the United States to buy their goods. A lot were happy for their drug money. But the U.S. prosecution also showed evidence that the Shower forced girls to carry narcotics. A mother from Tivoli wrote a letter saying that her daughter refused to carry cocaine, and in vengeance Shower Posse gunmen raped her and shot her in the vagina.

  The President’s ban on rape apparently had exceptions.

  Dudus also smuggled cocaine in another direction: on the several daily planes to London and Manchester. As a former colony, Jamaicans could visit the United Kingdom without a visa. And in Britain, cocaine collected a bigger markup than in the United States.

  The rise of Dudus coincided with a surge in British cocaine use. By 2002, Britain’s deputy high commissioner in Jamaica Phil Sinkinson claimed that one in ten passengers on flights from Jamaica to the UK were packing drugs.3 The claim was repeated in a United Nations report that said there could be twenty mules on planes from Kingston to London, overwhelming British customs. This is hard to prove as most smugglers don’t get caught. But police certainly viewed the trafficking from Jamaica as a major problem, and in 2003, the British government changed the rules to demand that Jamaicans need visas. It was a harsh blow for a Commonwealth country and along with the drug couriers, many innocent Jamaicans have since been denied a chance to see their families.

  British police were also worried about the Jamaican cocaine trade being linked to a spike in shootings in English cities. In London, police launched Operation Trident in 1998, targeting gun crime in Afro Caribbean communities. The operation netted many triggermen and cocaine traffickers, but has come under criticism for using dodgy criminal informants and overly targeting Britain’s black community.

  One infamous Tivoli gangster who sold crack and did armed robberies in London was Errol Codling, who also happened to be a reggae singer who went by the name Ranking Dread. He was deported back to Jamaica where he reportedly died in prison in 1996, although some rumors say he is alive and back in the UK. A Shower Posse enforcer called Maxwell Bogle was also in London before he went to the United States, where he was arrested and given a fifty-year sentence in 1999.

  London detectives also allege links between the Shower Posse and British gangs although hard evidence has not been produced in court. Among those named are the Peckham Boys, a gang of mainly black British youth in southeast London.

  A Trident report leaked to a British newspaper also cited the Shower Posse as having links to North London’s Star Gang.4 Trident officers investigating the Star tailed a suspect called Mark Duggan in 2011. When they tried to stop him in a taxi, he made a run and police shot him dead. Duggan’s family denied he was involved with drug trafficking and called the killing an execution.

  Duggan’s shooting sparked England’s 2011 riots. They could be compared to unrest in Baltimore or Ferguson but on a bigger scale. First mourners marched peacefully in protest of the police killing. Then youths fought pitched battles with police, looted, and burned buildings, leading to five deaths in Britain’s biggest unrest in decades.

  The vast majority in the riots had probably never heard of the Shower, and most weren’t even in gangs. The unrest hit a nerve with many young people at the bottom of society, in sink estates with failing schools and tensions with police. Riot fever spread to mainly white youths in Manchester and even to provincial towns like Gloucester. But the origins of the riots lie in Trident and its armed units, and the heavy-handed response to the spread of gangs, crack dealing, and gun culture.

  CHAPTER 22

  As Dudus earned stacks of dollars and sterling, he showed his charitable side. Gangsters have long given to their communities, often to persuade residents not to snitch. But Dudus took this charity to new heights in the scale and frequency of handouts, from parties, to schoolbooks, to medicine, to Christmas presents.

  The charity adds to Dudus’s construction of himself as the President, looking after his subjects. But perhaps he also genuinely wanted to help his community. This fits in with the educated Dudus, the man who studied quietly in his math class, who respected Rastas, prayed, and wore African-style shirts. Human beings are complicated animals. On one side, Dudus could chainsaw a crack dealer; on the other he could give out books and tell kids to stay in school.

  A sign of Dudus’s emotional connection to his charity work was in a letter he later wrote to New York Judge Patterson asking for leniency in his sentencing. Obviously, he wanted to do less time behind bars. But it is notable that he spends four pages going into minute detail about the charity projects, which he clearly paid a lot of attention to.

  As he pens in the handwritten letter:

  Dear Justice Patterson,

  Good day to you sir. I am humbly asking if you could be lenient on me during my sentence hearing … I would like you take these facts into consideration …

  I did a lot of charitable deeds and social services to help members of my community. I was involved in community development where I implemented a lot of social programs that the residents of my community could better their lives, programs that teach them about self empowerment, education and skills.

  Dudus mentions his “back to school” handouts of satchels, books, pencils, and uniforms. Tivoli residents describe to me how it worked. Before classes began for the academic year, Dudus’s thugs would go to a patio in front of the Tivoli apartment blocks. Kids formed lines according to their age groups, from elementary to high school age, and were given their goodies.

  There were similar handouts at Christmas, with the posse dishing out shiny plastic toys from the United States. A young Tivoli man tells me how Dudus also liked to wander round the garrison, spontaneously bestowing gifts, and describes him as an angel from heaven.

  “Nuff time I want lunch money, him there. More time you have hunger, him take it away. Christmas time, a him again. Birthday, a him again. Back to school, a him again.”

  When I listen back to a recording of this interview, the words that strike me most are “you have hunger, him take it away.” Many of us don’t know the aches of hunger. But for these ghetto youth it is a painful reality, one that haunts like a beast. The man who expels that hunger can win loyalty for life. This explains why protesters marched against the extradition of the President, with banners such as “Jesus die for us. We die for Dudus.”

  In his letter, Dudus also describes how he funded formal community works, founding the Tivoli school, the Western Institute of Technology, which gives out qualifications valid across the Caribbean. He stresses he backed a youth club, in which children play sport and do voluntary work such as combing the hair and cutting the nails of aging grandmothers. And Dudus describes setting up a Parent Association Committee, which has homework classes and makes sure kids under sixteen are off the street by eight.

  Again this shows the contradictions of the President. While he recruited some youth as gunmen, he got others to comb the hair of grannies. But residents I talk to hold up his argument that he cared about children. In the letter to the judge, he emphasizes how he is a parent himself and asks for leniency to be with his son.

  I got a son who is eight years old, he has been traumatized because of what I am going through. I was told that he is constantly asking for his Daddy and when he is going to see me again and he cries all the time since I am gone.

  Dudus also financed big events in Tivoli that drew outsiders from all over Jamaica. Using his soldiers, he guaranteed those coming in wouldn’t get robbed, adding to his mystique as a ruler; he might take
life away, but he could keep you safe if he so chose.

  The shows included a weekly reggae dance called Passa Passa and open-air boxing bouts, in which contenders fought in a makeshift ring. The boxing was a real slugfest, with anybody able to enter, and fighters of different weights going at each other. The BBC’s Jamaica correspondent Nick Davis described to me covering one of these bouts.

  “The Thursday night fights were a big deal, like the buzz occasion. With the Passa Passa dances and the boxing, West Kingston had become quite glam for uptown people and it was safe. They could go and revel in that ghetto life for a night. And to be fair, those downtown dances are great fun, they are vibrant, they are what Jamaica is all about.

  “Thursday night fights were for all comers to go in there. They would seal off the street and put some tires with concrete and poles to mark the ring. People had their boxing gloves and it was like, ‘Who do you want to go up against?’

  “So people would do betting on that grandma against that grandma or that huge fellow who was like the reigning champion and everybody would be saying, ‘Oh yes. Knock him out.’”

  Meanwhile, the Passa Passa nights won fame as one of the top dance events on the island, attracting throngs of revelers to party on the street till dawn. The music was mainly dance hall, an offshoot of reggae that dominates Jamaican clubs. Dance hall deejays chant fast in distinctive melodies over pounding electronic beats. The sexuality of the dancing makes both Miami bass and favela funk look mild, with women at Jamaican dance hall nights competing on how they can shake their backsides while wrapping their legs behind their backs and standing on their heads (no exaggeration).

  Dance hall has been at the cutting edge of dance music globally. It blasts in discos from Germany to Australia and its sounds have influenced songs in many other genres. American pop star Miley Cyrus did a watered-down version of Jamaican dancing, known as twerking, two decades after they were doing it in Kingston.

  However, critics moan dance hall is a symptom, or a cause, of the island’s violent youth. The music promotes misogynistic and gangster values, they complain. Some dance hall songs will give “shout-outs” to posses and triggermen. This contrasts with reggae in the time of Bob Marley with its socially conscious lyrics.

  I personally think music doesn’t have an enormous impact on behavior and other factors are more important. People become paid gunmen because of harsh realities such as poverty, impunity, family members inside the crime world, and the gang on the corner recruiting, rather than music on the stereo. Many people round the world listen to gangster music and don’t choose that lifestyle.

  However, Caribbean gangsters do get their name and fame spread through records. And Dudus became the most sung about don in Jamaican music. The President courted Jamaica’s top musicians with two massive annual events: Champions in Action in August and Jamboree in December. Many of Jamaica’s top artists played there, international stars such as Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, and Movado.

  Dudus organized the parties through a formal company that he founded along with his “Minister of Finance.” In his love for spreading his title, he called the company “Presidential Click” after his faction inside the Shower. Presidential Click had offices in Tivoli painted up with the name, announcing its rule formally.

  As Dudus became a personal friend of many stars, he got name-checked in song after song, with dozens of hot artists blending the words Prezi or Dudus into their verses. Even over in London, an MC called Skepta released a track called “Badman in Tivoli” about the don.

  However, it was the old-time reggae crooner Bunny Wailer who sang the most iconic Dudus song. Bunny Wailer is the stepbrother and former bandmate of Bob Marley, and Newsweek named him one of the three most important world music artists of all time. When the United States first called for Dudus’s extradition in 2009, Bunny Wailer recorded a song called “Don’t Touch the President” defending the kingpin. As the lyrics say:

  Don’t touch the President, in the residence,

  For we confident, say him innocent.

  Don’t touch the Robin Hood, in the neighborhood,

  For him take the bad, and turn it into good …

  Sometimes out of evil, come good.

  Can’t you see the progress, in the neighborhood?1

  It is easy to dismiss such lyrics as bravado. But Bunny Wailer, who never met or befriended Dudus, may actually have believed, like many on the street, that Dudus did good things. For decades, politicians had failed to provide schoolbooks and youth clubs. Here was a drug trafficker doing it. It is interesting how he sings, “Him take the bad [drug money], and turn it into good [charity].” So that “Sometimes out of evil, come good.”

  One of the biggest stars at Dudus’s actual parties was the deejay Vybz Kartel, reported to be a friend of the President. I try to interview Vybz to find out why he sang in support of a drug trafficker. However, Vybz is himself in prison on murder charges and when I turn up at the jail, the guards won’t let me in to talk to him.

  However, a famed female singer called Ce’Cile agrees to speak to me. Ce’Cile played at one of the Tivoli dances and sings on a track called “Which Dudus,” in defense of the don. Mixing reggae with American soul, the diva Ce’Cile crooned about the threat to extradite Dudus before he was captured.

  I meet Ce’Cile in a Kingston music studio where legendary reggae stars have recorded. I have seen her in music videos, scantily dressed and dancing sensually to thumping beats. In person, she is truly beautiful in a natural way as well as friendly and articulate. Ce’Cile is an interesting artist, who has had global success with a mix of styles; she has recorded poppy songs that have been hits in the United States, folky reggae tracks that are popular in Germany, and dance hall slammers for the Jamaican crowd. It’s telling that Dudus has such international artists singing his praises, not just anonymous ghetto voices.

  She tells me to my surprise that while she has played at the Tivoli dance, she is from a middle-class background in a small town. She says she sang at Dudus’s event as a young artist and was frightened.

  “Then, I was scared shitless. I didn’t really get to enjoy the atmosphere and enjoy the people. You hear so much about Tivoli, you are scared. I am a young girl from the country, come on. But looking back, the atmosphere is really wonderful.”

  Ce’Cile doesn’t generally sing about gangsters. Many of her tunes are romantic pop ballads. In some songs, she takes what she calls a “pro-girl” stance, challenging macho dance hall artists. This earned her a “bad girl” reputation. In one track, she sings how Jamaican deejays, who often boast about their sexual exploits, are probably terrible in bed. In another, she questions why there is a Jamaican slur on performing oral sex on women, which many on the island consider homosexual. She sings that men should do it more often. I’m a little embarrassed to ask her about this song. She’s not embarrassed to answer.

  “It’s this girl versus boy kind of vibe. I knew that I would have the ladies with this one. I was booed a lot by the guys when I was on stage but the girls made so much noise, it didn’t resonate. The ladies loved it. I talked about this thing that they claim you are not supposed to talk about in Jamaica. It is ridiculous, this macho thing. I wasn’t brought up ghetto, so I could say these things.”

  When I bring up the Dudus song, she puts it down to her rebelliousness.

  “I just sang it in the name of bad girlness,” she says. “Am I sorry I did it? No … I only heard stories from what people say. If they are hungry, he gives them food. He protected the community … I only heard good things, I never heard anything bad.”

  Like Bunny Wailer, Ce’Cile also says she doesn’t know Dudus personally and denies deeper connections to the Tivoli mafia. However, by spreading his name through song she added bricks to the building of the President’s personality cult.

  Jamaica is a country defined by its music. It’s at the heart of the nation, the way Brazil is defined by its football, or Mexico by its cuisine. Artists such as Bunny
Wailer and Vybz Kartel have a far bigger reach than the favela funk singers in Brazil. When they sang his name, the cult of the President touched all corners of the Caribbean and reggae listeners around the globe.

  CHAPTER 23

  The word “warlord” sounds like an ancient term, describing Genghis Khan or Hannibal. But it turns out it’s relatively modern. Ralph Waldo Emerson probably coined it in an 1856 collection of essays called English Traits. He uses it to illustrate the transformation of English aristocrats from violent feudal lords and buccaneers to statesmen and merchants.

  “Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord.”1

  This use of the term indicates knights who won riches and controlled fiefs with the sword in days before the modern state was born.

  The term was later, and more famously, used to describe regional rulers in China in the early twentieth century, especially by the British journalist Bertram Lenox Simpson in his 1926 work Why China Sees Red. These Chinese warlords controlled areas through force after the collapse of central government in 1916. They wielded power through their individual leadership, along with their militias.

  In the late twentieth century, the term made a big resurgence to describe militia leaders in Africa and parts of Asia, like Afghanistan. Journalist Aidan Hartley says he was at the forefront of its comeback, first using it when reporting in Somalia for Reuters in 1991. Covering gun-toting strongmen, he says journalists were stuck for language to describe them.

  Onto this stage walked a new breed of men who presumed to be the legitimate leaders of a nation. But war, not peace, was all they could offer. Peace was their worst nightmare. Correspondents of our generation had grown up in the Cold War. Nothing like Somalia had ever happened before and at first we had no idea what to call the frightening new strongmen. One day Jonathan and I were talking about the British 1970s sci-fi TV series “Dr Who,” which featured beings known as “timelords” and “warlocks.” For some reason we found this inspiring. Somalia was a sci-fi set that had gone back in time. We decided to christen the militia leaders “warlords” and the name was taken up by everybody in the news business. They were ruthless murderers and their terrifying reputation was only enforced by the childish gangster names they awarded themselves.2