by Ross Kemp
Tesak pulled a massive knife from his belt and showed it to me. Its handle was embossed with a Russian bear. ‘From fights with the blacks,’ he said. ‘In a fight you don’t always notice immediately that your enemy has a weapon, you just feel the blood running from your arm – but what can you do? In the desert there are aggressive wild animals. You have to hunt them. If you don’t, they attack the peaceful population… If you kill one of them, then a thousand immigrants won’t come.’
Tesak said he had become a racist after Chechens supposedly blew up several blocks of Moscow flats in 1999. ‘In the first block of flats lived a girl I knew. I said, “Let’s go and kill Chechens.” I took a knife and saw some guys with clubs. They saw my mood and said, “Come with us.” We went to a market and punished some Chechens for the crime committed by their compatriots.’
The dacha was immaculately clean and, as is usual in Russia, I had to remove my shoes before entering. No one would say who owned the place, but it was well furnished, well looked after and comfortable. Somewhere in the background lurked a wealthy politician or business sponsor willing to lend out his mansion for neo-Nazi use. The ‘library’ contained only five books, one of which was a Russian translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. There were no flags flying outside and no other gang or racist symbols on display. When I commented on this, Rumyansev said they did not want to upset the neighbours.
After the world’s longest tour – three interminable hours – it was time to go outside and see what the gang members were doing for their country training. What they were doing was cavorting about in the large gardens, learning basic unarmed combat moves as they had been when I met them in the Moscow gym, only this time in the open air. As usual, Rumyansev was standing on the sidelines, watching, and as it was a hot sunny day, the guys had stripped to their shorts. The whole scene looked like a very bad Russian remake of a Nazi-era propaganda film.
The other person who had stood out from the crowd when I saw them beside the steps was a slight, diminutive sixteen-year-old girl with dusty blonde hair. Katy described herself as the gang’s Web content manager. She attended the American School in Moscow and spoke very good English with an American accent. Katy was a strange one: why was a nice-looking girl from a rich family hanging around with this lot? She sat me down at a laptop and showed me her ‘Nazi artwork’, which consisted of cartoon images of Hitler in his underwear done Walt Disney style. She also showed me Tesak’s home videos of racist gang attacks on immigrants. To my eyes, a couple of these looked staged, but another video was a Ku Klux Klan propaganda film in which a man is first hung by the neck until dead and then hacked to pieces. Only too real, it was horrifying.
I couldn’t help thinking that elsewhere in the world, in places like Rio de Janeiro and El Salvador, people join gangs in the generally mistaken belief that this will make them wealthy, earn them kudos or at least help them stay alive. The NSO, in contrast, are together out of straightforward racial hatred.
A voice shouted lunch was ready, and we went back outside to the garden. Someone had been pushing the neo-fascist boat out: trestle tables were groaning under the weight of a large buffet. Among the dishes on offer was a white mayonnaise and cream cheese pie decorated with a swastika carefully piped on top of it in bright red tomato ketchup. While we were eating – and since I like to eat with friends or at the very least people who are not racists it was hard to get the food down – young Katy came up to me and made a confession. ‘Well, I killed one man.’
I stared at her. ‘You killed a bloke?’ She nodded and shot me a cheeky smile.
‘How did you do that?’
‘With a knife.’ She smiled again. ‘But I won’t do it any more. I had to.’
‘Why did you have to?’
‘To make friends with all these people.’ She indicated the rest of the gang. ‘It was just to see how it feels. I don’t like killing. It’s not funny.’
Katy liked the camera; Katy wanted to be a star. I think Katy would, as a result, have said just about anything to shock me. I allowed myself the comfort of disbelieving her account of stabbing an immigrant to death. Especially when she went on to add, ‘I think the robots will kill all the humanity – we’ll all die.’ Do you want to believe a sixteen-year-old girl goes around the Moscow transport system killing people because they look slightly different to her? Me neither.
Rumyansev sidled up to me in his crab-like way and drew me to one side. Pointing at the gang members munching their way through large helpings of swastika pie, he outlined his political agenda. ‘These young men and women,’ he told me, ‘are tomorrow’s Russian government. When we take power, we will clean all the weak, corrupt officials from government.’ Watching Tesak the Incredible neo-Nazi Hulk wolfing down hunks of barbecued meat, I tried to imagine him as the Russian finance minister. Somehow, I couldn’t quite get the vision to work for me.
I asked Rumyansev what he would say to those people who found the views and behaviour of the NSO shocking. He said, ‘I would like the viewers in Europe to remember the bombs on the London Underground. What’s happening in Holland. What happened in France, Holland and Madrid. If they don’t like our philosophy after that, then those people don’t deserve to be called people.’
Before we parted company, Katy dressed up for the cameras in full Ku Klux Klan rig, but the point of her conical hat kept flopping over to the side. It gave her a slightly comic air, rather like Dopey in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She seemed fond of Disney. I asked Tesak how you kept the point of your Klan hat stiff. Did starch help, or was there some other way of keeping it up? I don’t think Tesak quite saw the joke.
Back in Moscow we said goodbye to the NSO for the last time. Staying in character, Rumyansev once again gave the Sieg Heil! salute. I looked at the rest of the crew. ‘Byeee!’ we called out in best camp style, waving goodbye with limp wrists. Taking the micky was our way of letting off steam. Still, my time in Moscow made me feel that for all their foibles we should take neo-Nazi gangs like the NSO seriously. Their numbers are swelling. And too many people thought Hitler was a joke in the 1930s.
As I turned to leave, Sasha came forward and gave me a box of scented candles. A farewell present. I am pretty sure they weren’t laced with Semtex, but I left them behind anyway.
Beware neo-Nazis bearing gifts.
7. Jamaica
That first Friday evening we accepted an invitation from the Kingston murder squad to film a typical night shift. It was a balmy Jamaica night with a cooling breeze blowing down from the hills. The Undertaker’s Breeze they call it locally. In the evening it takes over from the onshore Doctor Breeze that helps cool the intense daytime heat. The Undertaker rustled the tall coconut palms and the leaves of the sea almonds outside the hotel.
I didn’t know it yet, but the undertaker was going to be busy.
We reached the central police station at around 8.00 p.m. Just crossing the road to get there was a near-death experience – the traffic in Jamaica doesn’t hang about. And it doesn’t stop. Settling in for a long night, I popped a boiled sweet in my mouth. Before I had finished it, the radio crackled into life. ‘Man shot dead, Lincoln Road. Please attend immediately.’ The location was close to Jubilee Market, where the witchy woman had put her mark on me a couple of days before.
Just before leaving the UK I had had a minor operation to remove a mole from my back. It had only needed a few stitches, but the wound was not yet healed. Standing in the crowded Jubilee Market on our second day, sweltering in the downtown Kingston heat, all of a sudden I felt pain flare across my back. I spun round. A tiny, stick-skinny, wizened old woman was standing a yard away, grinning at me. The dark brown eyes were uncannily bright, as if she knew me and all my secrets. A policeman standing by the stall next to us murmured, ‘You better watch out – she is a witchy woman.’
I stared at this complete stranger. Of all the places she could have pinched me… It was as if she had known it was there. And what was the evil grin about? With a last knowing
look the woman turned and disappeared into the crowd. I asked Andy Thomson, our cameraman, to look at the damage. All the stitches had burst and the cut was wide open. For the rest of my time in the market the blood ran down my back and mixed with the sweat.
For a European, downtown Kingston is the other side of the street. If I had not known that before, I was sure of it now. The incident left me feeling unsettled, much as I felt now. It isn’t every day you get invited to a murder.
We jumped in the cars and drove towards Lincoln Road at high speed, the police in their Suzuki four-by-fours, blue top lights flashing and our driver doing a great job to keep up with them. Kingston sits in a punchbowl: the rich live on the surrounding hills while the poor sweat it out on the flats. We were headed downtown, to the heartland of Kingston’s gang turf.
Reaching the crime scene in less than ten minutes, we stepped out. There was an unmarked white police car sideways across the road and beyond that a line of blue and white tape guarded by armed uniformed officers. They asked us to wait our side of the fluttering plastic. Beyond it, in the darkness, I suddenly made out the body of a black male lying in the road with his eyes wide open. You never quite get used to seeing violent death. There was an officer kneeling beside the man. Two detectives in armoured vests, white surgical gloves and with powerful scene-of-crime lamps walked up and bent over the dead man, pulling and poking at his clothes like looters. A loud burst of laughter came from somewhere close at hand, and there was the steady background thump of a dance track. Dogs attracted by the smell of blood prowled in the hope of a feed. An officer in dark blue coveralls and black boots armed with an M16 moved very slowly around the man, then stopped and pointed the weapon at something he could see on the ground. The object gleamed yellow as the light caught it – a cartridge case. The remains of what looked like a takeaway meal of jerk chicken lay scattered off to one side. A uniformed policeman was positioning yellow numbered markers next to the shell cases and other objects of interest around the body. So far, he had reached number nine.
Once they had carried out their initial exmination, the murder squad detectives invited us in through the line. The dead man’s open eyes gleamed in the darkness. Walking towards him, I had the strangest sensation he was still alive, just lying there very still, staring at me. As the detectives trained their lamps on him the detail of his death jumped out with shocking clarity. Aged about forty, he was lying on his front with his face turned slightly to the left. He had been thickset and strong, with broad features. Both arms were folded partly under him, hands up beside his shoulders as if he had been about to perform a press-up. There was a trickle of blood from a wound to the left forearm. He had a high forehead with a tight scrub of greying hair receding from the temples. His body was riddled with bullets.
Shot repeatedly through the buttocks and back, a section of lung had been blown out through his mouth. Bright red, it projected like an extra tongue. The underside of the body and the hard-packed light brown earth around it was a lake of thick, dark red blood. A single shot had been fired into the man’s head behind the right ear. A trail of blood led to the spot where he had finally fallen. Except perhaps for his age, there was nothing to mark him out as the victim of a suspected gang execution. He was not wearing any jewellery and his pockets had contained little cash. The dogs started barking and a fight broke out between two of them. A policeman shooed them away.
There is little dignity in death and there was none at all for this man. Murder squad officers who do this kind of thing every day are not respectful when it comes to handling a corpse. A detective yanked down the dead man’s dark grey jeans and patterned underpants and began measuring the size of the bullet holes in his exposed backside. A second officer pulled up the black T-shirt to measure the entry wounds peppering the torso and then stripped him of that, too. Rigor mortis had not yet set in and the corpse was still malleable. A yellow marker with the number 14 was positioned squarely in the small of the man’s back. A pale dog made it in through the cordon and started licking at the blood. I waited until the senior investigating officer had counted the entry wounds. ‘Eighteen shots. Somebody didn’t like him.’
Fired at close range, they were mostly 9-millimetre rounds but the kill shot to the head was a .45 calibre bullet. A gang killing, almost certainly. A friend of the victim had been with him at the time of the attack and had somehow escaped with nothing more than a leg wound. He might be able to help the police identify the attackers.
A crowd was gathering. The onlookers included several small children who stared wide-eyed at the mess on the ground. But some of the adults were laughing and jeering at the dead man. As their numbers grew the police advised us to leave. Before we did so, the detective inspector in charge told me, ‘So far, we’ve ascertained that at about 8.15 tonight a gentleman by the name of Roy Grant was shot and killed while he walked along the thoroughfare here. We have found seventeen spent shells. It could have been gang-related – a lot of shots have been fired. But Roy Grant was not known to us.’ A van arrived. Two policemen got out, laid a stretcher on the ground next to the body, picked it up, put it on the stretcher, covered it with a white shroud and put the whole thing in the back of the vehicle. They left behind the dead man’s shoes, which they had presumably forgotten. Those, and a broad pool of glistening blood. The DI added, ‘The people in this area didn’t like him, either.’
‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
‘If they like someone who’s been killed, they throw stones at us when we come to investigate the crime scene. And no one is talking about taking revenge, which is what they usually do when they liked the person who died. We think Mr Grant was from another area – he was just walking through the wrong part of town. What we have to watch out for now is someone in this area getting shot in revenge. They always do it straight away.’
Their work done, the detectives began peeling off their white plastic gloves. One of them said, ‘This kind of shooting happens all the time.’
After six hours of filming we went back to the hotel, had a cold beer and ate our fill of jerk chicken. Maybe the casual attitude to death in Jamaica was catching.
I was in Jamaica to find out how one of the world’s most beautiful countries came to have such a bad gang problem. I read up a bit to get an overview. It was quickly clear that nowhere else in the world is a country’s gang problem so catastrophically bound up with its politics. There are two major political parties: the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP). In the late 1970s and in the run-up to the 1980 general election, politicians on both sides armed people in Kingston’s garrisons, or local neighbourhoods, to bring in the vote – if necessary at gunpoint. The result was slaughter on the streets, as armed gangs from either side of the political divide fought for control of the garrisons. In the end the government that had taken power by implementing this organized insanity had to call in the army to stop it.
But the killing hasn’t ever stopped. The gangs have simply shifted shape, and if anything grown even more murderous. In 2006 Jamaica achieved the dubious distinction of overtaking its closest rivals as the country with the highest number of homicides per head: 69 per 100,000, compared with 44 in South Africa and Colombia’s 41. Since the vast majority of these murders take place in Kingston, this means that in a city roughly the size of Leeds four or five people are killed by violence every day.
As a way of rewarding the neighbourhoods that had voted for them, the politicians handed jobs and money out like sweeties to the ‘dons’ or garrison leaders. The dons distributed the work and the money – ‘spoils’ – to the people under their control and everyone was happy. Unless they lost out, in which case the usual thing was to pick up a gun and take someone else’s spoils. One of the most coveted sources of income for a garrison community was ‘gully work’ – clearing rubbish and muck from the wide, deep storm drains, known as gullies, that take the run-off from the hills around Kingston and flush it to the sea. As much as three metres
across and two metres deep, some of these gullies form borders between the garrisons. You know at once when you are in a gang-controlled area by the massive murals painted on the gully walls, often smiling portraits of the local don, and by the graffiti that proclaims the gang’s control; the pictures, signs and symbols tell you which gang holds sway in that part of town.
Over the past few years, like Frankenstein’s monster, Kingston’s gangs have run out of control. From what I could make out, there are two main reasons for this: drugs and money, each inextricably entwined with the other. With the global increase in drug consumption, the garrison dons have been quick to see that if they can make money selling marijuana on the island, or better still cutting themselves a slice of Jamaica’s massive cocaine transhipment pie, then, hey, who needs the politicians? And the drugs pie really is massive: every year roughly a tenth of all the cocaine on its way to the US from Latin America passes through Jamaica – billions of dollars worth – together with a fair tonnage of best-quality marijuana. The island is also popular with Colombian cartels looking to launder their ill-gotten gains.
The new drugs income has freed Jamaica’s gangs from political control, allowing them to do their own thing. With great power has come great irresponsibility. Not content with dealing and shipping drugs, the gangs have turned to other crimes, especially extortion and assassination, to swell their coffers. Most of the island’s gang warfare now comes down to claiming and holding turf, and beating off your nearest rivals at any cost. Who holds the ground makes the money – simple as that. The politics has got lost in the violence, and plain greed has risen to the top. As a result, the gangs are growing in number and splintering. The frontier lines between the garrison gangs are shifting ever faster, and the people who live in gang-controlled neighbourhoods suffer an ever-rising tide of violence and fear. As if the garrison gangs were not bad enough, sub-gangs have sprung up across Kingston, next-door in Spanish Town and now even in the tourist destination of Montego Bay – dozens of them, small groups of criminally minded armed youths who control a ‘corner’ or very small patch of turf, often as not just a single street.