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

by Ioan Grillo

  I saw many other origins of terms in British youth culture. The “Concrete Jungle” I had heard in countless songs is an actual neighborhood here. The word “gully,” meaning “tough” in London slang, refers to rough garrisons with drains running through them. Songs and rhymes to advertise dances on London pirate radio stations are based on those of Jamaican radio.

  However, I was surprised how one-way the influence is. I asked Jamaicans about British music and they seemed to care little for it, even by the artists of Jamaican descent. Jamaica of course has its own phenomenal music scene. But people also listen to American music. Hip-hop and soul are predictably popular on the island. But I was surprised to hear people tell me they like country and western.

  “Country music?” I ask one of Dudus’s cousins called Donavon, having to double take when he says it. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, by white people.” Donavon smiles. “Like from the Westerns.”

  Westerns were extremely popular in Jamaica, inspiring older gunslingers to baptize themselves with names such as Butch Cassidy. The cowboy flicks also inspired the term posse for gang.

  Crime aside, I find the people of West Kingston to be warm and open, as in the ghettos from Brazil to Mexico. Like many other outsiders who have trekked into these areas, I’m touched by the people’s generosity of spirit; their ability to forget about the cultural or socioeconomic gulf; and their openness to talk as human being to human being, showing spontaneous friendship from the heart.

  CHAPTER 18

  Tivoli Gardens’ history of violence physically shapes the garrison. At the entrance, you can still see the remains of barricades from the 2010 incursion to get Dudus, barrels and concrete slabs that soldiers struggled to move away. Bullet holes from where troops let loose with their rifles still pick away at Tivoli buildings, making them look like blocks of nibbled cheese.

  These bullet holes are thickest in the heart of the garrison, which is filled with a series of apartment buildings. The structures look much like the council tower blocks in London (which they were based on) or what are called projects in the United States.

  Round the corner from these apartments, a building displays a vast cross, a memorial to Tivoli residents shot dead by police. The deaths were not actually from the final battle to catch Dudus, but from two previous police raids into the President’s turf.

  “Lest We Forget. In Memoriam of Those Who Died,” it says above the towering crucifix.

  Below is a list with the names and ages of fallen residents. Many are teenagers and young men, age nineteen, twenty-two, thirty-two. But others are older residents who cops shot down, even an eighty-one-year-old called Trew Seymour. And there are tragically the names of slain children, including a six-year-old called Cruise Green. Tivoli residents are reminded of police brutality every time they walk on the main street.

  While showing the police as the enemy, the walls tell passersby of the local heroes, dons and their soldiers, with expansive murals to fallen gangsters. One wall on a central street carries an enormous image of Dudus’s father, known by his nickname, Jim Brown, along with the title “Don of Dons.” Jim Brown is depicted over a funeral wreath; he wears a backward cap and has his hand raised, showing off gleaming rings. He has a wise, impassive look, the kind of image one sees in paintings of nation founders. Police have painted over many gangster murals, but for some reason they have left this one.

  Next to the painting of Jim Brown is the mural of one of Dudus’s gunmen shot in the line of duty. Mario, alias “Sovady,” killed in 2009 at age twenty-one, is depicted with a tough-looking sneer. He is painted in front of the Jamaican flag with white doves flying past his face. FALLEN SOLDIER, it says above him. GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

  Interestingly, there is no painting of Dudus himself. I am not sure if the gangsters have to die before they get their mural. But while not on the walls, Dudus’s name is on the lips of residents. Despite the newspapers saying he had betrayed his people when he fled Tivoli, many residents I speak to still see him as their president and wish that he would come back.

  “Man Dudus done good. He the big man,” says a young man in the Tivoli tower blocks as I film with a video camera. “Since 2010 them take him away from we, like removing God from heaven, Dudus the President.”

  Colin hooks me up with a long and colorful cast of gangsters in Tivoli. Some are veteran hustlers who spent time “juggling” (selling drugs) in hard-core American and British neighborhoods from the Bronx to London to Manchester. “I used to live Moss Side,” says one corner vet, enthusiastic when I say I am from England. “Nuff IRA man there.”

  (Moss Side is a rough part of Manchester with big Irish and Afro Caribbean communities. There have been links between black and Irish gangsters, perhaps explaining his reference to the Irish Republican Army.)

  Other Tivoli hoods I meet are young hungry gunslingers, often referred to as shottas, which is perhaps a mutation of the word “shooters.” One shotta I meet is just fifteen and has already notched up several kills—or, as they say, has several duppies. The word duppie means “ghosts” or “spirits.” Someone who has a lot of duppies has murdered many; he is claiming ownership of their souls.

  One day as it beats down with rain, we go into a tower block and Colin introduces me to some of the top boys running Tivoli since Dudus was taken away. We talk on the steps, filled with their ganja smoke as the raindrops thump on the building. In this inner sanctum of Tivoli, they are happy showing off their 9 mm and Desert Eagle pistols as we chat.

  Simon, a stocky twenty-seven-year-old, is a lieutenant who keeps control of drug selling points on the corners and oversees a band of gunmen lurking around.

  “We come like the police. We serve and protect,” he says, sitting on the steps. “If there is house break-in. We gonna kill them.”

  Since Dudus was arrested, Simon explains, several of the President’s deputies have been vying for control of the Shower Posse, yet no one has established their firm leadership. The lack of authority creates tensions that periodically spill into violence.

  “Nuff man dying now. This a big problem. We have to put order again.”

  To get a better sense of how the reign of Dudus was established here in West Kingston, I seek out a veteran gangster, someone who was there when it all started. For this deeper perspective, Colin introduces me to Kami, a seasoned Shower Posse enforcer who knows the history. He is what they refer to in the garrison as an elder. But then again, so is anyone who has made it past the age of about thirty-five.

  In his early fifties, Kami is a hardened killer who has sent more duppies to the sky than he wants to count. After spending years as a trusted assassin for the Shower Posse, he went on to command squads of Dudus’s soldiers. He’s earned his stripes among the posse and has been able to take a step back in the last couple of years, only going on jobs if a seasoned hand is needed. Meanwhile, Kami’s son has followed in his footsteps as a feared Shower Posse enforcer, hungrily claiming duppies and earning respect among the young bloods such as Simon. His son’s reputation helps secure Kami’s own position. It’s a family affair.

  I spend a day riding around Tivoli with Kami, and on a second night I visit his yard, which is in a garrison called Southside, a couple of miles along the waterfront from Tivoli. The Southside garrison was also part of Dudus’s ghetto empire, which stretched through all laborite strongholds of Kingston, via either direct control or alliance.

  Kami speaks to me in English with an American accent as he spent many years in the United States where he served as a Shower Posse enforcer in its mainland operations. He was what they call a yardie, a Jamaican gunman overseas. He’ll still switch from American English to patois but doesn’t mix them.

  Sporting long dreadlocks, or cords of hair knotted together, Kami considers himself a Rasta. The Rastafari movement was born in Jamaica in the 1930s, mixing the teachings of Marcus Garvey with a veneration of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the dream of returning to Mother Africa
. Kami says his beliefs put him in good standing with Dudus.

  “The Prezi has a lot of respect for Rastas,” Kami says. “He likes the faith.”

  The tens of thousands of Rastas living in Jamaica today vary in their beliefs. Some are strict in their prayer and vegetarianism and live in communes in the hills. Kami mixes Rastafarianism with being a posse triggerman. But that is no different from many gangland killers across the world, who consider themselves Catholic, evangelical Christian, Muslim, or of other religions.

  In contrast, Kami’s father was a Hindu, the descendant of Indians who arrived in Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth century. After the British parliament declared Jamaica’s slaves free in 1838, many abandoned the sugarcane fields, so indentured Indian workers filled this labor gap. Most “East Indians” stayed to form their own businesses. The Indians are also credited with bringing marijuana to the island.

  Jamaica today is a majority Afro country, with 91 percent classifying themselves as black. However, many Afro-Jamaicans have ancestors from other ethnicities. Aside from the British colonists who stayed on, there was immigration from China and the Middle East. Kami’s features show a mix of his Indian father and an Afro mother.

  I ask Kami how many brothers and sisters he has. His answer astonishes me.

  “Forty-four.”

  “Forty-four?” I repeat, trying to figure out if we are talking about the same thing.

  “Yes. Sixteen brothers and twenty-eight sisters.”

  Such prodigious procreation is hailed by some in Jamaica. The bass player for Bob Marley is known as Aston “Family Man” Barrett as he fathered forty-one children. I also hear of a local legend known as Charley Mattress said to have fathered over fifty. (He owned a mattress factory, as well as spending a lot of time on them.) I even find a report in the Jamaican newspaper, the Gleaner, which interviewed one of Mattress’s children, who said she had fifty-six siblings and had spent her life looking after them.1

  Such enormous families can give Jamaicans blood links in all directions, sometimes connecting politicians and gangsters. Many also have a family member who is a famous reggae artist. Kami himself is the cousin of one of the most successful dance hall singers, who recorded a song with American rap legend Biggie Smalls.

  Kami also has a large family of his own, with twelve children from several baby mothers. He currently has a beautiful girlfriend in her early twenties and a newborn baby. As we sit in their home, Kami tugs on ganja spliffs with the frequency of a chain smoker, the yard buzzing with friends and family while speakers on the street blast dance hall reggae music.

  Spending time with Kami, I can’t stop liking the guy, despite him being a cold-blooded murderer. He is open and chatty and carries little violence in his body language. He tells me how he likes creative writing and shows me some pieces. One is an idea for a comic strip. It’s a world with mice and cats and dogs, where the mice are women, the cats are moneylenders, and the dogs are fighters. Its protagonist is a dog who smokes a lot of weed and is always in debt with the cats. It’s actually pretty funny.

  Besides talking about ganja-puffing canines, Kami is a wealth of information about Dudus, the Shower Posse, and the development of organized crime in Jamaica. His own life and criminal career follow the twists and turns of the don system that created Dudus, from the political wars to the global trafficking to the building of the Presidential Click—Dudus’s personal faction within the Shower. It starts back in the mid-twentieth century, when Jamaica first cut the shackles of Her Majesty’s government in London.

  CHAPTER 19

  When Kami was born in Southside in 1959, it was no ghetto. In contrast, it was an affluent part of Kingston, a waterfront area in the twilight years of the British Empire. “This was a nice neighborhood.” Kami shrugs. “Ships from all round the world would come to the harbor. Sailors would be buying and selling goods so you could find anything you wanted.”

  Jamaica was generally a more peaceful place back then. In 1962, the year it gained independence, there were just sixty-three murders reported on the island. In 1980, as the political wars raged, there were 889. In 2009, at the height of Dudus’s rule, the body count hit 1,682.1

  This is a shocking explosion of death; the number of killings has gone up more than 2,500 percent in a period of time when the population hasn’t even doubled. The fact that there used to be such a low murder rate proves that wanton killing is no natural state of affairs. Jamaicans can live peacefully. However, certain structural factors drive mass murder. At the heart of these is the don system that trains and directs assassins.

  When Kami was growing up, it didn’t take him long to find the crime world; his father was a smuggler taking boatloads of marijuana to the United States. Farmers grow ganja in abundance in Jamaica, so it is dirt-cheap and fetches a big markup stateside. Kami’s father supplied marijuana to the smokers of the beatnik generation. In the early sixties, it was easy to smuggle on the shipping path from Jamaica to Florida, before the war on drugs. The Shower Posse would later transform this drug route from a stream to a tidal wave.

  With his father wealthy from marijuana smuggling, Kami enjoyed a good living standard, eating well and attending school. However, the streets outside got steadily rougher, as waves of migrants from the countryside settled on the waterfront in sprawling shantytowns. Among them was a slum dominated by Rastas known as Back-O-Wall on the site of what is now Tivoli Gardens.

  Back-O-Wall was in such desperate poverty that it had just two bathrooms to serve over five thousand people.2 A government report described it as “a dehumanizing, dirt poor, labyrinthine squatter settlement of dirt-floor, zinc and board or wattle-and-daub shanties and hovels, criss-crossed by a maze of narrow earthen footpaths; densely populated; bereft of plumbing and electricity.”3

  It was to these utterly squalid conditions that politicians came to buy their supporters and organize them into garrisons.

  Two politicians dominated Jamaica in the late twentieth century: the charismatic socialist Michael Manley on the PNP side and the articulate conservative Edward Seaga on the laborite side. The two are contrasting figures physically as well as ideologically and make good sparring partners for cartoonists. Manley is overflowing with words, smiley, preachy, handsome, bulky, comfortable in casual dress in the tropical sun. Seaga is serious, precise, straight-faced, slim, dressed in well-pressed shirts tucked into his pants however hot it is. It is Seaga who is credited with inventing the garrison, and many paint him as the villain of the story. However, Manley’s supporters also carried out their own share of political murders and followed suit with their own garrisons.

  Seaga—pronounced see-ah-gah—is a curious character. Born in 1930, he is a light-skinned Jamaican of Lebanese and Scottish ancestry. He was vocally pro-capitalist and pro-American, anti-communist and anti-Cuban. However, he managed to gain cult support in certain Jamaican ghettos, challenging the PNP socialists for the votes of the poor black majority. Kami himself is a lifelong supporter of Seaga, and has met him several times.

  “Eddie Seaga is our man. He is very intelligent, very cultured,” Kami says, using the affectionate “Eddie.” “He loves music. You know he used to run a record label?”

  Seaga’s musical accomplishments are quite something, I discover. In 1955, after graduating from Harvard, he was one of the first entrepreneurs to record Afro-Jamaican bands. His West India Records Limited went on to become one of the most successful labels in the Caribbean, with prominent calypso and ska artists launching Jamaica’s phenomenal music industry.

  Seaga’s fascination with Afro-Jamaican culture can also be seen in academic papers he wrote on religious sects and faith healers. He studied Jamaican Revivalism, a movement that mixes Baptist-style worship with West African dance and drums. Seaga recorded masses in the Back-O-Wall ghetto in which people murmur as they dispel evil spirits.4

  Moving into politics, Seaga became the Member of Parliament for the rough West Kingston district in 1962, a seat he would hold for for
ty-three consecutive years. His research helped him find ways to reach his poor black constituents. In 1964, he personally arranged to repatriate Marcus Garvey’s body from London to Jamaica, giving the people the bread of their national hero. The next year, he married a brown and beautiful Miss Jamaica, providing him with needed macho credentials.

  Along with symbolic gestures, Seaga built a base of patronage. Becoming the Minister of Welfare and Development (or as Rastas said, the Minister of Warfare and Devilment), Seaga ripped the Back-O-Wall slum to smithereens in 1966. Many Rasta residents opposed their eviction, standing in front of the bulldozers. Seaga sent in baton-waving police. Tearing away all trace of Back-O-Wall, he renamed the neighborhood Tivoli Gardens and built the London-style high-rises at its center. The selected tenants who got keys to the new apartments voted for him in overwhelming numbers for decades. Tivoli was dubbed “the mother of all garrisons,” a model of a politically loyalist ghetto that was followed across the island.5

  Seaga was quick to see his supporters as a fighting force. When he spoke in central Kingston and PNP cohorts heckled him, he retorted in anger: “If they think they are bad, I can bring the crowds of West Kingston. We can deal with you, in any way, at any time. It will be fire for fire. Blood for blood.”6

  The laborite hold on Tivoli relied on local thugs making sure no PNP activists came to preach their socialism. By the early 1970s, a chief laborite enforcer emerged in the garrison called Claudius “Claudie” Massop. I ask Kami when people began to refer to Massop and other gangsters as dons. He smiles.

  “It was about the time that the Godfather movie came out. Everybody in Jamaica just loved it. It’s a film that you can watch a million times and learn something new from each time.”

  In the 1972 movie, the Godfather is of course Don Corleone. The title spread though Jamaican garrisons, and the don system went national.