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

by Ioan Grillo

  He got the call to come to New York as Jamaica’s electoral war raged in 1980. Kami had just turned twenty-one and was proving himself a capable killer in this political violence. The message came that his friend Vivian Blake was in New York and needed muscle.

  “It sounded like a good idea to go to America and make some cash. And the way bodies were dropping in Jamaica, I knew that I would die sooner or later if I didn’t get away.”

  Kami had known Blake for years and trusted him. Like Kami, Blake hailed from the rough streets of West Kingston but had a decent education, winning a scholarship to a private high school.

  “Vivian was a really bright kid. He always had ideas about making money. He was really organized. From when he was young, he was going over to the United States, and he was making bucks. It was good to be associated with him.”

  Blake earned his fortune with three products: marijuana, cocaine, and guns. He bought marijuana from Jamaican farmers, took it to the West Kingston waterfront, and transported it to Florida and New York, from where it spread across the United States. The smugglers hid the weed in commercial ships, among bananas, tobacco, or minerals; they took it on small fishing boats or speedboats; and they hid it on planes among passengers or even air stewardesses.

  Smuggling guns back from the United States was even easier. The gangsters bought firearms in states with liberal laws such as Texas using straw buyers—U.S. citizens paid to go in the shop. They hid the guns on the same commercial ships or fishing boats heading back to the island, taking them into the docks they controlled in West Kingston.

  Cocaine was just arriving in Jamaica in 1980 and it would be key to the posse’s expansion. When Colombians first shifted big volumes of cocaine in the 1970s, they simply flew it in light aircraft straight from Colombia’s coast to Florida. But police cracked down on such blatant trafficking by the eighties. So Colombians switched to the Caribbean islands from where they could bounce the disco powder into America on small boats. Jamaica is halfway between Colombia and Florida so it is a perfect stop-off point. And as Jamaican smugglers had already carved out trafficking routes for marijuana, it was simply an extra product to throw on board.

  I ask Kami if it was easy for him to get into the United States. He smiles.

  “I didn’t even need a passport back then. I just had a false Green Card. It was sent over to me. Vivian had his people somewhere sorting them out.” (The posses are specialists in false documents.)

  It was Kami’s first trip outside the country. He flew into JFK airport at night and got a taxi to a house in Harlem that he had been told to report to. He arrived to find Blake wasn’t there. However, there were other guys he knew from Kingston.

  The Jamaicans in the Harlem house were raging about a beef with some Latin Kings, a long established street gang in New York and Chicago. The Latin Kings had shot one of the Jamaicans for selling drugs on their turf. The Jamaicans were arguing about how they should respond.

  Kami volunteered to step in.

  “I said, ‘Look, I am new here. Nobody knows my face. I can get close and they won’t know what has hit them.’”

  After more discussion, they agreed to let Kami go in for the kill. The next afternoon he went out with a pistol to where the Latin Kings hung out slinging drugs, up on 225th Street and Broadway. He hid the gun in his jacket and walked toward them.

  “First I walked past them slowly, checking out their positions. I was biding my time. But one of them said, ‘Hey, he looks like one of those Jamaicans.’ So I had to make my move. I pulled out my gun and blasted. I took out the first two I saw and the rest ran. If they hadn’t, I would have killed more.”

  * * *

  Such brazen murder characterized the yardies’ entrance to America. Kami and others had just come from the street wars of Kingston and were accustomed to killing without hesitation. They fought like they had nothing to lose. Gangbangers in the United States were taken by surprise.

  They often used submachine guns and automatic rifles, spraying their enemies with gunfire. This was how the name “Shower Posse” came about, the fact that they showered their rivals with bullets. Kami said they coined it in late 1980.

  “It was Vivian’s idea. He said that we needed a name to set ourselves up in New York. We wanted to show people that we were here.”

  The label worked, with Shower Posse becoming a powerful brand that instilled fear across America and back home in Jamaica. Members often refer it as just “The Show,” pronouncing an owe sound.

  As well as smuggling drugs into the United States, the Shower Posse aggressively took over street corners. This distinguishes them from Colombian and Mexican cartels, who concentrate on wholesale, moving tons of drugs for billions of dollars. The cartels mostly sell their narcotics to middlemen and don’t care who ends up serving them on the corner, where there is maximum exposure.

  In some ways, the Jamaicans eyed a smaller dream than the Mexicans and Colombians. However, the posses also saw the big markup in profits in street sales. For example, cocaine sells for about thirty thousand dollars for a kilo brick in the United States, according to DEA agents. But when it is cut into grams and sold on the street, it can fetch more than a hundred thousand dollars. Whoever controls the corners makes this.

  As well as smuggling their own drugs, the Shower would steal narcotics from other people, Kami says. They prowled for information on where cocaine was stashed or a load was coming in. And they stormed in, showering bullets.

  “We were kind of unorthodox that way. Most people handed over the drugs once they had a gun to their head. But some of the Spanish [Latinos] didn’t give it up that easily. So we had to cut them up.”

  Kami almost apologizes as he recounts this torture. It is strange how people have these different sides to their character, how they can be friendly and funny on one hand and hack people up with knives on the other. You forget you are talking to a serial murderer.

  * * *

  Taking over street corners, the Shower Posse found a way to make even more money: crack. The rocks of concentrated cocaine are sold cheap, for about ten dollars a stone as opposed to a hundred dollars for a gram of powder. But crack users get hooked more quickly and come back for more and more.

  In his book Cocaine, Dominic Streatfeild traces what may have been the first crack use to the Bahamas in the late 1970s.1 Picking up the c-dust on its way stateside, Bahamians experimented by cooking it with baking soda to create the crack form, he finds out. By the early eighties, the recipe spread across the United States.

  Jamaican posses are sometimes labeled as the gangs who brought crack to America. That is likely an exaggeration. Crack is easy to make and various gangs, both American and foreign born, began to cook it. But the Jamaican posses were certainly major players, especially Shower, the biggest posse of them all.

  Cooking up crack is not rocket science. But it can be tricky, fiddly work, which some people have a knack for. Among the Shower, specialist crack cooks emerged, honing their techniques. In Kingston, I meet a veteran chef who was part of Shower’s American operations. He has two methods to cook crack, he explains: steaming and microwaving. In the steam method, he cooks the cocaine and baking powder in a glass vessel with water over a flame. Some water disappears in the steam, so the rocks are smaller but more concentrated. In the microwave method, no water is lost, so the rocks are bulkier, but not as pure. He says he personally prefers the steam method, which makes the customers get a stronger high so they come back for his quality product. He beams with pride as he describes his drug-making skills.

  Kami was better with a gun than in a kitchen. As an enforcer, his job was to collect debts and hit anyone who got in the posse’s way. Hard. For his work as a soldier in the United States, the Shower paid him five hundred dollars a week and extra money for certain jobs. He was often ordered to muscle drug dealers and allowed to take whatever stash they had, which could be packages of cocaine, heroin, or marijuana. He would normally hand these drugs to colleagues w
ho ran corners, preferring not to expose himself by standing in the rain selling dope. Kami was no millionaire, but he made more money than he ever could have in Jamaica. And he considered it an easy low-risk life, compared to back home.

  “We lived good over in America. We had nice cars, we had cash for what we wanted, we went out to nightclubs and restaurants. And compared to Kingston, you felt safe over there. People didn’t want to fuck with us.”

  With brazen violence and a steady drug supply, the Shower Posse expanded fast. In New York, it set up operations in the Bronx, Harlem, Queens, Brooklyn (including Crown Heights), and New Jersey. More planeloads of eager gunmen arrived from Jamaica, spreading the posse to Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles. And it kept growing. By the mid 1980s, it was in Baltimore, Kansas City, Houston, Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, Cleveland. Kami believes that by the late eighties, the Shower had more than two thousand operatives across the United States. Federal agents make similar estimates. After several years in New York, Kami himself moved to Atlanta to spread the Shower gospel.

  While Blake ran the American side of Shower, Jim Brown took care of the Posse’s business in Jamaica. Dudus’s father established himself as the new don of Tivoli Gardens, following the police shooting of Claudie Massop, and the short-lived reign of another don who died of a coke overdose. The Shower Posse now brought together the control of a physical turf in Jamaica with an international trafficking operation.

  The Posse was helped by the fact that Seaga and the Labor Party held power. The Tivoli gunmen had long identified as laborites and fought on that side of the tribal war. Seaga would later march at the front of Jim Brown’s funeral procession and describe him as the protector of the community. And Jim Brown’s lawyer was even a Labor Party senator, Tom Tavares-Finson.

  However, while the don system survived, it mutated. The Tivoli thugs were no longer just gunmen defending a voting turf. They were now part of a global trafficking web. The drug money made them less reliant on the politicians’ handouts. But they kept on with the political racketeering for a new reward: impunity.

  Shower Posse garrisons turned out votes for Labor members of parliament, including the PM Seaga. Meanwhile, Jim Brown had good luck with the police and courts. In one case, a bus driver made the mistake of getting into an argument with Jim Brown on the street. When he realized who he was cussing, he fled in horror to the nearest police station. But rather than protecting the bus driver, the police handed him over to Jim Brown and his thugs, who beat him to death outside.

  In a second case, in 1984, Jim Brown led a squad of gunmen into the Rema garrison and allegedly killed twelve people. Police arrested Jim Brown over the homicides. But the don was quickly released for lack of evidence. When the judge freed him, his henchmen fired a gun salute outside the courthouse and carried him on their shoulders through the streets.

  It is hard to prove the specific acts of corruption. Jamaica—like many countries in the Americas—struggles to punish officials; the system won’t investigate itself. Yet Jamaican statesmen talk openly about the gangster politics in general terms. As the parliamentary report on garrisons and dons says:

  In a transactional sense, the Member of Parliament is sure of retaining his territorial support, while the rankings (dons) are able to acquire wealth and local power as well as protection from the forces of law and order.2

  During this period, Dudus was living his teenage years, the son of this don at the zenith of his wealth and power.

  Jim Brown made sure that his children all went to good schools, with Dudus attending the fee-paying Ardenne High outside of Tivoli. I visit Ardenne to find an ordered campus where boys run round in khaki uniforms and girls sport blue and white dresses, like a scene from colonial times. After hunting round the buildings, I find Dudus’s old mathematics teacher. He is hesitant to talk at first, but in heckling British journo style, I corner him until he reveals something about teaching math to the President.

  “He was a very good student, an excellent mathematician,” the teacher tells me, warming up. “He would sit quietly and study. He wasn’t arrogant. He didn’t seem to use his status to bully other kids or anything. I didn’t even know that he was Jim Brown’s son for a long time. But he was very smart. Do you know that he was studying a law degree when he was arrested?”

  It is hard to verify this law degree, but it is certain that Dudus’s education would mark his rule. He was a calculated leader, juggling business, politics, and philanthropy. And while he used violence, he was more controlled than previous dons, and careful about implicating himself.

  * * *

  Back under Jim Brown, however, the Shower Posse exercised little control over its bloodletting, leaving a growing pile of corpses across the United States. Sometimes, their victims were American gangsters such as the Latin Kings that Kami gunned down. In other cases, the victims were Shower Posse members themselves, who they executed for stealing money or getting out of line. In some cases, the victims were innocent civilians who did nothing more than tread on the toe of a Shower Posse thug at a dance hall club.

  The Shower Posse thrived off its bloodthirsty reputation. In Miami in 1984, Shower gunmen shot dead five people, including a pregnant woman, at an apartment said to be a crack house. A witness later testified that Jim Brown himself was a shooter after flying in from Jamaica. The pregnant woman begged for her life before Jim Brown shot her in the head, the witness said. The following year, the posse shot up a reggae dance in the rented Fort Lauderdale Fire Department’s Benevolent Association hall. Stray bullets killed a twenty-four-year-old sound engineer.

  The Shower also clashed with rival Jamaican posses seeking their fortune in America. Just as Blake and Jim Brown built the Shower empire, gangsters from PNP garrisons went to New York and formed the Spangler Posse. Other Jamaican gangs included the Dunkirk Boys and Tel Aviv. When posses met in America, they brought their Kingston street war with them. In August 1985, the Spangler Posse was having a picnic in a park in Oakland, New Jersey, when the Shower attacked. A shootout left three dead and nineteen injured.

  As the posse’s victims piled up, police departments struggled with scattered homicide cases from Florida to New Jersey to as far away as Ohio and Colorado. Federal agents working organized crime had good files on the Italian mafia but knew little about these dreadlocked gunslingers from the Caribbean. However, feds gradually cottoned on that murders across the country were connected to a new organized crime conspiracy they needed to take very seriously.

  A lead came in 1984 when Jamaican police seized a shipment of weapons on the docks in Kingston and Interpol got their hands on the guns, passing the data to the ATF in the United States.3 The ATF realized the weapons had been used in homicides in several states and launched a nationwide investigation. As the case sprawled, the FBI and DEA got on board.

  The feds unearthed a long trail of blood. By the late 1980s, federal agents said the Jamaican posses were linked to more than fourteen hundred murders across the United States.4 It is hard to verify this number, which became widely cited in the media, but anywhere close to it would show that the Jamaican gangs were a significant factor in the rise in violence that plagued American cities throughout the decade.

  The Shower’s gory reputation that gained it territory brought down the wrath of U.S. law enforcement. In the late eighties and early nineties, federal stings with code names such as Rum Punch nabbed hundreds of yardies in dozens of cities. U.S. courts were quick to convict posse members and give them multiple life sentences.

  This crackdown would teach the Shower Posse—and other international traffickers—a lesson: in the United States, they couldn’t get away with the same level of violence they did in their homelands. In response, gangs from Jamaica to Mexico would establish a modus operandi of keeping a lower profile on U.S. soil, while carrying out wanton murder back in their countries. It’s a behavior with painful consequences for Latin America and the Caribbean. But it also shows a certain level of law enforcement can contai
n these gangsters.

  Kami was among those swept up in the crackdown. Luckily for him, police only nailed him with a 9 mm pistol and a small stash of marijuana, not for any of his murders. Unluckily, he was nabbed in Atlanta and transported to a federal prison in Kentucky, where he had little posse backup. He was locked up with poor white prisoners who targeted this half Afro, half Indian Rasta from the Caribbean. He describes how a two-hundred-pound “redneck” started a fight with him on New Year’s Eve.

  “He was a big guy and I thought he was going to tear my head off. He came right at me. But the fight was over in seconds when I stubbed out a cigarette in his eye. He went into hospital but I think his eye healed in the end and he was able to see again.”

  Despite this violence, Kami said that American prison wasn’t that bad, especially compared to Jamaica.

  “In American prison, you get blankets and a bed and meals. In Jamaica, it’s not a prison you are in. It’s a dungeon. You sleep on cold concrete and after a few months, if you are lucky, you might graduate to sleeping on a newspaper.”

  * * *

  As American police hammered posse members, some flipped and ratted on their leaders, leading to indictments of Vivian Blake and Jim Brown, who both took refuge in Jamaica. However, Jamaica itself stopped being a safe haven for the Shower after 1989, when Seaga lost power and Manley returned to office.

  Seaga’s policies had helped some, but failed to pull many Jamaicans out of poverty, so they turned back to Manley. However, Manley said he was a changed man in 1989, leaving socialism behind to become a moderate leftist. He promised to keep good relations with the United States and help business, focusing on limited welfare programs and winning voters with his charisma.