by Ross Kemp
‘Why did they run away?’
He pointed at a broken section of boundary wall. ‘They came through there. They were shooting everywhere.’ He made a noise like a kid playing war – ‘Brrrrrrp!’ ‘They’ were the opposition Benbow gangsters, the kind who had been eyeballing us from the other side of the invisible dividing line down the street. A little bit further on there was a shop selling dry goods. Bullets had shattered its plate-glass frontage in several places. A lot of the holes were at head height.
Ray, one of Wani’s mates said, ‘AK. AK-47.’
We reached the corner and turned into a main road. It led us along to a primary school with walls painted light blue. ‘There was a shoot-up in here,’ Wani told me.
In the school? We turned in at the gate. A sign above the main entrance read, ‘St Simon’s Basic School & Community Centre.’ In dozens and dozens of places the light blue plaster of the playground walls had been filled and overpainted in a darker blue to cover the bullet holes. I counted 300 during a break in filming and then gave up. Wani said, ‘They jumped over that wall.’ He pointed at the high wall on the playground’s far side. ‘Over there is Benbow. That’s where they come from.’ Inside the school I could hear an infant class reciting a lesson. It was lucky the shooters had come at night.
When we came back out, Wani’s friend pointed up the street. ‘There was a man ran a Shell station up there. He kept a gun to defend himself. A crew came and shot him for his guns. They knew he had them under the counter.’ He made a looping gesture with his hands around his neck. ‘Then they took his gold chains. So now we got no more petrol here.’
Wani led on. We squeezed along an alley almost too tight to turn in walled with corrugated iron. ‘Back of the yards,’ he said, pointing at the patched, rusting sheets to either side. Occasionally there were open spaces with piles of junk. ‘We safe here,’ Wani assured me. ‘The dangerous place is the boundary between gangs.’ I hoped he was right.
In the middle of Craig Town we came across Charlie’s Rum Bar. The breeze-block dive is run by the eponymous Charlie, a big laid-back fifty-year-old with a mass of long greying dreadlocks, a woollen hat in the Rastafarian colours, bright blue wraparound sunglasses and an interesting personal history. Charlie was very chilled. In fact he was almost monosyllabic. We sat down outside the bar. ‘Why is it so violent here?’ I asked him.
He gazed at me for a while and then uttered a single word: ‘Hungry.’
The man sitting next to him nodded. ‘People are fighting to live.’
Talking to Charlie and the others, I had an overwhelming sense of a community completely cut off: isolated in its hatred for anyone and everyone outside it and hated by them in return. Children are brought up to hate their neighbours just across the street, and blood is continually spilt between adjoining communities. The feeling of oppression, of hopelessness in the face of gang warfare, was tremendous. People gain identity from these tight-knit ghettos, but at the same time they lose any chance of a peaceful life.
Night came. The gang had promised to show me their arsenal of firearms. It was pitch dark. We were standing on a corner waiting for the gangsters when out of the night came the sound of a boy singing, one of the sweetest sounds I ever heard, a soaring solo hymn, something about ‘Jesus will save you.’ Glancing up at the five masked gangsters who had appeared around the corner on the other side of the road, I said, ‘Let’s hope He is not having a night off.’ Sometimes a bit of silliness breaks the tension.
We went across. The leader said, ‘We have our weapons, we are going on patrol. You can come with us.’
Right away, I felt something was wrong. The gangsters would not step forward out of the shadows to let me see them, even into the meagre light that came from the nearby church. They seemed to be holding weapons – pistols of some kind – but again something didn’t look right. You handle a real gun in a certain way, not as they were doing, in a posing kind of style like something out of a bad television show. I said, ‘Can we see your guns? Can you come forward into the light?’
One of the masks mumbled, ‘No, man, we are not showing you,’ and they turned and ran away.
We went after them. Our cameraman Andy kept good pace, despite the weight of the equipment he had to lug. We’ve been stitched up, I thought. Those aren’t real weapons. Worse, we were now in no-man’s-land between the garrisons, a rubbish-strewn area of waste ground with dogs barking at us, the kind of place where you are asking to get shot.
The gang stopped and we caught up with them. In the faint light I could see that the mask who had spoken to me was holding a contraption made of scrap wood and a wire coat hanger made to look like a sub-machine gun. Brandishing this, he made ‘pow, pow’ noises, the kind little boys make when they are playing at war or cops and robbers.
I stared at him. ‘Why are you making those noises?’ I asked. He turned ran off into the darkness again.
I turned to Andy and the rest of the crew. ‘This is pointless. Let’s stop filming, they’re wasting everybody’s time.’ They’d promised to show us how they protected their community but when it came to it they wouldn’t do it.
We’d been meant to stay on their turf overnight but now I said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I told Colin, our fixer, and Sarah Manley, who had both done a great job helping us out, that we’d been duped. Back at Charlie’s Rum Bar, which suddenly felt like a home from home, we had just sat down to have a beer when I noticed a small group of men staring at us. I recognized them by their clothing as the same masked crew who had just been giving us the runaround.
I stood up to go to the toilet. As I was passing the group, one of them leaned towards me and said, ‘You want to see my ting?’ Thankfully, he meant his gun.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s too late now.’
His hand went to his waist and he drew out a small .22 pistol, the kind of Saturday night special a lady might once have carried in her handbag. As tings go, it really wasn’t all that impressive.
‘We were expecting more than that, mate,’ I told him. A part of me was still angry. I told Charlie we had been let down. In a while he stood, moved slowly across to the group, had a quiet word with them and then came back.
‘Be in the same place, ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and you will see what you want to see.’ They escorted us back out to our vehicles. When we got there the next day, the gang were waiting – masked again, only this time in broad daylight. And with a police checkpoint right around the corner. They led us through a series of narrow, tin-walled rat runs and then stopped. They had definitely made an effort: there were two AK-47s, a pump action shotgun, several Glock pistols and an assortment of other 9-millimetre automatics. Enough to cause a lot of hurt.
There is no functioning social welfare system in Jamaica. The poor have to do what they can to survive – another major reason for the existence of the gangs. With the exception of the police, the emergency services frequently refuse to enter the most dangerous of the gang-held areas, for the simple reason that if they do go in to help, they are often fired on. What this means in practice is that if someone in, say, Craig Town gets shot and needs emergency medical treatment, his friends and family stick him in a wheelbarrow and push him to the nearest hospital. If he is lucky, the victim survives the ride. Lots don’t make it, or if they do they lose a leg or an arm.
To help combat the gangs, the Jamaican authorities have brought in London Metropolitan Police detective Mark Shields. In Jamaica on secondment from the Met and now one of Jamaica’s deputy police commissioners, Shields’s task is formidable: to get the gangs out of the garrisons and to oversee a clean-up of the island’s police force.
I met the imposing six-foot-six-inch Shields in Kingston’s Jubilee Market. I am five foot eleven but I had to stand on a ledge so we could talk on camera without me looking silly. A non-stop riot of bustling crowds, violent colours, shouts and thumping reggae music under the blazing heat, Jubilee Market crowds in and around the hollow shells
of some elegant crumbling colonial buildings on the edge of a park. I saw people picking up discarded chicken bones and rooting through dustbins for food. Strictly for the locals, the market is not on the list of recommended tourist destinations. Corralled behind the walls of their patrolled compounds, 99 per cent of the island’s tourists never learn that it has a serious gang problem.
For Shields there was an ecstatic welcome. Many people think he might be the saviour they have been seeking – an outsider with no previous connections in the Jamaican police. If you think I might be overdoing it a bit by using the word ‘saviour’, you won’t if I tell you that people were coming up and kissing his hand. Wandering around the market talking to shoppers before and after I met Shields, I found out why: most of them long to see Jamaica free of the gangs. They are sick of the whole politician–don connection, the corner gangs, the shootings, the drug-dealing and the death.
In 2004, Shields and Assistant Commissioner Glenmore Anthony Hinds launched Operation Kingfish, a high-profile anti-gang initiative aimed at toppling the top twelve dons and their crime syndicates and getting them and their violent foot soldiers out of the island’s communities for good. To date, Kingfish has dismantled two gangs, the Giddeon Warriors and Lewis, and seriously disrupted a further seven: Dunkirk, Jack’s Lane, Klansman, the One Ten Gang and the Top Road Gang, One Order and Mathews Lane. Its officers have either killed or arrested several dons; seized more than 1,800 firearms, large quantities of ammunition, more than fifteen tonnes of cocaine and some 2,000 kilos of compressed marijuana; and picked up more than 300 other people for a range of offences including murder, drug trafficking and possession of a firearm.
If Shields and Hinds don’t succeed it won’t be for lack of trying: all around the market and for that matter all around the island there are posters: ‘Ring this freephone 811 number and help the police arrest a gangster in your community.’ Is Kingfish working? Only time will tell. The police have received more than 1,000 calls in response to their plea for information. Many have resulted in arrests. Given past levels of public apathy, this is encouraging.
The island certainly needs someone with focus, power and will: the homicide map Superintendent Arthur Brown showed me in Denham Town police station in March 2007 is spattered with orange dots marking killings. ‘These are not individual murders,’ he told me. ‘Each dot represents a cluster of murders – many, many murders. If we put a dot for every murder, you wouldn’t be able to see the map for orange.’
‘How many murders have there been since Christmas?’ I asked.
He looked at me. ‘More than one hundred – about four a day.’ The map also had a great many red dots straggling across the board. I noticed they were in roughly straight lines. ‘Those red dots are where my men have been involved in firefights with the gangs. As you can see, they more or less mark the frontiers between the gangs. Our officers get called in to stop a shooting, and then they become part of it.’
Many Jamaican police officers were open about the problem of corruption in the Jamaican police. This is not to say that every copper in Kingston is bent – far from it. But as long as a minority of them take bribes, things won’t get straight on the streets.
Whether or not as a result of the island’s criminal gangs, since the 1950s hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans have emigrated. And with some of them has gone the island’s gang culture, implanted into Toronto, Miami, London – wherever the expat gangsters have set up shop. Some of these offshore gangsters keep in contact with their counterparts back home, mostly through dealing drugs. Scotland Yard estimates that impoverished young female Jamaican drug mules attempt to smuggle an average of a hundred kilos of cocaine into the UK every week, almost always by swallowing the drug in sealed condoms and hoping to get past HM Customs and the X-ray machines. This has become so commonplace the UK has recently introduced a visa system for Jamaicans wishing to enter Britain.
The close connections between gangsters abroad and back home means a conflict that started out in Jamaica can get settled by means of a phone call to Toronto or London. ‘You killed my brother in Craig Town. I’m going to have your brother killed to even things up. We know where he lives.’
One of the last people I met was another Craig Town resident. Carlton told me how his girlfriend and ‘baby- mother’ Jonelle King had been shot dead on the way to get some food. It happened just after Christmas last year. She was four months pregnant with their first child, but that didn’t stop an unknown gunman stepping out of the shadows and killing Jonelle and her unborn baby.
Sitting on the bed in his room, Carlton told me how he felt when they told him the news. ‘Horrified. Terrible. My mother and my sister talked to me and they helped me understand certain things. But we are all suffering.’ In his khaki shorts and striped polo top, Carlton looked much younger than his nineteen years. He said he did not know who had shot his girlfriend. He showed me the photograph of Jonelle on the front cover of the funeral service programme he kept. She was beautiful. A lovely smiling girl in a white dress and matching broad-brimmed hat, Jonelle King had been seventeen years old when she died.
No one had been arrested for the murder. Carlton sat on the edge of his bed and slowly turned the pages of his dead girlfriend’s funeral service. A polite and well-mannered young man, he told me if he ever managed to identify the gunman, he would kill him.
On my last day in Jamaica I was lucky enough to take a trip up into the Blue Mountains. There is nowhere more beautiful. There was a strong smell of wild ginger and eucalyptus, and the mountains in the distance really did look smoke blue. Staring at all of this beauty, it was impossible not to reflect on some of the horrors I had seen in the gang-controlled areas. Several things need to change before Jamaica turns into the kind of place where its people can live without fear. First, there has to be some serious investment in terms of education, jobs and housing in the most deprived areas; second, the minority of corrupt politicians has to be removed from office and replaced with honest people; and last, they have to break the gangs.
Easier said than done. If you grow up believing thieving is OK, if you grow up thinking it is normal to pick up a gun and shoot a guy in the next street, torch a home and burn out a family, that is what you will do. This is not to say bad environments always produce bad people. Plenty of Jamaicans born in the ghettos have had the courage and the will to make it up and out. But the island’s political corruption, its insidious gang and gun culture, its role in the international drugs trade and the widespread poverty make it difficult to see how change can happen. Still, if you treat people decently then they usually behave decently. Sometimes it is that simple.
Most Jamaicans would rather sit and have a beer with you and chew the fat than take a bullet. Just like anyone else.
Conclusion
In the early months of 2007, London saw five young teenagers shot dead. Kids as young as ten are now reportedly carrying sub-machine guns in the capital. For many people gang culture is about murder. It’s about rape, robbery, drugs, violence, death and hate. But a lot of other people – particularly young men under the age of twenty – have a completely different idea of what gangs are all about. Dazzled by the ‘gangsta porn’ they see rap artists, actors and musicians project on the TV and in films, they think gangs are about fast cars and even faster women, bling, champagne and the luxury condo in Bel-Air. Some global brands promote and manipulate gang culture: sports stores in some countries even separate their goods into gang colours, reinforcing the gang’s own branding.
I was optimistic setting out on my journey to meet the gangs, and I’d be the first to admit that in all kinds of ways I have been lucky – lucky with the crews I’ve had around me; lucky with the access I’ve been able to gain through the kindness of strangers. What has surprised me is how many gangsters out there have been prepared to talk. I have been even more surprised to connect with a few. More than once I have been moved to tears.
Then there are the stories of how so many of the g
angs got started in the first place: El Salvador’s gangs born as a direct result of the country’s vicious civil war; the South African Number gangs dreamed up by an early-twentiethcentury Zulu bandit; New Zealand’s Mongrel Mob formed by teenagers abused in the country’s children’s homes. You couldn’t make this up – as is so often the case, reality is better than fiction.
Is Gangs doing any good? Hard to say for sure, but people now stop me less because of characters I’ve played on TV, and more because I present a programme about gangs and they are interested. Especially young people. Some of them want to see if I am going to stop a bullet, but most simply want to understand more of what’s going on in the world.
Some people have accused me of glorifying gangsters. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we see in the series is men who have murdered their own sisters, men who’ve been raped in prison, victims who have been beaten, stabbed and shot to death, girls beaten and forced into street gangs and then branded with tattoos. I’ve met men with their faces melted away by crystal meth, a man whose six- month-old child killed himself with his father’s gun and a sixteen-year-old neo-Nazi Moscow girl who wants to wipe ‘blacks’ from the face of the earth.
What have I learned in the course of making the series? The wider the gap between rich and poor, and the more poverty it has, the worse a country’s gang problem will be. Gangs spring up when social structures are destroyed by sudden and drastic change: the civil war in El Salvador, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the collapse of communism in Russia. Some people join gangs because of peer pressure or to get the friendship, loyalty and respect they cannot find anywhere else. Some join because their attitude is, ‘If I can’t get it legally, I’m going to take it.’ A gang gives many people a family, a purpose and a sense of identity. A lot of men told me they join gangs to get women.
