Kingston residents fear police more than drug dealer Michael 'Dudus' Coke
After days of bloodshed that turned Kingston into a warzone, the world now knows the name of fugitive drugs kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke. Our author examines how his gang became so powerful in Jamaica - and beyond.
By Tony Thompson in Kingston JamaicaPublished: 8:25AM BST 30 May 2010
Ask the people of Tivoli Gardens, Kingston's most notorious "garrison" community, who they consider to be the greatest threat to their wellbeing and the answer is always emphatic: the police.
Little wonder. Prior to last week's bloodshed the area had one of the lowest-reported crime rates throughout the entire city.
Although murals of the prime minister, Bruce Golding, adorn many of the pastel-coloured four-storey blocks and low-rise homes, alongside graffiti urging the residents to support his Jamaica Labour Party, life here is controlled by a force far more powerful than any government.
According to the US State department, Michael "Dudus" Coke is a major drugs and arms trafficker but to those who have fought and died to defend him over the past week, he is the one they rely on to settle local disputes, ensure their children's schoolbooks and shoes on their feet, that holes in their roofs get patched up and rubbish is collected. Most importantly, Dudus is the only one they can rely on to keep them safe from armed incursions by rival garrisons.
To grow up in Kingston is to grow up knowing death and violence from an early age. Each community is allied to and supported by one or other of the two main political parties – the JLP or the People's National Party (PNP). Local MPs fight for seats by guaranteeing the desperately impoverished substantial financial aid for their communities in return for their support. It didn't take long for those living in the worst ghettos to cotton on to the idea of using force to ensure votes in their area went a certain way or, better yet, that all those in a neighbouring community also fell in line.
Running battles between rival garrisons that started out with sticks and stones soon escalated thanks to an influx of guns. During the sixties Jamaica became a covert front in the cold war between the USA and the USSR. The PNP received guns and money from the Soviet Union via its links to Cuba while the JLP benefited in a similar fashion from the US authorities. Edward Seaga, leader of the latter party at the time, became known as CIAga.
Since then, the island has effectively been embroiled in a slow burning civil war, a conflict that flares up every now and then and most notably at election time. During the 1980 campaign, 844 people were killed in the space of two weeks, most of them on election day itself.
The death toll climbs because, particularly for the residents of the ghetto, voting a party to power isn't so much about the broader issues of lower taxes or trade deficit as the specific personal matters of whether your homes gets connected to the local water and electricity supply and whether you can get treatment at your local hospital. It is quite literally life and death.
Violent tactics have and continue to be effective because Jamaican elections are often incredibly close.
In 1967 the JLP won with 224,180 votes while the PNP polled 217,207. In 2007 the JLP polled 405,215 votes to the PNP's 402,275. Changing the voting pattern of a small number of communities can have a huge effect on the overall outcome.
The threat of violence is very real and uncompromisingly brutal. Last Wednesday while attention was focused on Tivoli Gardens, a group of gunmen from nearby St Catherine took advantage of the lighter-than-usual police presence to settle some old scores. In two separate incursions they killed eight people, ordering them out of their houses and shooting them in the streets. One of their victims was a three-month old child. It is his ability to prevent such tragedies in Tivoli Gardens that has won Dudus the love and respect of its residents.
As one Tivoli placard states: "First God, then Dudus."
Quiet and unassuming, Dudus refuses to give interviews to the media, unlike other Kingston dons who regularly hog the limelight and revel in their notoriety, insisting on being seen at every club or party event, usually surrounded by dozens of scantily clad girls. Dudus, by contrast, is far quieter and has earned himself a reputation for being something of a thinker. A graduate of one of Kingston's most prestigious high schools, he is said to be extremely bright and capable. The construction company he established, Incomparable Enterprise, still receives millions of dollars worth of government contracts each year, most of it geared towards repairs and renovations in Tivoli Gardens itself... Another of his ventures, Presidential Click, stages the island's biggest weekly street dance, Passa Passa.
Despite his easy-going nature, he remains widely feared. Those foolish enough to challenge his brand of justice often end up dead, their bodies dumped in other parts of the city to ensure any head does not reflect back on the garrison itself. Within these communities, the power of the state wanes alongside the power of the dons themselves. The fact that Tivoli has such a low crime rate is at least in part due to a general terror of the potential consequences.
When Seaga first came to power in 1980, he immediately repaid his US sponsors by launching a war on marijuana, initiating a massive eradication programme, a move which spectacularly backfired by opening the way for Jamaica to become the favoured transshipment point for Colombian cocaine en route to the US and Europe.
At the same time gunmen loyal to the losing PNP party, now starved of funds and influence, fled abroad to escape roaming execution squads. Their fearlessness, total disregard for the value of human life, willingness to use guns and contacts with the cocaine business meant the Posses – Yardies in the UK – were perfectly placed to rise to the top of the drug business.
They did so in uncompromisingly brutal fashion and, particularly in Britain, were single-handedly responsible for a massive increase in the gun murder rate during the 1980s. Women and children suddenly became legitimate targets. Dealers would find themselves relieved of their entire stashes at gunpoint and be executed for showing the slightest resistance.
When the JLP gunmen saw how much money the PNP dealers were making, they too "went foreign". For them the exodus was led by a man who liked to be called Jim Brown but was better known as Lloyd Lester Coke – Dudus's father. His drugs gang, the Shower Posse, quickly established bases in more than 20 US cities, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Brown was personally involved in a massacre in which one victim was a pregnant woman, shot while on her knees praying for her life to be spared. Between 1980 and 1985, the Shower Posse and other Jamaican gangs were linked to at least 1,500 murders along America's east coast. In the five years that followed the gangs that came to the UK were linked to at least 500 murders and more than 5,000 gun attacks.
Other gangs in the drug business had no choice but to arm themselves and fight back or face being pushed aside. The birth of the youth gun culture which is now having such a devastating effect on the lives of many inner-city teenagers in the UK and the fact that many British police forces now have permanent armed patrols can be directly traced to the influence of a few hundred individuals from this tiny Caribbean island.
At first the money was channelled back to continue the political battles, but soon the Dons focused instead on their own needs, using the excess to buy the loyalty of the communities around them. The politicians still need the gunmen or more precisely, the votes they control, but they no longer have much of a hold on them. The wealth generated by the drug trade resulted in a new breed of gang leaders who no longer look for handouts and called their own shots.
Edward Seaga described Jim Brown as "the protector of Kingston's poor" and led his funeral procession, despite the fact that the Jamaican Police had charged Brown with murder on 14 separate occasions. The charges were dropped or he was acquitted after witnesses failed to turn up at court. After one acquittal his supporters gave him a massive gun salute on the steps of the courthouse before carrying him off to Tivoli on their shoulders.
Dudus too has little fear of local law enforcement. He has, after all, been arrested with little incident several times in the past. Most recently he pleaded guilty to possession of a cannabis cigarette and was fined $200. The difference then was that the charges were purely local.
Like other international targets of America's war on drugs, what Jamaica's dons fear most is extradition. On their home turf, witnesses can be intimidated, senior officials can be bribed. Charges can be dropped. Deprived of their ability to do this in America, they face lengthy sentences that they are unlikely to ever return.
Dudus's father, Jim Brown mysteriously burned to death in a maximum-security cell, just days before he was to be extradited to the US to face murder and drug-racketeering charges, and suspicions were high that he had been deliberately silenced. His lawyer, Tom Tavares-Finson – now representing Dudus – famously remarked at the time: "If you believe Jim Brown just burned to death, by accident, in his jail cell, you'll believe in the tooth fairy." Little wonder Dudus, too has chosen to remain at large.
Crime author Tony Thompson's latest book, Gang Land, was published by Hodder & Stoughton this month
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