Born Fi' Dead

Laurie Gunst

Description

Among the ethnic gangs that rule America's inner cities, none has had the impact of the Jamaican posses. Spawned in the ghettos of Kingston as mercenary street-fighters for the island's politicians, the posses began migrating to the United States in the early 1980's, just in time to catch and ride the crack wave as it engulfed the country. Laurie Gunst's provocative expose of the Jamaican politicians' role in creating this problem is also a moving and compelling tale of suffering and exploitation. Leone Ross' substantial afterword examines further the issues raised by the book from a British and Jamaican perspective.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• USA
• Organized crime
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 31 août 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847676702
• Langue: English

Extrait

For Brambles, Trevor, and Shenda And the sufferers of Kingston- Past, present, and to come.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Introduction


PART ONE: BORN FI’ DEAD
From Babylon to Brooklyn
Groundation
Brambles
Blood for Blood, Fire for Fire
Endgame
Kingston Farewell


PART TWO: NEW YORK
Meeting in Rikers
The Anatomy of a Posse
Sesame Street
Bones and the Gully
A Soldier in the Field
Reprise


Epilogue
Afterword: Requiem for Trevor
INTRODUCTION
W hen I began working on this book a decade ago, I conceived of it as both a work of history and a traveler’s tale, the story of Jamaica’s political gangs and the record of my journey into their labyrinth. This story began in the ghettos of Kingston, a chessboard of war zones with human pieces; for as long as the majority of Jamaicans can remember, politicians have armed and paid Kingston’s most notorious gunmen to enforce their rule in the capital city’s thronged slums. The worst of the violence came between 1975 and 1980, so it seemed to me as I set out on this journey that the heyday of the gangs was in the past. And I thought that the saga of the "posses," as the gangs have come to be called, ended where it had begun, in Jamaica.
When I moved to Kingston in 1984, the downtown ghettos were quiet and the sufferers the honorific tide that Jamaicans give to the poorest of their poor, the ones with the courage and resourcefulness to endure were still recovering from the undeclared civil war of the 1980 election. The death toll from that campaign has never been officially tallied. But Michael Manley, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time, dedicated his 1982 book Struggle in the Periphery "to the memory of seven hundred and fifty people who died so needlessly, many in the first flower of youth." This was his epitaph for a generation that was sacrificed to the fires of Jamaica’s political strife.
I began moving with the sufferers at a time that superficially resembled a period of healing and peace. It seemed like a good time to begin writing the untold story of the tribal gunmen who had fought for Manley and Edward Seaga, his archrival. The secret symbiosis between the politicians and their mercenaries has always been a dangerous subject in Jamaica, but it seemed a little less so after Seaga had defeated Manley and his new, right-wing regime began restoring the island to America’s favor. But the lull was ominous and deceptive. Even as I sat in rumshops and tenement yards, watching young men light glass pipes of crack instead of the ganja they would have smoked in a mellower time, I was already hearing the first rumors of an outlaw exodus to the American promised land. The "rankings" who had controlled Kingston for Manley and Seaga through the 1970s were leaving their ghetto hell for the cities of the United States, transforming their island gang alliances into mainland drug posses. This is a story without an end.
As I write this introduction, placing an arbitrary punctuation mark in an ongoing saga, I have just spoken with a reporter from the Miami Herald , Lisette Alvarez, who called this morning to interview me about yet another posse massacre. This time four people were shot dead at a Dade County dance hall. One of the victims was a girl who was celebrating her seventeenth birthday. Eighteen people were wounded when gunmen opened fire with the Glock 9 mm handguns that have become the trademark weapon of the gangs. Alvarez told me the Miami police were still uncertain about the motive for the shootings, but they thought the fight was sparked when two men from rival posses argued over who had fathered a woman’s child.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been tracking the posses since their mainland debut in the early 1980s, and it now reports that the gangs have killed forty-five hundred people in the United States since then. The gunmen began migrating to America just after the 1980 election in Jamaica; by that time Kingston’s top-ranking mercenaries had already begun trafficking in homegrown marijuana and transshipped cocaine. They soon branched out from Jamaica into the American market, and the money they made from the drug trade snapped the leash that had once bound them to their politician-patrons. The party leaders, menaced by an outlaw underworld they could no longer control, turned the Jamaican police loose in the ghettos to execute their former paladins. This reign of terror sent posse men by the hundreds on the run to the United States. They brought with them a killer enthusiasm honed by years of warfare with one another and the police, and when they came onto America’s mean streets, they were afraid of no one. Their timing was superb: the Jamaican posses quickly proved themselves indispensable to the Colombians, Cubans, and Panamanians who controlled the supply of cocaine and needed street-level dealers to sell the cheap new product called crack.
But long before the posses began migrating to America, they were learning bad-guy style from Hollywood. These island desperados are the bastard offspring of Jamaica’s violent political "shitstem" (as the Rastafarians long ago dubbed it) and the gunslinger ethos of American movies. They are a Caribbean cultural hybrid: tropical bad guys acting out fantasies from the spaghetti westerns, kung fu kill flicks, Rambo sequels, and Godfather spin-offs that play nightly in Kingston’s funky movie palaces and flicker constantly behind young men’s eyes. The posse men see themselves as Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry , Al Pacino in Scarface , or if they are old enough to remember the 1960s the rampaging misfits from Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch . I was captivated by this crazy synthesis between Hollywood and Jamaica’s Johnny-Too-Bad renegades; it was my way into the culture of this outlaw world.
I moved to Kingston to teach history at the University of the West Indies, but my real purpose was to write the secret history of the gunmen and their links with Jamaica’s elected leaders. I had been going to the island for almost ten years, long enough to know something of downtown Kingston from reggae musicians and Rastafarian elders, the lyric poets of rebellion. But it was a far cry from backstage encounters with Bob Marley or Jimmy Cliff to the ghettos that spawned their music, a distance measured by the boundaries of color and caste. Years before I came to UWI, a visiting Australian lecturer was stabbed to death at the Palace movie theater downtown by a famous criminal named Donovan Chin Quee, a half-Chinese outlaw who worked on and off for Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). No one on campus had forgotten this slaying, and my colleagues warned me to stay out of the places where the sufferers lived.
"Not one of us has any reason whatsoever for venturing into certain parts of this city," said the timid East Indian professor from whom I rented a house. "And if we do, we get what we deserve." Us and them the line of demarcation, never to be crossed, that separated the downtown poor from the fearful but fortunate uptowners.
But I had a reason for crossing this line. The Jamaican sufferers come from the same tradition as the griots of West Africa; they are the storyteller-historians who preserve the legends of a people, and they alone are the keepers of the posses’ saga. I couldn’t chronicle the exploits of gang leaders who were also Robin Hood heroes in the ghettos unless I went to stand with the sufferers on common ground. Downtown Kingston was the "groundation" for everything I had wanted to understand about Jamaica since my first trip to the island in 1976.
That initiation coincided with the years when a fiery and eloquent politician named Michael Manley began leading his People’s National Party (PNP) and Jamaica into a postcolonial reckoning with the past. The island had gained its independence from Great Britain scarcely a decade before, in 1962, and it was struggling to come to grips with a legacy of slavery and colonialism that persisted with a vengeance. The decade of the 1970s was a fever-dream of raised consciousness and high hopes, the first time in Jamaican history when the downtown, downside reality of "sufferation" gave the lie to the island’s polite British parliamentary facade. As reggae music and Rastafarian redemption put Jamaica on the world’s cultural map, its deep and painful schism between rich and poor, light-skinned and dark, was forced out into the open as never before. In an anguished reappraisal of the past, islanders began confronting the truths of a history that Peter Tosh lamented as "Four Hundred Years," four centuries of Babylonian captivity for the black race in Jamaica and the Americas.
At the same time, Manley took up the larger struggle of small, underdeveloped third world states against the overwhelming dominance of the old and new colonial powers. Even as Manley’s PNP raised this banner, Edward Seaga began turning the rival Jamaica Labour Party into a reactionary force, thundering against Manley’s warming friendship with Fidel Castro and his brave but foolhardy support for myriad third world insurgencies.
The United States embraced Seaga with predictable fervor. The American eagle hovered fiercely over Jamaica’s doomed experiment in democratic socialism and eventually routed it with the same methods the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency had used elsewhere. The American press painted a harsh portrait of the island, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) devalued Jamaica’s currency and destabilized an economy already battered by the oil price shocks of the 1970s, and travel agents discouraged their clients from going to Jamaica, thereby crippling the industry on which the island depended for its survival. And a tide of high-powered weapons flowed like bloody currency from the United States into the hands of political gunmen. Jamaicans were traumatized by the rising violence, but only a few dared to suggest that the kil