What order in the absence of the don?

By:Mark Wignall

Prior to the extradition of Dudus, during the JLP administration’s delaying tactics and right down to the heat of the Tivoli killings, widespread societal fear and his actual capture and extradition, much of the discussion in the media, on the streets and in homes took liberty with the word “allegations” and in the court of public opinion, replaced it with the word “guilty”.

That said, not even the most fastidious legal mind thought that Dudus was in the business of handing out begonias to little old women as they left church on Sunday. Having inherited all which his father and his partners had laid down, even if he had wanted to break away from that sordid past and lead a lawful life through lawful enterprises, there was always the reality of Tivoli Gardens and its cache of arms and ammunition to haunt him.

In the early to mid-2000s, sources in Tivoli were telling me that the “President” was somewhat fed up of the old arrangements whereby benefactors of armed inner-city communities were always handing out guns and he also desired that the young men in Tivoli be trained in areas that would allow them to earn income lawfully and sustain themselves and their families.

If we accept it as more than conjecture that many successful businessmen today got their start by operating below the radar in the 1970s in the lucrative ganja trade, we must also buy into the belief that at some stage, it was through some extreme resourcefulness on their part that they were able to transfer dirty money into the legal banking system through legitimate companies.

With the knowledge that many community dons have moved or are in the process of forming legitimate enterprises, the question that must arise is, at which stage do we stop calling them dons and begin to label them as “businessmen”? And if those who dabbled successfully in ganja in the 1970s made that crossover into legitimacy in the 1980s and respect in the 2000s, what is there to stop a young “community leader” currently dabbling in coke and guns to believe he can also gain that legitimacy and respect by, say, 2020?

It was no secret that it was Dudus who kept the peace in downtown Kingston. It was also not a secret that it was the JLP-dominated street gangs who established “one order” in an effort at organisation of all of them as the times changed into the computer age.

If the state with its legal police force with guns and ammunition could not bring peace to the many inner-city pockets in and around the country’s seedy capital and Dudus could do it, what were he and his organisation doing better than and different from what the state was doing?

One, the intelligence network of the downtown streets was far superior to what the police had. Encumbered by scarce resources and an inner-city population that disliked them, most police investigations went dead in the water before they began. Second, the unofficial “tax” of the streets, from large stores to small street vendors ensured that there was never any shortage of resources to fund its “investigation” arm. Third, justice was swift and guaranteed.

As word spread that downtown was one of the safest places to be, commerce there reached the outer limits and this only rendered the ‘tax’ as raw profit. Fourth, as far as the police downtown were concerned, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. For sure, those in the rogue element of the JCF would have wanted to cash in, simply because power seeks out other pockets of power to ensure that “the runnings” continue.

Now that Dudus has been extradited, there are more than signals that downtown Kingston and outlying residential, inner-city pockets are facing a threat from armed young men grown independent and uncontrollable.

Years ago after the Crime Management Unit had dispatched Andrew Phang, “community leader” for the Grants Pen area, a young woman from the community called and said, “A now de rape dem a go start.” And so they did, with the most evil perpetrator/murderer being one “John Blacks” who was eventually put away by a policeman’s bullet.

With the vacuum created by the absence of Dudus, the hard if unpalatable reality is that the disorder and open criminality which was a feature of downtown in the late 1980s to 1990s has begun to return.

One young woman from Denham Town wrote me: “Hi, pleasant morning, it seems as if some men in Denham Town just make up their minds to kill and destroy people. With all that happened a few months ago, they are far from turning a new page. Last night, about 8:30pm a bus driver was shot and killed on Victoria Street in Denham Town. Two weeks ago men traded bullets with each other in Denham Town and a lot of rapes are taking place morning, noon and night. The rapists are using crazy glue on their victims’ lips. It’s sad to say, cause we all are one, but it seems as if total destruction is the only solution for those residents cause no one can stop them from killing people.”

I have known this lady since the early 1990s when Tivoli took a new war to Rema. With Denham Town in the middle of the war zone, many residents’ houses there were firebombed. When I pressed her for more information, she said, “Well, the police seem as if they are fed up. One of them said last night that he can’t believe guns are still in the area. The persons who are being raped are not reporting it. Last week my friend who also lives in the area told me that three men were going through a woman’s window probably to rape her and after she made an alarm, shortly after they came back and poured gas all around her board house and was about to light it with her two small kids sleeping inside. Don’t know that they actually did, but I knew that she reported it to the Denham Town police.”

In the early 1990s, the late Professor Carl Stone was of the view that as heinous as rule by the don was, if it were to be replaced effectively, new paradigms in social interventions and economic expansions in these areas would have to be instituted. According to the professor, if the state could not apply these needed shifts, the vacuum created would lead to anarchy.

We gave up Dudus because Jamaica has an extradition treaty with the US. What we have also exposed in giving Dudus to the Americans is our inability to walk seamlessly into that vacuum and protect life and property of the people living downtown. We saw the don as evil incarnate, judge, jury and lord high executioner.

The harsh fact is, so far the state hasn’t identified the resources, neither has it deployed any funds to attack the problem which would naturally arise in the absence of the don.

In his absence, the people are on their own.