The Jamaican Posses Take Over America: Kings of the Crack Era
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February 1992, in a Kingston, Jamaica jail cell, and Lester Jim Brown Coke, the most powerful Don in Jamaica and leader of the notorious Shower Posse, is out of chances. We covered his rise in the last episode, but in case you missed it, Coke may be the most legendary gunman Jamaica has ever seen. He rose to the top at a time when the streets of Kingston were a war zone.

Allied with the most powerful politician in the country, Edward Seaga, Koch brutally took over the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood in Kingston, leading an army of ruthless killers who wouldn't think twice about murdering a civilian. In fact, according to Bob Marley himself, Koch was rumored to have spearheaded the attempted assassination of the Jamaican icon. But that's not why he's in trouble right now.

See, after 1980, he got involved in weed, cocaine, and gun trafficking, exporting his fearsome gang known as the Shower Posse to the east coast of the United States. Together with Vivian Blake, his men went about taking over the crack trade from Brooklyn to D.C. to Miami, fighting street wars and being involved in what federal authorities said is between 700 and 1,400 murders in less than a 10-year period.

If you include all the other Jamaican posses, some federal authorities estimate that when they ran wild all over the states in the 1980s, they were responsible for up to 4,500 murders. 4,500. By far the most violent criminal organizations that were out there. It took the feds a little bit of time to wise up on them. And once they did, launching a massive operation to take down them all, Brown was safely back in Jamaica in his fiefdom.

but then his guy lost. In 1988, Seaga loses the election and Michael Manley of the rival PNP party takes over in 1989. Manley has no love for Koch, but it's still a big deal to bring him in. But the U.S. really wants him on drug and murder charges.

Having no choice, Manley launches a serious police operation, losing a few officers to shootouts in the process. But he manages to lock Koch up in 1991. And Koch is furious, threatening that if the extradition goes through and he ends up in the U.S., he's going to name names and spill everything on powerful Jamaicans. All his contacts, politicians, everything. Koch appeals his extradition, but he loses. And DEA agents are literally in Kingston waiting to put him on a plane the next day.

That's not going to happen, though, because somebody really doesn't want Jim Brown talking. Because that night, he's burned to death in his jail cell. Some say it's an escape attempt gone bad. Others that it was suicide. But I mean, come on. The authorities are so clueless, they can't even find any flammable material, let alone solve it.

Till this day, the murder of Lester Jim Brown Coke, Jamaica's most powerful don, is unsolved, as are many other of the thousands of murders attributed to the posses who took over America's streets in the 1980s. This is The Underworld Podcast. ♪

Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld Podcast, where two journalists who have reported on guns and gangs and ganja all over the world now sometimes sit in their living rooms and tell each other stories of organized crime from around the globe, from the past, present and future. My name is Danny Gold, one of your hosts. I am here with Sean Williams, your other host, who now lives in New Zealand. Yeah, that sounds weird. I've also got a moustache, so I'm now a New Zealand moustache guy.

I know actually while we're while we're doing this intro I want to like shout out your recent story for tablet that was amazing man folks should definitely read it and they should bear in mind that we're actual journalists not just idiots talking shit yeah

important thing to remember. But yeah, man, it was good. A lot of positive reception. I was actually up last night at 2 a.m. because I had a hit with the BBC World Service about it. So I'm kind of exhausted. You guys might have to bear with me through this episode. As always, you can get bonus material at patreon.com slash the underworld podcast for $5 a month or even just chip in three to help us not lose the motivation to keep doing this or you can sign up on iTunes with one click and I think we actually have more

merch back up again. I know a lot of people are asking for that. - Yeah. - Yeah, if you go to underworldpod.com/merch or underworldpod.com and click on the merch thing, we got like the don't Instagram your crime shirts and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, wear them. Don't Instagram your crimes, but Instagram yourself wearing the shirts.

And then, I guess, tag us? I don't know. I don't care. So today, we are going to do a second episode on the Jamaican posses from when they left Jamaica and came to the U.S. in the early 1980s in a spiral of just bloodshed and crack sales that ripped apart the country. Like, seriously, the amount of murders here, it's a massive scale, and no one had seen anything like it. And if you want more in-depth background on their origin story and what happened in Jamaica with the politics and all that, you can go back, I think, to

two weeks ago, the episode. Yeah. So we really dove into it then. But you also don't need to if you just want to tune into this one. Yeah. I mean, it was beginning to get pretty feral with all the killings at the end of that last show as well. So I'm sure this one's going to be all roses and hugs and kisses and cool reggae and stuff like that, right? It's pretty brutal, but you can kind of go back. You know, we don't want to just go into like how crazy the murders were and all that. This sort of

Everything that went with it and the cause of it and all that violence that was brought onto the island and how it kind of engulfed society, every cause, reaction, all that sort of stuff. So if you want that depth, go back to the last episode, but back to the Jamaican gangs and what was to come. In that episode on the rise of Jamaica's politically intertwined gangs and the attempted assassination of Bar Mali from a few weeks ago,

We left off right after the violence-plagued election of 1980, and the once-promising gang truce had been broken when the top Jamaican politicians, Edward Seaga and Michael Manley, were more interested in warring for power, and Seaga had linked up with the infamous Jim Brown, Lester Koch, who had established himself as a prolific killer and just the top-ranking Don.

At the same time, cocaine starts to arrive in Jamaica as it becomes a major transshipment point to the U.S. And the Dons are getting a taste and realizing, you know, maybe they don't need the politics money if they can get the powder money, which is always a lot more.

Also, when Siaga's party had taken over, the Jamaica Labor Party, that is, they were cozying up to the U.S. and the USDA was hyper-focused on eradicating the marijuana trade. Says the Jamaica Gleamer, which is a local newspaper there, quote, the JLP had chosen to join the U.S. side in the Cold War and at that government's behest embarked upon a major ganja eradication campaign.

The anti-marijuana initiative caused an economic fallout among the growers and traders of the illegal crop and forced drug traffickers to seek alternative means to make their money. And the alternative means, of course, is cocaine trafficking because they already had the network set up in the US. Yeah, that's funny because that's kind of what happened in Nepal as well. And we've got a show coming out about my trip there in a couple of weeks. But I'm kind of like, you've done a bunch of reporting in Trinidad and you did a show like

a million years ago about that too is this similar to what happened there like the coke money outweighing the the political tricks and that kind of stuff i mean it's it's not it's not really because in turn out everything happened kind of really differently you know those gangs are much more of a recent creation they didn't have a lot of there wasn't a lot of political money keeping and the contracts came in later and trinidad also has that that you know we talked about in the episode that attempted overthrow of the government with the crazy islamic gang there

So it's kind of a different beast. There are similarities now with the gangs in Trinidad being tied in and with it being a transshipment point where some of that coke and the guns filter into Trinidad and lead to more violence. But it's the origins of it all and how it came about is, I think, very different from Jamaica.

But, okay, in that point, when all the cocaine's coming in, we're talking like early 1980s, even like the bad boy gangsters are getting nervous about the violence in Jamaica. And just the insane amount of extrajudicial killings being done by the police, they all have targets on them. So they start leaving Jamaica and heading to the States.

And by the mid 80s, the police in Kingston were committing one third of all murders and just became notorious as these killers in uniforms. There's one particularly famous one who was Siaga's bodyguard. His name was Trinity, and he was alleged to have killed dozens of people. Jesus Christ. And did this guy just get off? Did he end up going down for any of this stuff?

Well, he was the prime minister's right-hand man. I think he was eventually killed, but I actually don't know. There are only bits and pieces of him that I pulled off, and I didn't really dig further into it. So we also mentioned Lori Gunz's book, Born Fee Dead, in the last episode on Jamaica. She actually continues her reporting in that book, Into America in the 80s, and shows the connection. Here's a quote from it on what was happening.

The rankings who had controlled Kingston from mainland Siaga through the 1970s were leaving their ghetto hell for the cities of the United States, transforming their island gang alliances into mainland drug posses. Okay, so at this point, like, what's the difference between a posse and a gang or a clique or a cabal or a clan or mob or whatever, like...

I think this is what people are coming to us for. Isn't the posse like something to do with a sheriff in the wild west or something? Well, yeah, we talked about that before. It's just the influence of westerns, like spaghetti westerns in Jamaica in the 60s and 70s. They were amazingly popular, like super popular. And people kind of loved them, just loved them. And a lot of the language and the slang and even the nicknames, you know, these guys, they took them from the movies. So that's actually where Jamaican posse, where the posse comes from is that.

But yeah, I mean, it's similar to like a gang, organized crime, cartel, that sort of situation. You know, they're all kind of lumped in together, I would say. Yeah.

But with the posses coming in, right, they're bringing all their ruthless skills they've developed that they were fighting on the streets of Kingston for and just the callousness that develops from excessive violence, which, you know, they apply it right to the weed and crack shade in Miami, in D.C., in New York, in Baltimore, before anyone on the streets or in law enforcement really knows what's happening. And they just hit like a tornado and drive the murder rate sky high. And the numbers are insane, right? The ATF starts tracking them in the early 80s. And over the next decade or so, they estimate the posses to be behind, you know,

4,500 murders. And again, that's 4,500, which is just a crazy number. And this happens, you know, they start coming after that 1980 election, these mercenaries, as Gunz calls them. They had been trafficking marijuana growing in Jamaica and then started on the cocaine that came through from Colombia. They decide, you know, hey, let's move into America and get in on that side of it, the distribution side.

And this is when they didn't need the politicians anymore, the funding, so they just go rogue. And in turn, the politicians in Jamaica that, you know, they fear them now, they let the police come in and just go all insane in the ghettos there. So hundreds of these gunmen, they flee and they come to the U.S. And remember, they start coming in the early 80s, right? And what's happening then, what else is emerging around the same time that sets the drug game on this devastating ride? That's the emergence of crack.

So not only do you have the big time Jamaican posse members on the importation side, you also have a whole lot of Colombians, Cubans, Dominicans with their own networks going on, doing wholesale. Sometimes they link up with them to have them as street level dealers to move the crack, you know, the retail side. And they're going to link with other posse members and it just starts going crazy.

And do these like different nationality gangs, do they divvy up the US by city or are they just going at it hell for leather, like dropping bodies nonstop? You know, there was no divvying up by city. They were neighborhoods. You know, you had a lot of Dominicans in like Washington Heights in that area and things like that. And I think Colombians in Queens, but there was no like, you don't divvy it up by city, right? People fought over territory. That was the essence of the crack wars. It was people fighting over territory to make money.

Says Guns of the Posse Gunmen, "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."

But let's start from a little ways back, right? Jamaicans had arrived in the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Many actually first went to Miami to work in the fields there. And some in the US had been involved in the drug game in the 1970s, but that was all weed. And it was like empty storefronts, like vegetarian restaurants, Rasta's kind of more laid back. It wasn't super violent and they weren't super in control.

Jamaica had long been a big source of marijuana, and the crop had actually been brought over in the 1800s by indentured Indian servants. And we covered this in the last episode, but Jamaica was a prominent English slave colony. Then when the English abolished slavery, instead they brought over indentured servants from places like India and China, and some of those Indian laborers brought marijuana and it flourished in the islands and grew everywhere, especially up in the mountains there. Okay.

Oh, wait, but I was told in school that Britain valiantly ended slavery before anyone else. Is that not true? I mean, before the US, so I guess you guys have us there. Well done, us. But it still was a colony, you know, where they were not the best. I should say that. You know, I guess now we really identify Jamaica with weed from pop culture and all that, but, you know, Rostas. But back then, Rostas were kind of looked down upon by a lot of Jamaican society. I actually don't know the current dynamics, but I would assume...

It's more of an accepted practice now, especially post Bob Marley and reggae, than it was in like the 60s. Here's Bruce Gain, James Marcotte, who wrote in the Journal of Crime and Justice about how Jamaican posse is operating in the mid-70s, trafficking homegrown weed in the U.S. weren't even on the Fed's radar yet. They weren't hyper-violent or moving millions in coke until the 80s. Quote,

Between 1974 and 1979, most Jamaican posse members clustered around the cities of New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, and were mainly involved in the sale and distribution of marijuana. For the most part, posse members were ignored by law enforcement agencies as major narcotics dealers.

Posse members maintained a low profile, distributed marijuana, and committed few violent acts. This allowed the posses to establish supply routes and contacts without much legal scrutiny and intervention. So, you know, they were smart about it, right? They kept it low key and they didn't really sound any alarm bells off in any enforcement agencies' heads. So, yeah.

Things were going well, but of course that is not what happens usually when cocaine gets involved, right? The US market then, it wasn't super massive in the 70s. It only really started picking up steam in later years. It was still kind of a high-priced drug for rich people and sophisticates. There was no crack yet. And in Jamaica, coke actually got popularized a little bit in the grill, which tourists were there all the time. It was a resort town party spot. And it only really shows up in 1980 on a bigger scale

When the JLP gunmen, Siaga's guys, they start bringing it in through the peers they controlled. You know, taking a little here, tasting a little, selling a little. When Siaga comes to power in 1980, the country really becomes a transshipment point because he lets his guys control things. And some would say,

He had a hand in it as well. But again, that's, I don't think that's been proven at all. So just going to ruthlessly speculate here, but you know, what can you do? So all these gunmen and posses, they're arriving in America, just amazed at how easy it is to get guns. And they have these wartime skills and they just start setting up shop, right? They start in places with big Jamaican populations like Miami, New York City, Brooklyn, Bronx, DC, but soon they expand. They're in Philly, Cleveland, Kansas City, Dallas, Denver, and Detroit. And they just,

take over. Gunz calls them the children of Jamaica's nightmare years, which is just a great turn of phrase. They're the ones who grew up on the street during the dirty war. And she says the arrival of the posses and their rapid entry into the street level crack trade caught American law enforcement completely by surprise. Yeah, I feel like that's kind of a weird one, right? Tracking drugs and gangs is the only remit these specialized cops have in the whole world.

And their dog knows about Coke and the heroin epidemics that came before it. Like, and some trigger happy Jamaicans are just washing up in the States and taking them by surprise. No, no, it just seems a bit odd. Yeah.

I think it's just what happens. We've covered this with other groups when, even in the 1900s, Jews and Italians and other groups coming in, the Cubans and whatever, and the Asian groups in the 70s and 80s, when the police don't have a read on things, when they don't have informants, when they don't know the lay of the land, and new immigrant groups show up, they're very reclusive.

and they kind of stick to their own situations. And if you don't have sources, and if you don't have also members of that community on the police force,

it's really hard to get in there. I mean, it was a much bigger problem when you had, you know, the Vietnamese and the Chinese gangs in the 70s and 80s because they couldn't even, you know, they didn't even have translators there. And it's a very insular community. So I kind of understand it in that way. You know, if they don't make their presence known or it's hard to pick up on what's going on really until you start piecing it together, especially when you have guys in like,

We're talking like precinct cops and detectives there. They're not getting a... The internet wasn't even a thing. They're not getting a big picture view of what's going on. Forget just like in their neighborhood. If you're a cop in Brooklyn, are you getting a big picture of what's going on in the Bronx at that point? So I do understand why it would take them time to wake up about this sort of new situation that's happening. It's basically...

It's impossible to imagine a world where you can't just Google random shit now. I can't even imagine what that world looks like. You've got to read a book or something? Here's the thing about what would happen if these guys had actually played it a little cooler. How far could they have gone? But of course they don't do that because they're just wilds.

And I feel like, you know, every time we do a Gangs of New York City episode, I guess even in the Oakland episode, right, there's some legend about the emergence of crack or the guy who discovered how to make crack or how to sell it or the guy who popularized it at first. Gunn says the Jamaicans were showing up in New York already knowing about it. It had emerged in the Caribbean and the Bahamas in, I think, 79 or 80. Colombians, the ship a ton of cocaine through there, and at least some stayed behind and people were freebasing and someone started experimenting and ended up making what came to be known as crack.

She thinks just Jamaicans discovered it there in the Bahamas where a lot used to travel and were already selling it in New York in the early 80s. Yeah, I mean, that checks out. There's a really fascinating piece I actually read about it coming in in Washington Heights. That's where people thought it came in in New York and all the Caribbean immigrants there. I had no idea. It's really, really interesting stuff. Yeah, I mean, there's all those legends about California and how it was discovered, right? I think we covered that in the Wild Cowboys episode.

There was that guy that they said was the one who popularized it and got it big. There's a lot of legends about that, and it's hard to know what the reality is. It seems like every one of these we do has its own story in that regard. By the early 80s, the posses are completely making their presence felt. They're muscling in

they're all already experienced as shooters and killers and fearless. And they were also huge on gun running and gun trafficking. They bought guns all over places like Florida and Virginia and Ohio. And they would traffic them to cities like New York and back to the posse elements in Jamaica to continue the street wars over there. And I guess for people who don't know the states, every state has different gun laws. And New York has always been

A lot of the Northeast, the cities are very strict with their guns, but places like Florida and Virginia and Ohio, you can just get them. You can just walk in and get them. So it was, you know, people will run guns across the states. They'll buy them in Southern states where they're very easy to get, ship them to New York and then sell them for like an incredibly high markup. So that's, I mean, it's still a thing that people do. There's still, people are still gunning around like that.

So the posses are setting up shop in the Bronx, in Flatbush, in Miami, in D.C., in Crown Heights, all basically having moved with their names and affiliations from the Kingston neighborhoods. You've got the McGregor Gully, the 40s, the Hot Steppers, the Rankers who were led by Delroy Uzi Edwards. I can kind of let you guess on how he got that nickname, and he was not Israeli, so you know.

And of course, you have the Spanglers and the shower posse of Vivian Blake and Jim Brown, who we'll get into in a bit. Good names. Important thing to note, you know, these posse in the States, they maintain their connections to Jamaica and their political affiliations, too, which is going to make things interesting later on in the episode when some big names start getting mentioned in some interesting testimonies. But it was very important for the U.S. Don's making bank here to support their communities back home.

So take this guy, Eric "Chiny Man" Vessel, who was a big time boss in Brooklyn and Crown Heights, actually where I live now. He ran the Gully Posse, which was connected to the PMP, the People's National Party, Michael Manley's party back in Jamaica. He had actually switched from selling cocaine and weed to heroin, which was rare among the posses, and he would tax all his soldiers in New York City and the states

to buy all sorts of goods from clothes to electronics to food to send back to the gully in Jamaica for the people growing up in the slums. And they would have these big parties called treats, and they would pass out all the stuff shipped from the States. He also sent guns down there to Jamaica from Florida, which they referred to as vote-getters. That was like the code term for guns.

He expanded actually out to Houston to sell crack. He even took over a whole building in Crown Heights. He actually had beef with the Rancor's posse, the one I mentioned above, but they controlled 12 corners in Crown Heights and were doing like $50,000 a day selling crack. Delroy Uzi, the leader of the Rancors, he was actually a baby JLP gunman when he came to the States, just a young guy. His crew ended up killing six people, including torturing one, and they were the first posse to get taken down, and he ended up getting sentenced to 500 years. 500 years.

I mean, one day I'm going to ask you to tell me why the States dish out these sentences. I don't really get it, but I'm sure there's a logic to it. It's something I should know, right? Having covering crime for especially like the Daily Beat crime stuff, but I actually don't know. I mean, they just compound it.

Yeah, I have no idea. I'm sure there's a legal thing for it. I have no idea. Yeah, the Jamaica Rivalries, they continue in America. A Chinaman vassal eventually fled to Jamaica after facing a slew of murder charges, but he was extradited in 1997. His gang got busted in 1990. All the posses eventually get busted around that time 'cause they were just too wild and reckless and dangerous. And the most dangerous one of them all

the ones who became the most infamous and are responsible for the most violence are the Spanglers and the Shower Posse who fought wars, shootouts all over the Eastern Seaboard, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Fort Lauderdale, just like incidents where there were multiple body counts, barbecues, nightclubs, it just didn't matter. The Shower Posse, they had supported Edward Siaga and the Spangler Posse supported Manley. And heading up the Shower Posse was Vivian Blake stateside and Lester Jim Brown Coke from our intro in Jamaica.

He's the one who was involved in Bob Marley, the Bob Marley shooting. He was also second in line to Claudie Massup to run Tivoli Gardens, but took over when he was gunned down because Jim Brown didn't respect the gang truce. So he ran the gardens and then he started running cocaine and weed and crack houses. According to journalist Frank Owen,

Jim Brown was born in 1947 in Denham Town, which is a ghetto in West Kingston. And in 1996, he's a 19-year-old apprentice locksmith, and he's shot six times and taken to a hospital in the gardens. That was the new neighborhood, actually, that had just been built by the Jamaican Labor Party by Siaga. The doctors saved his life, and since then, he just became an incredibly loyal supporter of both Siaga and the JLP. And we covered his rise to kind of becoming the top just gunman in Jamaica, and that's where he sat in 1980.

And then there's Vivian Blake, who's the other side of the shower posse. He was born poor in Kingston, but was super smart, got a scholarship to go to a private school. He came to New York in 1973 with a cricket team. There you go, Sean. There we go. And he just stayed. But there's another source that says Blake's dad was a PMP official, and he went to America to Columbia University to play soccer, but he left to sell coke and weed. But Blake was just this kind of like...

Slick guy. He wore suits with pocket squares, you know, polished. He could hobnob with the rich and the elite, whereas Brown was kind of more of just like a really, you know, street dude. Yeah, I like Vivian. He's the best gangster we've covered on here. Hands down. Not even close. Really? You think so? Yeah, I mean, there's one detail that I like above all the others, but yeah, he sounds great. Oh, the cricket thing. Yeah. I figured that would sell you. But...

Blake had been doing his own thing. He was selling coke and weed in the Bronx when he links up with Jim Brown in the early 80s. Both had been very close with Siaga. They name it the shower posse, even though lots of people say it's because they shower their enemies with bullets.

There's another story that says it came from a Ciaga speech in 1980 where he said there was going to be a shower of blessings coming. Blake also had Colombian connections. In 1980 is when he really went from weed and just dived into cocaine. He handled things stateside, and Brown handled things in Kingston, and things in Kingston were just going nuts. One night in Kingston around then, Jim Brown and his shower posse men, they go into the garrison known as Rima. And remember, they were called garrisons because they were like fortified armed neighborhoods at this point.

Rima, they were part of the JLP, right? But they had threatened to switch allegiance to the PNP. And Brown and the JLP, they couldn't have that. So they just go into Rima and they kill somewhere between seven and 12 people in one night. Civilians, everything. It's a massacre. And of course, Seago was in charge, so nothing really happens to him justice-wise because he's untouchable. But he kind of wants to calm down a bit, so he heads to the States. So a year or two later in Miami, though,

You know, I've seen some accounts that say that it was Blake that did this and others that say it was Brown. But one of them gets robbed outside a trap house in Miami and they come back later and they go inside and they kill five people, including a pregnant woman. And this is just like a this is a massive, massive event in Miami. And it made all the news. And it was a really dark time. And the shower posse quickly becomes the most deadly posse in America then.

This is like insane levels of bloodshed. Surely this was a state of emergency or something. Or has Miami just always been this killing field for gangs and mobsters and stuff?

I mean, the 80s in Miami, man. What's the documentary about Miami in the 80s? Scarface? No. But fuck, what's it? Cocaine Cowboys. Yeah, Miami was just wild in the 80s because all the cartels were operating there. The Colombians and a lot of cocaine was coming in there, but then you also had the crack wars. So if you look at the murder rate, I think it really hit the apex, at least in New York, in like 90, 91, 92. But the

The level of murders, like the murder rate in the States in the 80s was insane. Like if you really compare the numbers, I mean, for New York, like what it is now, and you see how people talk about the city being dangerous or whatever, it was like six times what it is now. There were like five or six people being killed today. It was nuts. I mean, it was brutal.

Here's part of a Miami New Times article in 2010 recounting those days. Quote, Jesus.

Those are attacks that were only in South Florida. New York had its own, D.C. had its own, and there used to actually be this string of clubs on Empire Boulevard down in my neighborhood a few blocks from here, which used to be like this big industrial warehouse type area where there would be shootouts like every weekend. There was one at, one of the clubs was called the Love People One Club, and one officer there said to the Daily News, quote, the place is like Vietnam. The young tough show up there to show off their gold and their BMWs. Three things interest these guys. One,

guns, drugs, and cars. You know, adding cricket, that's basically Sean's old Tinder profile right there. All right, yeah, I'll give you that. Blake was running things in the U.S., though, between New York and Miami while he's fighting off the Spangler posse. And it's estimated between 1984 and 1987, they moved 300,000 pounds of weed and 20,000 pounds of cocaine. So I guess they actually didn't really give up the weed too much.

Blake also had two half-brothers that were shooters for the shower posse and one whose nickname was Fabulous was the chief executioner and wound up confessing to 87 murders. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. You hear something like that and I'm like, is he taking the blame for other people so that they don't get brought up on charges? But also, he could have killed, like the way these guys operated, he could have killed 87 people. Like, it was that insane. He probably got like, what, 2,000 year sentence or something? Yeah.

Yeah. And I want to be clear too. So, you know, we're going hard on this, but like we've talked about this with organized crime groups that come from, you know, the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, Albania, other countries with recent histories of oppression, violence, war, otherwise, you know, the people who emerge from

on the other side of this, these other side of these situations, like the situation in Jamaica, they're traumatized and they're familiar with violence. And, and in a way that, that, you know, most people are not and desensitized in a way that most people are not. So like, I'm in no way excusing it. Right. But people are generally products of their environments. And we've covered what that environment was like in Kingston, where these guys emerged from. So, I mean, I just want to, you know, point that sort of thing out. Like,

these guys came from, this bloodbath. So of course, when they get out of it, they're gonna continue with that mentality. And they did, they hit the cities in the drug trade like a tornado. By 1985, the feds and other various law enforcement agencies had started to catch on, including the ATF because of all the gun trafficking. At 1987, they launched Operation Rum Punch, which, I mean, kind of an amazing name, to take the posses down.

By the mid to late 80s, there were 23 task force set up nationally to take them down. You had DA, ATF, FBI, IRS, immigration, customs, local police, sheriffs. Like it was a massive, massive effort. And they're just wild stories that start to come out around them in the papers around this time. And I'm going to read a few of them just because, you know, why not?

The Times in 1987, they wrote it up, the first initial sweeps with 124 arrested in 13 states and D.C. Quote, the gangs known as the Jamaican Posse's have been connected to 625 drug related murders, along with kidnapping, narcotics trafficking, gun trafficking, robberies, assaults and money laundering. The Bureau's involvement in tracking down the Jamaicans began in 1984 when Interpol asked United States officials to trace several firearms recovered in Jamaica.

The investigation ended with corroborated evidence of the existence of a Jamaican-controlled narcotics cartel known as the Shower Posse. Other gangs include the Spangler Posse in Miami, New York, and Philadelphia, the Dog Posse in Philadelphia and Boston, the Tel Aviv Posse in Miami, Washington, and New York, the Dunkirk Boys in New York, the Waterhouse Posse in Kansas City, and the Bonson Posse in Miami, Washington, and New York.

So, yeah, I mean, these guys were they were just everywhere, man. They were moving, really moving. Here's the Sun Sentinel in Florida in 1998, quote, heavily armed Jamaican drug gangs have moved into American cities in such great numbers and with such shocking violence that federal and local law enforcement officials are making an unprecedented commitment to stop them.

When Jamaican posses get to a city, they tell people in the narcotics market that they are there and that they are taking over, said Joe Vince, special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. If those people don't like it, the gang kills them.

And it's like, I mean, I don't know, right? Like it sounds pretty dramatic and I'm always hesitant to take law enforcement a hundred percent in these sort of situations at their word. It kind of sounds like hyperbole and fear mongering, but it's also kind of legit. Like at the time, you know, these dudes were really out there just shooting shit up. The murder numbers really did get that high. They moved a ton of crack. They were legitimately violent psychopaths. So, I mean, there's probably a lot of, a lot of merit to that in,

In 1989, the LA Times writes up what happened in Kansas City, where they say 450 posse members had showed up and set up 50 crack houses. By then, 200 of them had already been charged and convicted, but local authorities had noticed them arriving as early as 1983. And I mean, this is written pretty wildly. Quote,

It wasn't until the bodies started piling up in crack houses across the city that the realization dawned. Kansas City was being invaded by violent Jamaican drug gangs. Volatile and ambitious, the gangs, called posses, after the gunslinging peacekeepers in movie westerns, were in large part responsible for the rapid spread of the drug crack into the nation's heartland in the mid-1980s. So they're actually putting the blame on crack reaching all over the U.S., away from New York, D.C., and Miami, on the Jamaican posses, which is crazy.

One narcotics officer says, quote, the Jamaicans brought in a much better quality of cocaine. That's what made them catch on real well. He said they weren't cutting the dope like everybody else and they were giving bigger pieces for the money. They just flooded the market. This is like, this is on such an industrial scale. Like this, I can't actually believe how huge these gangs are. I mean, also the journalists calling them posses and then describing what a posse is, which is not what they are. And then carrying on calling them posses is, is awesome. But, uh,

Yeah, this is, I don't think we've done a story on this scale in a while. This is absolutely chaos. I think they were, wait, what do you mean? I think they're getting it right. Like that's what posse's were, right? Like the old west sort of like. I guess they're saying they're named after gunslinging peacekeepers, but they are not. They are not peacekeepers. So yeah, I don't know. No, of course not. But they are named after them. Like that's where they got the name from. Yeah, yeah. No, I guess so. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, by 1988, 1989, a lot of them are just starting to get busted and broken up. 1988 is when the shower posse gets indicted and brought down. Though Jim Brown and Vivian Blake, they flee to Jamaica and were untouchable at that time as the Dons. Things did start to calm down with the posses in the States by then. And in regards to all the crazy violence, there's a New Jersey law enforcement paper. It says, quote, by the end of 1989, entrepreneurial considerations had become more important than political allegiances and running the posses.

As members of the old guard or the posse leadership are either killed or jailed, younger members, some of them second-generation immigrants less attuned to the gang warfare and politics of Kingston, are taking over. The emphasis now is on practical concerns such as who is able to supply the drugs and at what price. So they focus more...

More on the money and less on the murdering. And these guys too, one of the things you pick up on from looking into them is that they actually spent a lot of time killing each other for ripping each other off and also just other Jamaicans they preyed on. And what happens is there's no code of silence really. And because there was such animosity, many end up testifying against each other.

But, yeah, you know, we're going a little hard on the quotes here. But the thing is, I'm lazy and I had a lot of work to do. So I just kind of just juggling so many jobs. So, I mean, you know, what are you going to do?

Also, by 1988, people are looking into the posse's connections to the powerful politicians in Jamaica. Siaga's name is brought up in a congressional committee looking at Caribbean drug trafficking. And Caribbean? Caribbean? How do you even say that? I would say Caribbean, but you guys say Caribbean, right? I don't know. I'll say Caribbean. Yeah, Caribbean. Another thing that happens around then is that law enforcement agencies, even high-level politicians in the U.S., they're starting to look into the posse connections to the powerful politicians in Jamaica.

Seaga's name is brought up in a congressional committee looking at Caribbean drug trafficking. And also that year, a warrant is issued for Blake's arrest in Miami, but he's already in Jamaica where Jim Brown is holed up and they both escaped prosecution for all their massacres at this point. But what else happens in 1988, 1989?

Michael Manley wins the election, and he's actually – I think he becomes a capitalist now before he was a socialist. He does away with the whole socialism thing. But Seaga, his competitor who was the protector and benefactor of Jim Brown and Vivian Blake, he's out.

So the pressure is also building on Jamaica to do something, right? There's widespread pressure on the Jamaican community in the U.S. who are collectively being targeted because of the posses, lots of complaints about civil rights abuses, and it doesn't help that in 1989, the New York Post runs a big story talking about how the Jamaican posses got the entire U.S. hooked on crack. But also, the U.S. federal government

Everything, all the law enforcement agencies, they're applying pressure on Manley to get Jim Brown X-rayed to face murder and trafficking charges in the US. But Manley, he's reluctant. Brown is too powerful as the Don of Tivoli. And even though like, you know, he is not, Manley is not, and Brown are not part of the same party. They're competitors, but it's still a big deal to go after someone who has that much weight.

But he does make an initial attempt and says guns in her book, quote, In July 1990, the Kingston police tried to arrest him with a force of 80 men. They were caught in a gun battle that killed four policemen. The word on the street in Kingston was that the Americans roped in Jim Brown. The Tivolites would go over to Montego Bay and start killing tourists. Jesus Christ. This is a full on war at this point. Also, I like Tivolites, but yeah.

This is nuts. So Lester Jim Brown Coke eventually does finally get arrested then and he's held for two years. And then of course we have the cold open for the episode where he's mysteriously burned to death in his jail cell while he's awaiting exorcism to the US that was supposed to happen literally I think the day afterwards. He had threatened to air out the shower posse, big names if he was exorcized

as a way of kind of threatening Siaga or Manly, whatever, not to let him be brought to the U.S. And no one is actually ever arrested for his murder, which is just kind of wild. According to the Globe and Mail, his lawyer said after his death, quote, if you believe Jim Brown just burned to death by accident, you believe in the tooth fairy.

Like I said, there were theories that he killed himself and another that it was an escape attempt gone bad, but also like, I mean, come on. Yeah, so it's just Jim Brown and that Buddhist monk in Saigon or whatever. Nah. Yeah. I actually left out too, a month before that, one of his sons, Mark, who was supposed to be the next Don, he's killed by the PMP, which leads to chaos in Kingston. The shower posse rampage through a PMP neighborhood. They kill 20 people and the funeral is held three weeks later. 20,000 people attend and so does Yaga. Blake...

Oh, fuck. I never figured out how to say dudus. Is it dudus? That's what I was wondering. It's dudus if it's like Dudley, but then it's dudus. I think it's dudus because it's like...

It's like a nickname. Dudders. Dudders, like Dudley. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dudders. I'm going to say Dudders. Blake ends up taking over the shower posse for a bit, along with Christopher Coke, who is another one of Lester Coke's sons, who becomes quite infamous himself, but we'll get to that. Blake's eventually extradited to the US, where he serves eight years of a 28-year sentence, which...

I mean, I don't even understand that. And is released back to Jamaica where he dies in his early 50s of heart problems. Christopher, though, he becomes his own legend. Says the book The Dead Yard, quote, the power wielded by Koch in Tivoli Gardens had evolved in the absence of proper government. Without state provision, Koch alone had prevailed upon to settle local disputes, ensure adequate schooling, and create employment. In short, he provided services that the Jamaican government did not.

And he was not like his father or Blake. He was 100% about business. He didn't get violent unless he had to. Says Frank Owen, writing on a sub stack, compared to his father, Christopher Koch was an educated man. He attended Arden High School, one of Kingston's top private schools, where he was sent by one teacher to be a model student. Slight of build and soft-spoken, he was a math whiz and stayed out of trouble during his time there. Neither teachers nor students knew his father was the infamous Tivoli Gardens Don Dada.

It was during this period that he adopted the nickname Dudus because he wore a shirt so much the one sported by Jamaican diplomat Dudley Thompson. It's the kind of guy who avoids a spotlight, turns down interviews, wasn't flashy, and he tries to behave like a legitimate businessman. He does go a little crazy in 1994 when Ziggy Marley, one of Bob's sons,

is building a recording studio in the Rima neighborhood, and Koch doesn't get the construction contract. So his shooters attack the Rima neighborhood. They kill like 15 people, which again is eerie if you remember both his father's attack on Rima in the 80s and that his dad was involved in the shooting of Bob Marley. Seaga, who wasn't prime minister then but still represented West Kingston in parliament, he was pissed and he gave the police a list of 13 men to arrest.

But they just, they couldn't touch Coke. He was already too powerful. This guy is like, this guy is supposed to be the kind of buttoned up business guy, but he did, oh, he did do a cheeky little massacre. Just the one cheeky massacre. Yeah. I mean, it sounds, it sounds funny when you, when you say like, that sounds, yeah.

He did. Anyway, he kind of initiated peace in the neighborhood somewhat to unite some factions. He acts more political. He wasn't just about guns and drugs, right? He also gets involved in controlling construction and ports and all that. Says Owens again, it wasn't the Jamaican police that kicked out the rapists and muggers in the gardens. And it wasn't the Jamaican government that fed the hungry, paid for medical bills, or brought school uniforms for local kids. And if Dutt has achieved this by extorting business owners or selling drugs to rich Americans, few residents cared.

Koch had done what the state failed to do for decades, establish order. The only crimes that Dutis allowed were the ones he sanctioned. He was making more money from construction and his control of the docks in Newport West than he was from drugs and gun running. With the Jamaican Labour Party back in power, government larges filled the presidential clique's coffers.

In the early summer of 2009, Incomparable Enterprises, Koch's construction company, received three contracts worth 32 million from the Ministry of Water and Housing to repair buildings in Tovoli Gardens. Which again, that's a great name for a company run by a drug lord, right? Incomparable Enterprises?

If I didn't know that, I would investigate them solely based on the name if I was in law enforcement. I mean, Koch's name is a pretty good name as well. Oh yeah, that too. But yeah, I'm just going to keep going with the quotes because I'm just so tired of writing. So if you made it this far, I'm sure you won't mind. There's a big piece. I remember it years ago when it came out because it was really, really good. Mattathias Schwartz, he had a big expose for The New Yorker about the U.S. involvement in the raid that eventually brings down Christopher Koch.

He said, quote, Coke does not appear menacing. He is five feet four inches tall with a round baby face. But his dominion in Tivoli Gardens was absolute. His organization, known to residents as The System, had its own penal process, including the jail, magistrates, and executioners. Coke's code was simple. No robbing, no raping, no killing.

and is just as stringent. Teenage thieves had one hand broken. Rapists were beaten. Anyone foolish enough to persistently dissent was exiled or killed. Once, according to U.S. federal prosecutors, Koch ordered a man he believed had stolen drug proceeds to be tied down so he could kill him personally with a chainsaw. Koch's lawyers deny this.

Residents went to Coke for tuition, legal aid, business loans, food, and medicine. The rest of Kingston scrimped to afford Jamaica's electricity rates, as much as $1,200 annually, in a country where the gross national income per capita is about $7,500. Whereas in Tivoli, 99% of the electricity arrived free of charge. These guys make it big and they spread that money around to build loyalty, Lou Rice, a retired USDA officer said.

In 2009, the U.S. finally gives the extradition notice on Dutton for murder and drug trafficking. Jamaica's government refuses. Bruce Golden is the prime minister then, and he's a JLP man through and through, and Tivoli Gardens are his constituents. But the U.S. is applying pressure, and in 2010, Kingston starts gearing up for a war when it looks like Golden is just going to agree with it and go through with it.

In May of 2010, a state of emergency is issued as the garrisons are stockpiling weapons. Thousands of his supporters are on the streets. The police are killing people. Dutas is on the move avoiding the manhunt. There's a massive raid. The big operation raid is launched May 23rd, and there's just a heavy amount of violence over the next few days. Over 70 people are killed, mostly civilians, many executed. The actual fuck is going on here. This is nuts, even for this episode. Yeah, that's...

That's a big part of Matt's article that he goes into it in the New Yorker, which you guys should all read. There's also, I think the US used the drone during it, which was, I guess, revolutionary at the time, and they were not supposed to be doing that. So definitely, definitely read that.

Nearly a month later on June 22nd, Koch is still on the run, but he's caught in the car with a local reverend. He's dressed like a woman with a wig on and he's actually headed to the American embassy. He actually feared that he was going to be dealt with like his father was. So we turned down any appeal on extradition, figuring he's safer in the States. And he's on a plane to New York days later. And in 2012, he's sentenced to 23 years. And that's where we leave off.

Jamaica still has a massive gang problem. I think there was a state of emergency just declared a month ago. It also has one of the highest murder rates right now in the world. Yeah, man, I would still love to film a doc there at some point in my career. I got really close with Remastered, but then I had to fuck off for a different assignment. But yeah.

Yeah, it's a story, man. And this is a vicious one. But yeah, one of the ones I wanted to do for a long time. And definitely, I mean, read that book, Brief History of Seven Killings, which fictionalizes a lot of what we talked about both in the last episode and in this episode. It's really, really great. And yeah, I'm going to do, I think, a bonus episode on Charles Littleknot Miller, who

who was a member of the shower posse, turned witness against them, spoke about the CIA training him, ended up becoming a drug lord in St. Kitts and being sentenced to prison in the US. And we talked on the phone a bunch when I was working on that doc. But it's a weird one. So I'm going to save that, though, for the bonus episode. But yeah, patreon.com, Sesame World Podcast, or iTunes. And as always, we got... Oh, not as always, but we got merch up too. Oh, and shout out to Dale's tune as well. Oh, yeah. Dale, our audio producer, has a new...

he played drums on a new song called rich parents. I think it's the artist. So definitely check that out. Yeah. Sorry if this was a little, uh, a little out of this episode, man, those that to whatever it was fine. You guys liked it, right? Anyway, until next time.

Everyone you thought was cool just has red friends And everyone you thought was cool just has red friends, babe She said she's a painter, oh that's cool Is that why she's got a hot tub on the roof With the name to be swimming there too Look, I don't really care, I know that life is Please don't be so sad, we all know you're in some way When she says that Bono is good friends with her mom You can probably guess that there's something going on Everyone you thought was cool just has red friends

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Rich, rich parents. Rich, rich parents. Rich, rich parents.