The Rise of Jamaica's Warring Gangs & Bob Marley's Attempted Assassination
50:10 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat that's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

Ryan Reynolds here from Intmobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited premium wireless. I'm going to get 30, 30, I'm going to get 30, I'm going to get 20, 20, 20, I'm going to get 20, 20, I'm going to get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month. So give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. April 22nd, 1978 in Kingston, Jamaica.

Bob Marley is on stage with his band, The Wailers, performing his hit song, Jammin', in front of tens of thousands at the One Love Peace Conference. There's two men on the stage with him, and they're the two most powerful men in Jamaica. Edward Siaga, the head of the Jamaica Labour Party, and Michael Manley, the head of the People's National Party. They've got an election coming up for prime minister of the country, one of the many in which they would run against each other.

But they're more than just simple politicians. Some would even call them warlords. And Jamaica is in the midst of a low-level political civil war fought by the powerful neighborhood kingpins the Jamaicans call dons. Those dons are all in attendance, too. And they've been fighting each other with maximum bloodshed on the orders of the two powerful politicians on stage with Bob as things in Jamaica's streets threaten to spiral out of control.

It's actually pretty surprising that Bob is here at all in Jamaica performing. Less than two years earlier, men had run up in his house and shot him and a bunch of others. Rumors swirled about the reasons why, with lots of fingers pointing to Siaga's JLP shooters, potentially at the encouragement of the CIA. There's also talk of horse racing bets gone bad and other shady intrigue. Either way, Bob wasn't having it, and Jamaica's most famous man left the island for London when he recovered.

But something important has brought him back. Some won, actually. Claudie Massa, the JLP's top shooter in Don, and a childhood friend of Bob's, had gone to London and told Bob about something changing in the streets of Kingston. Claudie had been locked up in jail with his main rival, the PNP Don, known as Bucky Marshall, when both started talking and realized the futility of the war they were fighting.

They talked about how tired they were of poor young black men killing poor young black men for politicians who just didn't seem to care that much. They bonded and decided to try to forge a truce in the streets of Kingston to stop all the violence and killing before things got worse. They wanted Bob to come back to help celebrate it, to usher it in, to show it was for real.

And to show it's for real, Bob, in front of all the Dons and tens of thousands Jamaicans, grabs the hands of Jamaica's two most powerful politicians slash warlords of sorts and class them together over his head. The crowd goes nuts. It's looking like things in Jamaica are about to change for the better. Or is it?

You see, Ciaga and Manley have other ideas. In fact, some of the equipment being used for the concert is even used to smuggle in guns for Ciaga's JLP shooters. One of those shooters is Jim Brown, who is just below Claudie of the top-ranking Dons. He'll soon become one of the island's most prolific killers and most powerful Dons ever, as well as the founder of the infamous shower posse. And he's not going to let something like a peace treaty stop him from getting what he wants.

In fact, the election of 1980 that's coming up is going to end up being the bloodiest one in Jamaica's history at that point, with hundreds dying as the country threatens to launch into a full-fledged civil war. This is The Underworld Podcast. This is great. I don't even understand your joke already. This is perfect. Hello, this is The Underworld Podcast, the show where two journalists who have covered crime in just

danger all around the world, take you on a journey through fascinating stories of organized crime from around the globe. I'm one of your hosts, Danny Gold. I am here with Sean Williams, who I've had to warn repeatedly to stop making bad jokes in a Jamaican accent during the course of recording this episode. Otherwise, we're going to get canceled. I swear to God, if this dude says Yaman one more time, like it's over. Look, all I'm saying is how does Bob Marley like his donuts? Oh God, I don't even know this one. How does he like his donuts? Oh, come on, man.

With jamming. That's terrible. That is just awful. There we go. I'm going to check the metrics for this episode and we're just going to see it go from like 100% listening to like 15% after that joke. It's just going down. As always, we put up interviews and bonus mini episodes for subscribers, which you can do on iTunes or patreon.com slash the underworld podcast to help us get paid, which we're going to need when Sean's just awful jokes and Jamaican accents get us canceled.

But yeah, I think we also, do we have merch coming up too? Yeah, we've got merch coming up any second now. Actually, as we're recording this, it's coming up, but I think it's going to be up now. So I got, it's so hard to say. I hate it. Yeah. I hate doing anything online. It's just not what I'm good at. I'm, I'm the jokes guy. We'll figure, we'll,

We'll figure it out. I also wanted to say, actually, like, let's just front foot a mistake I made in the last show, because I did say in the Aussie episode that that bikey, like, sort of kingpin Mark Buddle was in exile in Turkish Cyprus, but actually...

One of our eagle-eyed or eagle-eared listeners got in touch on the IG to tell us that actually Mark Buddle was picked up in a sting in August last year. So he is currently behind bars. Although, as we learned from that show, that doesn't really mean that he's going to stop doing what he does best, selling tons and tons of drugs. Anyway, yeah, that's a little mistake that I made on our show. Yeah, we correct our mistakes here. Or Sean does. I actually don't make them. But, uh...

Yeah, bonuses. I actually have a good one. We have a good one going up on the origin of Los Chapitos, Chapo's sons who were just in the news for all that chaos in Mexico. I actually tell a story too about this. Sean knows this story about when I had the opportunity to potentially embed at the compound of a decently high level Sicario and his soldiers in Sonora. Oh, yeah. And it got

unfortunately canceled when like three days before our flight, he got picked up by the federales. So, you know, the best laid plans of mice and men stand no chance when the federales get involved. Anyway, that is a bonus. Sign up to do that. This episode, I wanted to do it forever. I actually did a ton of development production for a documentary that aired on Netflix about the shooting of Bob Marley called Who Shot the Sheriff?

It's part of the remastered series I worked on. It's a really good doc. So definitely tune into that if you have a chance. I think it was nominated for an Emmy. Unfortunately, I only did the pre-pro and the story development because I had another gig lined up. Otherwise, I would have gone down to Jamaica with the fantastic producer, Bill Wheeler, who...

Sean News, and who made a great documentary. Oh, yeah. And a huge mistake on my part, but I did a ton of research on it. Even spoke to the infamous Charles Little Nut Miller a lot on the phone, who I think is currently in Leavenworth Prison. But I could be wrong, but I'll talk about him more in the follow-up episode about how the posses took America by storm.

Pre-pro, man. You telly people. Yeah. Did Charlie Little Nut Miller get the nickname the way I thought he got it? I don't know, but he was in the midst of a mental breakdown while we were talking. It was actually really sad. But we'll save that story for the next episode. But yeah, that research is also where I read the book that is the foundation for this episode. It's Laurie Gunt's Born Fee Dead, which is the remarkable story of a woman who, you

You know, I think she was like a Harvard academic or something, but really got in the streets of Jamaica like no one else. It's unbelievable. Amazing book. And there's also this book, The Dead Yard, which is a bit more academic-y, but it's definitely a great book to read and definitely watch that doc. And then there's Marlon James, A Brief History of Sailing Killings, which fictionalizes parts of the story I'm about to tell, but it really is just a fantastic novel.

Yeah, I mean, when you said you were going to do a Jamaica episode, my ears pricked up, obviously. So if I don't get a cricket reference into this show, I'm going to be pretty upset. But yeah, let's see how it goes. I'm sure you'll find a way. But we're going to start with a quote from Born Free Dead. This story begins 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 strong slums.

So what that means is that the gangs, essentially in Jamaica at this time, belong to one political party or the other. And for that party, they turned out all the voters in their territory and tried to shut down the voters in the other territory by any means necessary.

Each gang was then rewarded by their political party that they banged out for with resources like new housing developments, jobs, public works, all that sort of stuff. And what it also meant was that as a gang leader, if your political party is in office or wins the election, you're straight. I mean, you're good. But if your political party loses, not so good.

But we'll get to that origin story and everything that goes with it shortly. Jamaica is, of course, an island in the Caribbean that was first conquered by the Spanish who killed off nearly all the indigenous people and brought in African slaves to work and then taken by the British who turned it into a slave colony in the 1600s, 1700s, that time period. And it was a pretty brutal one at that. I'm talking like...

really horrific conditions, even for slavery. Sugar was the big export harvested by slaves on plantations. And Jamaica at one point was the crown jewel of Britain's slave empire. Sugar was immensely profitable in the 18th century.

Jamaica also has this history of slave rebellions, of pirates using it as a hideaway, marauders, bandits that took up in the mountains. The Brits freed their slaves in the mid-1800s and replaced them with indentured servants from India and China. But of course, it was still a colony until Jamaica got independence in 1962. Yeah, and there's a really... I was listening to a BBC podcast recently, actually, and there's this really outrageous moment in the 1780s in Jamaica where

called the Zong Massacre and that's where British slave traders killed over 100 Africans bound for Jamaica and then just kind of tried to claim their lives back as chattel on the insurance as if they were objects and it was apparently a major event in the British slave trade abolition. I mean I'm just going to say that if you're going to look up the British monarchy and the empire there's probably more useful things to be looking up than which face cream Prince Harry puts on his frostbitten dick but yeah.

Nobody cares about that. But anyway, in the lead up to independence, there are two Jamaican leaders who are rising up. The first is Norman Manley, and he is the father of Michael Manley, who's the politician mentioned in the cold open.

He's an Oxford-educated lawyer, Rhodes Scholar, British Army vet, but he founded the People's National Party in 1938 as Jamaica was in the midst of a worker rebellion, a labor movement that had rose up as workers were just getting stiffed as sugar prices had plummeted during the Depression.

Around the same time, his first cousin, Alexander Bustamante, was rising up as a powerful speaker. He'd worked crap jobs all over the Caribbean, had also been what Gunz calls a, quote, ghetto moneylender. He was super charismatic, fiery, but like kind of shady and not exactly honest.

He was calling for blood in the streets and getting a lot of support from the poor and the workers, but he eventually gets jailed. And when he gets out in 1942, he calms down a bit with the violent rhetoric and launches the Jamaican Labor Party, which despite its name, is actually conservative and center-right, whereas Manley's PNP is left-wing or democratic socialist. Elections are held in 1944, and the JLP and Bustamante, they win everything.

handily, they would go on to keep trading off with the PNP from election to election for decades and decades. Yeah, it's worth mentioning here as a little aside as we're in that kind of...

time that Jamaica supplied many, many thousands of men to the British war effort as well. A lot of them in the Navy, as you might expect. And I'm not going to get into what happened next, but if you want to know more about Britain now, and then just type the word Windrush into Google, it might surprise you. Really interesting history there too. Sean, stop trying to make people care about England. Nobody cares. You've done bad things. We know horrible things, but we just don't care. It's not my fault. It's irrelevant. It's the Crown's fault. It's an irrelevant country.

Meanwhile, as each party is forming, they each have their own labor unions that align with them, and they fight violently for control. Each side has their leg breakers and thugs, one's got the docs, one's got the field workers, and so on and so on. Gunn sees this as a real origin story of some of the gangs, at least the building blocks.

Meanwhile, as independence is happening, you've also got little street gangs forming on the corners in the poor neighborhoods. Knife men, they're called, but very few guns. And you've also got plenty of migrants rushing in from the rural areas into the cities, which

where they think they're going to find work, but instead, of course, it's grimy slums and poverty and little opportunity and desperation. And we've seen this before, right? We kind of saw, I think in the Murder, Inc. episode, we talked about how the mafias in the 20s and 30s and 40s got involved with the labor unions and they had their own lightbreakers. But then in plenty of other countries,

This sort of influx when people are flocking to the cities, it's unfortunately usually going to lead to gangs and violence and slums and things like this. And I was going to throw the U.S. there as well, but it's more like...

I guess it didn't really happen like that exactly. It wasn't like migrants coming from rural areas, even though there was that, and it did lead to some crime increases because of poverty. But you had a lot of immigrant communities coming from around the world that arrive here expecting work and instead find crummy situations at first, leading to gangs and slums and all that. And that applies to everyone, right? That's not a specific group or country or ethnicity. I think we've literally shown through all the episodes that we've done, especially the New York ones, that it's just like,

Every wave of immigration, you know, the overwhelming majority of people contribute a ton to society, but you do have those small influxes of crime when people are, you know, kind of locked into poverty and hopelessness. But,

Here's how Owen Grillo, who we just interviewed, and we've interviewed him a bunch, and someone we use a lot on the podcast is great. He describes it like this, quote, when Jamaica gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1962, the nation's politicians inherited a country with vast chasms between the wealthy, often descended from plantation owners, and poor, mostly descended from slaves. Many of the poor flocked to the growing urban ghettos, especially in Kingston, which often lacked basic sanitation and paved streets.

Area leaders or strongmen emerged in these ghettos, becoming known as dons in the 1970s. The two major political parties, the Jamaica Labor Party and the People's National Party, both financed these dons to deliver votes for them in return for money and development projects. The dons' turfs became known as garrisons because of the way they were defended like forts with many blockaded entrances.

Also, one thing to add about Jamaica, too, is it's only 3 million people. And it's kind of shocking, like the influence that it's had. I don't think people realize, you know, how influential Jamaica is on culture in general for such a small country between, you know, music, whether it's reggae and rap and dancehall and punk, ska, but also style, slang, everything. It just has a massive, massive global influence.

Yeah, like the two-tone ska punk movements in London, they were all like Jamaica infused. Also, shout out to Jerk Food. Absolutely amazing stuff. And I kind of want to take you back for a second because I don't really get why everybody on this fertile tropical island is living in these incredibly cramped ghettos. Is that a hangover from the slave trading days or the British Empire? When I think in Jamaica, I'm thinking...

grass huts, sweeping fields, beaches. Am I just an idiot? Actually, don't answer that. Yeah, I mean, you're just like a racist, dumb idiot. Cool. Well, maybe we'll get some money for the pod then. No, well, as it's described, people, the economy's in turmoil.

The land down under has never been easier to reach. United Airlines has more flights between the U.S. and Australia than any other U.S. airline, so you can fly nonstop to destinations like Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Explore dazzling cities, savor the very best of Aussie cuisine, and get up close and personal with the wildlife. Who doesn't want to hold a koala? Go to united.com slash Australia to book your adventure.

The rural sort of situations are often, you know, it's not trad life, right? It's also very tough. It's usually very tough to live in a rural society on subsistence farming, and there are very few opportunities there. So people flock to cities. I mean, we see this all over the world, right? People flock to cities for opportunity for jobs, and a lot of the times, it's a really tough growing process.

and a lot of the jobs aren't there, the communities get crowded, shanty towns, slums form as people can't get work, and you just have a lot of really poor people in a tight environment, and the normal vices creep up, same with crime.

desperation, all that sort of stuff. That's essentially what it leads to. And that's not, you know, that's not unique to Jamaica at all. That's not unique even to the developing world. We've seen that in countries like the US, like the UK, all that sort of stuff. It's not, it's not new. It's, it's, it happens. It's a pretty, pretty, you know, not new, unique thing at all. But yeah,

The gangs. You can't talk about the emergence of the gangs without talking about Edward Siaga, the other prime minister on stage with Bob Marley, battling it out with Manly's son for the prime ministership in the 70s, 80s, and even early 90s, I think. He comes from a Syrian-Lemonese family from Kingston, but is born in Boston, goes to Harvard, and goes back to Jamaica in 1954.

Even though later he has this rep as this conservative right-wing politician, also kind of elite, he was actually pretty down to the level in Jamaica in some ways. He was super involved in the music scene early on, helping put reggae on the map, and he was down with the Pocomania Church, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which is sort of like this mix of

African folklore, religious stuff. I guess you maybe could compare it to voodoo when it comes to Haiti and all that. He was super, super involved in it, researching anthropology, you know, that aspect. And there was a lot of respect for him there in the church, which was relatively popular.

The story goes, he tried to join the PNP, but Manly just didn't like him, while his cousin, Alexander Bustamante, saw something he liked and brought him on board into the JLP. In 1962, when independence happens, he wins the parliamentary seat for West Kingston. And in 1966, he uses his political power to clear out the relatively infamous shantytown full of PNP supporters and Rostas, who were looked down on, called the Back of the Wall Slum.

He then builds housing, calling it Tivoli Gardens, which I think I might be mispronouncing, but we're going with the, it's Copenhagen, right? Like that's how they pronounce it? Tivoli? It's like the world's oldest fairground or some shit. I should really look this stuff up before we start recording. Anyway, he awards it all to the JLP supporters. That neighborhood, the gardens, right?

It's going to become infamous as the place where the baddest dons and drug lords come from, and one of, if not the most powerful garrison, which is what Jamaicans, like we said before, call these neighborhoods that are essentially fiefdoms for the dons. The PNP has their own politician challenging him, Dudley Thompson, and he carves out his own followers in West Kingston. And Siaga and this guy, they get the neighborhood gunmen to fight for them, followers versus followers.

These are the ancestors of the gunmen, the gangs that are going to wreak havoc across Kingston. And they start off doing so at the behest of these local politicians fighting for control. One of Siaga's young shooters at the start is the infamous Claudio Massa. This does actually kind of remind me of your Trinidad and Tobago show, if I'm not wrong. It was quite a while ago. Like right off the bat of independence, all this political violence on a crazy level, right? Is that a similar kind of thing? What?

Not exactly. I mean, Trinidad was actually, it's following the same pattern with politicians and public works and all that. But Trinidad was relatively, had a very low murder rate for a while. And then we had that attempted Islamic overthrow that I talked about. And then the gangs really don't start heating up until I'd say like the late 2000s, early 2010s.

Because that's when they really get into time with politics. And now it's a big thing, but before then, you didn't see the level of violence that Jamaica had in the 60s and 70s. Says Gunst, quote, "...in many ways, the politician and their gunmen took over where the slave masters and their overseers left. The practice of intimidation was a logical outgrowth of the brutal intimacy that had always prevailed between the powerful and the powerless."

Interestingly, I found a paper called Guns, Gangs, and Garrisons by Kevin Emmons, and he says the origins really lie with Ciaga's predecessor in the JLP, Alexander Bustamante. Quote,

So yeah, it's handing out jobs to

to the gunmen who you control and bring out your supporters and stifle your opponents. And now other gangs around that time are starting to spring up, aligned with politicians, with names like Tel Aviv, Phoenix, the Vikings, the Spanglers, and they're all aligned to parties, even individual politicians. It's a fight for votes, for supporters, for resources, then dispersed by the government. I mean, the Spanglers are winning that name contest hand down. I think it could be a pretty decent product, like a mix between...

Wranglers and Spanx? I don't know. Would it work? They get, I would not insult them if I were you. They get pretty vicious. I mean, they get big in the States too. That's the posse thing, but we'll get into that, like I said, in a follow-up episode. This is from Edmonds again, quote, following the example of the gardens, more and more garrisons were formed through the construction of housing projects set up by the ruling party and populated with its supporters, with all political opposition chased out at gunpoint.

Top-ranking gang leaders who controlled entry and exit to the garrison communities developed special relationships with the political leadership related to the different garrison constituencies, often members of parliament. Top gang leaders worked as conduits, connecting the party faithful in the local community to jobs, housing, visas, and cash. The primary condition underlying the continuation of these relationships was

was the deliverance of votes at election time. And it was not uncommon for garrison communities, such as the gardens, to deliver 100% or more of the vote to the aligned political party. So yeah, I mean, you guys get it by now. And in return for that, these guys, these dons, the gunmen, they become untouchable.

That's how you get them. That's how they become the dons. They're the providers for their community, worshipped in a way, with an army of young gunmen who are in with the politicians. So they're not going to get locked up anytime soon.

One thing too I should explain is the origin of posses and why so many Jamaican gangsters are named after cowboys and bandits. Spaghetti westerns were huge in the cinemas in Jamaica during this era. I'm talking like massive. And Gunn's rights to this love affair with the shooters and the bandits, some of it from the early stories in Jamaican history of slave rebellions, but also Robin Hood types in the 1920s and 1930s who robbed from the rich, you know, the plantation owners, gave to the poor and hid in the mountains.

Okay, so we have politicians and gangs starting to form in alignment with each other in the late 1960s, and the guns are going to start to come in, just creep in little by little. And is this all for domestic political control at this time, or are there drug markets or transshipment points these guys are fighting over? I mean, Jamaica's pretty close to the States, right? Yeah.

So the drugs won't start until at least like the late 1970s, early 1980s, really playing a role. And that's going to change everything. So good question. But we'll get to that, I think, later towards the end of the episode. That's when things really, really change, when it becomes a transshipment point, especially for cocaine. Yeah.

In 1966, the JLP Phoenix, that's one gang, and the PNP Vikings fight a gang war, one of the first heavy ones. And just to reiterate, JLP is Siaga, center-right party. PNP is manly, left-wing, Democratic Socialist Party. So the gangs, they fight each other. They fight the police. Eventually, sometimes they fight the army. They're shooting up dance halls, movie theaters, bars. Crackdowns start, but a lot of the gangsters, again, they're protected by their politicians.

Also, another reason to want to really get out the vote or stop the vote in other places, depending on which political party is in power, the police can go after politically affiliated gangs or leave others alone. And of course, like we said, similar to the Trinidad episode I did way in the beginning, or if you've seen my documentary that, in Trinidad, on the current day gangs and guns, the gang leaders emerge as these community leaders who dole out the resources that are doled out by their political godfathers. So, a lot of doling happening. A lot of doling.

Building and housing come up, construction contracts get tangled up, jobs, city jobs, all that. And soon you have these industries that are almost completely entangled with crime and political corruption.

Edward Seaga and Dudley Thompson, the rivals in West Kingston, they're seen as the two men that usher in this new era. And then in 1972, for the first time since Jamaica wins independence, the PNP wins the prime minister's office with none other than Michael Manley, who's the son of the founder of the party, Norman Manley. And that is going to upset the balance of power because prior to this, it was the JLP winning all the time. Now the PNP garrisons and gangsters, they're going to be on the gravy chain.

And the gangs just keep warring. The Gardens, which Claudie controls, he's the don of, it wars with the Red Welch Concrete Jungle Gang, headed by Tony Welch, whose patron was the housing minister, and it would work like the housing minister, he needs a tenement cleared. So he gets Tony and his soldiers to firebomb it. Then when the housing minister has jobs to give out, he gives them to Tony, and Tony gives them out to the people. So, you know, tit for tat, favors for favors, some pretty violent shit these guys were doing for these jobs.

In 1974, Manley and the PNP declare themselves socialists just as Seaga takes power in the JLP.

And this is going to have a huge ripple effect because what's Jamaica close to? Cuba, of course. And this is in the midst of a cold war and all the dirtiness that goes with it, which we'll get to. Manley visits Castro in 1975. And despite his assurances that he's not a communist, some people start getting scared, including the U.S. government, that Jamaica is going to be the next domino to fall.

There's rumors of anti-Castro Cubans and pro-Castro Cubans just operating on the island as well. And the guns are flowing in. And there's a lot of CIA rumors, too, which are going to be huge. Because remember, Rasta don't work for no CIA. No. Rasta worked for a racist, murderous dictator in Ethiopia. Hot take alert. God, Sean, stop. You know, you're getting off topic here. I'm just saying, in case people don't know, Rastafari is the name of Haile Selassie. So he's not a nice guy. That's true.

They have a, there's a Rastafari community in, what's it called? Shoshimani in Ethiopia. I spent time in Ethiopia. I never made it there and I always wanted to go. No, I know. I really want to go. It sounds pretty idyllic. Yeah. The PMP gangsters, they start seeing themselves as Cuban revolutionaries of sorts. And the JLP shooters, they're like these, you know, the stronghold of anti-communism. But the reality is they're mostly just opportunists, right? They just have their politician warlords choosing sides and directing them.

So the early and mid-70s, you have the post-colonial world developing. The world is on fire. The Cold War is raging. Jamaicans are trying to come to grips with their history as the gangs get stronger. You also have the emergence of Rastafarianism and Bob Marley and reggae as this powerful force. And Jamaica is also super combustible because you have this mixture of race and class. You have American slavery racism mixed with British classicism, and it's just very complex history.

in this poor, barely born country. And then you throw in the Cold War elements, the gangs, the guns, the starting off as a drug transshipment point, and it's gonna get bad.

The violence is kicking off just as it gains independence, and it only starts to get worse. And at the time, the Jamaican economy is reeling. There's the oil shock. The IMF is devaluing the currency and a bunch of other stuff like I'm not going to go into explaining when it comes to economics. If you want econ explanations, go listen to like Odd Lots or something. We're here to talk about gangs and cocaine. Yeah, that's possibly another T-shirt slogan right there. But the picture you're painting of Jamaica, I mean, stuck between...

the Reds and the US and weed and coke and gangs and guns and plantation politics. I mean, this place was like born to fail from the off. I mean, the second it got independent. Yeah, it's rough, man. Like I said, there's a lot of outside factors that contribute to the chaos that's there. And I think there's been recent, in the past couple of months, right, there's been a lot of stuff with the gangs there and states of emergency and things of that nature. It's just, yeah, like you said, born to fail in a way.

Manly and Siaga, they're arming their sides at this point. A lot of the guns are coming from the US. Meanwhile, Manly is kind of cozying up to Fidel a bit, and the US is, of course, now siding with the anti-communist side, the more conservative side of Edward Siaga. And maybe it's just me and this is a bad analysis,

But neither side here seems even that extreme politically. Manly constantly points out that he's not a communist, that even though him and Fidel get along, Fidel looks at him like he's just some liberal. Now I'm just thinking that Fidel would have been great at posting. Can you imagine him? Yeah, he would have been solid. And Siaga isn't even that extreme either. He's more center-right when it comes down to it. Obviously, one's left, one's right.

left, one's right, but they both seem relatively measured in their views that I think these situations were a lot more extreme in other places. Like obviously they're both, they both have a lot of violence under their belts, especially Siaga, but they weren't like, you know, he wasn't like an extreme fascist or anything like that. You know what I'm saying?

So the PNP and JLP, they're fighting over votes and their affiliated gangs are fighting in the streets. And the country is this back and forth of violence. Manley wins again in 1976. And then Philip Adjie, fuck, I need to look up these pronunciations. Philip Adjie shows up.

He is the CIA agent gone rogue, and he makes all these accusations of CIA agents all over the island that are running ops against Manley and the PNP for the JLP in Siaga. There's tons of rumors about destabilization plots and the shooters are running wild, especially Siaga's men. Manley is fearing more violence, so he declares a state of emergency and decides he's going to imprison and lock up

600 people, shooters, gang leaders, politicians. The economy is collapsing and the turmoil is high, right? It's just a tumultuous place to be. There's accusations of the CIA training JLP soldiers, which eventually, I mean, Charles Little, not Miller, is one of the main guys who do this. They testify to in court. The Cubans are supposed to be training PMP soldiers. And according to the book, The Dead Yard, a PMP offshoot actually sends some Jamaican supporters to Cuba for training.

supposedly for construction, but they also get kind of like low level, you know, fighting tactics. But the PNP mainstream disavows the group. There's also allegations that the PNP government tried to get guns from Cuba and Castro allegedly sent a few crates. But according to Trevor Phillips, who was at one point the chairman of the Peace Council, Castro had a dim view of Jamaicans as revolutionary material. And like I mentioned earlier on, Siago was getting guns shipped in from the U.S. too.

And then Bob Marley is gunned down in his own house. Bob, you know, he's a huge star by then. He is a Rastafari. He sings and speaks out against oppression. But he never wanted to get too political when it came down to the parties. Everyone clamored for his support, but he knew it was too dangerous.

He has this famous mansion on 56 Hope Street where it's this idyllic, peaceful, neutral area. Everyone went there, the dons, the politicians, Rastafarians, musicians from all over the world. Sometimes it was also rumored that some of the gangsters tried to extort Bob and shake him down.

Anyway, Bob agrees to do this earlier peace concert, not the one I opened with, to unify the country. Right afterward, the PNP announces elections and kind of makes it seem like Bob is doing the concert for them. And this is bad. He's getting death threats. The JLP is allegedly threatening him. And then one morning, early in the morning,

Early on, shooters run up in his house and shoot a bunch of people, including him. I mean, this is insane, right? He is a global superstar at this point. The most iconic Jamaican in the world, beloved by all. It's like Michael Jordan being shot in Chicago in the midst of his championship wings. You're like, I don't know. Drake being shot in Toronto, but actually way bigger than Drake being shot in Toronto. Who am I kidding?

Bob's a political icon. On the island, it goes crazy. Fingers are quickly pointed at the JLP, but there's something weird there, right? There were PNP men who had been acting as security, and they had disappeared that morning. There's a lot of talk of the CIA ordering it. There's also rumors about gambling debts, something involving a fixed horse race Bob got involved with that involved one of his close friends. Wait, so would the CIA want him dead because he's

ostensibly backing the party that they don't like? Is that the theory? I don't know. I guess the theory, he wasn't really backing them. I think the theory is more that like he was a voice against oppression. I don't think, I mean, there's never really been any real evidence to the CIA ordering it sort of thing.

Yeah. But Bob doesn't back down. Two days later, he performs in front of tens of thousands at the Smile Jamaica concert. Then he leaves the country for London for a few years, doesn't feel safe,

A lot of Jamaicans are feeling the same way and emigrating. Yeah. And then him and the Whalers record Exodus, right? At the Island Studio in Notting Hill, not far from where I'm sitting right now, actually. I remember thinking as a kid that he was even British. There were so many memorials to him all around London. I was a very small child at this time, but his presence in London is huge still now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, his presence around the world, I think, is huge. But yeah, he had that connection with London and spent a lot of time there. When was Exodus recorded? I actually have the book that I had to go through for that research period. I think they recorded it between 76 and 77. And they released it in 77. I think they might have recorded one or two songs in Jamaica and then recorded the majority of the album in London. Oh, after he died. Yeah.

But yeah, Manley wins in 1976, but the election is marred by gang political violence. The army and police are in the streets, but it gets so bad they abandon some neighborhoods. And in 1977, the JLP shooters are going nuts and it's just getting worse. The shooters, they're getting bigger and more violent. One interesting element,

When they would get a little too big for themselves, maybe seeming like they're out of control of the politicians or asserting their power over the politicians, the politicians would send the cops after them, like have them, their own guys is who I'm talking about, locked up, try to cool them off, show them who really wields the power.

But the thing that happens in jail is they're mingling with their enemies and finding out, you know, they have more in common with each other than they do with the high-level politicians. And they're getting tired of the violence of all the dead young men, all the shooting and killings. Just no way to live, bruv, you know? As Gunt says in Remastered, quote, "'Kingston was a checkerboard of war zones loyal to one party or the other.'"

Politicians needed gangsters to get out the vote, and the gangsters needed politicians for protection from the police and for money and for guns. So what happens when they don't need the politicians for money and guns? So think about how that's going to play out when we talked about the drug trench shipmanship and all that. Claudie Massa, Marley's boy from the opening, he'd been clashing with Siaga, accusing him of not giving a shit about Jamaica's poor. He gets jailed, and he starts bonding with the PMP's big shooter, Bucky Marshall.

The guys on this side, they're getting close with the guys on that side. This is the late 70s, and they're jailed together in 1977, I think. They're tiring of all the political bullshit. And at this point, too, these guys are cultural icons for Kingston, right? They really hold sway. Wow. I mean, is this episode going to have some kind of reggae kumbaya happy ending? Like all the gangsters passing around a joint laughing about the bad old days, that kind of thing? Or are you going to kill the last scrap of optimism I've held onto in this world?

Yeah, don't be, I think I kind of hinted at that pretty strongly. Don't be optimistic about how these things work out. In January 1978, there's also a huge incident that really tips the scales in favor of the gang members putting down their guns and really convinces them maybe the politicians don't give a shit. Rogue soldiers of the Jamaica Defense Force, allegedly PMP guys loyal to Manley,

They decide they're going to take out a JLP posse on the south side. Remember, the PNP is in power now. The military intelligence unit gets involved, led by a shady Cuban advisor known only as Montero. They basically become a death squad. And these rogue military guys, they set up a honey trap for a bunch of the JLP youth, pretending there are jobs for them in the army and they're going to get guns.

They pick up a dozen or so gang members. They drive them to an army firing range and they just massacre them. They just opened up with automatic weapons, machine guns, five die right away, five somehow survive. It's called the Green Bay Massacre.

Manly's responsibility is never established, and some people even end up blaming Siaga, even though the men who got gunned down were his supporters. - Oh, there we go, optimism snuffed. - Yeah, no, no optimism. Should point out too that the Jamaican police and military, they're basically their own gangs. They're quick to kill, and they very rarely face consequences.

Either way, this massacre has a profound effect. The gang members realize who really is in charge, how little their lives are worth, and truce talks start to really form. Peace stuff. Gang members go to each other's neighborhoods for parties, they drink, they smoke together, it's really picking up steam. Claudie and Bucky, the two of the biggest gangsters, they have their arms around each other at some points,

They want no more black youth with no jobs killing other poor black youth with no jobs. It's becoming a big thing. It's in the papers. The churches are getting involved, NGOs. And in the middle of it, Claudie gets Bob Marley to come back and perform at this massive record concert with Peter Tosh and other musicians, everyone else that I opened up with. And Bob takes Siaga and Manley's hands above his head. Peace, all that. But alas, it is not meant to be.

A central peace treaty forms, and it also keeps the police out of the ghettos, and it maintains briefly. The politicians don't want it to last.

The JLP and Siaga, they're pushing for a fight leading into the 1980 election. The PMP is digging in for the war. Dudley Thompson, that PMP minister who had first gotten the PMP gang started, he disavows the truce and disrespects the dead who got killed at the Green Bay Massacre. There's also the story of the JLP using the concert equipment brought in for the peace concert to smuggle in guns from the states.

And who ends up doing the dirty work? It's the notorious Jamaican police force who are infamous for their excessive use of force and extrajudicial killings. They start to kill off some of the top rankings, including Claudie, who wanted peace. He's killed in early 1979, and the hope for peace really dies with him. Because taking over for him is the infamous Lester Jim Brown Coke, who is now going to rule Tivoli Gardens and eventually the cocaine and crack shade in the eastern United States.

He calls himself Jim Brown after the NFL player who starred in the movie The Dirty Dozen, which was huge in Jamaica, and Brown is ruthless. He's brutal. He cares nothing for peace. And this new generation of gunmen is just as brutal as him. They've grown up surrounded by guns and violence and murder. Bucky Marshall actually flees to the U.S. and is soon gunned down in Brooklyn by a JLP shooter

By 1979, every one of the top-ranking dons involved in the truce is dead. I have a couple of questions, actually. Firstly, the Brits have gone, what, less than two decades, but do they not get involved in any of this crazy violence? Do they not come back and try and help out with army or anything like that? Because they've done that elsewhere. That's...

That's a good question. I actually don't know. I didn't see it talked about a lot. There might have been meetings or involvement, but they didn't come in with troops or anything like that. But I actually don't know the answer to that. Are Jamaican gangs still kind of big time in New York and along the eastern seaboard today?

I guess you're going to get into this in the second show, right? Yeah, I think there are still some. They're definitely not what they were like in the 80s, which is literally thousands of people were murdered and they ran the crack trade. And then they got cracked down on super, super heavy. But I think obviously there's Jamaicans still involved in gangs, but it's not like it was in the 80s, like not even close. We'll talk about that more, I think, in the next episode. There are still powerful traffickers in Jamaica right now, right? I mean, Jim Brown's son,

was the guy, there's a really good New York article about Matt Ataya Schwartz was involved. When they went into the gardens and had to take them, the military, and there were like dozens dead, and the US was involved, and there was drone usage, all this stuff. It's actually a really, really good article. We'll talk about that later on, or in the next episode. One thing also about Jim Browne

Bob Marley had told people he was there the night of his shooting or the morning of his shooting in 1976. He recognized his face, and it was always rumored to be the JLP to make Manley and his government look bad, but everyone knew Claudia was Bob's boy. So they went around him, and it was Jim Brown and his shooters involved. In the 1980 election in Jamaica,

it proves to be the most deadly yet. There's something like 900 murders, 500 more than the year before. Dance halls are shot up, even a politician is killed. There's incidents and shootouts all over with three, four, five, six bodies. The garrisons really take after their namesake. There's borderlines and vicious fights. Blocks become no man's lands. Young boys fire at each other with automatic rifles in the streets. It's basically a low-level civil war.

Guns calls it tribal warfare and Brown establishes a rep as one of the most infamous gunmen. He killed so many people in the 1980 election. He was the undisputed champion bad man, the Don Dada as the Jamaicans say. And how would they say that in a Jamaican accent, Danny? I think the readers should know. Not, not.

Not going to happen. Seaga wins the election, and now the JLP are in power. But another monumental thing happens in 1980 as well, which is cocaine appears. Seaga's gunmen start using it, selling it, and it's coming in on the JLP peers. And Jamaica is going to turn to a massive trendshipping point. And what happens then is all these gangsters and dons, they're going to have another way to get power, to get money, without having to rely on politicians anymore.

They're going to be free, no longer bound to politics. And in another interesting phenomenon, a lot of these original gunmen, they're going to get fearful of their chances at survival on the island and fearful of all the police executions. So they're going to leave and end up in Miami, in DC, in Brooklyn and the Bronx while maintaining their contacts in Jamaica where all this cocaine is going to start flowing through. And that is going to lead to the emergence of the Jamaican posses in America, the crack wars and literally thousands of people who are killed.

We are going to save that for another episode for part two of the Jamaican Gangs. And that is not the kind of Jamaican history lesson you get from a BBC podcast anyway.

Yeah. I'm sure that, I mean, I think the BBC did good work while this was going on. I feel like there are some video clips of them like being in the streets as guns are, you know, like a dude in a blazer standing up talking and behind him, behind him is like two Jamaican teenagers firing guns at each other in like 1979. Uh, it's pretty wild. So there are some good, good reports. All right. Well, I'm off to smoke a bowl, listen to Exodus and watch the 94 Blackwash series on YouTube now. Uh, I've, I've been inspired by this.

You should be. But yeah, definitely get that book, The Born Free Dad. It's an amazing work of journalism. You guys should read it if you can. And definitely subscribe to us on patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. You know, I think we're also putting the audio on YouTube as well. So for our channel there, check that. And you can sign up directly through iTunes. One click.

for bonus stuff and all that. But yeah, until next time, thank you for listening and supporting us. We really appreciate it.