Whitey's Payback (6 page)

Elections had been violent through much of the country’s history, but it took a massive infusion of guns into Jamaican society in the 1970s to produce the current harrowing conditions. The many high-powered weapons that flooded into the country arrived at the same time the CIA, under its director George Bush, was widely reported to have taken an active interest in Jamaican affairs. The American rationale was unambiguous. Throughout the 1970s, the government had followed a leftist doctrine, courting Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas, among others. The opposition party was led by Edward Seaga, a friend of Ronald Reagan.

Destabilization of the Jamaican government paved the way for a Seaga victory. It also forced gunmen employed by the losing side to flee the island or face the victors’ retribution. One favored destination for the losers, of course, was the United States, and this tide of well-armed Jamaican refugees produced America’s initial wave of posse-related violence in the early and mid-1980s.

Along with grinding poverty and political violence, Jamaica’s ghetto dwellers must deal with abuse from the island’s security forces. The Council for Human Rights, located in tiny downtown offices near Kingston’s once-thriving port, devotes the majority of its time to investigations of police beatings and shootings. “On a slow day,” says the group’s head, Florizelle O’Connor, “we might get four reports of brutality. When the police are really having a good time, we get anywhere from fifteen to twenty per day.”

Outside O’Connor’s office, in a cramped, sweltering third-floor hallway, residents gather to file official complaints against the police. In the first two and a half months of 1991, the
Daily Gleaner
, Jamaica’s largest newspaper, reported 156 violent deaths, an average of two a day. Of those, nearly one quarter were killings by police.

A small, finely feature woman dressed in traditional African garb, O’Connor stands at the door of her office. “Here,” she says, nodding toward a group of sufferers who have lost all faith in the law, “this is our future.”

Through a maze of loosely connected one-room shanties, near the back of a bustling tenement yard, a twenty-eight-year-old bicycle repairman named Johnny extends his hand to a visitor. He wears his dreadlocks gathered in a ponytail that flows to the middle of his back. Johnny is not a rude boy, but he knows many young men who are. As a male in his late twenties who is not dead, in prison, or on the run, Johnny is viewed as something of a wise old man in Denham Town. He is at first hesitant to criticize life in Kingston in front of a stranger. Speaking in a heavy patois, he says of those who complain about their lot in life, “Dem people, dey get up inna mornin’ an’ see de sunshine an’ dey curse de sun. Next day, dey see de rain fall, an’ dey curse de rain.”

As Johnny speaks, a scruffy teenage boy walks into his one-room shed. A gauze bandage soaked with blood is stuck to his forehead, and his neck bears a fresh five-inch knife wound. Shaking his head in dismay, Johnny sends the kid away, presumably to have his wound tended to by a neighborhood bush doctor.

As Johnny explains it, the young man was at a Denham Town “moulood,” or yard party, the previous night. A gang of thugs associated with a rival political faction crashed the moulood, touching off a violent rumble. Surprisingly, no one was killed.

As he speaks, Johnny becomes more upset—and forthcoming—about living conditions in the ghetto. “De cost a livin’ is killin’ dese people,” he laments. That day, the price of basic foods such as milk, flour, and butter had gone up once again. Along with everything else, malnutrition was a major concern, especially with the “lickle pickneys,” or young children. “I’d like fe dem tings to change,” he says pleadingly, “an’ me know dem must change. Our youts is comin’ up, an’ we can’t continue livin’ like dis.”

Despite the violence, Johnny refuses to bad-mouth the rude boys, or “badmen,” as they are called in Kingston. If nothing else, the badmen are a force the establishment must reckon with, which gives them a certain stature in the ghetto. To some, they are seen as the inheritors of Afro-Jamaica’s rebellious history, which began with the maroons, the seventeenth-century runaway slaves who refused to submit to their colonial masters, and continued through many violent uprisings in the centuries that followed.

It is no accident that reggae became the music of the rude boys. “Fe years, Rasta been persecuted by society,” says Johnny. “Society chase de Rastamon, an’ dem chase de badmon. So de badmon an’ de Rastamon becomes friends. Just as Jesus Christ was walkin’ an’ him never choose a priest, an’ him never choose a high man. Him choose some fishermon, a lowly mon.”

The reverence with which Johnny and other ghetto dwellers view the island’s gunmen is based on the realities of life in the ghetto. Brutalized by the police and ignored by their government, the sufferers are sustained by their own mythology. They see the outlaw as an avenging angel, a latter-day Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the sufferers.

To illustrate this point, Johnny tells the story of Rhyging, the gangster/outlaw whose exploits have become ghetto folklore in Kingston. In 1948, Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin, a twenty-four-year-old burglar and gunman from a West Kingston ghetto, escaped from prison. Nicknamed Rhyging, patois for wild, angry, or foolhardy, he eluded a massive police dragnet with the help of sympathetic ghetto dwellers. Johnny takes obvious pleasure in recounting the tale, made famous in the Jimmy Cliff movie
The Harder They Come
. “Rhyging de
baddest
badmon,” he says, “but de people support him, fe him one a dem.”

The visitor asks Johnny about another violent tale, one that took place in Brooklyn, where a family of four lived in a tiny apartment. One night, gunmen entered the apartment and brutally murdered the residents. One of the victims was a pregnant woman. The gunmen, believed to be posse members exacting revenge for a drug deal gone bad, deliberately shot the woman in the belly, killing her unborn child.

Johnny has heard this story before. A few weeks earlier, it made headlines in Jamaica. “Dem posses,” he says, “Me hears dem de roughest, toughest. Killers!” He shakes his head, then adds in a firm voice, “But dem people carries wit’ dem de sufferin’ a de Jamaican people.”

To the Gullymen’s Vassell, organized gangsterism must have seemed like a natural career move. After spending many months shooting up rival campaign rallies and delivering votes with the barrel of a gun, he fled Jamaica after the 1980 elections. Upon his arrival in New York, all he had to do was adapt his skills to America’s criminal marketplace, where prospects for advancement were vastly superior to anything back home.

At five feet eight inches tall, with a scrawny ghetto physique, Vassell was not physically intimidating. Soft-spoken, with short, neatly coiffed hair, he had a broad, toothy smile that made him look years younger than he was. Because of his diminutive stature, he knew the value of surrounding himself with physically impressive strong-arm men.

In Brooklyn, Vassell made contact with a group of Jamaican killers called the 98th Street Men, a resident gang near Crown Heights. With this group of trained hit men, Vassell targeted a section in the neighborhood then controlled by a small group of Panamanian nationals. “The Panamanians themselves were no slouches when it came to violence,” says a New York detective formerly assigned to the Gullymen’s turf. “But the Jamaicans just shot them right off the block.”

Once he had established a base of operation, Vassell’s drug business followed a pattern similar to that of other posses across the United States. Guns and henchmen flowed easily back and forth between Jamaica and the States. Violence was used not as a last resort but as a calling card. The Gullymen staked their claim through drive-by shootings—the gangland equivalent of a leveraged buyout.

Despite his lack of formal education, “Brooklyn Barry,” as Vassell became known on the street, possessed an undeniable business acumen. By the late 1980s, his operation included some forty Gullymen who were reaping combined profits of more than $60,000 a day. Business was so good that in 1988, Vassell sent Paul Moore, his brother-in-law, to Texas to explore the possibility of expanding their operation to include the sale of crack. Two murders and many assaults later, the Gullymen were the largest crack dealers in Dallas.

To a bunch of young ruffians weaned in a Kingston ghetto and only recently arrived in America, it must have seemed like a dream. They pulled up in a sleek, new BMW in front of their headquarters on Schenectady Avenue, the Crown Heights Soccer & Domino Association, dressed “spree-style,” with gold jewelry on their fingers and around their necks.

One of the few Gullymen who refrained from indulging in opulent displays of wealth was Vassell himself, who preferred to explore other benefits of the trade. He would take his pick of the beautiful women gathered at the rude boys’ favorite Brooklyn dance halls and have them taken to his apartment. Apparently, his reputation was hard to resist. As of last December, Vassell is said to have fathered nineteen children from thirteen women, or “baby mothers,” as he prefers to call his ladies.

Having established himself as a prominent figure in criminal circles in America, Vassell found that his reputation was growing back home in Kingston. Like many posse leaders, during trips to Jamaica, he took money, clothes, and lavish trinkets to the sufferers, which he handed out in annual “treats,” or street festivals. Brooklyn Barry was welcomed in McGregor Gully as a renegade hero who had returned to help redistribute the world’s riches. Beauty pageants were held in which budding baby mothers were sponsored by Vassell and other members of his gang. For the adults, Vassell often took guns—“vote getters,” as he sometimes called them—that he had purchased in Florida and Texas, packed inside television sets, and shipped via air freight.

The reigns of the Gullymen might have lasted indefinitely were it not for their tendency toward unpredictable acts of violence, which, as their business became more profitable and more unwieldy, inevitably turned inward.

Among Vassell’s most visible lieutenants were Danny, Winston, and Fitzy Reid, three brothers from Kingston. Because the Reids had been with the government and the police department back in Jamaica, Vassell never completely trusted them, even though he valued their talent for mayhem. Fitzy was particularly brutal and had been used as the Gullymen’s favored hit man on numerous occasions.

In late 1989, Fitzy was arrested on drug- and gun-possession charges. Vassell refused to post bail. When Fitzy had to sell his car to raise the money, it ignited a smoldering resentment that led to a series of murders and attempted murders within the gang. In May 1990, after a night of dancing at a popular reggae dance hall in Brooklyn, Fitzy was trailed by two gunmen as he walked to his new Mercedes. Someone yelled, “Hey, Fitzy!” as he got behind the wheel. He looked up just in time to catch the barrage of gunfire from an M-16 assault rifle. The shots wreaked so much devastation on Fitzy’s body that initial reports of the murder stated that his head had been chopped off. Street talk held that Vassell had paid $25,000 for the hit.

In the wake of Fitzy’s death, a distraught Danny Reid, already a cooperating witness, found new inspiration to tell everything he knew to FBI Agent Robert Chacon and Detective Tom Bruno, members of a task force that had been investigating the Gullymen for months. Reid’s cooperation touched off a panic in Brooklyn posse circles, with dozens of rude boys tripping over one another to cut deals with the feds. “Generally, posse members are easy to turn,” says one agent involved in the investigation. “I guess they’re used to Jamaican law enforcement, where they might get shot at the drop of a hat. We give them a sandwich and Coke and talk to them in a nice voice and they act like puppies. They come right over and lick you.”

In Brooklyn, the excitement of a major organized crime bust is soon consumed by the daily travails of life in New York. At 1367 Sterling Place, formerly one of the hottest coke and heroin locations in New York, only the bullet holes in the lobby walls are a reminder of the building’s former status as a drug haven. “It’s quieter, but I’m not saying it’s any safer,” says a woman who lives on the ground floor. When the sun goes down, gunshots and sirens are still a common sound. Five blocks to the east, a group of Jamaicans known as the Jungle Posse is said to be expanding its operation, hoping to capitalize on the demise of the Gullymen.

Vassell is still at large. Some say he’s hiding in Kingston, while other reports suggest that he may be in Brixton, a densely populated Jamaican community in London. A profile on the television show
America’s Most Wanted
reported that he might be in Long Island or Brooklyn.

Despite the increased success in capturing and prosecuting individual posses, federal agents are baffled by their continued growth. The problem, it seems, lies far beyond the traditional domain of American law enforcement. “We have a sayin’, ” explains Johnny, chewing on a piece of roasted fish in Denham Town. “If a fire, mek it burn. If a blood, mek it run.” In other words, as long as Jamaica’s sufferers see themselves as victims, a parade of aspiring rude boys can be expected to follow the Gullymen.

In Kingston, young boys continue to prowl ghetto neighborhoods with such names as Concrete Jungle, Lizard Town, Dunkirk, and Beirut. With their fathers dead, in prison, or off fighting for their little piece of the American Dream, the youths’ tough, streetwise exteriors mask a burning desire to find someone who cares for them, who has an eye out for their interests. With no families and few role models, they look to the rude boys.

Last spring, the talk of Jamaica was twenty-five-year-old Nathanial “Natty” Morgan, the latest gangster to follow the legendary Rhyging. Wanted for the murder of seven people, Morgan escaped from jail and had been eluding the police for the past five months. In the meantime, he continued his life of crime, robbing from the rich and allegedly giving money away to people in his home community of West Kingston.

The closest the police came to capturing Morgan was when they fired at him one night from a considerable distance. He ran, leaving behind a shotgun and a Bible marked
OUTLAW NATTY MORGAN
. Inside the Bible, he had written:
I HAVE THE WILL TO LIVE AND NOT TO DIE, THOUGH I PREFER MY FREEDOM MORE THAN MY LIFE
.