The Dead Yard Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  by the same author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Preface to the U.S. Edition

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - (Black Man) in Hammersmith Palais

  Chapter 2 - Trench Town Mix Up

  Chapter 3 - Strictly Come Dancehall

  Chapter 4 - Slaving

  Chapter 5 - Massa Day Done?

  Chapter 6 - I’ve Got to Go Back Home

  Chapter 7 - Forward Unto Zion

  Chapter 8 - Maximum Black

  Chapter 9 - Stranded on Death Row

  Chapter 10 - The Negotiator

  Chapter 11 - Blood and Fire

  Chapter 12 - Revival Time

  Chapter 13 - Don’t Call Us Immigrants

  Chapter 14 - English Upbringing, Background Caribbean

  Chapter 15 - Everything Crash

  Chapter 16 - Nanny Knew Best

  Chapter 17 - The Killing of a Chinese Shopkeeper

  Chapter 18 - 007 (Shanty Town)

  Chapter 19 - Sitting in Limbo

  Chapter 20 - Police and Thieves

  Chapter 21 - Night Nurse

  Chapter 22 - Scotland Yard

  Chapter 23 - Herbsman Hustle

  Chapter 24 - Investors in People (‘Cargo’)

  Chapter 25 - Lord Creator

  Chapter 26 - Life of Contradiction

  Epilogue

  Further Reading

  Index

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR THE DEAD YARD

  WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY

  OF LITERATURE ONDAATJE PRIZE

  WINNER OF THE DOLMAN

  TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR

  “You may not want to visit Jamaica after reading The Dead Yard. Thomson interviewed Jamaicans across the social spectrum: their voices speak for the violent discordant society, and are underpinned by his thoughtful discussion of his history of this multicultural, postcolonial world.... Vivid and evocative, a fine expression of the spirit of place and the best kind of travel writing.”

  —PENELOPE LIVELY

  “A marvelous, revelatory trawl along the back roads and into the homes, kitchens and hearts of Jamaican all-sorts, leaving you steeped in the island’s culture and conundrums.”

  —The Scotsman “Books of the Year”

  “Thorough and elegant.”

  —ANTHONY HOLDEN, Daily Telegraph

  “Thomson is strikingly brave.... Much of the book is both subtle and telling.... Thomson is a fine and tough-minded guide to what he calls this ‘corrupted Eden.’”

  —ANDREW HOLGATE, Sunday Times

  “The Dead Yard is required reading for the rare traveller to Jamaica who wishes to learn what’s going on beyond the grounds of an all-inclusive resort hotel.”

  —DAVID SHAFTEL, Financial Times

  “Thomson braves dangers to bring home some fine set pieces.... Good on the sweep of history.... This book offers a thought-provoking insight into modern Jamaica and should enjoy a long shelf-life.”

  —ANDREW LYCETT, Sunday Telegraph

  “Thomson brings back traveler’s tales we need to hear from a Third World basket case.”

  —IAIN FINLAYSON, The Times

  “In his exhilarating new book, Ian Thomson catapults himself into the troubled heart and soul of raw Jamaica, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey.... Jamaica is exposed, scars and all. Thomson reveals a magnificent, snarling, wounded animal chewing on its own paw. Without fear he walks up to it and strokes it; he peers right down inside its open mouth. These modern tales are deeply considered, thoroughly examined. There is nothing throwaway here: a fascinating account of a beautiful, treacherous country.”

  —AMANDA SMYTH, Irish Times

  “Ian Thomson’s compelling book combines history and travelogue to paint an insightful picture of modern-day Jamaica ... this is a powerful and enlightening book that deserves to be read.”

  —SOPHIE MISSING, Observer

  “If you are planning to go to Jamaica, don’t buy a guidebook, buy THE DEAD YARD, it takes you to the heart of Jamaica before you even get on the plane.... A well-observed look at a small but complex nation. Ironically it also tells us much about England and other parts of the Jamaican diaspora. There are streets, buildings and people I know in this book. The brother got it right. Ian Thomson has captured the tension, the politics, the heat, the chaos, the beauty and the music of Jamaica.... He got down with the people, he took risks, but Jamaicans do that every day.”

  —BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH

  by the same author

  PRIMO LEVI: A BIOGRAPHY

  BONJOUR BLANC: A JOURNEY THROUGH HAITI

  SOUTHERN ITALY

  ARTICLES OF FAITH: THE COLLECTED TABLET JOURNALISM OF GRAHAM GREENE (ED.)

  For Pat Kavanagh and Jim Ballard

  The stranger who comes to Jamaica with his head full of romantic ideas of charming walks and lovely groves, shaded and adorned by aromatic trees and shrubs, perfumed with a thousand flowers, refreshed by limpid streams, and harmonised to the melody of the bird of Paradise, will find himself grievously disappointed.

  J. Stewart, An Account of Jamaica and Its Inhabitants (1808)

  Murder was the case that they gave me

  Dear God, I wonder can you save me.

  ‘Lil’ Ghetto Boy’, Dr Dre

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have been written without the generosity of all those in Jamaica who shared their stories, suggestions and personal recollections with me. I owe a special debt in this regard to a number of people in Kingston. P. J. Stewart (PJ) not only fed and gave me shelter, but introduced me to Jamaicans I could not otherwise have met. Valerie Salmon, PJ’s housekeeper, likewise offered me counsel and support, while Butch, Peedles and Sexy enlivened the PJ household in their own way.

  The help and advice of Annie Paul (Small Axe journal) and Anthony Miller was decisive in helping to open doors to Kingston’s music community, and the staff at the Institute of Jamaica, Kingston, were gracious and accommodating of my requests for material. Sheree Rhoden of the Gleaner library archive went out of her way to obtain microfilm newspaper records for me. Among others who helped me in Kingston I must also acknowledge Professor Roy Augier, Professor Barry Chevannes, Dr Carolyn Gomes, Leeta Hearne, Professor Mervyn Morris, Andrea Hopwood, Lady Golding, Mark Golding, Cookie Kinkead, Mary Langford, John Maxwell, Sonia Mills, Veerle Poupeye, Justine Henzell, Jackie Ranston, Rachel Manley, Bas Ogden, Paul Stockhausen, Ainsley Henriques, Valerie Facey and Bella Endeshaw (Tekle-Hawariat).

  Herman van Asbroeck deserves a special mention for putting me up at his home in Kingston. I am extremely grateful to him, as well as to his partner Eunice, who went to considerable efforts to ease my way in the city. Elsewhere in Jamaica, many others were kind enough to share their thoughts and point up further contacts, among them Leonard ‘Sparrow’ Dillon, Joyce Francis, Geoffrey de Sola Pinto, Freddie Hamaty, Richard Jones, and June Gay and Frank Pringle, who let me stay with them. In Morant Bay, Evelyn Matalon was especially supportive of this book and generously gave of her contacts as well as her hospitality and wisdom. Sally Henzell and the late Perry Henzell provided constant support; I owe Sally a heartfelt ‘thank you’.

  In Canada, Richard Greene and Father Brian Massie SJ were of immense help in helping me fathom Jamaica’s legal system and Catholic death row chaplaincy. In Britain, the base for much of my research, I was given helpful advice by Donald Hinds (author of Journey to an Illusion), who guided me through his old Brixton haunts and was tolerant of my intrusiveness. The Dead Yard began in conversations I had some time ago with Jamaicans in London. I would like to thank James Berry
, Jean Besson (Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College), the Reverend Les Isaac, Arthur ‘Jimmy’ Lee (treasurer of the West Indian Ex-Servicemen’s Association in Clapham), Connie Marks (chairman of the Friends of Mary Seacole), Gladwin ‘Gladdy Wax’ Wright, Patsy Robertson, Charles Riggon, George Walters and Cecil Wilson. I am also indebted to the Co-operative Friends of Jamaica for their invaluable leads in locating returnees.

  Evan Jones was always encouraging to me, and gave me advice regarding an early draft of a chapter. Mary Turner of the Commonwealth Institute, London, provided me with key contacts in Kingston. Caroline Butler introduced me to her Jamaican neighbours in Brixton (Thelma Genus, Pearl Willis) and was vital to the chapter on returnees. J. G. Ballard suggested that I go ‘somewhere depressing, like Chechnya - what about Jamaica?’

  Anne Walmsley, Frances Wilson, Sue Gaisford, Nick Gillard, the late Amanda Saunders, Bill Schwarz, Bryan Claxton and Sarah White (of New Beacon Books) offered more useful assistance, while Tony Pawlyn (chief librarian at the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall, Falmouth) went to considerable efforts to obtain material for me on aspects of the maritime slave trade. Vanessa Salter, Keeper of Social History, Hull Museums, Monument Buildings, offered advice on how to navigate the complicated Wilberforce House archives. Tony ‘Ras’ Goldbourne, Chairman of Hull’s Afro-Caribbean Association, showed me round the city’s Jamaican community and introduced me to Denzil Johnston, whose reflections on Jamaica’s role in the Second World War were invaluable. Claire Taylor of the Methodist church in Hull shared many generosities with me.

  Several people did me the honour of reading pages in progress and demonstrating their enthusiasm (or lack of it) for the way I was going about this book. Among them were my friends James Ferguson, Herman van Asbroeck, Miranda France, Mark Thompson and Maurice Glasman. Their thoughtful comments were adopted in nearly every case. Jessamy Calkin of the Telegraph Magazine sent me to Jamaica in the first place; my thanks to her.

  Neil Belton, whose gentle but persistent encouragement urged me to efforts I may not otherwise have made, commissioned this book. And his assistant, Kate Murray-Browne, was a model of tactful criticism. Paula Turner at ‘Palindrome’, the copy-editor, has my profound gratitude for her attentive and punctilious reading, while Peter McAdie proofread the text and Alison Worthington prepared the index. The late Pat Kavanagh, my agent, I shall miss very much. She guided, encouraged and launched so many authors over many years.

  Laura, my wife, gave me encouragement and advice for this book; I offer her a special toast to all the years together. Maud, Sidney and Henry had the good sense to choose Laura as their mother; I thank you for tolerating the time I spent on ‘Majaica’.

  My apologies to those who should have been mentioned but are not, and to those who would have preferred not to be mentioned but are (even if their names have been changed). The Dead Yard is not ‘the’ truth, it’s only as I saw it.

  Finally, I am happy to acknowledge the Society of Authors for the provision of an Author’s Foundation Grant.

  Preface to the U.S. Edition

  In May 2010 a state of emergency was declared in the Jamaican capital of Kingston. Schools and businesses were closed down as armed vigilantes were roaming the streets. In Tivoli Gardens, a west Kingston housing project, gang members began to stockpile weapons to prevent the arrest of their leader ‘Dudus’ (Michael Christopher) Coke, revered locally as a Robin Hood figure, reviled in the United States as a master of drug cartels.

  Tensions had been simmering for nine months at least. The previous summer, in August 2009, the United States had served an extradition notice on Coke, who was wanted in America on charges of murder and drug trafficking in the New York area. At first the Jamaican government refused to extradite Coke. What crimes, exactly, had he committed? Weeks passed, and still the authorities hesitated to hand Coke over. Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, seemed intent on shielding Coke from U.S. law. (The extradition treaty, he objected, was based on illegal wiretap evidence and therefore inadmissible.) As Golding continued to demur, relations between Jamaica and the United States were increasingly strained.

  The reluctance to extradite Dudus Coke was, it seems, politically expedient. Tivoli Gardens is a neighbourhood controlled by Coke; it also happens also to be Golding’s constituency. In Jamaica, the link between politics and crime is pronounced; politicians have long enjoyed the electoral support of ‘garrison’ constituencies like Tivoli Gardens in downtown Kingston. In exchange for his continued political allegiance, Coke was allegedly lavished with public contracts and other government favours.

  In recent years, however, Jamaican politicians have sought if anything to distance themselves from ‘ghetto’ strongmen like Coke. In a role reversal, a new type of don—the narcotics don—has begun to dictate the terms to the politicians. While downtown Kingston has produced songwriters, musicians, and sportsmen of world renown, the neighbourhood has its corrupt side, too. Back in the 1970s, community enforcers such as Claudius Massop, Aston ‘Bucky’ Marshall and Lester Lloyd ‘Jim Brown’ Coke (Dudus Coke’s father) ruled their Kingston turfs through intimidation and a gangster-man largesse; they paved the way for latter-day dons like Dudus Coke.

  The power wielded by Coke in Tivoli Gardens had evolved in the absence of proper government. Without state provision, Coke alone was prevailed upon to settle local disputes, ensure adequate schooling, and create employment. In short, he provided public services that the Jamaican government did not, and still does not. One of the world’s ‘most dangerous narcotics kingpins’ (in the words of the U.S. Justice Department) was, for the inhabitants of Tivoli Gardens, a benefactor and a godfather of sorts.

  Born in Kingston in 1969, from an early age Coke had been acquainted with violence. His father, Lester Coke, mysteriously burned to death in a maximum-security prison cell in Kingston in 1992. During the 1980s Lester had led Jamaica’s feared Shower Posse gang. On his father’s death, Dudus assumed control of the Shower Posse and set up a number of outwardly licit companies in Tivoli Gardens, among them Incomparable Enterprises and Presidential Click (which continues to organise the neighbourhood’s weekly passa-passa street party).

  A man this powerful would be hard to bring to justice. On 17 May, however, after months of pressure from the Obama administration, Prime Minister Golding finally agreed to sign the extradition order and issued a warrant for Coke’s arrest. A bounty of $60,000 was put on his head, and, in a televised address, Golding apologised for the delay in processing the extradition. (His government had become improperly involved in Coke’s case, he said.) As the manhunt got underway, Coke loyalists surged onto the streets in the thousands to show solidarity. ‘Jesus died for us,’ they chanted, ‘so we will die for Dudus.’ Quite how many had already died for Coke, nobody yet knew for sure. Coke’s fear was that security forces would kill him in order to hush up the extent of his ties to politicians.

  In the clamour to find Coke, reports came through of extra-judicial police killings. Like the ghetto hero of the Jamaican film The Harder They Come, he managed to evade police dragnets and frustrate police intelligence. Perhaps he had fled to Venezuela? Or perhaps he was still in Kingston—in Denham Town, or adjoining Jones Town? The Jamaican government’s inability to find Coke was now an embarrassment to Golding; on 24 May, thirty-six weeks after the extradition, he launched a last-ditch offensive aimed at cornering Dudus. As gunmen redoubled their resistance in Tivoli Gardens, the casualty toll climbed, and Kingston Public Hospital filled with bodies. At funeral homes in Kingston, meanwhile, people turned up with photographs of missing loved ones, hoping that staff might have seen them, dead or alive.

  As the violence raged, a friend in Jamaica asked me, ‘Will they distribute The Dead Yard over here now?’ It was a question that I found difficult, as most bookshops in Jamaica had declined to stock The Dead Yard, owing to its alleged ‘sensitive content.’ While I had not anticipated any legal problems (in fact, there were none), Jamaica has a long-entren
ched culture of litigation. The island’s Libel and Slander Act of 1851 (amended by the Defamation Act of 1961) is considered by some to be an obstacle to press freedom. Not surprisingly, Jamaican newspapers favourable to Prime Minister Golding had been careful not to dilate on his alleged links to Coke.

  But why, my friend persisted, this aversion to The Dead Yard in Jamaica? (It seemed absurd, ‘and for that matter unfair,’ that people outside Jamaica could read the book, while Jamaicans could not, he said.) Perhaps the answer lies in this: for good or ill, The Dead Yard exposes a dark side of island life at odds with the ‘paradise’ island of travel brochures. What I found at times was a vexatious, fear-ridden nation that had slipped painfully and not entirely from British rule onto a path dictated by the crime and business interests of the United States and its Caribbean neighbours. The Coke affair shed a glaring light on the longstanding complicity in Jamaica, as well as in the Jamaican diaspora, between politicians and gang leaders.

  As the manhunt entered its second month, Coke was at last taken into custody. The police had detained him on the morning of 22 June at a routine roadblock in Kingston; with him in the vehicle was a local evangelist, the Reverend Al Miller, whom Coke had asked to help turn him in at the American Embassy. (Coke had not trusted the Jamaican police to turn him in alive.) The preacher had been on his way to the embassy with Coke when their vehicle was flagged down. Bizarrely, Coke was found to be wearing a woman’s wig and in possession of a second (pink) wig, along with a pair of women’s sunglasses. By this disguise he had sought to evade police detection.

  Later that night on television, Coke’s well-fed, healthy face gave an impression of loneliness, sadness, and disappointment. Two days later, on 24 June 2010, U.S. Federal Agents were seen escorting him off the plane in New York. On the advice of his lawyers, Coke had chosen to waive his right to an extradition hearing in the Jamaican courts. His capture was a victory of a kind for the U.S. Justice Department, but a calamity for the thousands of Jamaicans who had relied on him for a livelihood. (‘No Dudus, no Jamaica!’ they say.) If convicted of the charges against him, Coke may spend the rest of his life in jail. Dreadfully, the five-week manhunt had resulted in the deaths of over seventy people, among them police and civilians, as well as armed gang members. Whatever happens in the New York law courts, in Tivoli Gardens there will always be a Mr Michael Christopher Coke, the drug lord known as Dudus, whose sins, some argued, paled beside his largesse.