Shower Posse: The Original Black Mafia Family

A Look Back At Jamaica’s Most Infamous Drug Gang

Feb 13, 2022

In the annals of crime, few tales are as dramatic as the rise and fall of the Shower Posse.

From humble beginnings in the ghettos of Kingston, the Shower Posse rose to become the most feared drug gang in Jamaica, creating a sprawling international crime network with outposts in Miami, New York and London.

They were hungry. They were brutal. And they didn’t care how many innocent bystanders they shot. Overwhelming firepower unleashed in public spaces was the gang’s calling card.

First under the leadership of Lester Coke, and then his son Christopher Coke, the Shower Posse spanned two generations and boasted a web of political affiliations that connected the highest members of Jamaican society to the lowest.

Over time, the gang became more popular than the politicians who enabled them, leading to an inevitable showdown between the government and the state-within-a-state the Shower Posse built in Kingston: an epic battle that saw the largest mobilization of the army in Jamaican history, the Shower Posse decisively crushed by the forces of law-and-order, and the resignation of the country’s prime minister.

Add in the alleged involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in arming the gang during the Cold War, as well as the role Lester Coke reportedly played in the assassination attempt on reggae icon Bob Marley, and you have a story filled with intrigue and bloodshed.

And it all began in Tivoli Gardens, a peeling, pastel-colored slum bristling with high-powered weaponry that for decades had operated as a no-go zone where the police feared to tread.

Lester Lloyd Coke was a bad man with a big belly. He was born in 1947 in Denham Town, a ghetto in West Kingston. In 1966, Coke, then a 19-year-old apprentice locksmith, was shot six times in the chest and left to die in the gutter. This was the same year that Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie visited Jamaica, where he was greeted at the airport by 100,000 Rastafarians who believed he was God. Coke was rushed to a hospital in Tivoli Gardens, a new housing project built by the right-wing Jamaica Labour Party, where doctors saved his life. When Coke left the hospital, he was a changed man. He became a passionate JLP supporter. Former friends who supported the left-wing People’s National Party became his enemies.

JLP politician Edward Seaga built Tivoli Gardens when he was finance minister. He bulldozed a Rastafarian shanty town called Back o’ Wall to make way for the project. Seaga filled the new community with fervent followers. A project supposed to provide quality housing for the poor was, in reality, an attempt by Seaga to redraw the political map of Kingston to favor the JLP. Tivoli Gardens was Jamaica’s ﬁrst “garrison community.” In response, the People’s National Party built their own fortified fiefdoms. The party packed them with supporters, just as the JLP had done. Tivoli Gardens set the stage for the tribal political warfare that would consume Jamaican society for the next four decades.

In the beginning, Lester Coke worked for JLP enforcer Claude Massop, Tivoli Gardens’s first don dada. Jamaicans call the criminal bosses who control poor neighborhoods “dons,” after The Godfather. A don dada is a don of dons. The Shower Posse was originally called the Phoenix Gang. Claude Massop headed the Phoenix Gang, along with Carl “Byah” Mitchell. Mitchell was implicated in the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley by author Timothy White in his best-selling Marley biography Catch A Fire. White speculated the CIA contracted Mitchell to organize the attack. Two cars of gunmen sprayed Marley’s home on Hope Road, injuring Marley and two others. The reggae icon—who grew up in the PNP neighborhood of Trenchtown—told associates he saw Lester Coke skulking in his back garden before the assault.

Claude Massop’s chief claim to fame was the peace deal he negotiated with PNP gang leader Dennis “Copper” Barth after the attempt on Marley’s life. Barth was a cross between John Dillinger and Robin Hood. A prolific bank robber, he used the proceeds from his robberies to feed the poor. Massop explained his desire for peace: “Everybody I grew up with is dead.” The pact angered elements within the JLP’s ranks, and so in May 1978, Lester Coke set up a robbery with Barth at Caymanas Park racetrack and then ratted him out to the police. Barth died in a gun battle with waiting cops. In the same month, the Phoenix Gang’s second-in-command, Carl “Byah” Mitchell, died of a brain hemorrhage caused by a cocaine overdose. A team of Rasta hit men intent on avenging the attack on Bob Marley, tracked him down and reportedly force fed him cocaine. Nine months after, Claude Massop was cut down in a hail of police bullets during a traffic stop in what many believed was an extra-judicial assassination intended to scupper the truce he’d negotiated.

With Massop and Mitchell dead, Lester Coke took over the leadership of the gang. Coke wasn’t interested in peace. One of his first actions was to organize Tivoli’s gunmen into a more effective fighting force to defend Tivoli from the PNP gangs allied with Prime Minister Michael Manley. He called his new group the Shower Posse. “Posse” because he loved watching spaghetti westerns at the local drive-in; “Shower” after a famous line in one of Edward Seaga’s stump speeches: “Blessings will shower from the sky and money going jingle in your pocket.” Coke adopted the name “Jim Brown,” after seeing the football legend-turned-actor in the movie, The Dirty Dozen. There’s a cinematic quality to Jamaican violence. One of the country’s most famous cops, Keith “Trinity” Gardner, who also worked as Edward Seaga’s security, took his street handle from the 1970 spaghetti western They Call Me Trinity.

The Shower Posse was forged in the heat of the street battles that rocked Kingston during the 1980 general election. The bitterly fought contest pitted Prime Minister Michael Manley of the People’s National Party against the Jamaica Labour Party’s Edward Seaga. Seaga was a Harvard-educated anthropologist who pioneered ska music in the 1960s. He owned West Indies Unlimited Studios, home to The Skatalites and The Dragonaires. Despite his upscale pedigree, Seaga knew the streets. The rude boys with ratchet knives who provided security for the backyard parties he promoted eventually morphed into posses that acted as his political enforcers. The Shower Posse’s mission was twofold: to protect Tivoli Gardens from attacks by PNP gangs and to muscle residents to vote for Seaga.

Violence at the ballot box was nothing new in Jamaica. PNP thugs and JLP thugs had been fighting each other since the 1950s. But the Shower Posse upped the murder and mayhem to unprecedented levels. Over 800 people died in the violence surrounding the 1980 general election, making it the bloodiest in Jamaican history. The sticks and knives used in past street battles were replaced by brand new M16 riﬂes, which led to speculation the CIA was supplying Seaga’s gunmen with weapons to punish the left-wing Manley for his support of Fidel Castro.

According to former CIA agent Philip Agee: “The CIA was using the JLP as its instrument in the campaign against the Michael Manley government. Most of the violence was coming from the JLP, and behind them was the CIA in terms of getting weapons in and getting money in.”

In an explosive expose published in 1989 by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a JLP gunman told the newspaper: “We received several shipments of guns from the CIA. The guns were sent to the JLP by plane. The planes were then reloaded with ganja for the return flight to America.”

Seaga won a landslide victory over Manley. But he didn’t make blessings shower from the sky. Nor did money jingle in people’s pockets. Instead of becoming “the Singapore of the Caribbean,” as he promised, the Jamaican economy tanked. The country was drowning in debt. After Seaga paid the international bankers, there was nothing left for ordinary Jamaicans. The value of the Jamaican dollar plummeted. Social services were slashed. The economy went from bad to worse in the countryside after Seaga launched a program to eradicate marijuana farms in return for U.S. aid. Marijuana was one of Jamaica’s biggest cash crops. Most of the ganga grown in Jamaica was exported to America. The result of Seaga’s war on pot was predictable. Marijuana traﬃckers like Lester Coke forged alliances with the Colombian cartels and switched to cocaine. Jamaica was ideally situated as a transshipment point midway between Colombia’s Atlantic coast and South Florida. But the local market for the drug was limited. Coke and his kind looked north to the United States, where the demand for the white powder seemed limitless. Before long, posse leaders headed to the U.S. Embassy to apply for visas so they could hop on the plane to Miami.

Coke developed another urgent reason to leave Kingston in May 1984. Prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest following a mass slaughter that took place in Rema, a JLP ghetto near Tivoli Gardens. In the middle of the night, Coke led a gang of Shower Posse gunmen armed with M16 riﬂes intent on disciplining a renegade JLP faction. The faction was complaining the party’s leadership was pouring funds into Tivoli, but ignoring Rema. If the JLP didn’t treat Rema better, they threatened, they would switch allegiance to the PNP. In a scene that could have come from one of those spaghetti westerns Coke enjoyed, the raiding party set light to two houses hoping to smoke out the occupants, waited until they stumbled coughing into the street, and shot twelve of them dead.

Seaga realized he had created a monster in Tivoli Gardens. The Shower Posse was so out of control it was murdering fellow JLP members. It was best for all concerned that Coke took an extended leave of absence. Even with an arrest warrant in his name, that October, Coke had no trouble boarding a plane for Miami.

Miami in the 1980s was a wide-open town, a polyglot sin city where silk-shirted gangsters ruled the night. Cocaine money was literally changing the physical landscape. Glitzy new towers sprang up along Biscayne Bay, ﬁnanced by profits from the illegal drug trade. Lester Coke must have thought he’d died and gone to dope-dealer heaven. But his new surroundings didn’t temper the bloodlust Coke exhibited during the Rema massacre. He was barely in the country for six weeks when he ordered another mass slaughter. Coke was high on cocaine when he was robbed of his money and jewelry at a crack house in a poor part of Miami. After leaving the dilapidated bungalow, he called in a team of Shower Posse gunmen and together they executed five people in the house, including a pregnant woman who begged for her life and that of her unborn child.

One killer was Charles “Little Nut” Miller. Miller would eventually turn state’s witness against the Shower Posse after he was arrested in 1989. Miller testified the CIA trained him: “The United States made me what I am.” He later escaped the Witness Protection Program, moved back to his native St. Kitts, where he tried to overthrow the government and install his own narco-state by assassinating the police chief, the prime minister’s son, and the local U.N. ambassador. Another Shower Posse member police linked to the killings was Vivian Blake. Blake was the brains behind the organization. He was the one who alerted Coke to the money-making potential of the American drug market after he visited New York as part of a traveling cricket exhibition and decided to stay. With Coke’s muscle and Blake’s business acumen, the Shower Posse expanded aggressively into the Miami crack cocaine trade. The gang soon spread up the East Coast to Washington, D.C. and New York, then into the Midwest, introducing crack to places such as Kansas City. The Shower Posse eventually created outposts in cities as far away as Anchorage, Alaska and Toronto. Wherever they went, gun violence followed.

In 1985, Shower Posse gunmen opened fire at a crowded reggae event at the Fireman’s Benevolent Hall in Fort Lauderdale. They wounded three partygoers and killed the DJ, who was allied with the Shower Posse’s archrivals, the Spangler Posse. Over the summer, they struck again, when during a picnic in suburban Oakland, New Jersey, Shower Posse shooters engaged in a gun battle with members of the Spanglers. They killed three and wounded twenty-three. The same year, the Shower Posse attacked a friendly soccer match in Bunche Park, north of Miami. They missed their intended target but killed rising professional soccer star, Colin Fowles.

One of the most notorious shootouts the Shower Posse was involved in came in 1992 at a Miami restaurant called Taste of the Islands. Just before 4 a.m., as the DJ was playing Mad Cobra’s “Flex (Time To Have Sex),” four Shower Posse shooters emerged from the bathroom and sprayed the dance ﬂoor with automatic weapons. Partygoers screamed in terror and dived under tables, while wounded patrons stumbled into the parking lot where they collapsed. One young man, his white t-shirt soaked in blood, died in the bushes bordering the parking lot. A 17-year-old female celebrating her birthday expired in her sister’s arms. Four people were killed and seventeen were wounded. The cause of the violence proved trivial. A Shower Posse member was arguing with a rival gangster about who fathered a child.

“The Shower Posse expanded quickly because they were so violent,” said Len Cartor, a former Miami-Dade Police Sergeant. “Even African-American drug dealers feared them. Everyone did.”

Cartor, and his partner Kevin Dougherty, ﬁrst heard the name Lester Coke in a FIST meeting held in Miami in late 1984. FIST was the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team, a multi-agency dragnet organized by the U.S. Marshals to catch violent fugitives. The task force was known for its creative stings. One time, they sent letters to hundreds of fugitives telling them they’d won tickets for a rock concert, and when they turned up to collect their tickets, they arrested them.

A wanted poster was handed out. They were instructed to keep an eye open for Lester Coke, who was wanted in Jamaica for the Rema killings. While his exact whereabouts were unknown, the Shower Posse leader had recently been spotted at the Columbus Hotel on Flagler Street in Miami betting on horse races and at the Love People Club on Empire Boulevard in Brooklyn, New York.

Dougherty was a tough Irish-American cop with slicked-back hair. Cartor was his caffeine-fueled comrade who had just transferred over from narcotics. Both had reputations as dogged investigators who worked 24-hour shifts without sleep or overtime pay. Not long after the FIST meeting, Cartor and Dougherty were staking out a fugitive in North Miami when a call came over their radio: a suspicious white van with ﬁve black males inside had been stopped nearby. Cartor and Dougherty drove over to check out the van. They asked the people inside for ID. One man showed a Florida driving license with the name Jim Brown. Finding neither drugs nor guns in the vehicle, they let them go. It wasn’t until they got back to the oﬃce they realized Jim Brown was Lester Coke.

Angry they’d let Coke slip through their hands, the duo built a proﬁle of the Shower Posse using license plate numbers, photographs and linking charts. Their investigation soon revealed how the group imported drugs into the country. The Shower Posse wasn’t like the Colombians, who moved multi-ton loads of cocaine in container ships. The Jamaicans smuggled smaller loads, but with greater frequency. One way was recruiting “higglers,” merchants who sold cheap goods at ﬂea markets in Jamaica. A group of female higglers who worked at the King Street Market in Kingston often flew to Miami to buy second-hand clothes and ship the clothes back to Jamaica to sell. The Shower Posse employed some of these women to smuggle packages of cocaine hidden in their vaginas.

“The packages looked like Hillshire Farm sausages,” said Dougherty. “You’d see them squatting down in the parking garage at Miami International Airport and handing over the packages to a driver.”

“They’d have twelve higglers on one ﬂight, so even if one was caught, eleven would get through,” said Cartor.

Another way the Shower Posse smuggled drugs into Miami was on cruise ships. “These Jamaican guys are often smooth talkers,” said Dougherty. “They’d con some naïve college girl on the ship to take a package from them: ‘Me can’t bring me coffee in, can you carry this off for me, girl?’”

Cartor and Dougherty discovered the Shower Posse was also involved in gun-running. With the money made from drug sales, gang members bought machine guns and assault rifles from South Florida pawn shops and gun stores. “You could go to Woolworths at the 163 Street Shopping Center and as long as you had a Florida driver’s license, you could walk out with an AK-47 or an M1 carbine,” said Dougherty. The Shower Posse sent the guns to Kingston hidden in U-Ship barrels, a cheap way to ship goods abroad that Jamaicans used to send everyday items like diapers and children’s clothing to their families.

In July 1985, Dougherty got a call from a confidential informant: “If you want Lester Coke, he’s at this phone number.” Dougherty matched the phone number to an address. The address belonged to a house immediately behind his home in Andover, a middle-class suburb in Miami Gardens. A group of Jamaicans had recently moved into 455 N.W. 202nd Terrace, a large Spanish-style ranch house with white walls and red terracotta tiles. Coke was hiding in plain sight, living in suburban splendor, while his next-door neighbors—doctors, cops, lawyers, FBI agents—didn’t know who he was.

Dougherty and Cartor drove by the house to make sure Coke was home. Then a Special Response Team broke down the door. They arrested Coke and ten others on marijuana traﬃcking charges after they found a hundred pounds of pot on the premises. Prosecutors dropped the charges against Coke after another man in the house claimed the marijuana belonged to him.

A year later, the two cops were eating at a diner called the Ham and Eggery in North Miami Beach when who should walk in but Lester Coke. Coke had been across the street signing up for a gym membership. Coke greeted Dougherty and Cartor warmly, even agreeing to have his photo taken with them.

“Lester was always polite,” said Dougherty. “The dons were cool. It’s the guys called ‘steppers’—up-and-comers who hadn’t yet made a mark—you had to watch.”

Part of the Shower Posse mystique was that it wasn’t just a criminal gang but a political force with connections in high places. But politics played a lesser role in the violence in America. Making money was the primary motivator. “In the neighborhood where I lived, I had Lester Coke living behind me and about 100 yards as the crow ﬂies lived Kenneth Black, also known as Skeng Don,” said Dougherty. “Skeng Don was a big PNP supporter who threw a box on the table containing a $100,000 cash donation at the annual party conference in 1986. You could throw a softball from my house and hit his house. He was a leader of the Spanglers who were based in Ft. Lauderdale. In Kingston, Skeng Don and Coke would have shot each other, but instead, they were my next-door neighbors. I would jog at night and write tag numbers on my hand as I ran around the neighborhood.”

Coke may have beaten the marijuana charge, but in 1987, the Immigration and Naturalization Service deported him to Jamaica to face justice in the Rema killings. Soon after he returned to Jamaica, Coke killed again, this time a bus driver, Jerome White. White got into an argument with Coke after the bus driver swerved in front of Coke’s car. The driver realized too late who he was arguing with. White ran to the Denham Town Police Station, seeking refuge. But Coke and his goons dragged him outside and murdered him in full view of the cops. The authorities were reluctant to arrest Coke until the bus drivers went on strike. A hundred police and an armored carrier stormed Tivoli Gardens and Coke was taken into custody. He was charged with White’s murder, but the jury acquitted him after witnesses failed to show up for the trial. Coke believed he was untouchable. He bragged to friends he was going to run against Edward Seaga for prime minister.

Meanwhile, in Miami, the feds were ready to deal a heavy blow to the Shower Posse. In October 1988, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted 34 members of the gang, including Lester Coke and Vivian Blake. Coke was already back in Kingston, but in his absence, Blake was busy running the American side of the operation. He was moving hundreds of thousands of pounds of marijuana and tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine up the Eastern seaboard. A month later, 53 members of the Shower Posse were arrested in New Jersey. Tony Bruce and Erroll Hussing, Vivian Blake’s two half-brothers, who were in charge of the Shower Posse’s New York operation, were taken into custody. But Blake evaded the federal dragnet when he slipped unnoticed onto a cruise ship in the Port of Miami that was bound for the Jamaican tourist town, Ocho Rios. There, Bake opened a jet ski business and tried to keep a low proﬁle.

More bad news followed the next year when voters unseated the gang’s protector, Edward Seaga, as prime minister and replaced him with his PNP nemesis, Michael Manley. Even with Seaga out of oﬃce, the Lester Coke name was so feared he was practically unprosecutable in his hometown. His trial for the Rema killings followed the same pattern as his trial for murdering Jerome White. Eyewitnesses recanted their testimony and the jury gladly acquitted. Coke’s supporters waiting outside the courthouse celebrated the news by shooting their guns into the air, which sent cops and court oﬃcials scurrying for cover. The crowd carried Coke on their shoulders back to Tivoli Gardens. Later that night, Seaga was seen drinking beer with Coke toasting the verdict.

Two years later, the Jamaican police arrested Coke again, but this time he couldn’t beat the rap. Coke was picked up at the request of U.S. officials, who wanted him extradited to face a slew of charges including gun running and drug traﬃcking, as well as multiple murder counts because of his involvement in the Miami crack house killings. While Coke was in jail, his son Mark Anthony Coke, aka Jah T, took over the day-to-day running of the Shower Posse. But on February 2, 1992, Jah T was shot to death while riding his motorcycle in downtown Kingston by gunmen from the Black Roses Crew. The reprisals were swift and sparked a wave of unrest in the city. Twelve people died in the next two weeks. Three weeks later, Mark Anthony Coke was buried. The funeral-goers barely had time to get home and change out of their mourning clothes, when later that night, news broke that Lester Coke was also dead.

A mattress and a curtain had caught ﬁre in Coke’s jail cell at the General Penitentiary; the resulting conﬂagration had left him badly burned. At the time of the ﬁre, Coke’s lawyers were on their way to deliver the bad news that the British Privy Council had rejected his appeal to stay the extradition. He would most likely be leaving Kingston for a federal lock-up in Miami in the next 24 hours.

Many Jamaicans thought Coke had been silenced. It made sense. He knew too much about the cozy and mutually beneficial relationships between politicians and gangsters to be allowed to live. He had threatened: “It is not I-one going down alone”. And he meant it. But Martin Dougherty said his law enforcement sources in Jamaica told him Coke died in an escape attempt gone wrong. Shower Posse associates had helped him set ﬁre to his own jail cell. The plan was to wait for the prison guards to respond to the emergency, overpower them, and set Coke free. “They set the mattress on fire to get him out of the cell,” said Dougherty. “But nobody unlocked the door. The ﬁre didn’t kill him. It was the ambulance ride to the hospital that killed him when the ambulance crashed.”

Whatever the exact cause of death, Coke’s end was horrific, which seemed ﬁtting, given the horror he had visited on others. His family buried him with the pomp and ceremony of a state funeral. 40,000 people attended. It was as if an elder statesman was being laid to rest. A testimony to the political power he wielded was the presence of Edward Seaga, who led the funeral procession. Seaga defended his decision to attend by saying he was there to pay homage to “a protector of the community.”

By the mid-1990s, with the gang’s top leaders either dead, deported or in jail, the Shower Posse had dropped off U.S. law enforcement’s radar as a major threat. It was thought the Shower Posse was extinct. But it wasn’t. After Lester Coke’s death, the Shower Posse didn’t disappear. Under the new leadership of his son Christopher Coke, it re-organized and tried to keep a lower proﬁle, working behind the scenes to become even more powerful than it had been in its violent 1980s heyday.

The rise of Christopher “Dudus” Coke to the top spot signaled a new, more low-key direction for the gang. Circumstances partly dictated the course change. The Shower Posse was so notorious that the name alone attracted law enforcement attention. So Dudus invented a new name for the outfit, Presidential Click. Dudus was “the President,” or “Prez,” and his longtime girlfriend, Stephanie Gayle, was “First Lady.”

But it was also partly dictated by temperament. Compared to his father, Christopher Coke was an educated man. He attended Ardenne High School, one of Kingston’s top private schools, where he was said 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 similar to the one sported by Jamaican diplomat Dudley Thompson. Once in power, Coke eschewed the ﬂashy lifestyles of his fellow dons and avoided the spotlight. While local newspapers often mentioned him, he always declined interview requests by reporters. And he tried to cultivate the image of a respectable business owner with friends in high places.

Not that he couldn’t copy his father when he felt the need. In 1994, Coke set off an orgy of murders, robberies and rapes when he ordered his gunmen to attack nearby Rema. Among the 15 people killed was seven-year-old Crystal Francis. Coke was angry that Ziggy Marley, who was building a recording studio in the neighborhood, didn’t give him the construction contract. Edward Seaga was furious with Coke. While no longer prime minister, he still represented West Kingston in parliament. He submitted a list of 13 men, including Coke, to the police commissioner, demanding that police arrest them. The Rema attack eerily echoed his father’s attack on the same neighborhood a decade earlier, as well as Lester Coke’s alleged involvement in the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley.

But overall, relative calm characterized the younger Coke’s rule. By the start of the new millennium, he had negotiated a truce with rival gangs, a policy known as “one order.” No more fighting over the scraps thrown to them by politicians. No more allowing the establishment to divide and conquer. United as one, the gangs took over the functions usually reserved for government.

Dudus made it known to top JLP oﬃcials he was dissatisfied with the political arrangement between the JLP and the Shower Posse. JLP operatives turned up in Tivoli Gardens every ﬁve years to supply guns, expecting his men to do the dirty work of political killings. And then ignored them until the next election. Tivoli Gardens didn’t need more guns. There were plenty there already. What Tivoli needed was more jobs and economic opportunities. The state was powerless to curb the dons’ authority. They had eyes and ears everywhere. They were so firmly entrenched in the power structure of Jamaica—the police, the military, the banks, the parliament, the legal profession, even the clergy—that to topple the dons risked collapsing the whole corrupt ediﬁce the two-party system had created. Ordinary people supported the dons. They looked to neighborhood bosses like Coke for leadership. The positive effects of Coke’s peace efforts could be seen in the downtown commercial district, where rampant criminality in the 1990s had forced away businesses and shoppers. Stores began to re-open and bargain-hunters returned, as the news spread that the area was now a safe place to do business. “It was no secret that Dudus kept the peace downtown,” wrote Jamaica Observer columnist Mark Wignall. Of course, there was a limit to Coke’s altruism. Peace came with a price tag, as a “tax” levied on store owners, taxi drivers and vendors that Coke’s goons demanded and which was almost never refused. Many thought it was money well spent.

A result of the revival Coke engineered were the Passa Passa street parties. While Coke didn’t organize the parties, he was a frequent guest. As many as 20,000 people attended the Wednesday night events, where they danced to the latest dancehall reggae sounds until eight in the morning. The parties became a worldwide sensation, drawing reggae lovers from as far away as London and Tokyo. The gatherings were so popular, Passa Passa parties spread to the rest of the Caribbean. In the 1990s, holding a large-scale event on the edge of Tivoli Gardens would have been unthinkable. No outsider would have dared to set foot there. But under the new policy of “one order,” harmony reigned.

It wasn’t the Jamaican police that kicked out the rapists and muggers in Tivoli Gardens. And it wasn’t the Jamaican government that fed the hungry, paid for medical bills, or bought school uniforms for local kids. And if Dudus achieved this by extorting business owners, or selling drugs to rich Americans, few residents cared. Coke had done what the state failed to do for decades: establish order. The only crimes that Dudus allowed were the ones he sanctioned.

There were occasional ﬂare-ups, of course. In May 2003, Coke’s brother, Omar, was one of two alleged cop killers shot dead by police after they gunned down a police corporal. The following May, Dudus’ half-brother, Christopher “Chris Royal” Coke, who was angry at the police killing of Shower Posse lieutenant Zion Train, launched a revenge attack and killed a police officer sitting in a car. He was killed in return by security forces as he ﬂed the scene on a black motorcycle. The next day, Shower Posse gunmen attacked a police station and killed a police inspector. Dudus didn’t sanction the reprisals. He vowed to stop the tit-for-tat killings.

Coke had too much to lose. 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 largesse ﬁlled the Presidential Click’s coffers. In the early summer of 2009, Incomparable Enterprises, Coke’s construction company, received three contracts worth $32 million from the Ministry of Water and Housing to repair buildings in Tivoli Gardens. Coke was well on his way to becoming the Michael Corleone of Kingston, when in August 2009, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan charged Coke with gun and narcotics traﬃcking. The indictment alleged that Coke had traﬃcked guns and drugs from 1994 to the present. The feds said they had telephone wiretaps from as late as 2007 between Coke and Shower Posse members in New York implicating Coke in various schemes to ship drugs into and guns out of the United States.

Prime Minister Bruce Golding refused the U.S. government’s request to extradite Coke to face charges in New York. Golding said the wiretaps used to indict Coke were obtained illegally under Jamaican law. His party secretly paid $400,000 to a Washington D.C. law firm to lobby the Obama administration to drop the request. Golding claimed he was acting on principle. His government continued to give contracts to Coke’s company, including a $40 million contract to provide construction materials for a new road project. This, despite Golding’s promise during his election campaign not to give public money to known criminals.

When Golding was elected prime minister in 2007, Dudus must have thought he was protected from above. Even with the attempt to extradite him, Coke felt safe enough that he stayed in Tivoli Gardens. After all, if it wasn’t for Coke, Golding wouldn’t have a job. It was Coke, in his role as kingmaker, who had brokered the behind-the-scenes deal that allowed Golding to take over the West Kingston seat of Edward Seaga, when he announced he was retiring from politics. And like Seaga, Golding had used the position as a springboard to the prime-ministership. But just like his father before him, Coke underestimated the treachery of Jamaican politicians.

On May 17, 2010, Prime Minister Bruce Golding made a surprise television appearance. He announced to the nation that, after careful consideration, he had decided to comply with the U.S. government’s request to extradite Christopher Coke. Golding’s decision was stunning for a number of reasons. Golding, as well as holding the oﬃce of prime minister, was a member of parliament for West Kingston. He was, in effect, declaring war on his own constituents. There was also the issue of shady dealings between the Coke clan and the leadership of Golding’s party. Even if he wasn’t corrupt himself, he must have known that if the suspected collaboration between criminals and crooked politicians became public, he was finished.

Angry church ladies dressed all in white took to the streets to protest the prime minister’s decision. They waved signs that read: “Leave Dudus alone. Him no break no law” and “Jesus die for us. We will die for Dudus.” The demonstration took place outside the Denham Town Police Station, the same place Coke’s father had brazenly murdered the bus driver, Jerome White.

Already ramshackle barricades had sprung up at the entrance to Tivoli Gardens to prevent any outside incursion. An explosives expert constructed an improvised defense system. Home-made bombs attached to gas canisters and connected by trip wires were carefully placed on the perimeter. Residents packed plastic crates full of Molotov cocktails. Snipers took up positions behind sandbags on the roofs of high-rise buildings. Next to the sniper nests stood stacks of truck tires ready to be set on ﬁre to create a blanket of black smoke if the Jamaican military launched a helicopter attack. Residents remembered the last time the forces of Babylon came calling in July, 2001. Police and soldiers stormed the neighborhood looking for illegal weapons. A siege ensued that left 27 people dead and a downed army helicopter smoldering in a pile of twisted metal in the middle of a courtyard. The barricades grew higher and more impressive with each passing hour, as residents wheeled in everything from abandoned cars to rusty washing machines to furniture cabinets to add to the piles. By Saturday, Tivoli Gardens looked like a set from a Mad Max movie.

The question on everybody’s lips was, what happens next? Would Coke stand down and turn himself into the authorities, as the prime minister demanded? Would he allow the authorities to dismantle the state-within-a-state he had set up in Tivoli Gardens, an alternative system of government complete with taxes, welfare services, policing, and a private standing army? Or would Golding relent, realizing his government had as much to lose as Dudus if both parties declared war? The answer came on Sunday, when in a coordinated attack, Coke’s supporters ﬁre-bombed four police stations, sending oﬃcers ﬂeeing for their lives. Residents shrugged at the news. The police are hated in Kingston’s poor neighborhoods, despised for their venality and brutality. Coke was sending a message: back off or else. Golding had little choice. He declared a state-of-emergency and sent in the army. Coke was challenging the state’s authority to impose law and order within its own borders. The government pleaded with law-abiding citizens to evacuate Tivoli Gardens before the attack. The police sent buses to pick them up, but most of them left empty.

Monday was supposed to be a national holiday. Nobody was celebrating in Tivoli Gardens. They were too busy preparing for the battle ahead. A predator drone appeared out of the clouds pinpointing potential targets. On the ground, Coke’s gunmen scurried from doorway to doorway. Some of them were dressed in drag, a ruse designed to prevent the soldiers from shooting at them. The assault started with the sound of metal crushing metal when armored vehicles smashed through the barricades. 800 soldiers and 370 police officers poured into the breach. A fusillade of automatic gun ﬁre met them. Progress was slow under these conditions. The security forces realized they had to be careful about where they stepped. Booby traps wired to detonate by remote control were everywhere.

The intensity of the battle was such that it took troops three hours to cover 200 meters of ground. Coke’s gunmen proved formidable foes, matching the army bullet for bullet, bomb for bomb, pulling on their AK-47s and MI6s until their trigger ﬁngers were numb from ﬁring. It took security forces twelve hours to ﬁnally surround Coke’s headquarters in the center of Tivoli Gardens. Inside, they discovered a sign behind Coke’s desk that said “Jesus Loves You” and a sophisticated video surveillance system that monitored all the entrances and exits in and out of the neighborhood. But Coke was nowhere to be found.

The battle for Tivoli Gardens continued the next day. The army went door to door, ﬂushing out the remnants of the Shower Posse army. Helicopter gunships hovered overhead. Women and children huddled together in their homes, jumping in fright every time an explosion went off. Unconfirmed reports surfaced that police officers were dragging young men into the street and executing them on the spot. Witnesses said they were burning bodies to prevent identification. The military claimed it had discovered a secret torture chamber, part of the long-rumored kangaroo courts in Tivoli, where justice was not only swift, but frequently deadly. By Wednesday, the army had prevailed. Civil society had been restored, though at considerable cost. For the ﬁrst time in decades, Tivoli Gardens was under the full control of the Jamaican government.

But where was the manhunt’s target? In all the bloody chaos, Coke had slipped through the military lines. After the smoke cleared, the oﬃcial body count was released: 73 civilians were killed, plus two police officers and one soldier. But some suspected the real death toll was higher.

One of the most telling accounts of the Battle of Tivoli came from a survivor, Cedric Murray, aka Doggie, a contract killer for the Stone Crusher gang in Montego Bay. Murray recruited other Stone Crushers to travel to Kingston to ﬁght alongside Shower Posse gunmen. Six weeks later, he was shot to death during a police stop and a diary was found on his body. The Jamaica Constabulary labeled men like Murray “mercenaries” because they were outsiders being paid to ﬁght, but for most of them who came to Tivoli, the primary motivation wasn’t money but respect for the Coke clan, not only for Christopher Coke, but respect for the memory of his late father Lester Coke aka Jim Brown. In the entry for May 24, the ﬁrst day of the battle, Doggie wrote: “Invasion of Tivoli Gardens by Babylon the enemy, gunshots rang out from every corner of West Kingston and other places of Kingston to protect the man Don of all Dons. Christopher Coke, aka Dudus. My don is free. I will always say Jim Brown. I am loyal to the Coke family and my gun will always be ready.”

To anyone unfamiliar with the Jamaican scene, the events of May 2010 appeared inexplicable.

Why were so many people willing to die to protect a ghetto enforcer? Where did the suicidal sense of fealty to the Coke family come from? And how did what should have been a local police action blow up into a giant geopolitical headache, not only threatening to bring down the Jamaican government but straining ties with Washington?

In the days following the Battle of Tivoli, rumors circulated, speculating about Christopher Coke’s whereabouts. Coke was trying to negotiate with the U.S. authorities, fearful if Jamaican police arrested him, he would be shot dead on the spot. Few Jamaicans believed Dudus would be caught alive. Another rumor was the Colombian drug traﬃckers Coke did business with, had a go-fast boat waiting in the harbor to rescue him, but the Jamaican Coast Guard thwarted them. The manhunt continued when Jamaican soldiers and police raided a house in the upscale Kirkland Heights neighborhood of Kingston, looking for Coke. Instead, they killed the owner, 63-year-old Keith Clarke, son of PNP politician Claude Clarke, in front of his wife and daughter. An autopsy revealed that Clarke was shot twenty times. The violence was now spreading to rich areas of the city.

Those expecting Dudus to go out with guns blazing like Ivan, the character played by singer Jimmy Cliff, at the end of The Harder They Come, would soon be disappointed. A month after the Battle of Tivoli, the police captured Coke without incident on a quiet stretch of the Mandela Highway on the outskirts of Kingston. They had been trailing Coke’s convoy for a couple of hours when they pulled over the vehicle in which he was traveling. According to the cops, two cars full of gunmen accompanying Coke sped off without a ﬁght. Captured along with Dudus was the ﬂamboyant minister, the Reverend Al Miller. Miller claimed that he and Coke were headed to the U.S. Embassy, where Coke wanted to turn himself in. What caught the imagination of the Jamaican public was the disguise Dudus wore. At the time of his arrest, Coke was sporting a curly woman's wig and thick glasses that made him look like an elderly matron on the way to Sunday morning services. A dress was found in the car. If the police’s aim was not to kill Coke, but humiliate him and turn him into an object of ridicule by stripping him of his bad man persona, it had succeeded. To add insult to injury, the cops even put out a story to the local press—probably untrue—that Dudus had wet his pants when he was arrested. The police also claimed that after being arrested, Coke thanked the oﬃcers for not harming him. It was an anticlimactic end to a tumultuous episode in Jamaican history. What began as a war movie, morphed into a chase ﬂick, now seemed like a cross-dressing comedy.

The Dudus affair shined a spotlight on what sort of society Jamaica had become. It wasn’t a ﬂattering portrait. As the University of the West Indies professor Annie Paul wrote in her blog: “In Jamaica farce, intrigue and tragedy remain inextricably intertwined.” “When he was arrested on route to the US embassy wearing a woman’s wig, that was pure farce,” Paul told me later. “What exactly was the United States’ role in all of this? That’s pure intrigue. Many lives were lost. Why didn’t Dudus give himself up earlier? Why did the people of Tivoli barricade themselves and force the army to move in? That to me was pure tragedy.”

Born Fi Dead author Laurie Gunst thought it was a mistake to see the Dudus affair as being about drugs and guns. Ultimately, it was about the way Christopher Coke had become a power-unto-himself through his control of the wharfs next to Tivoli. “He was the ﬁrst Tivoli don who had this kind of muscle on the docks,” said Gunst. “Nothing moved through those wharfs without Dudus taking a cut.”

“Whether it was cars or lighting fixtures, Dudus was getting a slice of the pie. Why was the U.S. State Department so hot-to-trot to get him? Compared to the big boys, Dudus wasn’t a big player in cocaine smuggling into America. The real answer is through his control of the wharfs, he had the power to destabilize the country and destabilize the legitimate economy.”

As DEA agents escorted Coke onto a Lear jet at Norman Manley International Airport to whisk him off to New York, Dudus released a statement through his lawyer: “I take this decision, for I now believe it to be in the best interest of my family, the community of western Kingston, and in particular the people of Tivoli Gardens and, above all, Jamaica.”

Dudus sounded like a great leader giving a farewell speech to the troops before heading into exile. And, in a sense, he was.

In August 2011, Christopher Coke pleaded guilty to gun-running and drug-trafficking. The evidence in the case was overwhelming. The Shower Posse leader was caught on intercepted telephone calls discussing the shipment of guns from the United States to Jamaica, advising Shower Posse members how to resolve drug disputes and arranging to receive drug profits. The U.S. government also uncovered evidence about the Shower Posse’s strict code of conduct known as “the System.” No one could own guns, sell cocaine, or commit crimes in Tivoli Gardens without Coke’s permission. Those who broke the code were beaten (for domestic violence), shot in the limbs (for petty theft) or killed (for more serious offenses).

A cooperating witness, whose job was to clean Coke’s private prison, described an incident where a man who failed to repay a drug debt was tied to a table. The witness claimed Coke killed him with a chainsaw. Hoping to get a reduced sentence, Coke wrote to the judge outlining his charitable activities in Tivoli Gardens, which included “an Easter treat for the elderly” and “a back-to-school treat for the children.” The judge sentenced Coke to 23 years in a federal prison. Noticeably absent from the case was any mention of the politicians who enabled his crimes.

A month later, Prime Minister Bruce Golding resigned. Golding captured the Shower Posse leader. But the death and destruction caused by the operation and his mishandling of the extradition damaged his standing with the Jamaican public. A Commission of Enquiry examined the conduct of the security forces. It concluded there was evidence of at least 15 extrajudicial killings. The Enquiry heard testimony from three soldiers who witnessed police officers killing unarmed men, as well as from a mother who claimed officers made her two sons lie on their stomachs and shot them in cold blood. The Jamaica Constabulary rejected the findings. No police officers were criminally charged for the killings.

The underlying conditions that bred the Shower Posse still exist in Tivoli Gardens. Dire poverty. Political corruption. A lack of opportunities. Some things never change. Last April, Christopher Coke’s son, Michael Coke, and Christopher Coke’s two younger brothers, Leighton “Livity” Coke and Lanchester “Bamma T” Coke, were released from custody after being charged with the abduction and murder of Christopher “P Boy” Davis, the reputed leader of the Scream Corner Gang from Denham Town. The case collapsed when a key witness disappeared before the trial. The Shower Posse may be extinct, but the Coke family name still inspires fear.

Christopher Coke is due for release on July 4, 2030. He will be 60-years-old.

Frank Owen's Criminal Minded

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