Drug-Dealing ‘Posses’ : Jamaicans: New Faces in U.S. Crime

The Jamaicans were easy to spot. When the police here started arresting men in dreadlocks, they knew something was up. Trouble is, they had no idea what.

The Jamaicans talked differently, dressed differently and acted differently from Americans. “They stuck out like a sore thumb,” said police Sgt. Marcus Harris. But nobody knew why they were here.

It wasn’t until the bodies started piling up in crack houses across the city that the realization dawned: Kansas City was being invaded by violent Jamaican drug gangs.

Volatile and ambitious, the gangs--called posses, after the gunslinging peacekeepers in movie Westerns--were in large part responsible for the rapid spread of the drug crack into the nation’s heartland in the mid-1980s.

Ethnic Gangsters

The growth of the Jamaican gangs is also evidence--along with the rise of Colombian, Asian, Russian and other ethnic crime organizations--of the changing face of organized crime in America, authorities say.

Kansas City once was home to powerful Mafia families, whose ranks have been weakened in recent years by a series of successful prosecutions. Although law enforcement officers invoke the memory of Al Capone and Frank Nitti to describe the viciousness and vaunting ambition of the new gangsters, since the mid-1980s Kansas City’s most fearsome crime family has spoken with a Jamaican accent.

“The Jamaicans introduced crack to Kansas City,” Capt. Dave Barton of the city police department said.

Took Crack to Other Cities

According to federal authorities, they also introduced the highly addictive cocaine derivative or facilitated its spread to Houston, Dallas, St. Louis, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, rural West Virginia and elsewhere.

After first setting up operations in Miami and New York in the early 1980s, the Jamaican posses soon branched out to other East Coast cities and to the South and Midwest, spreading crack and death as they went. Nationally, the violent gangs have been blamed by the FBI for 1,400 deaths since 1985, the year they first came to the government’s attention.

The posses won grudging respect from authorities for their business acumen, if nothing else.

“They do market research,” Barton said. “They determine where the money can be made. And, if there’s an opening, they move in.”

“I just think they’re good marketing folk,” said Alvin Brooks, founder of a citizens’ group that fights crime in Kansas City’s black neighborhoods by operating a 24-hour hot line for tips and giving cash rewards for information leading to arrests. “Not that they follow the Dow-Jones averages, but they figure out where . . . the demand can be developed for their product.”

The posses targeted Kansas City early.

On the face of it, this Midwestern city seemed a peculiar choice. There long has been a Jamaican community here, but it was tiny--fewer than 1,000 hard-working, law-abiding, decent people, the police stress.

Some police officers were concerned about the growing presence of Jamaican criminals here as early as 1983. But, by the time the department higher-ups began to take notice--in 1986, about the time that the federal government began a national crackdown--the posses had moved 450 gang members into town, set up business in 50 crack houses and created a demand for the drug that shows no sign of abating.

It was a slow, wet Friday night in Kansas City. Sgt. Marcus Harris was cruising rain-slick streets.

Despite the weather, the crack houses were busy. After slowing down in front of one that the police had closed and boarded up the week before, Harris turned his spotlight on the open door. There were furtive glances from the people inside. The squad car kept moving.

“You shut them down and they’re back open the next week, sometimes the next day,” Harris said.

A few minutes later, driving through a sprawling north side housing project--a “supermarket of crack,” Barton calls it--Harris called out to a group of young men standing outside in the drizzle. “What’s up fellows? What’s going on?”

Fear etched their faces briefly, until they saw that it was not a bust.

Harris knows many of the small-time drug dealers--the “local entrepreneurs,” as Barton calls them, who are helping to satisfy the high demand for crack created by the Jamaicans. Sometimes he takes it on himself to talk to them, to try to help them straighten out their young lives.

“My thing is, I don’t want them to feel like I’m a threat to them,” he said as he drove the city’s meanest streets. “I tell them I’m a police officer--’If you do something wrong, I’m going to bust you.’ ” But, even though it angers him that they are selling drugs, “I don’t antagonize them. I don’t roughhouse them.

“This generation that we got coming up right now, they’re definitely in jeopardy--an endangered species.”

‘Imitation Crips and Bloods’

Harris stopped his squad car to talk to a young man named Winston, whom the police officer identified as an active dealer but who denied any involvement with drugs. Winston did acknowledge, though, that the projects were full of “imitation Crips and Bloods.”

“A lot of the guys I knew when I was growing up, they just wanna be Crips,” he said, standing in a parking lot with his girlfriend and small child. “They want to display the name.”

As the Jamaicans in Kansas City have gone underground as a result of a successful crackdown started by a law enforcement task force in 1986, the Crips and Bloods--Los Angeles gangs--have moved in to help fill the void.

“They’re not here to recruit for their gangs or anything along those lines,” Barton said. “What we’re seeing are drug entrepreneurs trying to open up markets for their product . . . . When they leave Los Angeles, they stop being gangs and become drug organizations.”

To that end, the rival gangs have joined forces in the Midwest, as have the Jamaicans.

The Jamaicans are still here, authorities and community activists say, but in reduced numbers, and they are using Americans as front men. “When word got out that we were targeting Jamaican criminals, people would call and tell us the minute a Jamaican appeared on their block,” Barton said, explaining why Jamaicans dealers are lying low.

Even though police here were slow to realize what was happening, the crackdown on the posses in Kansas City has been praised by other law enforcement agencies because of its effectiveness and relative swiftness. “We estimated 450 Jamaican criminals here in 1986,” Barton said. “We’ve charged and convicted over 200.”

He said he believes there probably are only about 30 Jamaican posse members in Kansas City today. “We’d like to think it’s because we make the cost of doing business so high,” he said. “But in the Midwest they are still very much a problem.”

It was in 1983 that Tommy Williams first became concerned about the Jamaicans.

He and other police officers noticed that Jamaican nationals were being arrested here on drug charges in increasing numbers. The Jamaicans all had fake passports and IDs. They would get out on bail and disappear. The posse leadership would ship them off to another city.

The men who worked in the drug houses looked like vagrants. They were unkempt, uneducated. Although, when arrested, they often were wearing gold chains and had large amounts of money in their pockets--sometimes thousands of dollars--the police didn’t see them as part of any larger picture. “What they had on them was everything they had in the world,” Williams said.

To Harris’ mind, most of the Jamaican posse members arrested were themselves victims. “A lot of these guys were recruited from Jamaica. A lot of them say they were recruited to come over here and were told they would be given jobs. Then, when they got here, they were put in a dope house. They didn’t have no transportation, no nothing. They were locked in the house to sell drugs. Members of the gang brought food. They had girls sent over.”

Many Were Lying

Harris realizes that many of the men probably were lying about their lot. Still, he believed some. He read some of the letters they wrote home. “A lot of them, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for . . . . These guys really didn’t know anything.”

In 1983, Williams and another Kansas City police officer attended a seminar in New York on Jamaican posses. That’s when he realized that what was starting to happen in Kansas City was the same thing that had already happened in New York. He said he wrote a report for his superiors after returning home, but no action was taken. The Jamaicans were not yet recognized as a serious problem.

The posses began setting up operations in this country in the early 1980s, after bloody elections in Jamaica in which gang members turned the streets of Kingston into sandbagged battlefields and 600 people died.

Violent gangsterism had exploded in Jamaica in the 1970s, as the Jamaican economy plunged into record depression. Then-Prime Minister Michael Manley at one point declared a state of national emergency because of the violence. By 1980, the posses had become affiliated with each of the two major political parties, leading to the election campaign bloodshed of that year.

Authorities say they have traced shipments of guns and money from the posse members in the United States to Kingston, leading to speculation that next spring’s elections in Jamaica may be even bloodier than the 1980 election, although both of the candidates for prime minister deny that their parties are connected to the gangs and have made repeated calls for peace.

The first Jamaican posse members in the United States sold marijuana, then moved to crack. Hardly anybody in Kansas City knew what crack was at first. It was a problem on the coasts back then, but nowhere else. But the Jamaicans helped change that--fast.

All of a sudden, crack was everywhere. Barton estimates that now, on a given day, it can be bought at 100 sites in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

One of the innovations the Jamaicans brought to Kansas City was the use of children to sell drugs. They were used because they were cheaper and easily recruited and because of what Barton called weaknesses in the juvenile justice system. “They believe that, when juveniles are arrested for selling cocaine, nothing’ll happen to them, that they’ll be right back out on the street again,” he said. “To a large extent, that’s true.”

By 1985, when law enforcement officials around the country first began to take notice after an alarming increase in homicides involving Jamaicans, the posses had already taken over much of the cocaine trade in New York and had a solid foothold in Kansas City and other cities.

“We had one dope house that made $1 million before we knew anything about it,” said Harris, a narcotics officer when the crack invasion began.

“The Jamaicans brought in a much better quality of cocaine--that’s what made them catch on real well,” he said. “They weren’t cutting the dope like everybody else, and they were giving bigger pieces for the money. They just flooded the market.”

Lack of Competition

The Midwest was attractive to them in the first place because of the lack of competition.

“They could double their profits by selling here as opposed to Miami or New York, and, to a large degree, that still is the case,” Barton said. “It’s still $120 a gram here while it sells for $60 to $70 a gram in South Florida. I believe (the price is) even lower than that in L.A.”

Since last year, more than 400 Jamaican nationals have been arrested in nationally coordinated roundups. The Justice Department estimates that 10,000 posse members belonging to about 40 separate gangs are in the United States.

In Kansas City, as in other cities that have been targeted by the posses, it was the homicide unit that first discovered the seriousness of the problem. In 1985 in Kansas City, 91 homicides were reported. By 1987, after the introduction of crack into the city, the number had risen to 131. Many of the killings involved Jamaican nationals. Even with the increase in homicides, Kansas City escaped the blood baths that occurred in Washington, New York and other cities when the free-shooting posses battled rivals over turf.

Authorities nationally speak of the alarming propensity for violence among the posse members and of their fetishistic attachment to guns.

“They seem to have a fascination for firearms,” said Tom Truman, the agent in charge of the Kansas City office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “I don’t know what the reason is or what it is about their culture that causes this. But, in 135 prosecutions in federal court and 43 in state court, we confiscated 230 firearms. That’s more than one per defendant.”

In some arrests, as many as eight high-quality, large-caliber weapons--sometimes including machine guns--have been confiscated from a single crack house, Truman said. He called the weapons “the best that could be purchased.”

“I’ve seen pictures that we’ve gotten from crack houses where they posed with weapons and had their photographs taken with guns sticking in the air, very much like in the pictures of Western posses.”

In Jamaica, posse members even have been known to attack police departments.

Wayne Smith, one of Jamaica’s most notorious killers and a gangster who police say was affiliated with the posse that is active in Kansas City, led a raid on a police station in Kingston in 1986, allegedly after his girlfriend was roughed up by police officers.

The Jamaican Weekly Gleaner described the attack this way: “First, they lobbed . . . petrol bombs on the police station, and raked it with gunfire from four sides. They then killed three policemen. They took away the slain policemen’s revolvers. They then broke into a safe at the station and stole two submachine guns, two M-16 assault rifles and three .38-calibre revolvers.”

Smith, who used the nickname Sandokhan, used one of the M-16 rifles as his personal weapon until he was killed in an ambush by vigilante gunmen in September.

The talk in the United States about the Jamaican drug traffickers is full of references to the Wild West and to the lawless Prohibition days in Chicago. One must reach back that far to find a comparison.

“You haven’t seen anything like this since the Nitti days,” Harris, the police sergeant, said of the posses, which he compares to the Mafia in other ways also.

“I think it’s a lot like when the Italians first came over here and got involved with bootlegging and things like that,” he said of the posses. “To me, they’ve done what every other group has done when they came to America.”