Marley’s assailants, according to street wisdom if not the courts (no charges were ever filed in the attack), were “Labourite ta Ras”—hard-core JLP men. Marley was a savvy ghetto kid with close bredren from both sects: he always sought to project a public image of prophetic nonalliance—and to maintain juice, behind the scenes, with all parties. But after the PNP’s Michael Manley became prime minister, in 1972, that image grew harder to maintain. Manley allied himself, during his winning campaign, with the Rastas. This risky move proved prescient; in the 1970s, the faith’s icons and argot became the lingua franca of island culture. For Seaga’s JLP, a party nominally in thrall more to Christ and capitalism than to “social living” and reggae, this remained a problem throughout the decade (Manley was reelected twice). Perhaps it also convinced some of Seaga’s soldiers, if not the “Big Man hisself,” that offing the biggest Rasta of all might be a good idea. That offing didn’t work. But neither, sadly, did the One Love Peace Concert Marley came home to play in 1978. The show’s aftermath comprised a bloodier-than-ever election season during which both Bucky Marshall and Claudie Massop were slain. The peacemaking “shottas” heirs, now armed with M16s (guns provided them, if they were tied to the JLP, by the CIA), were responsible for some eight hundred deaths, during the campaign that saw Eddie Seaga installed in Jamaica House for the first time. Among those who abetted that win, in 1980, was a new don of Tivoli. That figure’s rise made him a hero for would-be bad men across Jamaica and heralded an era in which the garrisons, and their dons, would grow more powerful than the politicians who had made them.
The man they called “Jim Brown” was born Lester Coke in Denham Town and first won notice in his teens on the blocks he would rule as a soccer player.1 The legend of his rise began one day when he was walking home from a kickabout. Jim Brown (who chose his sobriquet in homage to the American football star whose “bad strength and pride” he admired) was jumped by a gang of assailants, affiliation unknown, and found bloodied and dying in the street. His friends brought him to a new free health clinic in nearby Tivoli Gardens—whose doctors were installed by the area’s JLP member of parliament, Eddie Seaga. Jim Brown built his career and fearsome rep from there, at the side of JLP bad men like Claudie Massop. And then he gained control of Tivoli just as Seaga was helping, inadvertently or no, and in his first term as prime minister, to vastly increase the Jamaican underworld’s power and wealth. In the ’70s, Jamaica had earned its reputation as America’s great source for marijuana. In the supply chain that made this so, the best-armed and best-connected segment of Jamaica’s populace—its bad men—had naturally become big players. After Seaga took power in 1980, his own patrons in Washington, D.C., leaned on him to curtail the stream of ganja-fueled prop planes and boats departing Jamaica for Miami. His success at doing so, in the ’80s, had two effects above all. One was to help spur an explosion, still ongoing, in ganja production stateside. The other was to help push Jamaica’s gangsters toward a much more lucrative and dangerous replacement.
That replacement was cocaine. And among those who moved aggressively to make Jamaica a key node in the hemisphere’s trade was Jim Brown. Working with a close émigré associate named Vivian Blake, Jim Brown built an international cartel based in the Kingston garrison he now ruled. His syndicate network of smugglers and hit men reached from his Tivoli headquarters south to Colombia’s coca fields and north to Brooklyn and the Bronx, through Miami, Baltimore, Toronto, and Texas. His cartel was called the Shower Posse. It was perhaps named for a JLP slogan, but the gang’s tag also evoked its members’ predilection for showering their enemies with lead. In conjunction-cum-rivalry with the PNP-affiliated Spangler Posse, centered mere blocks from Tivoli in the adjoining burg of Matthews Lane, Jamaica’s cartels became the hemisphere’s only ones to rival the Colombians’ impact. They perhaps gained an even larger one: it was the Shower Posse’s Vivian Blake, who, while looking for more profitable ways to push cocaine, and foisting what he cooked up on poor addicts in the Bronx, is alleged to have invented crack.
Such activities on U.S. soil have a way of attracting federal heat. The FBI and the State Department both built huge dossiers on a ring allegedly responsible for more than two thousand murders by 1992, many of them grisly. Eventually, the investigation brought Jim Brown down. In 1991, he was imprisoned in Kingston’s castle-like General Penitentiary. But with U.S. agents waiting at the airport to extradite him to the States for indictment on a raft of charges, the cell of “don dadda” was engulfed in a mysterious fire. Jim Brown died in the fire at the age of sixty-four. Whether the flames were set by a don who preferred silence by suicide to being asked to squeal on his cronies or by cronies or enemies who feared that he would is still debated. But Brown’s funeral march saw Eddie Seaga lead thirty thousand mourners through Kingston’s streets. It was the sort of thing to keep conspiracy theorists talking for years. (Many naturally posit that since the autopsy photos of Jim Brown’s charred body have never been released, he’s still alive.) But it also set the stage for Jim Brown’s youngest son to take his place—and go further.
The man all Jamaicans learned to call “Dudus” was a short, pudgy youth of just twenty-one when his father died. Christopher Coke was not only the youngest of Jim Brown’s sons; he was also born to a woman who was not the don’s wife—hardly a rare story in context, but a certain handicap for his prospects. (The alleged source for his moniker was his favoring African-style shirts that were also worn by the ’70s-era Jamaican statesman Dudley Thompson.) During the weeks and months after Jim Brown’s death, not a few pretenders to his throne were subjected to a “Tivoli funeral,” their bullet-riddled bodies deposited in front of the Denham Town Police Station. During this interregnum, Dudus displayed deft cunning. Helped by the fact that Jim Brown’s eldest son, Jah T, had been murdered in mysterious circumstances days before his dad’s death, Dudus outmaneuvered his rivals to secure rising-don status. He ultimately won power, in an apt wrinkle on this incestuous isle, with the unwitting help of another son of a 1970s icon.
Bob Marley’s eldest son, Ziggy, is a singer who has enjoyed a modicum of success internationally—though not in Jamaica—that has often seemed to depend on his striking resemblance, especially as beheld by stoned reggae fans abroad, to his famed father. As a spoiled son of privilege, Ziggy grew up far from Bob’s home ghetto and its ways. In 1994, he endeavored to “give back” to Trench Town’s people by building a recording studio for local kids and seasoned pros who wanted to soak up the vibes of his father’s home slum near Tivoli’s edge. Unfortunately, he neglected to call the area’s new don to kick the construction contract his way. Maybe Ziggy was determined not to deal with the progeny of men who had tried to murder his father (Jim Brown was long rumored to have been one of Marley’s assailants in 1976), but in any case, this wouldn’t do, and it was Dudus’s swift campaign to show as much—a couple of Ziggy’s associates ended up prone in front of the Denham Town Police Station—that concretized his rule as the new don dadda. (It may be no accident that the only one of Marley’s offspring with much cred or popularity on the Jamaican street is Damian. “Junior Gong,” as he’s known, is the son of Cindy Breakespeare—Miss World 1976—who, after the Gong’s death, partnered with a prominent “garrison lawyer” who was intimately tied to the leaders of the Tivoli garrison, and made sure her son spent much of his youth downtown.)
Dudus was as unflamboyant as Jim Brown was flashy; “Short Man” (another nickname) was a study in wily discretion—and a keen businessman. He moved quickly to open a new construction firm. That outfit, Incomparable Enterprise, soon had a portfolio of rich public contracts from such agencies as Jamaica’s National Heritage Trust and the Ministry of Education. Its projects didn’t just include bread-and-butter local jobs like rebuilding Tivoli’s drainage gully; Dudus’s firm was also responsible for such prominent gigs as the long-delayed refurbishment