Original subtitles

From destitute beginnings in Jamaica

created one of the most feared drug gangs

in American history.

He is responsible for thousands of deaths.

His impact is felt even today,

continuing war against drugs.

Lester Coke created an empire, an empire built on fear.

In the annals of organized crime, violence is not uncommon.

Brutality is often a tradition

with origins that can be traced back centuries.

In the 1980s, however, a new crime organization took hold.

Born of the drug trade unrestrained by ancient custom,

the Shower Posse brought havoc

not only to its native Jamaica,

but across the United States as well.

At the top of the organization

stood the most feared Posses out of them all.

Lester Lloyd Coke.

In less than a decade,

Lester Coke's Shower Posse rose from obscurity

in the political unrest of Jamaica

to prominence is one of the most feared drug gangs

in American history.

And in that same decade, the FBI, the DEA and the ATF,

fought together in an unprecedented battle

to bring down Lester Coke, and in doing so,

raise the stakes in the widening war against drugs.

To most, Jamaica's a vacation paradise,

birthplace of reggae music,

a land of unique art and culture.

The qualities that bring millions of tourists to the island

make it an enchanting destination.

But there's another Jamaica,

a complicated land with a tragic past.

This was a Jamaica that created Lester Lloyd Coke.

Coke grew up in Tivoli Gardens, a poor community

on the outskirts of the Jamaican capital of Kingston.

His early life was spent in this cramped tenement yard.

As many as 10 families lived here,

each limited to a single room,

with the entire building sharing one bathroom.

He came from the world of the sufferers.

Those sharing a life of extreme poverty and desperation.

Well, the typical childhood

of a youth in Jamaica is a very frightening one

in the sense that many of that generation

was simply not able to have access to high schools.

I mean, their schooling would end at the age of 14 or 15.

It would mean then that just housing

would be a serious problem.

Getting food on a daily basis would be a serious problem.

Many of these people did depended on remittances

coming from abroad.

I mean that really sometimes determined

whether they survived or did not survive.

And of course, growing up in those communities

with the level of violence,

you really had to be tough in order to survive

and just very difficult to survive

if you didn't develop a certain inner toughness.

While researching for her book

on Jamaican Posses, author Laurie Gunst

became intimately familiar

with the people and the spirit of Jamaica.

I came to realize that the main sound

that I remembered from Kingston's ghettos

was the sound of children crying.

It is really weeping and wailing and crying

that I remember most of all from those streets.

That and the hot sun beating down and the hunger,

it's a destitution that is almost impossible

for an American to understand

because in this country, we always have hope.

It's a huge country.

There's always another frontier.

There's always a place to go.

In Jamaica, there's nowhere to go

unless you can escape from the rock.

Unless you're one of the tiny lucky few who have a visa

and can get to the United States.

Otherwise, for you, there will be no hope.

Like so many of his generation,

young Lester Coke found hope in American movies,

captivated by the interracial embrace between actors

Jim Brown and Raquel Welch in the 1969 movie "100 Rifles".

Coke would adopt the film star's name.

In Tivoli Gardens he was the new Jim Brown.

I don't know him as Jim Brown, I know him as Bye-Bye

because that's the name we call him.

When he was a little boy going to school.

The boy that Taylor Egbert Edwards

knew as Bye-Bye offered no hint of his future path.

I never even seen him even fight a boy.

I never seen him do nothing like that.

I know him as a clean man.

I used to make his pants

he was a little boy going to school.

So we were associate when he was a small boy.

Quiet, nice youth growing with us on Milk Lane.

Brown began to learn a trade.

He was a welder, a cabinet maker, and a locksmith.

His neighbors saw him as a good, hardworking young man.

A man looking for an opportunity.

But in time, his ambition would lead him

to a criminal career.

Achieving for him the dream of many of the poor in Jamaica,

the freedom to escape.

The Jamaican people have had a very difficult history.

It's a history that is rooted in slavery

and in colonialism.

But the Jamaican people are also very imaginative,

very creative, very aggressive,

and very willing to resist oppression.

One of the unique features about slavery in Jamaica

is that almost every five years there was a major rebellion.

And I think that there is something in the Jamaican spirit

that makes us willing to resist oppression,

now that might manifest itself in different forms.

What you have in Jamaica is the third world democracy,

struggling to accommodate itself to a very harsh reality,

which is extreme poverty of the majority

and the very great wealth of the very, very few.

That's not a situation in which democracy thrives.

In 1962, the world was on the brink

of a third world war when Soviet missiles

were placed on Cuban territory.

In a tense showdown,

the United States demanded their immediate removal.

Finally, the Soviet Union acquiesced,

from then on the United States considered

the entire Caribbean an important frontier

in the East West struggle.

So what happened was that Jamaica began to be drawn

into the orbit of this struggle

and her politics polarized accordingly.

So that by the time Michael Manley

became prime Minister in 1972 and articulated socialism

as the path his people's national party was going to follow,

and Edward Seaga emerged as the leader

of the Jamaica Labor Party,

and he was the significant force on the right side.

That is the right wing side.

Politics in Jamaica polarized very sharply

along these two lines.

And that meant that as far as the ghettos were concerned,

there was gonna be increasing polarization

between the two parties and increasing violence

as both sides enlisted their paladins, their gunfighters

to control vast areas of Kingston's ghetto downtown.

Basil Wilson,

provost to the John J College of Criminal Justice

has written extensively on the political history

of his native Jamaica.

And one of the things that emerged

is a battle for scarce resources.

So the party in power tended to be a low income housing

and distributed that housing to their supporters

and politicians vying for power

would politicize particular communities

to be able to provide those communities with contracts,

with low income housing, with other niceties of government.

And I think that led to highly politicized communities

where elections then became a life and death struggle.

And the level of this warfare is almost impossible

for an American to understand because it involves strategies

and tactics such as burning people out of their homes.

If there's an area that's known to be packed

with supporters of one party

and you're in the other party and you wanna unseat them,

you simply torch that neighborhood by night

and shoot at the firemen

as they're trying to put out the blaze.

And when the blaze is over, you bulldoze the rubble

and build a housing scheme as it's called in Jamaica,

a housing project,

and you pack it full of your own supporters.

Because the construction trades in Jamaica were so corrupt

and were so tied into the politicians.

And because the tribal warfare downtown

often consisted of burning out

entire neighborhoods in downtown Kingston,

the contractor had a particularly lucrative tie

to the two political parties

because when you were a contractor and an area was burnt out

and needed to be rebuilt, if you had ties to a politician,

you would be the one he would call.

So Jim Brown had come up fairly well

in West Kingston by the mid 1970s.

He was a well-known figure in Tivoli Gardens,

which is Seaga's constituency in West Kingston.

He was actually a contractor

and he was very much an up and coming enforcer.

He wanted to get involved as Seaga's right hand man,

and he was pushing himself

up through the ranks of West Kingston gunmen.

Politics is the key thing, factor.

You see, because we stand up for one thing.

We had forces that tried to fight that.

Give you a hard fight.

And we had to make sure we keep those forces out.

Devin Clark was born on Milk Lane,

the same street where Jim Brown spent his early years

You definitely have to have somebody

to make the place what it is.

Where you can sleep with the door open.

You can do anything like that.

And that was the kind of man he was.

What was happening on the streets downtown in Kingston

was a growing fascination

with the Hollywood silver screen and primarily the outlaws

and cowboys and bandits that came out of Hollywood

in the 50s and 60s and early 70s.

All of these movies really captured the Jamaican imagination

and the gangsters who were by then up and coming

in the ranks of both parties

began to style themselves after these cowboy heroes.

And that became the real kind of emotional substance

that the gangs carried to Kingston's poor.

In 1980, a pivotal national election in Jamaica

was a culmination of the political unrest

that had shaken the foundations of its government.

The radical divisions between Michael Manley

and Edward Seaga led to disaster.

The 1980 election in Jamaica was a bloodbath

in which perhaps as many as a 1,000 people lost their lives.

The level of terror in 1980

was unlike anything Jamaicans had ever experienced before.

To anybody who had a grudge to settle in Kingston

or anywhere else in the Allen

hoped to get themselves recruited.

Most of the gunmen wanted to fire shots

for the Jamaica Labor Party

because it was already well known by that time

that the Jamaica Labor Party

was the one favored by the United States and the CIA.

As expected, Edward Seaga and the Jamaican Labor Party

were swept into power,

a power that extended to one of its strongest supporters,

Jim Brown.

With Seaga's victory,

Brown emerged not only as his bodyguard,

but as a leader in Tivoli Garden.

So that when the election was over,

what you had was victorious gunman

of whom Jim Brown was the most important.

He emerged at the top of the heap after 1980.

And losing gunman on the PNP side,

who got the message very quickly

that they had better get out of the island

if they wanted to live.

So that was really the 1980 election in Jamaica

that initiated the exodus of the Posses to the United States

because once that election was over,

there was only room in Jamaica

for a few of the victorious Posse dons,

it was only the ones at the very top of the heap

who were very closest to Seaga,

who were going to really be able

to parlay the work they had done for Seaga

in the 1980 election into continuing a lucrative life.

Though Jim Brown, as don of Tivoli Gardens

was already earning a reputation as a man to be feared,

he was still considered a hero to his followers.

To them, he was living the Hollywood screen legend

of the American West.

The lone misunderstood gunman

achieving good against all odds.

He was the person who decided to stand up

for the cause of the community and put himself out,

sacrifice himself for we in other community,

The Don would be synonymous with that of a godfather.

The don basically is the leader within the community.

He provides the protection

and he tends to be a major figure.

A champion, yes, champion

because he is a champion for the people,

the people in West Kingston.

He respected the people

and the people gave him the same amount of respect.

And we love that, you know?

As much as law enforcement

will look at the dons as being criminals,

within the community, the dons are seen as leaders,

as community activists,

as people who provide the community

with certain basic necessities.

So I think you have an interesting contradiction there

as to who is looking at the don

and who is interpreting what the don is doing,

and whether the don is benefiting the community

or is in fact being detrimental to the community.

A good man but if it comes to the test,

you know, a good man can turn.

Several things happened to Jim Brown

after the 1980 election.

One of them was that as Seaga's bodyguard,

he had what was basically diplomatic immunity.

He could shuttle back and forth with Seaga

or on his own between Jamaica and the United States.

The other thing was that after 1980,

Ronald Reagan was in the White House

and America really stepped up its war on drugs abroad.

In the case of Jamaica,

what this meant was American military and USAID funding

for ganja, marijuana eradication in Jamaica.

And it became increasingly difficult for Jamaicans

to get their product off the island.

So men like Jim Brown, who had contacts with politicians,

who had contacts on the wars in West Kingston,

which are within the area that Seaga controls

became crucially important to Jamaica's growers

because they could no longer attempt

to get their drugs off the island.

What Jim Brown did was to basically leapfrog

the Jamaican marijuana connection into the United States

using his connections in Miami, Toronto, Washington DC,

New York, and Los Angeles,

and keep the money flowing in to Jamaica's growers

for whom marijuana was the only game in town.

It was Jamaica's only cash crop.

This was a real story of Jim Brown

and his criminal organization called the Shower Posse,

the Shower of ammunition Posse members

with unleash against riffles.

They began as brutally forces of political will.

They would soon be ruled by an even greater force,

a worldwide demand for illegal drugs.

The Shower Posse entered the US narcotics

traded at a critical time, usage was at an all time high.

And the drug war in the United States,

though heavily funded and widely promoted,

continued to be ineffective.

Shower Posse by any other name

had really resolved itself into an entity

by the time of the 1980 election.

Jim Brown was already at the helm.

As Seaga's bodyguard

he was the top ranking enforcer in Kingston.

But it really wasn't until after the election

when all of these gangsters on both sides,

all of what Jamaicans called the Friars,

the small chickens, were basically skittering out of Jamaica

to try to make their fortunes in the United States.

That Jim Brown saw that the real money lay up here

in the burgeoning crack cocaine trade.

Jim Brown,

along with his second in command, Vivian Blake,

already had connections in New York, Washington, and Miami

to make the Shower Posse an important force

in the sale of crack cocaine.

Jamaican sort of storefront operations,

old marijuana, reggae records, vegetarian food,

Vivian Blake and Jim Brown saw that they could parlay

these connections in Jamaican communities across the country

into very lucrative crack cocaine trade.

At the same time,

they also had their own Jamaican product, marijuana,

that they could sell.

And what basically happened

by the time crack hit the streets in the United States

was that the drug lords, the Colombians,

particularly the Cali Cartel,

which had a special relationship with the Shower Posse,

it's been said that the Cali cartel handpicked Jim Brown

and the Shower to be its street level middlemen

in the United States.

The Colombian cartels in a lot of cases

in certain cities have better market penetration

than Burger King.

If you don't believe me, ask the next cop you see.

He will tell you that he can find drugs

or drug users or drug dealers probably within a few blocks

of where you're standing right at that very moment.

They were bolder than the rest.

They had come from an island,

it must be remembered in which the police force

routinely commits between one third

and one half of the island's homicides.

That's a staggering total when you think about it.

So these were gangsters who were perfectly willing

to violate the most important rule

that the underworld has ever known,

which is don't kill cops.

Jamaicans do not abide by that rule.

They were perfectly willing to kill police officers

and they were perfectly willing to shoot anybody

who was in the way.

They thrived on violence

and they were quite willing to use it.

And this made them ideal street level enforcers.

Jim Brown and the Shower Posse were thriving.

In Jamaica he was at the height of his power.

When the neighboring community of Rema posed a threat,

it was Brown who led a reprisal raid

in which 12 people were murdered.

Though there was a public outcry,

he was never brought to justice.

Instead, the government seemed to expand his ability

to move freely to and from Jamaica.

For Brown business was good.

Crack cocaine, UCJ grown to epidemic proportions

in the United States.

Law enforcement so far was ineffective.

The body count attributed to Shower Posse violence

continued to rise.

According to the United Nations.

the drug market internationally

is somewhere around $400 billion a year.

Which puts it ahead of the oil business

and slightly behind the arms trade

as number two in the top three

industries on the planet today.

That money is going tax free

into the hands of some of the worst people on the planet,

and they are using that money to strengthen themselves.

The United States authorities

had no idea who Jim Brown was.

He was shuttling back and forth between Kingston and Miami.

And almost as soon as he got here, got to Miami in 1984,

he perpetrated a multiple homicide

in a crack house in Miami, in which five people,

one of them pregnant woman who knelt and prayed for her life

while he executed her, five people were killed.

And speaking of dominance, this is the way you do it.

This is the way you get your name known

on the street in the drug trade,

is by being willing to perpetrate these kinds of homicides.

It was only after the 1984 crack house slangs in Miami

that federal law enforcement authorities

in the Metro Dade Police in Miami

realized that Jim Brown

and Lester Lloyd Coke were the same person.

March 30th, 1985,

Shower Posse members open fire on 300 reggae dancers

at the Fireman's Benevolent Association Ball

in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

One man is killed, three others injured.

The body count from Posse violence continues to rise.

The thing that really snafued the Posses

in the United States and brought alcohol, tobacco,

and firearms into the prosecution of them

was their pension for interstate firearms trafficking.

They became very good at buying guns in Ohio,

Virginia, and West Virginia.

Those were their three favorite states

and ferrying them up by car to New York, Boston,

wherever guns were needed for Posse operations.

At that point, Jim Brown was also sending firearms

back to Jamaica.

In 1984 the Shower did send down to Jamaica

an enormous shipment of firearms

that wound up on the Kingston Boards

and someone was tipped off.

And so the person who was to claim it never did.

When they opened the barrel

and found these high powered weapons,

this was the first time that Interpol,

the International Police Organization,

was called in to try to track the source of these guns.

And it was discovered that some of these same guns

that had been sent in this barrel back to Jamaica

had been used in homicides in the United States.

And it was really that shipment of guns to Jamaica in 1984

that first alerted international law enforcement

to the presence of the Posses.

July 3rd, 1985,

Posse Vana strikes down an innocent child.

A 6-year-old Miami girl on her way to buy an ice cream cone

is killed in a gunfight between rival Posses.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms

was really the first federal agency

to realize what the Posses were,

or even if there were Posses,

because law enforcement on the state level

began to turn up homicides and firearms trafficking.

And it was when they began to see

all of this gun trading going on,

that they turn to the Bureau of Alcohol,

Tobacco and Firearms,

because that's really ATFs purview.

Law enforcement now aware of the growing threat

began a unique effort to eradicate Brown

and the Shower Posse.

You know, there's always been a tremendous rivalry

in this country between municipal police departments

and federal agencies.

Between the police and the FBI, the FBI and the ATF,

and then of course the Drug Enforcement Agency,

which is relatively new.

In the case of the Posses,

for most of these successful prosecutions,

they put their rivalry on the back burner,

and that's what enabled them to win.

You know, ATF says, "I don't want DEA getting in my hair."

And DEA says, "You know, I don't want ATF on my territory."

And in the case of these gangs,

in order to successfully prosecute them,

the inter agency rivalries went by the board.

I think the most, the most exciting

and interesting thing about busting the Posses

as far as American law enforcement was concerned

was that as an ATF agent in New York

told me these guys were really bad.

And we knew that if we wanted to take them out,

we were going to have to drop our rivalry.

Everybody started basically to become aware

at the same time.

Interpol realized that the Posses

were shipping firearms to Jamaica.

They called in ATF's help.

Various state and municipal law enforcement

realized that there was this Jamaican presence

that was very violent,

that had a great deal of firepower

that they had never seen before.

So it really all began to happen 84, 85.

That was really when the United States authorities

awoke to the presence of the Posses.

The New Yorkers office of the FBI

began to research the need for,

and the possibility of creating a squad

dedicated to targeting Jamaican criminal organizations.

The research found that from the late 70s into the 80s

and throughout the 80s,

the Jamaican organized criminal groups

were becoming more and more of a presence,

both here in New York and across the country.

And the Shower Posse was one of the largest Posses ever

to dominate the New York criminal landscape.

The Shower was really, I think, the only Posse of it today

that deserved to be called Jamaican organized crime.

The very top was Jim Brown

and his right hand man, Vivian Blake, who legend has it,

had a scholarship to play soccer at Columbia University

and left to sell drugs.

Vivian Blake was educated, he was polished.

He was the son of a man

who had been in the People's National Party

with Norman Washington Manley in the 30s and 40s.

Jim Brown was sort of a ghetto ruffian, if you will.

And Vivian Blake had the charm and the connections uptown.

They were the real leaders.

The Shower had various trusted henchmen

all over the United States,

but they all did report to Jim Brown and Vivian Blake.

And it was a much more centralized organization.

It was probably really the only Posse

that you could give the name of organized crime to.

I have heard it said that organized,

that Jamaican organized crime is an oxymoron.

That it should better be called Jamaican disorganized crime.

Because the truth of the matter was,

as any federal agent will tell you that Jamaicans

never had the kind of omerta bond of loyalty

that the mafia did.

When American law enforcement was able to arrest

a few of the Posse members in various states

and various locales, they found that these men

were often so frightened and so willing to cooperate

in return for lighter sentences,

that it was much easier to break apart these gangs.

Once you roped in one or two of its troops

or its workers, they would sing operas

for law enforcement about the operation.

The Jamaican Posse didn't have

a strict code of silence among its members.

What it did was to make up for that

was practice an extreme level of violence and intimidation

and simply not out of honor

did people not talk but out of fear they did not talk.

And I think they made up for a long history

of not talking about the activities

as some of these traditional groups did.

They in a very short time,

established a similar code through fear

and through the extreme level of violence.

I think that in part, that was a conscious effort

to establish that kind of code in a short period of time.

And they did that through acts of extreme want and violence.

Perhaps the most violent of all

the Shower Posse members with its own leader, Jim Brown.

He was someone who was feared

and feared because of the violence that both he could bring

and the people around him could bring.

He surrounded himself with violent people,

extremely violent people.

Where there is a gun culture in Jamaican society

that there is a fascination for guns.

And of course, one of things about guns

is that when you put guns in the hands of poor people

or [indistinct] use, it is a form of empowerment

and it gives them a sense that they have control

of life and death.

And so one of the things that has emerged in the society

when you examine the poor communities

is that there has been a proliferation of guns.

Other Posse members I have interviewed

and spoken with numerous other members of other Posses

who at times dealt with Shower Posse members,

including Jim Brown.

And it was always a somewhat intimidating experience,

even for some of these people

who were fairly violent themselves.

I pay you good money, I take care of, you know that.

I put food on your table.

They always knew when they were going

into some kind of transaction with him,

and personally or with his people around him,

that they had to be very careful

because of his reputation that preceded him.

Well he's a man, if you mash his corn

he's gonna mash back your corn.

And when he's mashing your corn,

he'll mash the whole corn field.

I can tell you that.

While Vivian Blake

ran the Shower Posse's US activities,

Brown controlled operations in Kingston.

To his followers, he was larger than life.

A Robin Hood who used criminal proceeds

to fund community centers

to pay for local children's school tuition

and even to pay for burial suits.

What you can say about Jim Brown

was that if you were a supporter, you adored him,

and if you were an adversary, you were terrified of him.

He was obviously ruthless.

It will never be known how many people he killed.

Certainly, well upwards of 20,

if you just count the homicides in Jamaica alone.

Men, women, children, law enforcement,

it seemed that the Shower Posse's violence had no limits

and that no one could stop Jim Brown.

Jim Brown was arrested in 1984

after the homicides in Miami,

and he was deported by the immigration

and naturalization service back to Jamaica,

where he was promptly set free

because as Seaga's right hand man

and one of his principal enforcers,

he was what Jamaicans call an untouchable.

Meaning that the law would never lay its hand upon him.

So he proceeded to keep shuttling back and forth

from Jamaica to the United States after 1984

on various passports and various aliases

until 1986 when he murdered

a mini bus driver in Jamaica.

And this was the first and only case

that ever brought him before the law.

By that time, the Posses had become so violent in Jamaica

and in the United States that there had begun

to be an outcry against the untouchables.

And Jim Brown was brought to trial,

but the predictable took place.

He was tried and acquitted,

and on the day that he was acquitted,

his Shower Posse supporters mobbed the street

in front of the Jamaican Supreme Court

and bust shot, shot off their guns

to show their joy at the verdict.

Law enforcement kept its sights on Jim Brown.

The Rico or Racketeer influence

and corrupt organization statute allowed federal officials

to pursue the leadership of the Shower Posse

for the crimes of its soldiers.

Jim Brown's days, it seemed, were numbered.

American law enforcement was beginning to feel

that go up against these gangs [indistinct].

There had been so many homicides by that time

attributed to Jim Brown and the Shower

that the alcohol, tobacco and firearms, the DEA, the FBI,

the New York Police Department

and the Metro Dade Police Department

felt that if they could get Jim Brown

back to the United States,

they could prosecute him and win.

Continuing pressure from the United States

and ongoing violence on the streets of Kingston

finally force a Jamaican government

to take Brown into custody.

An extradition process was initiated

to send him back to the United States to face justice.

As the assault on the Shower Posse

and other Jamaican gangs continued.

The Shower Posse may have been a victim

of its own success.

It had grown to be a very large Posse.

The Shower Posse became very large.

With the advent of crack cocaine coming on the scene

it created huge amounts of cash for these groups,

a high profit margin.

And the cash resulted in internal feuds.

More people wanted more of the cash.

The Posses at that time

had a very vertical organizational structure

where the people at the top

are the people that benefited the most.

And the people in the middle

and at the lower ends didn't benefit too much.

And with the advent of this huge inflow of cash

from the sale of crack cocaine,

it created a lot of problems

within the Posses and the Shower Posse.

A large Posse like that

and internal strife kind of came into play

and splinter groups started to form

and members started to relocate to other areas

where they thought they could establish

their own crack cocaine business.

US authorities continue their assault

on Jamaican Posses.

Robert Chacon recalls one important raid.

December 6th, 1990, a coordinated effort

fed by the New York office of the FBI

in conjunction with the New York City Police Department,

the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,

the State Department, the Immigration Service,

and numerous other state and local and federal agencies

executed simultaneously 32 search warrants,

mainly in Brooklyn, New York, but also in Albany, New York,

Long Island, New York, and Dallas, Texas.

The search warrants targeted numerous locations

known to be used by the Posse,

used as either residences or warehouses

for cash and guns and drugs.

Numerous Posse members were arrested that night,

taken into federal custody.

Automatic weapons were seized.

Large amounts of marijuana, cocaine,

and heroin were also seized that night.

The message was clear,

the crime and violence of the Shower Posse

and other Jamaican gangs would be met with a full force

of American law enforcement.

Jim Brown, meanwhile wasn't giving in so easily.

He fought them all the way up

to the British Privy Council,

which is the court of last resort for Jamaica.

And he appealed the extradition

to the British Privy Council,

which ultimately in 1992 denied his appeal.

Which meant that Jim Brown was going to be extradited

to stand trial in the United States.

In February, 1992, US Federal Marshals

arrived at Kingston's General Penitentiary

to take Jim Brown back to the United States.

But before they could take custody,

Brown was burned to death in a fire in his cell.

Though there is no hard evidence,

some believe they know why Jim Brown was killed.

Edward Seaga knew that if he were allowed

to go back to the United States and talk,

he would tell the federal authorities

everything he knew about his connections to Seaga

and the Jamaica Labor Party,

and the ways in which the party had aided

and embedded the Shower Posse's exploits

in the United States.

Whatever the cause, the fire in Kingston

brought to a close Jim Brown's life,

but not his puzzling legacy.

At Jim Brown's memorial,

former Prime Minister Edward Seaga would call Brown

the protector of Kingston's poor.

Thousands of mourners attended

what seemed like a state funeral.

The question is often asked,

why these men were so violent?

Why they killed so many in their own neighborhoods

in the line of duty?

Why are they seen as heroes?

Why are they seen as Robin Hoods to the poor?

And the reason is really very simple.

It's that throughout the 1980s

the International Monetary Fund crack down

on debt ridden third world countries like Jamaica,

and as the New World Economic Order,

increasingly marginalized countries like Jamaica,

the drug trade became the only game in town.

These men, men like Jim Brown

and his Shower Posse became the people,

the only people who were putting shoes

on the feet of children,

who were putting roofs over people's heads,

who when Hurricane Gilbert hit Jamaica in the fall of 1988,

and the government was so corrupt

that it never dispensed any of the foreign aid

and the rebuilding materials

that various countries provided.

It was the Posses who had the foreign capital,

who had the hard cash,

and to basically resuscitate entire communities

so that when somebody needs money

to pay child school entrance fee,

they're gonna turn to their local Posse.

That's who they're gonna go to for help

because they can't go to the government anymore.

These governments have been so crippled

by the International Monetary Fund

that they have nothing to dispense.

So basically what you're seeing,

and you're seeing it all over the world,

you're seeing it in Mexico, you're seeing it in Columbia,

you're seeing it in Jamaica,

and all the Allens throughout the Caribbean

is a withering away of the power of the state.

You're seeing states that are now so impotent,

so unable to really provide for their own people

that the drug trade steps in to fill the vacuum.

And that is why these men,

despite their violence and their mayhem,

are seen as Robin Hood heroes to the poor.

The thing that plagues Jamaican society,

and it is something that the society has to resolve

in the coming decades, is how do you distribute wealth

much more evenly, much more symmetrically?

A democratic society as Jamaica cannot really maintain

social order effectively or non corrosively

unless it can find a way

to include its marginalized elements.

It's unemployed, it's very poor

into the benefits of the society.

And that's a challenge that come from the society

in the coming decades.

Law enforcement can't reform society.

It is a holding action.

It is a temporary barricade

against the worst proclivities of a society.

What we need to do in the United States and elsewhere

is to find ways to convince the public

to shy away from those activities

which support organized crime.

Which organized crime feeds itself.

You'll never eliminate crime from society.

But what you can do is that if you reduce

the level of marginalization,

you will invariably reduce

the level of violence in a society.

Any society, if it wants to reduce the level of violence,

if it wants to achieve a state of wholesomeness,

if it wants to increase to a high level of civility,

it has gotta find ways in which young people

can be channeled in such a way

that they can become productive human beings.

If you block those channels,

then you set up a system in which people are reproduced

as gunmen, as hustlers,

as people with any reverence for human life.

US authorities attributed over 1,400 murders to Jim Brown

and the Jamaican Shower Posse

in the few short years they thrived.

Both explosive world of the drug culture

and the unprecedented efforts of law enforcement

effectively dismantled this dangerous new threat.

As long as a demand for illicit drugs continues however,

Posses and other drug gangs will always exist

to serve the customer.

For law enforcement, the fight continues.

I'm Robert Stack.

Thanks for joining.