By Joel Liburd

The Federation of St. Christopher
and Nevis thought it had exhaled, finally. But that was soon
shattered by gunshots in the still of the night that claimed the
young life of a national athlete. After being ranked in 2018 as one
of the Five Deadliest countries in the world, based on its per capita
murder rate that was five times the global average, the Federation
had not seen a drop of bloodshed for nearly eight months. Miracle or
malaise?

While we would have prayed for the
former, we know all too well that crime in any country is practically
an institution. It is a business, somewhat like mergers,
acquisitions, hostile takeovers, liquidation. Except that criminal
activities are done with the human element as collateral, using blood
money in underground economies that destabilise the very fabric of
democracy.

Unlike poverty, ailing health and
failing education systems, crime is one of the few of society’s
ills that one can simply throw money at. But strangely enough, too
many ill-informed administrations – regionally and globally –
have made the mistake of playing the soft hand with criminals.

Mind you, this is not a debate on
retributive versus restorative justice, but rather examining how
crime lords (yes, we now casually call them “lords”) have turned
to the same political and administrative systems that are supposed to
hunt them down, and hoodwinked them into increased profit and
protection for their anti-social activities.

There are too many studies to
cite, that it is an accepted fact that the moral decay of mankind
begins at home. Single mother, absentee father, bad company, missing
rod of correction et al. This is further exacerbated by the
conditioning in the immediate community and environment. For the most
part, it is the lack of access to education and employment, which is
where the State gets involved.

All human beings have dreams and
aspirations, whether they’re born in Manchester or McKnight. They
want to be successful leaders, live comfortably, travel to places,
educate their children, own their own homes and not be beholden to
any neo-Colonial capitalist oppression, as their forefathers endured.
Note that having “tigers on a gold leash” and “touching down
inna the G5” is not the type of excessive opulence that should be
included here.

In the region, many
administrations have kept a corner of their beds warm for their
respective society’s killers, drug barons and contract mafia. It’s
for a simple reason really. The lifetime of a gang can span many
decades, but a politician is only really sure of one term of five
years in the Caribbean. It therefore makes sense for the weak,
cowardly political leader to foster a symbiotic relationship between
the lawmaker and the lawbreaker, so that each can retain their
respective grasp on their perceived power base. In short, making
crime pay.

In Trinidad and Tobago during the
Patrick Manning era, for example, then-Minister of National Security
Martin Joseph called the 500-plus murder toll “collateral damage”.
The takers of many young lives were allowed to continue their trade
unhindered, and roam freely. The police detection rate for serious
crimes was less than 15 percent; the conviction rate was in single
digits.

In an act of desperation, Prime
Minister Manning arranged a meeting with nearly two dozen of the
country’s top-level crime bosses to discuss peace at the
now-infamous Crowne Plaza Peace Treaty on September 6, 2006 –
months before he called general elections. Instead of bolstering the
police service and addressing the case backlogs in the judiciary, the
Prime Minister chose to bow to the feet of killers, promising them
millions in box-drain contracts, road-sweeping contracts and prize
money for community basketball leagues, if they would just stop
making his government look bad. But crime rates went through the roof
– everyone wanted a piece of this public-purse pie and kidnappings
for ransom activated hundreds of millions in fast cash; beheadings
and executions increased and “hot spot” zones and turfs dictated
the daily commute of ordinary citizens.

In the ten years since that
meeting, all the persons present were dead; only two by natural
causes – Manning and the patriarch of the Sandy gang.

In 2010 though, Manning’s
successor, Kamla Persad-Bissessar seemed to have not learned from
Manning’s playbook, and instead appropriated $400 million to a
programme called LifeSport. On paper, it sounded good; creating
community programmes to keep at-risk youth off the street. Instead,
the result was the creation of a crime force largely aligned to her
party, with illiterate gangsters driving around in Range Rovers and
sporting gilded AK47s. Members of this new faction have been arrested
and charged with the execution of the country’s Director of Public
Prosecution, Dana Seetahal, on May 4, 2014. But these killers and
“dons” are far from languishing behind bars, as they continue to
live a luxurious jail life and continue to run their empires from
behind the safety of their cells.

Political alignment to violent
gangs is not a new phenomenon in the Caribbean. It’s been in
Jamaica for decades. However, it took the dramatic extradition of
Christopher “Coke” Dudus in May 2010 for the world to realize how
deeply ingrained and ingratiated Jamaican gangs such as Coke’s
“Shower Posse” were to the Jamaican political landscape. In 2007,
Prime Minister Bruce Golding returned the JLP to power, while
representing the very constituency that included Coke’s hometown of
Tivoli. In 2009, the United States indicted Coke and issued an
extradition order for him. Golding refused to accept it, saying it
included information from unauthorized wiretaps on Coke’s phone.

What happened after was arguably
Jamaica’s darkest era in generations. Major General Stewart
Saunders was the top military man on the island and a close ally of
then Prime Minister Bruce Golding. His task? Make it all disappear,
and protect Golding’s reputation with the United States at all
cost. An American Lockheed P-3 Orion spy plane was given airspace
clearance to stream real-time footage to a frantic Saunders, who
ordered Major Warrenton Dixon to fire mortars into the community.
When the dust cleared, 73 bodies were removed in what is now known as
the Tivoli Massacre.

In 2010, during the inquiry into
the massacre, the attorney representing the Office of the Public
Defender, Lord Anthony Gifford, postured that both Saunders and Dixon
should be indicted for murder. Politics, again, came in to save the
day, and instead, Dixon was allowed to retire as Chief of Defence
Staff later that year. A few short years later, the “Butcher of
Tivoli” was handed a lucrative contract as National Security
Advisor to the Harris Administration in St Kitts and Nevis.

Gangsters in the Federation – be
they from McKnight or Old Road or Lodge – are not terribly
sophisticated. But they are learning. Saunders, the “Butcher of
Tivoli”, quickly realised that there was no chance he would get to
fire a few mortars outside Basseterre, so another plan had to be
hatched.

In true Daffy Duck fashion, this
plan seemed “so crazy that it just might work”.

Harris then systematically
transformed the judicial and penal system, by placing only his most
trusted people in the highest positions of authority. It was a
pitiful move that showed that Harris had no real friends left, as
these appointments were made to relatives only.

In particular, enter Deputy
Commissioner of Corrections Denzil “Bull” Harris, and exit Prison
Superintendent Junie Hodge. Denzil Harris was now in a position to
identify, embrace and negotiate with gang leaders who were behind
bars, seeking their favour in exchange for cold hard cash.

Hodge, for all his years of
service in keeping the criminals away from society, was now relegated
to working a security company to keep criminals at bay in society.

It’s not an easy operation; to
take taxpayers’ dollars and hand it over to killers, while keeping
it off the books. One would need a bank, and a banker. Fortunately
for Prime Minister Harris, his brother Len just happens to be the
boss at the Development Bank of St Kitts and Nevis.

From there, big brother Tim
appropriated five million EC dollars to fund the Peace Initiative.
The actual logistics of cash getting from the bank vault into gangs’
coffers are still not clear. However, a number of names tend to
surface when questions arise in this matter.

For one, Denzil Harris keeps a
very tight circle within Her Majesty’s Prison; namely Assistant
Commissioners McArthur Browne and Adolph Harris. It is unthinkable
that if collusion with gangsters were taking place, that these two
senior men would not know about it.

There have been allegations that
convicted fraudster-turned-radio talk-show host Niresh Nital has been
observed having a lot of scheduled meetings with some of the major
players, outside of his radio programme hours. Nital is also said to
be favoured by the Attorney General himself, although Vincent Byron
would surely deny such a claim.

But, as in all business
transactions, the middle man is the key; the person who makes the
markup. In this case, it is telling that such a middle man would have
to be able to comfortably traverse political, prison and public
boundaries freely. A prominent defence attorney in the likes of Dr
Henry Browne may know such a person, but the question is if he would
admit so.

Then again, as cutthroat a
business that criminality is, there always seems to be some honour
among thieves.

The gangsters have scored a pretty
payday nonetheless. Foot soldiers receive EC $200 per week, while
gang lieutenants get as much as EC $2,000 per week. Bear in mind,
that this is occurring in a society in which the average worker may
take home EC $1,800 after a month’s labour.

With that said, the bigger
question is how does Harris and Team Unity expect to sustain this
project? Indeed, now that the criminals have come to the bargaining
table, what’s to stop them from “helping” with the election and
then demanding an increase in payment? What happens when Harris can’t
offer that? What happens if Harris loses the election and an
unsuspecting government is sworn in, only to face the wrath of
shooters drug dealers who were dormant on the public dime? How many
will die when the balance is interrupted?

These are the questions that all
those who brokered this deal have failed to address. It’s further
proof of a stop-gap administration, rather than one focused on real,
long-term development. This money could have been used in a myriad of
other ways to save the undereducated and unemployed, and uplift the
developmental status of the Federation, instead of lining the pockets
of uneducated cowards who have managed to hold a bland administration
to ransom.