The country was on edge yesterday as rumours started lighting up, first on cellphones, and then the radio, of a shootout in Denham Town, West Kingston. The speculation was wild: had Jamaican security forces finally made a move for Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke in neighbouring Tivoli Gardens?

Everyone was nervous. While we shrug at the daily list of fatal police-gunman shootouts, this was Tivoli. The worst ‘incursion’ by security forces had left 27 dead in 2001. Now of course, the United States wants to extradite Dudus, and removing him, likely by force, threatens a repeat of Mogadishu.

It’s this situation that should remind us how close we’ve been to the edge for a long, long time.

And yet we’re a ‘narco-state’, an island where politicians-criminals-businessman can at times be indistinguishable, except by public pretense. These few photographs were taken while FIRST was downtown today, and in the event, quickly. You’d find these images okay, in your community?

Previously published in FIRST: Death in Tivoli Gardens

First footage. First linkage. First, First First!

Tivoli…you large.

LINK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7375039.stm

And so, it would seem, is Lester Lloyd Coke, as Jim Brown was identified in dozens of U.S. and Jamaican police files. Still, on walls all around Kingston, the graffiti say FREE JIM BROWN, the alias he rode to the top of the Jamaican capital’s drug -fueled slums. To his friends, Brown was a hero who rose above the despair of Jamaica’s ghettos.

In Kingston’s slums, he was a key enforcer for former prime minister Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labor Party; Seaga himself called Brown the “protector” of Kingston’s poor, and helped lead the don dadda’s funeral. But to local police-who had tried, and failed, to pin 14 separate murder charges on him– Brown was the most influential of the city’s gangland bosses. When he mysteriously burned to death late last month in a maximum-security cell, Brown was within days of being extradited to face U.S. murder and drug-racketeering charges; suspicions ran high that he was silenced because he knew too much.

Guns swept into Jamaican ghetto politics in the mid-1970s. That is when Kingston’s worst slum areas—places with names like Concrete Jungle, Dunkirk, Trenchtown and Jim Brown’s own Tivoli Gardens-were carved into so-called “garrison constituencies,” controlled, Chicago style, by shifting hierarchies of local bosses for both leading parties. Jamaican involvement in the 1980s cocaine boom increased the power of the bosses.

Read the rest of this article at Newsweek HERE

The pictures don’t say enough, there is blood splattered on the walls, there are holes through the windows and marrow on the floor, they are gruesome, but they are not enough. It is the smell that lingers, that which struck us most upon entering that house, that smell, like meat left for weeks in an unplugged freezer, these were human remains, it is the unmistakable stench of death.

It is oddly quiet in the community, despite the bustling traffic on its exterior, unsupervised children play games on the concrete and I wonder for a moment if this is the right place, then we draw closer. There are easily more than one hundred tiny bullet holes in the tin window on the top floor, but from a distance, on the outside the house looks like any other on its scheme, a two-storey wedged in between other two-stories. Inside it is a slaughterhouse, like something out of a movie I had never wanted to see, and I feel the temperature fall as I step inside out of the stifling Tivoli heat. Complete and total disarray, like a storm had blown through.

Sunday dinner remains seasoned and uncooked on the kitchen sink, and the flies watch as their larvae wriggle to life. There are pictures strewn all over the upstairs floor not far from the front page of The Outlook; even the dresser, the bedroom closet, a Styrofoam box has bullet holes, life has been interrupted here. The bloody, bullet-holed pillow sitting on top of what I assume had once been used as a dining table screams that this was no small effort – had they stripped him here, the one whose blooded, tattered jeans remain?

To the people sipping wine from the assumed safety of their balconies, Sunday, January 13, 2008 would have been another day in Tivoli Gardens – the community is known after all for being Jamaica’s biggest garrison and five people dying there would be neither a surprise nor a concern to one who believes the place to be seething with decadence and crime, but things were quiet here before they came.

Mere meters away from the scene, separated only by a fence is the Edward Seaga Sports Complex and a batch of young boys have gathered in a circle on what looks to me like a basketball court while an older man stands giving instruction. They and others like them in Jamaica’s inner cities must have the strength of lions to be able to remain productive in an environment that does not foster such things as productivity, in a country that believes them to be a failure before giving the chance to succeed.

In Jamaica, we generally have what I call ‘crowd conversations’; everyone speaks at the same time, yet everyone is heard, and for a grassroots community such as this, the crowd is a single entity, a common identity is shared here and most often the mystery becomes clear when you turn a listening ear. But I can only tell you what I saw two days after the shooting. The bullet holes nearly blanket the walls of the house; there is a trail of blood leading from a splash on the wall through to the back of the house where they say the bodies were dragged out and transported to the morgue, smudges behind the fridge that look like they had come from a gripping hand and the stove they had moved to clear the way for their transport is covered in the same.

No matter how we spin this it looks like a massacre; one like too many others in Jamaica’s recent history.

Then the crowd speaks, we are all human and subject to biases, but this is what was heard. There is a woman, sitting out in front of the gate leading to the house, a baby bouncing about in her lap. She tells me she doesn’t like to relive it, then of how he cried that day, and how she begged for both their lives, holding him naked in her arms, crying “He has asthma” and how they had tried to push her in with the rest, in the room upstairs. They did not care the child was there.

The old woman, in the house next door, her sheets are burnt from where the teargas canister fell. Others say the rain fell heavier as the bullets sprayed from the helicopter above. There was one lucky enough to hear her brother die, on the phone. He told her he was cold. They beat her with a piece of board for defending his life and then handcuffed her and took her to the hospital for treatment.

They told me they celebrated, took pictures posing with the bodies, proud of their feat. Many have lost their allegiance to their government, they feel deeper disenfranchised, and I am not the only one worried about retaliation.

Enter Kong. A dangerous looking character with blood in his eyes, arriving by SUV and quickly escorted into the square by his ‘trainer’ at approximately 12:15 am.

The usual spectators suddenly found themselves scrambling for a better view as hundreds more caught word of the challenge and hurriedly made their way to ringside. Although Thursday Night at the Fights is never poorly attended, this was by far the largest turnout. People climbed higher up into trees and onto roofs as Leo’s crew started to make their way (with Vegas-like fanfare) through the thick crowd via the empty land to the back.

Wads of money appeared as the contenders’ respective camps haggled over the prize money, which had now reached a purse of J$40,000.

At 1 am, the smaller children were cleared back from the ropes. Extra people were removed from the ring leaving only two referees (one to handle the fighters and one to control the crowd).

After some grimacing and a little more posturing, it was time.

All things considered, they should really have a bell by now. But they don’t, so someone grabbed the mic and said: ‘Ding!’

Not surprisingly, the fight is quick and brutal. Kong, clearly the early aggressor is punished for his confidence and gets consistently pummelled by the slightly larger champion who ruthlessly smashes his face for three intense rounds before Kong collapses in his corner, forfeiting the victory before heading to the hospital, probably for some Tylenol 4s.

With this declaration of defeat, the crowd erupts with a roar as Leo throws his gloves into the air and his fans clamber into the ring, begging to be photographed with him.

Who needs HBO?

Last (Thursday) night at the Fights from firstjamaica on Vimeo.