A REPORTER AT LARGE A MASSACRE IN

After the demanded the of a , a bloodletting ensued. BY MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ

ost cemeteries replace the illusion were preparing for war with the Jamai- told a friend who was worried about an of life’s permanence with another can state. invasion, “Tivoli is the baddest place in illusion:M the permanence of a name On Sunday, May 23rd, the Jamaican the whole wide world.” carved in stone. Not so May Pen Ceme- asked every radio and TV station in tery, in Kingston, Jamaica, where bodies the capital to broadcast a warning that n Monday, May 24th, Hinds woke are buried on top of bodies, weeds grow said, in part, “The security forces are ap- to the sound of sporadic gunfire. over the old markers, and time humbles pealing to the law-abiding citizens of FreemanO was gone. Hinds anxiously di- even a rich man’s grave. The most for- Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town who alled his cell phone and reached him at saken burial places lie at the end of a dirt wish to leave those communities to do so.” the house of a friend named Hugh Scully, path that follows a fetid gully across two The police sent buses to the edge of the who lived nearby. Freeman was calm, and bridges and through an open meadow, neighborhood to evacuate residents to Hinds, who had not been outside for far enough south to hear the white noise temporary accommodations. But only a three days, assumed that it was safe to go coming off the harbor and the highway. few boarded, and the buses drove away and buy food. Fifty-two concrete posts are set into the nearly empty. Late in the morning, she left her flat. earth in haphazard groups of two and Marjorie Hinds, who supported her It was a clear day, and the trade winds three. Each bears a small disk of black family by selling groceries from a coming off the harbor eased the sun’s diz- metal and a stencilled number. The ma- wooden shed, was one of the residents zying heat. A white surveillance plane jority of these mark the unclaimed dead who ignored the warning. She was was circling Kingston; a blue seal on the from the last days of May, 2010, when thirty-seven years old and took pride in tail identified it as belonging to the U.S. the police and the Army assaulted the her clothes, her cooking, her manicured Department of Homeland Security. Ar- neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens, in nails, and her ironed hair. Hinds lived mored personnel carriers and soldiers from West Kingston. The rest mark the graves with her boyfriend, Radcliffe (Mickey) the Army, or Jamaica Defence Force, and of paupers. Freeman, and their two children, ele- the police, or Jamaica Constabulary Force, The trouble that led to the Tivoli ven-year-old Nikeita and eight-year-old were massing to the south and east, out- Gardens deaths began in August, 2009, Mickey, Jr. Their apartment was on the side the ring of barricades. when the United States government re- ground floor of Building Two, just At 11 A.M., gunfire erupted as the se- quested the extradition of Christopher north of Coke’s headquarters, in the curity forces breached the barricades. Ev- (Dudus) Coke. In the U.S., Coke stood area of Tivoli known as Java. Freeman eryone in the street around Building Two charged in federal court of trafficking in had been working in the U.S. when, in scrambled for cover. Many ran to the narcotics and firearms; in Jamaica, he April, Hinds asked him to return home. ground-floor flat of an elderly woman was known as the country’s most pow- Freeman had played on the same street- named Murline Campbell, Hinds’s neigh- erful “don,” a community leader who corner soccer team as Coke when they bor. (“When they come to my house, they also runs a criminal enterprise. He lived were children, but their lives followed are all family,” Campbell said later.) Sud- in Tivoli, where everyone called him very different paths. From 2007 to 2008, denly, a J.D.F. helicopter appeared over- “president,” and, since 2001, Jamaican Freeman worked on the completion of head, and Hinds was struck by an explo- police had not been able to enter the a new U.S. Embassy compound in sion. Her yellow shorts were charred black neighborhood without his permission. Kingston, a job that required his name and her hip and buttocks were severely Coke was so powerful that Prime Min- to be checked against lists of known burned. She fell in the middle of the ister spent months re- criminals maintained by the Jamaican street, and blood flowed from gashes on sisting the extradition order. But in early police. Contractors in Kingston and the her legs and face. May, 2010, under heavy international United States knew him to be a hard- A neighbor ran to Scully’s house, political pressure, Golding authorized working carpenter and a family man. where Freeman was tending to a young Coke’s arrest. In response, Coke con- That day in May, Hinds thought man who had been injured in an explo- verted Tivoli and nearby Denham about leaving Tivoli, but she told herself sion nearby. “Marjorie dead!” he cried. Town into a personal fortress. Barri- that anyone who fled would have to live Freeman found Hinds lying unconscious cades of rubble and barbed wire sprang with the shame of having abandoned the where she had fallen. He picked her up up across major intersections. Armed community. Neighbors might label her an and rushed to Campbell’s apartment, sentries took up posts around Tivoli’s informer. She also didn’t think that the where his daughter was hiding under perimeter. It looked as though Coke security forces would actually enter. Hinds Campbell’s bed. Freeman laid Hinds BY OWEN SMITH ILLUSTRATIONS

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TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 62—133SC. Marjorie Hinds was out buying food in Tivoli Gardens on the morning of May 24, 2010, when the security forces moved in.

TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 63—133SC.—LIVE ART R21584—#2 PAGE—REALIGNED CAPTION WITH ILLUSTRATION down on the floor with her head resting ten or more times, according to a Jamai- DVDs are sold on rows of tarps among in his lap. She came to for a moment and can doctor familiar with the postmortem. knotted plastic bags of peanuts, curry, and asked for water, and Campbell brought No fewer than seventy-four people seasoned salt. Early in the morning, the some. The men sat silently in chairs. The were killed in the operation to arrest Chris- sound of creaking wood fills the air as the women cracked open the windows and topher Coke and extradite him to the pushcart men guide their barrows to the peeked out into the street. The gunfire United States—one soldier and seventy- market. To the west is the highway lead- seemed to be getting closer. three civilians. Among the dead were at ing to the city’s main port, where cranes Four or five hours later, Campbell’s least three women and one United States are forever assembling and dismantling door was kicked down and about ten sol- citizen. Three more residents of Tivoli walls of steel shipping containers. In diers burst into the apartment. They carried Gardens, including a sixteen-year-old boy, Tivoli, blue fifty-five-gallon shipping bar- M-16 assault rifles and wore the camou- are missing and presumed dead. The Ja- rels, with addresses that indicate they once flage uniforms of the Army. They had yel- maican security forces say that many of the travelled from or Miami, are low “Police Line” tape tied around their dead were armed gunmen allied with repurposed as hampers, barbecues, rented arms. The soldiers carried Hinds out to a Coke, but they recovered only six guns storage units, and garbage cans. In May of jeep, which took her to Kingston Public during the assault. According to extensive 2010, some were filled with sand to make Hospital. interviews with Tivoli Gardens residents the foundations of the barricades. At around four o’clock, the soldiers led and Jamaican officials, the resistance that Tivoli was designed in the early nine- the rest of the apartment’s occupants to a the security forces encountered in Tivoli teen-sixties, after an American-born, shaded area between the building and the was quickly overpowered. Coke and most Harvard-educated sociologist named Ed- street. On a normal day, young men of the gunmen are believed to have fled ward Seaga visited Back-o-Wall, a stretch would gather there to sit in high wooden when the raid began, escaping through a of wasteland beside the Kingston harbor. chairs, play dice, and smoke marijuana. network of gullies and sewers. The rest of The houses there were made of old match- One soldier walked around with a plastic the battle was not a firefight so much as a boards, sacking, and mud. Some had bag, collecting cell phones. Campbell’s police operation. The security forces floors of pressed dung. There was no daughter, Ayoni, remembers the soldiers rounded up residents and conducted plumbing in Back-o-Wall, no electricity, punching and kicking the men and older searches from house to house. Unarmed and little work. boys. Nikeita began to cry. “What kind of men of fighting age were interrogated on Seaga, a shy, cerebral man with the work you do, man?” one soldier asked the spot, and more than a thousand were aristocratic airs and light skin favored by Freeman, whose shirt was stained with sent to detention centers, from which they the Jamaican electorate, ran for office as a Hinds’s blood. “Me a carpenter, officer,” were released a few days later. Mickey member of the conservative Jamaica Labor he replied. Freeman was one of dozens allegedly shot Party. In 1962, the year Britain granted Soldiers told Freeman and three other to death in custody. the country full independence, he won men to stay where they were; everyone A year and a half later, the Jamaican West Kingston’s parliament seat. Seaga else was ordered to walk a few hundred government has refused to make public cleared Back-o-Wall and replaced it with feet to a street called Sangster Crescent. what it knows about how the men and Tivoli Gardens. The units were given to Nikeita remembers seeing her father sit- women of Tivoli Gardens died. So has the Party loyalists, and the neighborhood has ting peacefully under a tree in the custody government of the United States, despite been faithful to the J.L.P. ever since. of soldiers and a few policemen. She clear evidence that the U.S. surveillance A promotional film from the late six- walked on with the rest of the group to plane flying above Kingston on May 24th ties shows Tivoli as a suburban develop- Sangster Crescent, where hundreds of was taking live video of Tivoli, that intel- ment with manicured parks, playgrounds, residents sat on the pavement as gunshots ligence from the video feed was passed and illuminated fountains. In the video, continued to echo. through U.S. law-enforcement officers to Seaga boasts of erasing all traces of the After sundown, Nikeita was released. Jamaican forces on the ground, and that neighborhood’s identity as “a nest where She returned to Building Two but was un- the Department of Homeland Security the worst criminals gathered.” Tivoli was able to find her father. She spent the night has a copy of this video. The video could built on what Seaga called “the self-con- at a neighbor’s flat. The next morning, she corroborate, or refute, allegations that tained-community principle,” with a pre- encountered a soldier whom she recog- members of the Jamaican security forces natal clinic, a preschool, and a vocational- nized from Campbell’s apartment. He was massacred dozens of innocents, and could training center. “We have not only taken stocky, she says, with a dark complexion help identify the alleged killers. the man out of the slum but we have taken and a wrinkled face. “Hey, your father is the slum out of the man!” Seaga an- the short man?” he asked, in a voice that lass in Kingston corresponds to ele- nounced to an adoring crowd. seemed to her full of contempt and satis- vation. Below the Blue Mountain But Seaga’s invention soon degener- faction. “Your father dead, you know.” Ccoffee estates, the grand houses sur- ated into a new kind of slum. Tivoli’s Hinds was in the hospital, still uncon- rounded by barbed wire, the gated apart- fierce loyalty to the J.L.P. made it the first scious. When she awoke, days later, a ment complexes, and the mazes of wooden of Jamaica’s “garrison communities”— doctor told her about Freeman. His burial shacks, on a level with the graveyard and neighborhood enclaves controlled by order lists the time of his death as “be- the garbage dump, lies Tivoli Gardens. To gangs associated with either the J.L.P. or tween 23 and 25 May 2010” and the cause the east is Coronation Market, where its rival, the People’s National Party. as “multi gunshot wounds.” He was shot kitchen knives, sneakers, and pirated Many of Jamaica’s low-income commu-

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TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 64—133SC—#2 PAGE—NEW TEXT CORRECTION nities are still led by dons, whose organi- zations act like miniature states: allocat- ing benefits, defending borders, and extracting taxes. The most famous don of Tivoli was ’s father, Lester Lloyd Coke, who renamed him- self Jim Brown after seeing the prison- hardened Nazi hunters of “The Dirty Dozen.” He consolidated his power in 1980, as Seaga was about to be elected Prime Minister. Around this time, the dons began shipping Colombian to the U.S. Brown killed off his rivals and became known as “the don of dons.” By 1990, Jamaican gangs, or posses, had street organizations selling cocaine throughout the U.S. The most notorious was Brown’s , named for its willingness to shower bullets on any crowd thought to contain an enemy. In the U.S., the Shower Posse was linked to more than a thousand . Gang members turned up in cities from Dallas and Kansas City to Anchorage. One West Kingston resident told me that he knew Freeman during this period, when both men were living in . “Him a gangster in Jim Brown days,” the man said. “But he change his life around.” Seaga’s J.L.P. lost the 1989 general election, and power shifted to the P.N.P. In 1990, Jamaican police acquiesced to American demands and arrested Brown, who faced and drug-racketeering charges in the U.S. He died two years later, in a mysterious prison fire, while awaiting extradition. Thousands of mourners marched in Brown’s funeral Christopher Coke was the don of Tivoli Gardens, and his dominion was absolute. procession, including Seaga. (“In a com- munity like that, you can’t disrespect a tors, Coke ordered a man he believed had of charge. “These guys make it big and man whom the people respect,” Seaga stolen drug proceeds to be tied down so he they spread that money around, to build explained to me.) Christopher Coke, could kill him personally, with a chainsaw. loyalty,” Lew Rice, a retired U.S. Drug Brown’s youngest son, fought off rival (Coke’s lawyers deny this.) The police Enforcement Agency officer who worked successors and soon emerged as the new twice conducted major operations in at the agency’s Jamaica office in the early don of Tivoli Gardens and the leader of Tivoli during Coke’s time. Both ended in nineteen-eighties, says. the Shower Posse. bloodshed: four civilians were killed in Many people felt safe enough to leave Coke does not appear menacing—he May, 1997, and twenty-five in July, 2001. their doors unlocked. “If someone grabs is five feet four inches tall, with a round In the latter incident, an Army helicopter your chain in the market and you go to the baby face—but his dominion in Tivoli was shot down, and police fired more police, they will take out a big book and Gardens was absolute. His organization, than fifteen thousand rounds. they will take a long statement,” Pastor known to residents as “the system,” had its Residents went to Coke for tuition, Patricka Hall, who leads one of Tivoli’s own penal process, including a jail, mag- legal aid, business loans, food, and medi- churches, says. “You never hear from them istrates, and executioners. Coke’s code cine. The rest of Kingston scrimped to again. In Tivoli, all you need to do is tell was simple—“No robbing, no raping, no afford Jamaica’s electricity rates—as much the man where exactly your stuff was taken. killing”—and his justice stringent: teen- as twelve hundred U.S. dollars annually, In a few hours, maybe a day, you get back age thieves had one hand broken, rapists in a country where the gross national in- your thing. How they do it, I might not were beaten, anyone foolish enough to come per capita is about seventy-five hun- be able to pencil in. But they get it done.” persistently dissent was exiled or killed. dred dollars—whereas in Tivoli ninety- For years, the Jamaican government Once, according to U.S. federal prosecu- nine per cent of the electricity arrived free left Tivoli alone. Coke commuted from a

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TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 65—133SC.65—133SC—LIVE ART R21602 lavish uptown villa to his office, in Java. He directed Shower Posse affiliates in the U.S., and his legitimate Jamaican busi- MY HONEYBEE nesses won road-paving and government security contracts. Crying in the cosmos that doesn’t sound like you Mickey Freeman, like everyone in Tivoli, had to present at least the appear- Crying in our arms ance of loyalty to Coke, negotiating alle- in the cosmos in our giances to both the don and the law. Free- arms man’s construction job at the new U.S. Embassy was the result of a referral from Missile static and afterburn in the petals an earlier construction job at a fertilizer plant, which came through Incomparable Your yellow- Enterprises, a company controlled by and-black stingers Coke. “You hire from the area,” Darren Wilson, a manager at Tank-Weld, a con- A child’s drawing tractor that employed Freeman, said. “You don’t have much choice who you Some riddle from before we were born that sounds like a river get. They’re waiting at the gate when you and spreads on toast get there.” On his final trip back from the U.S., Freeman carried two BlackBerrys And floats and a bottle of cologne—gifts for the don. from flower to flower “ oke was like Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes books,” Rich- The first needle ardC Smyth, who was the deputy chief of The honey in the pot the U.S. Embassy in the late nineteen- nineties, says. “He was at the center of the web but was never caught doing anything himself.” In 2004, the D.E.A. entered * into a secret agreement with the Jamai- can Ministry of National Security that I have always wanted allowed it to listen in on Coke’s inter- to wake up surrounded cepted phone calls. This led eventually to by buzz and the extradition request. fuzz By then, Golding had become Prime Minister. He was a protégé of Seaga’s and My head lifted by a furry crown set sailing into the late a member of the J.L.P., the party long as- drone afternoon drifting at the speed of sound sociated with Coke. To delay Coke’s ex- tradition, Golding authorized the reten- My mouth full of strange sunlight tion of a U.S. law firm—for a hundred thousand dollars per quarter—to lobby Killer bumble honey officials in Washington. In a cable, the in the brain U.S. Embassy in Kingston reported that the Jamaican government “understand- ably fears bloodshed and civil unrest,” but State Department revoking the visas of in Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town. it did not recommend changing course. powerful Jamaicans. (After the raid, ABC On Wednesday, an armored Army vehicle “Coke financed the Party, through overt News reported that U.S. authorities had attempting to push through one of the new and covert contributions,” a former State intercepted communications between roadblocks was met with gunfire. Department official told me. A current Coke and Golding, and that a U.S. gov- On Thursday, thousands of Tivoli State Department official said that Gold- ernment document called Golding a women marched in downtown Kingston ing’s administration was “obsessed” with “criminal affiliate” of Coke.) The pressure on Coke’s behalf. They wore white and the extradition. The campaign against the on the Prime Minister became too great, carried signs, written in marker on scraps extradition was likely perceived by the and on Monday, May 17th, Golding in- of cardboard: “Taking Di Boss Is Like Embassy as confirmation of Coke’s dan- structed his Minister of Justice to sign the Taking Jesus”; “After God, Dudus Comes gerously high standing with the Jamaican extradition order. That afternoon, shops in Next!”; “Jesus Die for Us. We Will Die government. downtown Kingston rolled down their for Dudus!” By May, 2010, Golding’s recalcitrance gates and sent employees home early. By the weekend, Tivoli had filled with had set off a diplomatic crisis, with the Coke’s men began putting up the barriers armed men. But, even as Coke prepared

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TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 66—133SC. lice poured in and trucks carrying dead bodies drove out. Gunmen clearly fired on the security forces the moment they went in. An Dusting the earth Army video shows a sniper taking aim from behind sandbags. Another shows a Sail on teen-age boy in a school uniform walking Sail on around with an assault rifle. “Invasion of Tivoli Gardens by Babylon the enemy,” a I have always wanted to bump the stamen diary written by a gunman reads. It was recovered months later, after the gunman and start the universe was shot to death by police. “Gun shots rang out from every corner of West swaying Kingston. ...I fired my AK until my finger was numb.” But the resistance melted away. Most of Coke’s followers, realizing that they * stood no chance against the Army’s ma- chine guns, helicopters, and armored per- Those ten thousand wings you hear coming for you are sonnel carriers, fled through Tivoli’s maze- yours my little honeybee like drainage system. Police later found a large cache of guns and ammunition at a Burning in place house beside a gully connecting Tivoli to in space Denham Town. By the time the security forces began searching door to door, Pinprick in the epileptic air most, if not all, of the actual combatants had left. Coke, the man who had spent al- Or swept up from the corners most two decades claiming to be Tivoli’s and wrapped in protector, was nowhere to be found. banana leaves I lived in and around Tivoli for about three months, reporting this story. Resi- Are you hungry? dents, government officials, and sources close to the police there told me that the Alive in the middle of the room killings occurred in two waves. The first Alive in flowers took place in the morning, while the se- curity forces were rounding up residents Your white shoulders and white rump and gaining control of the neighborhood. The second began in the afternoon, when Invisible death’s-head police started conducting house-to-house turning on and off searches for weapons and gunmen. Some in the dark used tissue swabs to test residents’ hands for traces of gunpowder. Often, the ques- —Michael Dickman tion of who was a gunman and who wasn’t was decided on the spot. If an unarmed man’s claims of innocence seemed uncon- for war, he was negotiating his surrender that night with Jamaica’s top security vincing, the police might kill him. with the police through a prominent officials, the police commissioner, accord- “What are you doing in Tivoli Gar- member of Jamaica’s clergy, Bishop Herro ing to someone who spoke to him soon dens?” a policeman asked George Lewis, Blair. Blair said that Coke was terrified of afterward, warned that as many as two a portly middle-aged man who installs dying, like his father, in a Jamaican prison hundred people might die. wood floors in . He was visit- cell. But the Bishop’s hopes for a truce fal- ing Jamaica and had come by a friend’s tered on Sunday morning, when Coke’s he assault on Tivoli Gardens, known apartment on May 24th. He and the po- forces attacked police patrols and four po- as Operation Garden Parish, began liceman were sitting, Lewis remem- lice stations, setting fire to at least one. Tat 11 A.M. on May 24th. “The objective bers, in the living room. The policeman The police commissioner cut off negotia- was to establish law and order in a place had his rifle pointed at Lewis’s chest. tions, and at six o’clock Golding declared where there was none,” Karl Angell, a “It’s guys like you bringing in the a state of emergency in Kingston, giving police spokesman, says. Media were pro- loads of guns,” the policeman said. the security forces expanded powers of hibited from entering the area. The rest “I’ve always been a law-abiding citi- search, arrest, and detention. In a briefing of Kingston watched as soldiers and po- zen,” Lewis said, trembling. Moments be-

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TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 67—133SC. death certificate from the Jamaican gov- ernment, so that she can arrange for a proper burial. Detective Gladys Brown, one of the police detectives who processed and identified the Tivoli bodies, said that it was difficult to predict whether any member of the security forces would be held to ac- count. “There were over five hundred sol- diers,” she told me, sixteen months after Smith was shot. “Nobody is able to de- scribe who saw and who did what. It’s very difficult to pinpoint one or two of these men who held a gun to the head and fired.” She emphasized that Coke’s men fired first. “There was warfare,” she said. “These people attacked the state. People were shot and killed. Eventually, we retaliated.” “The security forces were of the view that Coke was in Tivoli Gardens,” K. D. “This is Mahoney—he’s one of our youngest farts.” Knight, a Jamaican senator who headed the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Re- lations under the P.N.P., told me. He said •• that the security forces came under heavy fire. “They were going to get him. Any- fore, he had heard gunfire from the apart- tles. Lewis was released on Thursday eve- one and anything in the way was going to ment next door. A second police officer ning. “I heard so many horror stories,” he be regarded as collateral damage.” leaned in, looking shaken, and asked what told me. “They summarily executed peo- Unofficially, some police officials char- to do with the bodies. “Tie a sheet around ple. Do you know why? Because people acterized the operation as a “sacrifice,” them and carry them downstairs,” Lewis’s outside hold this area in low esteem.” pointing to a thirty per cent decline in Ja- interrogator said. As Lewis was being interrogated in maica’s murder rate as justification for the “I’m the decision-maker now, you Tivoli Gardens on Monday, Joan Mc- loss of life in the Tivoli raid. An official hear?” he continued. Lewis told the po- Carthy, an elderly woman who lives in the from the P.N.P. suggested that Tivoli’s liceman that he had a nephew in the flat next to his friend’s, was held outside guilt was, in a sense, collective. “There was Army. The policeman asked for his name the building. Minutes before, police had a chamber,” he said. “The com- and phone number. Lewis wrote them on ordered Andre Smith, her twenty-five- munity has to take some responsibility. a slip of paper. He placed it on the coffee year-old grandnephew (and a U.S. citi- I’m sure the entirety of Germany wasn’t table, next to his American green card and zen), and Dwayne Edwards, her daugh- guilty of the crimes of the Second World his Jamaican passport. ter’s boyfriend, upstairs, after the soldiers War, but an entire generation of Germans “Call him,” the policeman said. Lewis had taken everyone outside. She heard had to suffer the consequences of the Al- could not get through. He began to pray. gunshots inside the building, and then lied bombing.” The policeman looked at the slip of saw police carrying two bodies wrapped in paper. “You all right,” he said. Lewis be- sheets down the stairs. She recognized y the day after the operation, claims lieves that he recognized the nephew’s Edwards’s shoe protruding from one of extrajudicial killings had reached name. sheet. McCarthy was certain that neither theB Prime Minister, who asked Bishop The police handcuffed Lewis and took of them was involved in the fighting— Blair and the nation’s public defender, him to Tivoli’s community center, where they had spent all morning together, hid- Earl Witter, to go to Tivoli to investigate. he spent the night lying on his stomach ing in her dining room. McCarthy later The men spent several hours there, ac- on the concrete floor. The next day, he found Smith’s driver’s license and laptop companied by members of the security was taken to an old industrial plant. The on the floor of his room, covered in blood. forces. Walls were pocked with bullet floor was covered with rainwater, so he Beside them was his passport. Smith had holes. Two buildings had burned to the stood awake all night, shoulder to shoul- planned to attend Husson University, in ground. In some apartments, the men der with scores of other men. On Maine, that fall. Months later, after the found up to a dozen people packed into a Wednesday, the prisoners were driven to police claimed that there was no record of single room, sweating and terrified. the National Arena, about three miles his death, DNA from his father was Women told them of police shooting un- from Tivoli, where more than five hun- found to match the DNA of one of the armed young men inside their homes, or dred other men and boys were being held. unidentified dead buried in May Pen dragging them out into the street and kill- The toilets were clogged, and the detain- Cemetery. Smith’s mother, a nurse who ing them. In a flat near Java, the investi- ees had to urinate into empty water bot- lives in Atlanta, is still trying to obtain a gators saw a waist-high bullet hole in one

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TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 68—133SC—LIVE ART A16157. wall and blood on the floor; witnesses said deeply,” he said of Coke’s extradition, in the D.H.S. confirmed to me that it had that Errol Spence, a twenty-two-year-old an address to the nation. aircraft flying above Kingston on May barber, had been shot and killed there. After decades of quasi-independence, 24th, “in support of the D.E.A. and the Blair, who had served in the Jamaican Tivoli Gardens is finally under state con- Jamaican government.” A D.H.S. inci- National Guard, was skeptical of claims trol. The neighborhood pays for its elec- dent report obtained through the Free- that a massacre had taken place. He said tricity and takes its disputes to Jamaican dom of Information Act describes the sur- that when he met with Coke in Java be- courts. But residents continue to praise veillance. “All scenes were continuously fore the attack, to try to negotiate a reso- Coke: “Dudus a good man”; “Just an ordi- recorded,” the report reads. lution, he saw roughly a hundred gunmen nary man. A man you can go up and talk The State Department and the D.E.A. with him. “There is a script that is written, to”; “If Dudus here, me beg him fifty dol- have also officially acknowledged that the whenever police are involved,” he told me. lars and me get it.” Tivoli’s greatest tribute plane assisted the Jamaican government “People will all say the same thing.” Wit- to Coke is paid in silence. “Ah! How during the Tivoli operation. The P-3 ter, a former journalist, whose office in- Tivoli people talk!” a mother who lost two Orion, they said, in a statement given to vestigates constitutional violations and sons in the attack said when I mentioned me this fall, passed information “to U.S. cases of injustice, took the allegations se- rumors that one had fought for Coke. “I law-enforcement officers stationed at the riously. After hearing rumors that soldiers need to choose my friends more carefully,” Embassy, who provided that information were advising residents to clean up crime she said. to Jamaican authorities.” The statement scenes, he opened an office in the neigh- I asked whether she was certain that said that U.S. law-enforcement officers borhood and began an investigation. there was not a gunman among the five had not made “operational decisions” dur- (Eighteen months later, Witter’s investi- boys killed on her street. “You know that ing the incursion, and emphasized Jamai- gation is still under way. He expects to I can’t give you that information,” she said. can responsibility. “The video material complete an interim report by the end of When I said that made it hard to be- was not viewed in the Embassy,” a State the year.) lieve anything she said, she snapped, “I Department spokesperson said. “It was On June 22nd, a month after the at- say. Then you talk. Then I get killed.” viewed at a tactical-operations center, and tack on Tivoli, the police caught Coke I don’t have the location of that.” When at a roadblock. He was dressed as a hortly after one o’clock on May 24, asked whether there were U.S. officials at woman and wearing a wig. The car’s 2010, Norman Grindley, the chief the tactical-operations center, the spokes- driver, the Reverend Al Miller, said that photographerS of the Jamaica Gleaner, person said, “I don’t know. I can’t clarify Coke was on his way to the U.S. Em- climbed up to the roof of the paper’s office that for you.” A D.E.A. spokesperson bassy to surrender. building, in Kingston, and began taking said, “We were absolutely not involved on Since late June, Coke has been held at pictures of a plane that he had seen circling the ground in any of the operations.” the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in above Tivoli since late morning. It was the But parts of the D.H.S. report appear lower Manhattan. He has been listening surveillance plane, a Lockheed P-3 Orion, to contradict that assertion. The plane on a CD player to the thirty-five thou- with the seal on the tail identifying it as was assigned “at the request of and in sup- sand wiretapped recordings that form the belonging to the U.S. Department of port of the Drug Enforcement Admin- bulk of the government’s case against Homeland Security. A spokesperson for istration (D.E.A.) Kingston Country him. In July, a dozen or so relatives and well-wishers came to the federal court- house on Pearl Street to attend a hearing. Coke wore a jumpsuit, and his hair was shaved down to stubble. Accompanied by two guards, he kissed his palm as he en- tered the courtroom and held it up to his supporters, who remained standing until the don had taken his seat. Coke had heard about the death of Mickey Freeman. “He got emotional,” Stephen H. Rosen, one of Coke’s two at- torneys, said. “His eyes welled up.” (Rosen told me later that Coke denied ordering that barricades be built or that anyone at- tack the security forces.) In late August, Coke pleaded guilty to racketeering charges. He is scheduled to be sentenced in January and faces up to twenty-three years in prison. Less than a month after Coke’s plea, Bruce Golding announced that he would resign as Prime Minis- ter. “The entire episode has affected me “Seltzer . . . seltzer!”

TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 69—133SC.—LIVE ART A16016 Office,” the report reads. “Surveillance ment had provided satellite images of prisons: “Many bad guys do not go to jail. support is needed to increase officer Tivoli in response to a 2008 request from Or they are able to operate their criminal safety.” Later, spokespeople from the Jamaican law-enforcement officials who empires from inside jail, or they escape State Department and the D.H.S. said said they needed help tracking Coke. with ease. Police officers, in particular, are that this referred solely to Jamaican offi- The U.S. knew there was a risk of vio- at risk. Some of them are targeted and cers. Major General Stewart Saunders, lence against civilians during the opera- killed. So, on occasion, they might feel who led the Jamaican Army during the tion. For decades, human-rights activists that it makes more sense to kill someone attack on Tivoli, retired shortly afterward, have been collecting stories of J.C.F. ex- on the spot.” People like Mickey Free- and declined repeated requests for com- cesses, including officers indiscriminately man and Andre Smith were in particular ment, as did Prime Minister Golding. firing on teen-age girls or crowded buses. danger from the Jamaican police because Numerous other officials at the U.S. Em- In 2010, the police killed three hundred they had come in from outside Tivoli. bassy in Kingston, the D.E.A., the Justice and twenty civilians, a figure that does not “Dudus had called in bad guys from Department, and the State Department include the seventy-three who died in across Jamaica to come and defend him,” declined to comment, saying that they Tivoli. This is forty times the number the security adviser continued. “Police had to wait until Witter’s report was com- killed last year by the Police and soldiers knew that they were likely to pleted or until Coke was sentenced. Department, which is responsible for a encounter some of the most vicious kill- It is clear that the U.S. played a major population three times as large. “The ers in the country, and that any non-local role in tracking Coke before the operation. J.C.F. routinely carried out summary exe- man present in Tivoli on that day had “We were constantly involved in the in- cutions of suspected criminals,” Jerome probably not come as a tourist.” vestigation,” Bill Sorukas, the chief of the Harris, who retired as head of the D.E.A.’s I put the question of Freeman’s char- International Investigations Branch of the Caribbean division in 2008, says. In Feb- acter to more than twenty sources in U.S. Marshals Service, said. “We provided ruary, 2010, three months before the Kingston, including not only official information and intelligence on Coke and Tivoli incursion, a leaked cable signed by media contacts at the U.S. Embassy, the associates he was with.” He noted that the the chief of the U.S. Embassy cited a U.N. J.C.F., and the J.D.F. but a high-rank- U.S. collaborates closely with the Jamaica report pointing out “the propensity for ex- ing J.C.F. officer and a former Shower Fugitive Apprehension Team, a special trajudicial killings by the J.C.F.” Posse lieutenant. I asked each of these unit of the police, and that the “investiga- A security adviser in Jamaica who interlocutors for any evidence they might tion was worked jointly” by the D.E.A. works closely with the police said it may have showing that Freeman was any- and the police. A senior Jamaican parlia- be that Jamaican police commit murder thing other than a noncombatant who mentarian added that the U.S. govern- because they don’t trust the courts or the was intentionally shot and killed by the security forces. No one was able to pro- vide such evidence. In its absence, the case against Freeman’s innocence con- sists of small circumstantial connections to Coke. These must also be weighed against the strong evidence supporting his good character: Freeman’s security check, which allowed him to work for the contractors building the U.S. Em- bassy; interviews with Freeman’s super- visors in Jamaica and the U.S.; and mul- tiple accounts from Freeman’s neighbors and family. But the question of Free- man’s innocence or guilt on May 24, 2010, wasn’t decided by a court, a jour- nalist, or, most likely, anyone who knew him. It was decided by members of the security forces in Tivoli Gardens. None of them have spoken out about that day, and no court has compelled them to. It is therefore impossible to know what standards they applied to the question of who would live and who would die.

or two weeks after the operation, res- idents were forced to stay near their Fhomes. Many residents’ sofas had been “I need something that says, ‘I’m sorry about that thing cut open, ceilings ripped down, and tile I said that caused you to totally overreact.’” floors smashed during police searches for

TNY—2011_12_12—PAGE 70—133SC—LIVE ART A16138. weapons. For the next month, Tivoli was mislead you to do anything that is not One day, a memorial took place at under a six-o’clock curfew, enforced by right in the sight of God.” Heroes’ Circle for Errol Spence, the arrest. Entering or leaving the neighbor- A memorial for Mickey Freeman took young barber, who was known as Culu. hood after the curfew required a police place late in the afternoon on the follow- His tomb rises four feet up from the un- permit. A year later, in May, 2011, Tivoli ing day, in the yard where Nikeita re- even ground, and is finished in white tile, Gardens still looked like an occupied ter- members last seeing him. Bubba, Mick- with his name and dates cut into the ritory. Coke’s office had become an Army ey’s half brother, cooked chicken and rice headstone. A case of beer, a bottle of post, and the Jamaican flag flew over- on grills made from rusting hubcaps. A rum, and a sprig of marijuana had been head. From time to time, patrols of sol- line quickly formed, and Bubba brought placed on top. diers emerged from the camouflage mesh out Heineken, rum, and Pepsi. Darkness “These are Cokes,” one of the mourn- concealing the entrance. The patrols fell. One by one, the women of Tivoli ers, a middle-aged woman, said to me. passed by pickup soccer games, tennis- knelt on the sidewalk and lit “They don’t want you here.” But ball cricket matches, and groups of white candles. Someone rigged a large man with bowed legs women hanging out laundry. They up a sound system and played a and a diamond earring was crossed streets on the diagonal, rifles cra- Buju Banton song: eager to have someone record dled across their chests. Next to the Army Top a top Dudus his thoughts. He introduced Live upon Chris post was a new police station. The offi- Top a top Jim Brown himself as Big Pimp and said cers there seemed friendlier, eating box Dem the gun specialist that he was close to one of lunches in plain view and bantering with Coke’s nephews. “Me two balls residents. On one wall was a sign left be- “Blau! Blau! Brrrr-au!” three and me word and my family— hind by the old order: “No Idling, No young boys shouted, spraying that’s all me have,” he began, Smoking, No Foul Word.” the street with imaginary ma- paraphrasing Al Pacino in “Scar- When Marjorie Hinds talks about chine guns. face.” “Then they come. And May 24th, she speaks with a stutter. Hinds sat looking out at the they take that away.” He took a Without Freeman’s support, she has a party from the veranda of her old apart- swallow from a Heineken. “If me no cry hard time feeding her children. She and ment, with Mickey, Jr., at her feet, rolling on the outside, me cry on the inside. We her daughter beg. Her old neighbor an unlit candle between her hands. She lost a lot of friends, we down here. We Murline Campbell begs on her behalf. stayed inside through most of Memorial live like brothers and sisters. Police and “You have to be strong, Marjorie!” her Week. When she went out, she did not soldiers? We have all hate for them.” friend Jane McFarlane said as the two sat linger near Building Two. A suitcase on He compared Jamaica to Libya and in McFarlane’s living room, which is dec- top of a bedroom dresser holds the re- Afghanistan. He talked about human orated with stuffed animals and artificial mains of her old life. When she wants to rights. “Bare innocent!” he cried, at the flowers. McFarlane lost a son and a cousin explain who she once was, she will carry mention of Culu. “Cold-blooded mur- in the attack; bullet holes and splattered it to the kitchen table, spill out a bundle dah! The soldiers, they swab him! They blood still mar one of her upstairs bed- of loose papers, and begin picking out the find nothing! And they kill him!” rooms. She now lives with a friend in a vital documents—identification cards, Early in the morning on another day, town west of Kingston, and had returned letters of reference, phone numbers of nine-year-old Mickey, Jr., took me to to visit Tivoli on the one-year anniversary supervisors who will attest that Mickey see his father’s grave, which lies well to of the killings. “This house is not a home Freeman was a good man. In a photo- the south of Heroes’ Circle. He and to me anymore,” she said. graph taken at a job site, Mickey, in hard Nikeita have got used to looking after During Memorial Week, a public hat and earplugs, waves at the camera. themselves. When Hinds is able, she commemoration of the attack’s first anni- With half-closed eyes and the hint of a sells vegetables in the market, but she versary, the pastor at the Faith and Hope smile, he appears sanguine. He has a often goes to the country to rest. Deliverance Church unfolded two sheets small frame but a workman’s thick fore- It was just after dawn, and the sky of paper and read a letter from Coke. arms. There are photographs, too, that was gray. Mickey, Jr., slipped on his “Dear Residents of Tivoli Garden,” show how much Hinds has changed. She sandals and led me to May Pen. He the don had written. “I hope you are all is heavier now, with a black scar running threaded the narrow paths running fine and this letter reaches everyone in the along one cheekbone. “I was pretty,” she between the graves. In places, the way best of health. As for me I’m doing all said. She pointed to the scars on her feet was paved with old stone markers sink- right and my health conditions are fine.” and legs. “Look, they spoil me up.” ing into the dirt like cobblestones. Coke thanked Tivoli for sending him “This one,” Mickey, Jr., said, sitting postcards and said he was sorry for the im Brown’s body lies beside those of down on a tomb of pink tile. There was pain of the past year. For the future, he his family and his retainers, beneath a no headstone. In its place was a sun- looked to God. “My deepest sympathy bedJ of artificial flowers and a bare light bleached photograph of two stuffed and condolences goes out to the families bulb. The grave is in the northeast corner bears, with the words “I love you so who loss their love ones and to those that of May Pen Cemetery, an area known in much.” “Me a’ bed, then go to school,” were injury....When the community cry, Tivoli as Heroes’ Circle. The words Mickey, Jr., said. He looked weary in I cry too.” One sentence could be con- “Death Is the Surest Thing in Life” are a way that most nine-year-old boys strued as a warning: “Don’t let anyone painted in black on a nearby wall. never do. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 12, 2011 71

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