Kingpins and Deportees

I'd sure like someone to explain to me why it is that some people get summarily deported back to the Caribbean, like this poor fellow, who was deported to Jamaica six months ago and is sitting in prison there still. And who also happens not to be Jamaican, but a native of the U.S. Virgin Islands, i.e., a U.S. citizen. They shipped him out, apparently, without bothering to ascertain this.

Do you have a passport?

But while there's no such thing as too much haste in deporting people to the Caribbean, I am at a loss to explain why the U.S. spent close to 10 years trying to bring two Kittitian citizens to the U.S. as international drug traffickers. Glenroy Matthew and Noel "Zambo" Heath fought extradition the whole time, with their case going all the way to the Privy Council in London. They lost their last appeal last year, and U.S. agents went to St. Kitts to pick them up, against the very strong feeling of the country. Matthew has just been sentenced to 135 months in prison in the U.S. I haven't been able to find out what Heath's sentence was. I'll update with that once I do a bit more searching. There's a long history to this which I won't retell here. But I'll point you to this press release from the DEA about what they are pleased to call the "capture."

I did not know these two guys personally; I did use to see Noel Heath around St. Kitts from time to time. He doesn't look like this. This is a picture of Takoo the murdering black savage who wants to rape your daughter.

He was not "captured." He lived his life in St. Kitts wide out in the open and defended himself against extradition with what means the law afforded him there. And that is what Glenroy Matthew did too. His lawyer, who I knew very well, fought the fight for them both as long as he could. So that red lettering stamped across his face is meant to convey this impression of the drug war as this sort of Rambo business. And that's why they brought him back, it's politics, he's literally a poster boy for the War on Drugs. I have no idea whether he is guilty. Those were very strange times in St. Kitts, in the mid-late 1990s, when the country was almost held hostage by Charles "Little Nut" Miller, a former leader of the Shower Posse. You may remember the Jamaican Drug Posses that ran up the east coast? Miller, a Kittitian, had grown up in Jamaica and got into political gangsterism which is connected to the drug (cocaine) business. He turned state's evidence in the U.S. against some of his even scarier associates and went into a Federal Witness Protection Program, from which he unexpectedly emerged in St. Kitts, where he started transshipping cocaine from Columbia up the islands to the East Coast and going slightly mad.

You can get a minimal sense of it here. This all ended two years before I got there. But here's a little more background to the background, with a bit of detail. But it hadn't quite ended. While I was there the young man who was charged in the killing of this blogger's uncle, a police officer, was set upon by a gang of boys and stabbed to death outside a nightclub about three blocks from my house. He had at least two trials and had hung juries in both. The mystery of who actually pulled the trigger has never been sorted out. And who knows if it ever will. Politics (local politics) and rank evil is so deep in this whole business...