The Boss, the Squire and the President

Article by Charlie Thompson. Edited by Claire Stratton. Additional Research by Robyn Hall.

Most Americans, at least those who took an interest in events in Jamaica last spring, could be forgiven for thinking the situation there somewhat odd in comparison to the political culture of the United States. For all of America’s political woes, the Republicans and Democrats don’t muddy their hands with criminal gangs who, on one hand, act as enforcers for their political patrons, securing huge local turnouts for that political party; while on the other forming a state within a state, providing ‘policing’, welfare and employment.

This is exactly what some of Kingston’s political gangs are alleged to do, including Christopher “Dudus” Coke’s Shower Posse. Like many of the other gangs, of which the Posse is the largest and most developed, it rose to prominence when successive Jamaican governments in the 1960s and 1970s built huge low-income housing estates and filled them with local supporters. They then turned a blind eye to criminal gangs in return for their loyalty when writs are dropped for general elections. Until Prime Minister Bruce Golding decided to order Coke’s arrest, the Tivoli Gardens area of western Kingston where he operated was a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) stronghold. So strong, in fact, that Bruce Golding is their MP.

Yet it would be mistaken to assume that there is much loyalty to Golding or the JLP in Tivoli Gardens, as the protests at and defiance of the police and military by ordinary citizens at the attempt to arrest Coke shows. The JLP had made a rod for its own back. By allowing the gang to operate as a state in miniature, providing food for the starving, education for the children of single-parent mothers and paradoxically provide law and order for a community in fear of crime the JLP here had given many people reason to support the gang, not the state.

But this bizarre situation might have been extremely familiar to nineteenth-century American city-dwellers.

Philadelphians in the antebellum era (before the Civil War) might have been familiar with a gentleman known as William McMullen. He did not operate criminal gangs in Jamaica, New York and Toronto – as the FBI alleges Coke does – but he in some ways provided a rehearsal for Tivoli Gardens on American soil. He, too, received the unending loyalty of his constituents. Coke was nicknamed “The President” by his dependants, an apt moniker for the alleged criminal, given how he has been allowed to assume the functions of the Jamaican state. McMullen went by the name of “Squire” instead. Whether through medieval conceptions of loyalty or modern concepts of the state, both titles show just how these leaders were seen by their communities.

The unique combination of mass white male democracy, voter intimidation and a political culture that accepted patronage meant that American cities became home to so-called political machines that fused gang activity with formal politics just as Jamaican gangsters are alleged to do. Both Squire McMullen and William M. “Boss” Tweed of New York City used various methods to deliver votes for the Democratic Party through criminal means. Volunteer fire companies were intensely political, at least when they weren’t fighting each other (they rarely fought fires) and sustained by the politicians that appointed and financed them; Tweed himself began as volunteer fire-fighter. In New York City, local Democrats and state Republicans even formed rival police forces that fought for control of America’s urban space, and the formal political power that followed. Men who could control these mobs and gangs were often candidates for political success, as state boss Thurlow Weed did for Governor William Seward and one Philadelphia Mayor did for himself by leading a mob to the Delaware River to ceremonially dump abolitionist literature.

This meant that machines could rely on mobs and gangs to help them control formal political machinery through voter intimidation and fraudulent practices. However, they also relied on popular political support, as the protests show that Coke was able to do. Catholics’ children found education in subsidised Catholic parochial schools, otherwise denied to them in rabidly Protestant America. Tweed’s machine built many icons of New York such as Central Park, the prominence of Broadway and many nineteenth-century buildings to provide jobs for the poor when the government would not. Many fiscal conservatives derided this as corruption and patronage (and not without reason as Tweed’s machine embezzled up to 8 billion US Dollars) but what Tweed may have created was a welfare and relief programme, albeit illegally, that earned the loyalty of impoverished New Yorkers.

And like the poor of Tivoli Gardens, New Yorkers proved that this gave them an incentive to support their bosses above the state. Despite the eagle-screaming furore at the beginning of the American Civil War, local Irish Democrats’ loyalty to a government that offered them little was proven shallow when many rioted against being drafted into the war effort and symbols of Republicans who they believed despised them.

It is often quite easy to ascribe criminal characteristics to politicians – especially when they secretly help themselves to generous amounts of public money. Effectively contracting out the state to gangs in return for votes certainly brings great rewards for politicians that can successfully broker between formal and informal (or real and theoretical) monopolies on violence. The votes that put Tweed in office allowed him to make millions in embezzlement and fraud; Tivoli Gardens has returned a JLP political dynasty for generations. But this can come at the cost of long-term political stability if the state or the public perceives that their contractors have gone out of control.

Where does this leave Golding and Coke? The Republican elite was able to dismantle Tweed’s machine in the 1870s, so, if the political will is there, it may well be possible for the Jamaican government to dismantle the gang-states without a successor filling the void, as the press seemed to predict. However, the similarity between Jamaica and America’s historic political machines is uncanny, and perhaps this strange contradiction between America’s contemporary image of itself as the archetypical democratic republic and its history makes it a curiosity for historians.

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Michael Christopher Coke (Dudus) was leader of the Shower Posse gang and leader of the Tivoli Gardens community where he distributed money to the poor, created employment and set up community centres.

In 2009 the US requested his extradition, then in May 2010 the Government of Jamaica issued a warrant for his arrest.

Initially people fought against the extradition and the area of Kingston was placed under a state of emergency.

It is claimed that 76 people died trying to defend Coke.

Coke surrendered himself to the US claiming that he wanted to avoid any more violence in Jamaica. Coke will be tried in the State of New York for drugs and weapons trafficking.

Prior to the arrest of Coke, Tivoli Gardens had the lowest reported crime rates throughout Kingston. The local community relied on him the way most communities would rely on the police and local authorities.

Jamaican posses are a loose collection of gangs based predominantly in the New York City area and Toronto. 

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