ADAMS SEH DUDUS DID FRAIDY FRAIDY

‘Dudus’ was always a coward — Adams
Retired crime fighter says Coke got away with ‘chicken feed’ sentence
BY HG HELPS Editor-at-Large [email protected]
Sunday, June 24, 2012

RETIRED Senior Superintendent of Police Reneto Adams has dubbed imprisoned gangster Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke a coward, adding that he got away with a ‘chicken feed’ sentence recently.
“He was a coward. He was always a coward and that was one of the reasons why I was never afraid of him,” Adams told the Jamaica Observer in an interview.
Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke on his arrival in New York in June 2010. (Photo: AP)
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“He had never faced a situation up front, like a shootout. He had always sent his men and when they thought he was there with them he would have gone elsewhere to a hotel or something. I would want to hazard a guess that he was never involved in a shootout with the police,” Adams said.
Coke was sentenced to 23 years in a United States prison earlier this month after he pleaded guilty in a New York court last August to one count of racketeering conspiracy and one count of conspiracy to commit assault with a dangerous weapon in aid of racketeering.
Once the leader of the feared North America-based Shower Posse, which he ran for over 20 years from his West Kingston fiefdom of Tivoli Gardens, Coke was captured in June 2010, following a month-long police search for him that followed a bloody battle in Tivoli between gunmen loyal to him and security forces, which left 76 people — including a policeman and a soldier — dead by police account.
Coke had fled Tivoli during that firefight.
Adams, who left the constabulary force on his 60th birthday — July 11, 2008 — recalled facing the fury of Coke and his men in a blazing shootout in Tivoli Gardens in July 2001, one that left 27 people dead.
Adams maintains that Coke was behind that assault of the security forces, one of whom was killed in the community, but the retired feared crime fighter suggested that Coke was never up front in that battle, which he felt was started after Coke was tipped off that police would be raiding his stronghold.
“It was ‘Dudus’ who was behind it. We got the intelligence that he had called in warriors at the time from other parts of the Corporate Area to help defend the place and we saw them while we were there,” Adams told the Sunday Observer.
“On the day in question that the shooting started, I counted 76 gunmen and none of them had fewer than two guns, usually a long gun and a short gun.
“That’s why I made that famous or infamous statement, that if what I saw today was what Jamaica had become, Jamaica would pay dearly, dearly, dearly,” he said. “I didn’t plan to go down there, but I was sent by the commissioner of police, Francis Forbes. We had a meeting one day with the commissioner of police that guns, drugs, ammunition had come in and were being stored at a house for old people in West Kingston, north of the Denham Town Police Station.
“I was not told the day at the commissioner’s office that I would lead the party, because he had actually selected (assistant commissioner) Arthur ‘Stitch’ Martin to head the team. I don’t know what happened, but I got a late instruction from Commissioner Forbes that I must lead the operation and I was supplied with a written intelligence, signed and stamped by ‘Stitch’ Martin.
“When we got the intelligence, we heard that the guns and the contraband were for ‘Dudus’ and the intelligence suggested that we had to be very, very careful, because this was now attacking the man personally.” Adams recalled.
“We had planned that after we retrieved the contraband, we would have raided his (Coke’s Presidential Click) office, hoping to have him arrested, but we never got around to doing that because he was so heavily fortified,” Adams disclosed.
Adams, now managing director and chief executive officer of Adams Security Management Unit, said that the Government, during the time that Coke and other criminals thrived, refused to implement certain measures which he believed could have worked against criminals like Coke, in the society.
“One of the reasons we could not deal with the crime as it was at the time was that people like me who advocated certain laws and actions were bluntly refused by the Government,” he said. “This would include eavesdropping equipment, which I asked for when I went to the CMU (Crime Management Unit). I asked for certain other equipment to set up instruments covertly and to videotape what was being said, using the technology available at the time. This was refused, as the Administration said that it would be encroaching on the human rights of criminals. That’s one of the reasons why we could not deal with the criminal elements here.
“I was one of those who first asked for the Criminal Enterprises Act. I said to the commissioner of police, how can we have men driving six, seven, eight and 10 BMWs and Benzes around town and they are not working men?”
Adams said that long ago he had recommended to the top brass of the police force that something be done because he had intelligence that guns were being stored at a warehouse on Industrial Terrace in bags of red peas.
“We had information that the containers were taken there and in my own meetings, questions were being asked what evidence I had to show. So I was being bombarded from inside and outside and politically, too,” Adams said.
He also claimed that Coke had connections with politicians and members of the police force, some of whom he claimed were on the convicted man’s payroll.
“They were afraid of him. He had inside connection in the police force, politically, in the civil service, on the wharf, in just about everything, because he was a wealthy man,” Adams charged.
“Many times when we would have gone in search of him, when we had intelligence, some of our people were selling information to him. That was what prompted me to take away policemen’s phones when I was going on operations and didn’t tell them where I was going. If I was going to Constant Spring I would have told them that I was going somewhere else.
“All that had repercussions, too, but I thought that if we were dealing with criminals and we had even one among us, then I had to find solutions to that and who wanted to vex just vex,” stated Adams.
“When he gives instructions, it is stronger than any law that is passed in Parliament and it must be carried out,” Adams said.
As for the 23 years that Coke will spend in unfamiliar surroundings at a correctional facility in the USA, in addition to facing four years of supervised release and US$1.5 million in forfeiture, Adams said that the punishment was not enough.
“When I compared the sentence to (R Allen) Stanford, who stole some money and got over 100 years, it would seem to me that the sentence on Dudus, based on what the evidence has revealed and what I personally know, is a chicken-feed sentence,” said Adams.
“I was looking, not just at Dudus alone, but many of the criminals in Jamaica, for at least 100 years all the time and being kept in underground cells. That is how Reneto Adams recommends that you deal with criminal elements — make laws that will send them away for long, despite what the human rights people want to think, and they have their work to do too.
“Since the capture of Dudus, crime has considerably been cut down in Jamaica. I had already told Jamaica that if we deal with crime in Western Kingston and, by extension, the criminal elements in Tivoli Gardens, crime could be cut down by 80 per cent in the entire Jamaica,” he said.
“At one time, any man in Jamaica who wanted a gun to hire or buy, anyone who committed crime in Westmoreland for example and wanted to hide, they could go to Tivoli and hide out and would be given sanctuary by Dudus,” the former cop said.
“They could get guns too, in other places like Jungle (Arnett Gardens), but Tivoli was the main place. Another problem, too, was that members of the police force hardly knew him, because he was a man who never offered to be photographed by anyone,” Adams added.
“We had a photograph of him when he was about 20. That, for a long time, was the only photograph we had of him. I had people based in Tivoli giving me intelligence, who would send me a photograph of him, but that was highly confidential and not even the commissioner I could have passed that on to, because in Tivoli, if John Brown did something today, they could tell you tomorrow that John Brown did it,” Adams stated.