A fugitive Jamaican drug lord’s criminal tentacles reached deep into Queens and The Bronx, where he ran an expansive drug- and gun-smuggling operation, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.
Christopher “Dudus” Coke — who is now the target of an international manhunt led by the Drug Enforcement Administration — is behind a drug-and-gun ring that operated for years out of Eastchester in The Bronx and Rosedale, Queens, the sources said.
His minions trafficked in tons of marijuana and moved cocaine by forcing Jamaican businesswomen to hide it in their bodies when they traveled to New York to buy clothes for their shops, court documents show.
The gang used the profits from its New York crimes to buy guns, which were shipped back to Coke in Jamaica, says the federal indictment that is the basis of the government’s efforts to extradite him.
Coke himself hasn’t visited the United States in years, sources said.
But a man identified by sources as his brother, Omar “Lion” Coke, is awaiting trial on a separate Manhattan federal indictment charging him with trafficking more than a ton of marijuana. He is free on bail and works as a security guard.
Four days of assaults by Jamaican police on Christopher Coke’s slum stronghold in Kingston led to the deaths of 73 people, including three police officers, authorities said yesterday.
As the toll mounted in Coke’s Tivoli Gardens neighborhood — which is also the electoral base of Jamaica’s prime minister, Bruce Golding — Coke was nowhere to be found.
His lawyers had been negotiating to have him voluntarily surrender to US authorities, sources told The Post. Some in Jamaica suspect he’d rather take his chances with a life sentence in the United States than end up like his father, who died mysteriously in a Jamaican prison.
Jamaican forces have arrested more than 560 people while looking for Coke, who’s known as the head of a criminal organization called the “Shower Posse.” The word “shower” refers to the bullets it rains on its enemies.
Golding for months had fought US extradition efforts. After the prime minister finally gave in to US demands last week, Jamaican forces went into Tivoli Gardens to look for Coke — despite residents’ warnings of a possible gun battle to prevent his arrest.