He was the Robin Hood- like ganja-for- guns gangster who wielded bloody and fearsome power in Jamaica, authorities say.
But the rise of drug lord Christopher “Dudus” Coke may have had its start with a business snub from the eldest son of reggae legend Bob Marley.
Last week, Coke was finally brought to the United States to face weapons charges that could jail him for life, ending weeks of murderous riots that claimed 76 lives when police tried to arrest him.
In the early 1990s, as Coke allegedly took the reins of the family business in the Jamaican slums of Tivoli Gardens, there was one deal that ignited his rage, according to “Born Fi’ Dead” author Laurie Gunst. Ziggy Marley, Bob’s now-41-year-old son, was building a studio almost on the border of Coke’s territory, trying to provide aspiring musicians with a community base.
“Ziggy didn’t give the construction work to Dudus and his posse, so the Tivoli don was taking his revenge,” Gunst wrote. A series of killings cowed Marley, just as it expanded Dudus’ territory and consolidated his rule.
Coke’s rise in the underworld was swift — and deadly, authorities say.
His father, Lester — known as “Jim Brown” — was the architect of the Jamaican crime dynasty, twisted from a quiet, soccer-loving boy into a “bad, bad man” after surviving a shooting in his teens, a childhood friend told The Gleaner newspaper. “That’s when everything changed.”
The elder man fashioned his “Shower Posse” — so-named for spraying victims with bullets — into a drug-dealing conglomerate that employed his three sons. The youngest was Christopher, who earned his nickname “Dudus” — pronounced DUD-us — because he wore an African-style shirt favored by Jamaican World War II hero and Cabinet minister Dudley Thompson.
“It’s basically a family thing — gangster royalty,” said a law-enforcement source familiar with the Coke clan.
The gang rose to prominence on fear and intimidation, gaining a reputation for killing at the slightest offense.
US investigators believe the Shower Posse was responsible for approximately 1,400 drug-related slayings in the United States during the 1980s drug wars.
DUDUS, born Michael Christopher Coke in 1969, “had a brother named Jah T, who was sort of slated to take over but he was subsequently murdered in a shootout,” the source said. “There was another brother, Chris Royal. He also died in a shootout.”
Their sister was also gunned down. The father was still in charge in 1992 when the United States indicted him on conspiracy charges and he was arrested in Jamaica.
The day before he was set to be extradited, “his jail cell went up in flames and he died,” said the law-enforcement source. The violent mystery was never solved and no one was ever charged.
With no one else to take over, Dudus grabbed control of the family business — and soon became one of the world’s most dangerous drug lords, according to the Justice Department.
And, like the American gangsters of the ’20s and ’30s, he operated in the background, without flash or bling, forging loyalties, eliminating competitors and raking in millions.
Starting in 1994, the Shower Posse sold drugs by the ton, according to Coke’s indictment, unsealed in May. One investigator estimated that the gang smuggled at least 2,200 pounds of marijuana — and almost as much cocaine — into the United States.
The pot, a mix of ultra-potent Jamaican and Mexican varieties, also got shipped to markets around the world.
“It’s global,” said the investigator. “It’s pretty much anywhere you find Jamaican communities — the UK, Canada and the United States.”
The gang was open to creative payment plans — cash was good, of course, but it also accepted guns, electronics and even clothing as ” ‘tribute’ payments, in recognition of [Coke’s] leadership and assistance,” the indictment says.
For sneaking the product into the United States, Dudus preferred that his “mules” be female.
One Jamaican woman traveled to New York as a tourist, to buy clothes to sell back home — and was ordered by Dudus to carry cocaine hidden in her body.
“If the girls refuse to do so, then their businesses will be threatened and the clothing they sell and the money they earn will be stolen,” the woman told investigators.
All this information was gleaned from years of investigative work, which included phone taps that recorded Dudus arranging shipments of drugs and handguns.
But Coke isn’t just an alleged kingpin — he’s a folk hero in the slums of Kingston, where citizens revere him for providing handouts to the poorest of the poor, neighborhood security and jobs through his legitimate businesses, including a music-event company.
He’s also credited with helping to keep law and order by using his clout to punish crooks in an area where the government has little presence.
“He lives in a poor area, and because of his sale of cocaine, he basically plays the Robin Hood role,” Jamaican-born lawyer David Rowe, a University of Miami adjunct professor, told CNN.
And the poor pay him back with unwavering loyalty.
“After God, then Dudus,” one resident scrawled on a sign during the bloody manhunt for Coke. “Jesus died for us, so we will die for Dudus,” another sign declared.
It’s no accident that this jovial, stocky 42-year-old kingpin — called “the president” and “the general” by his admirers — sounds and acts much like “Dapper Don” John Gotti.
Like the late mob don, Dudus appears the devoted father and community patriarch — as kindhearted to his neighbors as he is deadly to rivals, ruling a global empire from a sprawling white mansion with purple roof and awnings, nestled amid squalor.
That two-story hilltop compound is where Coke plotted his political cover, supporting the prime minister’s Labor Party and getting back millions in government grants for his firms after swinging the election for Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding by delivering the slum vote.
It’s also where Coke and his Shower Posse schemed to swamp New York with huge quantities of marijuana and cocaine, some sold in exchange for high-caliber American weapons used on the island to eliminate threats to Coke’s fiefdom, law-enforcement sources said.
“To an outsider, it might look like, ‘Damn, these guys are mean!’ But being from Jamaica, you see it growing up. You see it all your life,” one native arrested in New York told author Gunst. “I think maybe Hollywood had a part in the ‘rude boy’ thing, with the movies they put out, like certain Westerns. Jamaicans act out a lot of that stuff, want to be tough like outlaws.”
BECAUSE of Dudus’ po litical clout and sup port, Jamaican authorities waffled for months about whether to extradite Coke. But Prime Minister Golding finally gave into US pressure last month. His men headed to Dudus’ compound — and straight into a nightmare.
The slums rebelled. Re sisters piled junk cars onto roads, rigging them with homemade bombs or electric wires. Gang sters shot up police stations. Civilians flooded the streets.
“They don’t know, if he’s extradited, who will be there for them,” Professor Rowe said. “There are mothers wondering, ‘Who’s going to buy my child lunch?’ or ‘If I get sick, who’s going to pay my hospital bills?’ ”
Police responded with brutal abandon, killing more than 70 people — some of whom were dragged into the streets and shot dead, their bodies left to rot, locals said.
Helana Pinnes, an elderly resident of Tivoli Gardens, said she saw army forces shoot two young men at a house across the street.
“They take them out of that house. They take them out and kill them,” she told the Guardian of London. “There wasn’t a shootout with anybody.”
Another witness, Timothy Macintosh, said soldiers fired at unarmed residents. “Most of these people that died, they didn’t fight,” he said.
After five days of the siege, the United States warned Americans not to travel to Jamaica — potentially a crippling blow to the nation’s economy — and the government gave up its search for the elusive drug lord.
On Wednesday, police finally prevailed.
Dudus had donned a comical, curly wig and was riding with a pal, the Rev. Al Miller, in a section of Kingston when the vehicle was pulled over at a checkpoint and he was arrested.
Coke claimed he was on his way to the US Embassy to surrender. On Friday, he pleaded not guilty in Manhattan Federal Court. He faces life in prison.
Once in the United States — hauled here by the DEA in a Learjet — Dudus claimed regret at the lives lost in the fighting during the search for him.
“I take this decision, for I now believe it to be in the best interest of my family, the community of western Kingston, and in particular the people of Tivoli Gardens and, above all, Jamaica,” he said.