Strategic location
In the early 1980s, new drug trafficking routes were required to push greater consignments of cocaine from Central America to the wider world, where demand was fast outpacing supply. The Caribbean Basin region, with a strategic location that allows for cargo to be shipped easily to either of the two major continents, was quickly utilised as a major transshipment point.
The Scott Drug Commission thus reported on a "juncture when the Medellin cartel was flooding Trinidad and Tobago with kilo bricks for movement through the Caribbean Island chain to the United States and Europe". But, despite the report containing a welter of information about the intricacies of drug trafficking here in this country, no concrete action was ever taken to dismantle these local networks and/or to target the individuals involved.
The Mexican-based British reporter, Ioan Grillo, in writing his seminal ten-year study of Mexican drug gangs, entitled El Narco, explains how corruption and political indifference over time, played a significant part in shaping a criminal insurgency that was responsible for almost 13,000 murders in the last year alone: "The drug market was a fraction of the size of today, and officials didn't see it as a huge deal. In this system, heroin money was just one more kickback flowing up. Everybody was happy and stayed in line because everybody got paid."
Replace Grillo's reference to "heroin" with the word "cocaine", and the journalist could just as easily have been talking about Trinidad and Tobago. By 1994 then, a man whose name had featured prominently in the Scott Commission Drug Report ten years earlier, had risen to become one of the most feared drug barons in Trinidad and Tobago.
From his base in central Trinidad, Nankissoon 'Dole Chadee' Boodram had tentacles that seemed to extend across all sectors of society. Jerome Harris, one-time head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency's Caribbean operations, referred to Dole Chadee "as one of the premier traffickers, one of the most significant, and one of the smartest in the Eastern Caribbean". Chadee was no stranger to the law, though, and had been arrested numerous times for a plethora of criminal offences. But, prosecutors never could make any charges stick, and so he walked free time and again.
It was only in 1993, that Chadee and his two cousins had been charged with the shooting death of St Clair McMillan. However, Cuthbert "Scotty" Charles, the main prosecution witness, would be kidnapped and murdered in Carenage a few days before he was due to give evidence, and the case against the Chadee trio collapsed. Dole Chadee seemed untouchable, and his legend grew exponentially with every folded case.
Maybe it happened that Chadee himself started to believe his own hype, we will never really know. Nevertheless, by ordering the death of an entire Williamsville family, Chadee would set in train a sequence of events that would lead to his ultimate downfall. The Teflon don from Piparo didn't yet know it, but he had in effect signed his own death warrant.
A murder too far
Hamilton "Mice" Baboolal had been a part of Chadee's crew, before a fatal lapse in judgment persuaded him to steal some cocaine from his employer to sell for his own profit. On the night of January 9, 1994, Chadee summonsed his psychotic killer-in-chief, Joey Ramiah, to his farmhouse in Piparo, where he handed out guns and masks to Ramiah and (other) members of his feared gang. He made it quite clear that he wanted Mice and everyone in that Williamsville house dead.
The gang of ten drove the short distance to the Baboolal home in Williamsville, and went to work. Hamilton "Mice" Baboolal, his sister Monica, and parents Rookmin and Deo, were made to kneel on the floor and then shot through the heads. On searching the rest of the house, gang member Levi Morris came across 11-year-old Osmond Baboolal, and his 9-year-old sister, Hematee, cowering in one of the bedrooms.
Morris hid the children under a bed, and reported back that the house was empty. With the job done, the gang drove back to Piparo to inform the Boss. Even by our society's depraved standards, the Baboolal murders were seen as beyond the pale and sent shockwaves through the country. The police immediately suspected the hand of Chadee in the hit, but with no conclusive evidence, and no credible eyewitnesses, the trail soon went cold.
Four months later, Clint Huggins, one of the gang who was present at the murder scene, walked into a police station and decided to become a state's witness. Dole Chadee was again arrested and charged with murder. This time though, a combination of overlapping factors would ensure that there was no escape for the great Trinbagonian Houdini. Other local crime syndicates had been eyeing up Chadee's massive slice of the cocaine pie with some envy, and so with him behind bars, they made their move.
Many of those within the corridors of power, some of whom were themselves linked to the drug trade,also felt that Chadee had become too big for his own boots. Thus, both sides of the law and order spectrum, criminal elements on the one hand, and those sworn to protect and serve on the other, would set about ensuring that Chadee's fall from grace was permanent.
Despite all of this, Chadee still had sufficient clout to reach out from behind the walls of the gaol on Frederick Street in Port-of-Spain, and kill Clint Huggins at a second time of asking. But, when Levi Morris calculated that a life spent looking over his shoulder was still better than one dangling away at the end of a noose, and decided to turn state's witness, Dole Chadee must have realised that his race was run.
Over the course of three days in early June 1999, Chadee and the remaining eight members of his gang would be hanged by the neck until they were dead. However, if the authorities believed that Dole Chadee's hanging would bring some semblance of peace and stability back to these islands, then they had grossly miscalculated. That particular genie had long since escaped its bottle.
One former Trinidad & Tobago diplomat, speaking to me after a security conference in London last year, explained that "many people who owed the Chadee franchise thought that they no longer had to pay up. What these people didn't realise, though, was that the money owed to Chadee, was money owed to the Colombians. And they soon came to collect." Kidnap for ransom would be their modus operandi.
Unleashing a wave of violence
The Colombians had in fact signalled their intent two years prior, when Dole Chadee's brother, Thackoor Boodram, was kidnapped from his home on December 20,1997, and a $5 million ransom demanded for his safe return. When the deadline expired, police officers received an anonymous call directing them to a Johnny Walker whisky box placed on top of a bench in Mosquito Creek.
Newsday reporter Ken Chee Hing explained the scene that greeted him on his arrival. "The lower corner of the box was stained with blood and a thin thread of blood had leaked out onto the dirt. Without a word, one of the officers used the barrel of his SLR and tipped the box over. Out rolled the severed head of Thackoor Boodram".
Another school of thought suggests that Thackoor Boodram's hit had been ordered by rivals from a local syndicate, who, with Dole Chadee locked up and facing execution, were looking to cement their place at the top by removing the last vestiges of his cartel. Whatever the real reasons behind Thackoor Boodram's murder, his death, and the state execution of his brother two years thereafter, would trigger a wave of tit-for-tat kidnapping and counter-kidnapping that went on for several years. It was a macabre cycle of murder and even bloodier retribution. Some of the victims were high-profile, many others were not, a grisly end their only common feature.
With the authorities seemingly unable to cope, kidnapping soon morphed from being a staple of those fighting for control of lucrative international drug routes, to the stock-in-trade practised by criminals of all ilks. It seemed that anybody who had enough money to buy two or three decent pairs of sneakers, or who sported a heavy gold chain around their neck, was thought to be fair game.
The high tonnage of cocaine flowing through these islands also meant that the inevitable run-off into the local stream presented an opportunity for those willing and able to take advantage. Smaller and less organised criminal elements started to kill each other, fighting to be 'top dogs' on the drugs blocks of Port-of-Spain, San Fernando, Arima, and beyond, which were now awash with a deadly combination of crack cocaine and plenty guns.
The economy of violent crime, which had usually been subservient to the needs of those engaged in the drug-trafficking trade, was beginning to take on a life of its own. On September 11, 2001, 19 men walked through passport control in cities on the eastern seaboard of the United States, and boarded flights for internal destinations. Hours later, Uncle Sam would come to the stark conclusion that the quantity of drugs flowing through his southern flank was the very least of his concerns.
Thus, as the US "began to draw down its presence and engagement in the Caribbean," and tilted its head towards the Middle East, Trinidad and Tobago, as did many other Caribbean islands, was shunted across the Rubicon and on towards a point of no return.