An­na-Lisa Paul

A West­moor­ings busi­ness­man is se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing sell­ing and leav­ing T&T af­ter he was robbed three times with­in the past year.

The lat­est rob­bery took place just around mid­night on Sat­ur­day at the 12-acre Cu­mu­to es­tate owned by Dex­ter Nicholls and his fam­i­ly.

Op­er­at­ing JZAD Es­tate for the past sev­en years, Nicholls re­mained un­cer­tain yes­ter­day if he could start over yet again as ban­dits had ren­dered the out­fit in­op­er­a­ble af­ter steal­ing close to $300,000 worth of equip­ment, raw ma­te­ri­als and pro­duce.

Stand­ing next to the car­cass­es of his two dogs who were poi­soned, Nicholls sought to shield his wife and chil­dren as he ex­plained, “Our ba­sic op­er­a­tion here is to grow and pack­age frozen cas­sa­va.”

“We al­so do a lot of cit­rus in the form of por­tu­gals, grape­fruits, some or­anges and we re­cent­ly start­ed do­ing wa­ter­mel­ons.”

Claim­ing the fam­i­ly’s main in­come earn­er re­mained the frozen cas­sa­va logs usu­al­ly sup­plied to restau­rants in Port-of-Spain—and al­so eas­i­ly found in all the ma­jor gro­cery chain out­lets—Nicholls said he was more wor­ried about the 13 em­ploy­ees whose lives will be al­tered.

The ul­tra-pri­vate Nicholls re­vealed he re­ceived a call around 7.30 am yes­ter­day dur­ing which an em­ploy­ee in­formed him of the break-in.

He re­called prepar­ing to head to church when he learned that Brown­ie and Oreo had been found dead.

Con­vinc­ing his wife and chil­dren to ac­com­pa­ny him, Nicholls claimed the ban­dits gained en­try to the se­cured premis­es by pris­ing open a steel se­cu­ri­ty door to the back of the prop­er­ty.

He re­port­ed the place had been ran­sacked and sev­er­al items stolen in­clud­ing three vac­u­um-seal­ing ma­chines; a gas tank; re­frig­er­at­ed food; frozen cas­sa­va; and a heavy-du­ty ma­chine used to pre­pare the land.

Up­on learn­ing that the vac­u­um-seal­ing ma­chines along with the trac­tor ma­chine used to pre­pare the land were all miss­ing, Nicholls said, “That’s when I re­al­ly got wor­ried be­cause the last time we had a break-in on De­cem­ber 19, 2018…they didn’t even touch those ma­chines.”

Nicholls be­lieves that who­ev­er or­ches­trat­ed the break-in has an in­ti­mate knowl­edge of the busi­ness.

Hav­ing con­tact­ed the po­lice on his way to the es­tate, Nicholls said, “We don’t like to pub­li­cise our per­son­al life and busi­ness for this very rea­son…this fear of reprisal.”

“But now, I re­al­ly don’t care any­more. I just want to get up and get out of this place and coun­try. I no longer want to be in this busi­ness any­more or any busi­ness in Trinidad. This is the third time in less than a year we have been a tar­get.”

Pained at the thought of leav­ing sweet T&T as he de­scribed it, Nicholls said the price of his and his fam­i­ly’s safe­ty was too high a price to pay to try yet again.

He lament­ed, “The ban­dits have the up­per hand on us. We don’t have any­thing to pro­tect our­selves with. The on­ly thing we can do is go to church and pray and hope we don’t be­come a tar­get. I think this time it has re­al­ly cut my busi­ness clean from un­der me. There is no way I can see a way of con­tin­u­ing any­more. They have stolen over $300,000 worth of prop­er­ty and as­sets…and the hard part is they have put a lot of peo­ple out of pock­et. I don’t know who and where to turn to now.”

Nicholls said the rob­bery back in De­cem­ber had re­sult­ed in two em­ploy­ees be­ing tied up, beat­en, gagged with steel wire and as­sault­ed.

Fol­low­ing that, he said a de­ci­sion was tak­en for all work­ers to re­turn home dai­ly and the prop­er­ty wired with se­cu­ri­ty cam­eras so they could mon­i­tor the op­er­a­tion.

In­di­cat­ing he had ap­plied for his Firearm User’s Li­cense (FUL) back in 2013/2014, Nicholls said he has al­ready gone through the le­gal process and had even re­newed his ap­pli­ca­tion in 2015 but has had no feed­back from the au­thor­i­ties since.

Ad­mit­ting his wife and chil­dren vis­it­ed the es­tate for the first time yes­ter­day, Nicholls said they were fear­ful of hav­ing no pro­tec­tion as they drove past the gate but it was a re­al­i­ty they had to con­front and deal with.

Pressed to say if this was the end of the line for him and JZAD Es­tate, he said, “The de­ci­sion to leave is not an easy one. My friends who know me will know this is the last thing I would want to do, I am so pas­sion­ate about T&T in all forms. It’s 50/50…I still want to see how we can con­tin­ue busi­ness here. I am open to talks with peo­ple now…my wife and my­self need to sit down and re­flect and see what’s the next best move. I don’t want to run from here to be a sec­ond class cit­i­zen but liv­ing in T&T now…the good hard-work­ing, law-abid­ing cit­i­zens are re­al­ly sec­ond class cit­i­zens be­cause at the end of the day, we are at the mer­cy of the ban­dits out there and I see no light at the end of the tun­nel.”