(Jamaica Gleaner) Police investigators believe the Clansman gang, one of the deadliest criminal organisations in the country, is raking in over J$400 million a year from its nefarious activities.
“A moderate estimate is about J$448 million a year,” a senior police investigator based in the gang’s Spanish Town enclave told The Sunday Gleaner.
Investigators said most of this wealth, which is derived from the gang’s primary activities of extortion and contract killings, is used to purchase high-powered weapons and vehicles, and to finance an operation that is highly organised.
“Sometimes we would see them going around in up to a dozen Hyundai cars, and by the next week, they have a dozen Toyota Altis. It’s hard to keep track of them,” the senior investigator complained.
The police say they have intelligence that gang members hide AK-47s and handguns among the stalls used by vendors to sell produce and other items along March Pen Road.
In fact, the police believe that members of the Clansman gang, armed with some of these weapons, used the cover of the March Pen Road vending area to stage Thursday’s brazen attack on the Spanish Town Police Station.
“You will see them (gang members) on the street corner, and when you search them, you don’t find anything; but in a minute, they can cause major destruction in the town,” a police source said, adding that in the past, several firearms were found in unattended stalls.
Misguided actions
Some vendors denied the police claim while they were being evicted from the area owned by the Jamaica Railway Corporation on Friday.
The actions of the police, according to one man, who described himself as a taxi operator, were misguided. “A more crime dem a breed up. Yu see wha gwaan last night (the attack on the station), a just the icing pan the cake that,” he said.
The police are withholding the latest crime statistics for the St Catherine North Division, the area in which the Clansman gang and its bitter rival, the One Order gang, operate.
However, statistics obtained by The Sunday Gleaner show that there were 199 murders in the division last year, a 16 per cent increase, which came at a time when homicides had fallen 15 per cent nationally. This increase, the largest among all police divisions in the country, was accompanied by a 17 per cent spike in shootings.
Superintendent Victor Hamilton, who is in charge of operations in the division, told The Sunday Gleaner that “in excess of 80 per cent of these murders is attributable to gang violence”.
Over a month ago, the police managed to dismantle the Clansman gang’s cash cow: an illegal bus park set up and operated along March Pen Road in Spanish Town since 2007.
On any given day, an investigator said, the amount of money earned from the extortion of bus operators was based on the gang leader “on duty”.
“Someone would come out and say, ‘One thousand dollars for every vehicle for the day’. Later in the day, after he has collected the J$1,000, he will charge an additional J$200 for every other trip,” the investigator said.
Despite the dismantling of the illegal bus park, investigators say the gang continues to rake in large sums of cash from the extortion of fearful business owners and at least one major contractor in St Catherine.
At the same time, the police say they are seeing an increasing number of cases where Clansman gang members are flocking to churches, indicating that they want to get baptised, in an attempt to throw off investigators.
One investigator pointed to two recent cases, one of which involved a Clansman gang leader who was overheard plotting the death of a rival gang member moments after he left a baptismal class.
Not aware
Bishop Rowan Edwards, whose Spanish Town church was invaded by heavily armed cops who removed three men last Sunday, said he was not aware of the practice, but would not be surprised to hear of it.
“I have worked with the Clans(man gang), I have worked with the One Order, and I have never dealt with anybody from those groups who was seeking cover in the church,” said Edwards.
The head of the Jamaica Association of Full Gospel Churches is angry at the actions of the police, but made it clear that his organisation does not believe in shielding wanted persons.
“They must go to the police with the assistance of a lawyer, a pastor, or a trusted individual and go get yourself justified,” said Edwards, who has escorted several gangsters.
In the past two weeks, three top-ranking members of the Clansman gang, including feared enforcer Donovan ‘Don’ Topping, were killed by the police, who have launched an aggressive push to dismantle the gang.
The other two were Joel Jennings, more popularly known as ‘JJ’, who was wanted for a number of murders and shootings in St Catherine, and another man investigators say was the gang’s undertaker.
In addition, the police have placed a J$500,000 bounty for Navardo Hodges, otherwise called ‘Dee Jay’, and Amal Roman, otherwise called ‘Satan’.
