One of the main witnesses in the trial of three men charged with a drug-related killing in the United States recently testified that he got his drug supply through Guyana’s ‘Phantom Squad,’ which is believed to be responsible for a number of execution-style deaths here.
Paul “Uncles” Ford, a former drug dealer, also stated that the group had hired him as an assassin in the United States.
Ford made the disclosure during his testimony in the trial of brothers Brian “Brawl” Gill, 46, and David “Plot” Gill, 43, and Samuel “Waco” McIntosh, 40 in a Brooklyn Court.
According to a report in the Staten Island Advance, the brothers along with McIntosh allegedly committed the murder of Michael Dawson on June 22nd, 1994, when they along with another man riddled him with bullets in broad daylight. The trial has concluded and the men are now awaiting the verdict of the jury, which is deliberating.
The report said that Ford, a witness for the prosecution, had testified that, as he watched from a taxi, he saw all three brothers shoot and kill Dawson.
However, the Gill brothers’ defence attorneys targeted Ford’s criminal past and tried to bring up rumours that he had once decapitated a woman.
In her closing argument, defence attorney Kelley Sharkey challenged Ford’s credibility as a witness, making references to his own testimony that he got his drug supply through a connection to the Guyanese “Phantom death squad” and that the group had hired him as an assassin in New York.
“Paul Ford came to the United States on a fake soccer scholarship and within a year, within two years, when he’s not even 20 or maybe just 20, he is making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling cocaine up and down the East [Coast]. And in the ’90s, who is he trafficking in drugs with? The Phantom death squad,” the lawyer was quoted as saying in the report.
“You learned from Ford’s own mouth that the Phantom death squad in Guyana, it’s a hit squad. And rival political parties pay them money to kill their political rivals… I am not kidding. Is this someone whose testimony you’re going to believe for half a second?” she asked.
The squad was headed by convicted drug trafficker Shaheed Roger Khan, who is now serving a 15 year sentence in the US.
During Khan’s trial, it was revealed that one of the government’s confidential sources indicated that the “Phantom Squad” was responsible for “at least 200 extra-judicial killings from 2002 to 2006 in Guyana.
