Kingston, Jamaica, a city where music, money, and murder have always walked the same streets. Where a man can throw a party for thousands one night and be buried the next week. Where the line between entertainer and enforcer has never been very clear. And in the middle of all of that, for nearly three decades, stood one man.
A man who burned 50-pound notes just to show he could. A man who drove a Jaguar with a license plate that read 007. A man who threw parties so massive, so wild, so over-the-top, that even Scotland Yard called it Jamaica’s Hollywood. His name was Owen Clark, but the whole world knew him as Roy Fowl. And on the night of February 22nd, 2019, somebody decided it was time for Roy Fowl to die.
To understand who pulled that trigger and why, you have to go all the way back to where it started. Owen Clark was born in Jamaica, growing up in the Kingston 11 area, in the rough neighborhoods around Waltham Park Road and Waverly Avenue. He was not born into wealth. He was not handed anything.
But from early on, he had a gift for connecting people, for creating energy, for making a crowd feel something. He also had an appetite for the kind of money that parties alone could never provide. At some point in the late 1980s, Clark made his way to London, England, the way many young Jamaicans did during that era, looking for opportunities that the island could not give them.
He settled in Sudbury, a quiet area in the northwest of London. And from the outside, he looked like any other Jamaican immigrant building a new life in England. But what was building beneath the surface was something else entirely. By the early 1990s, Owen Clark had established himself as one of the biggest dancehall party promoters in the United Kingdom.
His events, held under the banner of the British He threw massive parties at La Roose, a beachfront nightclub outside Kingston, pulling crowds of up to 7,000 people. He also hosted big events in Harlesden, in Northwest London, where the Jamaican community was thick and his name carried serious weight. People flew in from across the UK and from Jamaica just to be there.
The parties were glittering, expensive, and enormous. But, according to law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic, the British Link Up Crew was never just about music. It was a front, a very well-dressed, very loud, very convincing front for one of the most sophisticated cocaine smuggling operations Britain had ever seen. Detective Sergeant Steve Waller of Scotland Yard’s Operation Trident Unit, who spent years building a case against Clark, estimated that Clark’s reign as the head of the British Link Up Crew lasted more than 13 years. During that
time, he crafted an empire that reached from the Caribbean all the way across Europe. He used dozens of women as drug mules to import huge quantities of cocaine from Jamaica into the United Kingdom. These women traveled by plane, by cruise ship, and by cargo boat. Some flew first to continental Europe before taking short connecting flights into the UK.
Others traveled on Eurostar trains through the Channel Tunnel into Kent and London, carrying cocaine either by ingesting it in pellets or concealing it in false-bottom suitcases. From London, the drugs then spread across Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, and Brighton with a network of hundreds of dealers moving the product on the streets.
At its peak, it was estimated that around 20 mules were bringing approximately 500,000 pounds worth of cocaine into Britain every single week. Clark recruited many of his mules at the very parties he threw. Women attending events at La Rousse and that is London clubs were charmed, wooed, and eventually drawn into the operation.
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According to sources, some of the women who worked as mules for Clark’s crew were connected to Air Jamaica, Jamaica’s national airline. Their professional appearance and access made them perfect carriers, able to pass through customs without raising suspicion. It reportedly worked for years.
One of the most high-profile mules ever connected to the network was Jamaican beauty queen Marsha Parangue Singh, who was caught and served time in a British prison before returning to Jamaica. She died in 2014 when her car crashed into a pole. She was not the only one who paid a heavy price. According to people who knew the operation from the inside, at least one woman allegedly died when the cocaine she had swallowed was not properly sealed and burst inside her body.
Others were allegedly beaten when they arrived in England and were told they would not be paid. The money was big, but so was the danger. Back in Jamaica, Clark lived a life that looked nothing like the quiet bungalow he kept in Sudbury. At home, he was a king. He owned a multi-million pound cliffside mansion. He drove a 75,000 pound Jaguar with personalized plates reading 007.
He wore diamond-encrusted crucifix necklaces that cost $13,000. He reportedly burned £50 notes just to entertain guests. He left the price tags on £10,000 designer suits, flicking them up so everyone could see exactly what he had spent. He rubbed shoulders with pop stars and sports personalities, and at his parties, the level of display was staggering.
Detective Sergeant Wallace said it best when he described it to the press. “Lorry loads of designer dresses arrived as gifts for female guests.” Clark himself would make his entrance like a rock star to wild applause, dripping in gold. At the time of his arrest in 2003, he owned three mansions in Jamaica, as well as properties in the United States and Canada.
By the court’s own reckoning, the properties linked to him contained cocaine worth £6,000, the judge at sentencing noted that it was Clark’s own arrogance, his burning of money, his price tags, his inability to keep a low profile that had finally brought him to their attention. The British authorities had actually been watching Clark for much longer than most people knew.
Scotland Yard, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, Customs and Excise, the FBI, and Jamaican authorities were all involved in what became known as Operation Jaws, a coordinated effort to bring Clark down. When Operation Trident, Scotland Yard’s dedicated black gun crime and drug unit, was formally established in July 2000, Clark was already one of their top targets.
Rather than going straight for Clark himself, the operation methodically worked its way through his organization, picking off his lieutenants one by one. First came Nadia Cordner, who ran Clark’s operation out of Hackney and Stoke Newington in northeast London. A 4-month surveillance operation caught her making a rare personal delivery in Golders Green.
The jury took just 11 minutes to convict her, and she was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Then Paul “Pepsi” Hamilton and Vernon “Laddy” Anderson, who ran supply for the Luton and Bedfordshire areas, fell. Police discovered that 50 kilos of cocaine, worth roughly 10 million pounds, had passed through their crack conversion factory in Luton.
Clark replaced them with Mikey McDaniel and Bibsy Finley. The police caught them, too, finding a kilo of cocaine in the washing machine at one of their addresses. Clark had survived close calls before all of this. In 1999, a year before Operation Trident even formally began targeting him, Clark was shot on Willesden High Street in northwest London by a teenager.
The bullet ricocheted off his arm. He walked away. That near-death experience did nothing to slow him down. He kept building, kept recruiting, kept throwing parties. He had survived at least two attempts on his life in Jamaica, as well. For a man who made so many enemies, Clark seemed untouchable. That reputation only made him bolder.
But the walls were finally closing in. In 2003, armed officers from Operation Trident raided Clark’s home and recovered 50 kilos of cocaine. A further 51 kilos were found at a safe house in South Harrow, London, with a combined street value of 1 million pounds. Two of his close associates were arrested alongside him.
Clark was convicted at Snaresbrook Crown Court in June 2004 on two charges of possession with intent to supply crack cocaine and one count of conspiracy to manufacture crack cocaine. The judge, William Kennedy, sentenced him to 13 years in prison. Kennedy’s words at sentencing were direct and damning. “Those who deal in class A drugs deal in death,” he said.
“Those who supply others are responsible both directly and indirectly for much of the violent crime that terrifies decent people and shatters lives.” The judge added that he hoped Clark would never again be a free man in England. Clark appealed and had two years knocked off the sentence, bringing it down to 11 years. But the empire was finished.
During the forfeiture proceedings that followed his conviction, the court attempted to recover his ill-gotten gains. Despite owning multiple luxury properties, two of which had contained cocaine worth 6 million pounds, Clark was ordered to pay back just 300,000 pounds. The court heard that Clark, despite his clearly enormous wealth, kept no financial records and had no bank account.
He told the court that his income came from music promotions. He said the same thing publicly in a 2013 interview, claiming his crew had started simply with him and some friends cooking and roasting corn to fund their early parties at La Rousse. Many who knew him laughed at that story. Clark was also associated with the Yardie network, the loose but dangerous web of Jamaican organized crime figures operating across the UK during the 1990s and 2000s.
The British Link Up Crew was believed to have been involved in numerous acts of violence during those years. One of the most shocking involved Link Up Crew associate Anthony Blacka Pinnock, also known as Bertram Byfield, who was gunned down along with his 7-year-old daughter at a house on Harrow Road in Harlesden.
The Jamaica Gleaner also reported in 2004 that Clark was thought to have been involved in the shooting death of DJ Village, a London-based radio DJ who was killed in 2001. Clark was never charged in connection with that death, and he always denied being a violent man, but the allegations followed him.
Clark was deported from the United Kingdom after serving his sentence and returned to Jamaica. He settled back on Waivel Avenue in Kingston 11 in the same community he had grown up in. Back home, he picked up where he left off in terms of visibility. He stayed in the dancehall spotlight, continued holding his British Link Up events, and kept the lifestyle going as best he could.
In a 2013 interview, when asked why he had remained in the game for so long, his answer was simple. The money, the lifestyle, and the girls, he said. As he put it, the more you get, the more you want. Even in that same interview, Clark maintained that he was not a violent man. He said he had never sent guns to Jamaica, never funded gunmen, and that no man could come to his yard asking him for money to buy weapons.
But those who truly knew the circles he moved in told a different story altogether. Sources close to the situation alleged that Clark had never fully stopped his dealings after deportation. The men he had known from his UK days, many of them also deported after their own prison sentences, had returned to Jamaica and were running drug operations behind legal businesses.
Clark, it was alleged, maintained those relationships, which meant he was still connected to a world that had very specific rules about loyalty, betrayal, and what happened to men who crossed the wrong people. By 2018, Kingston’s underworld was in chaos. The area around Cockburn Pen and York Avenue, neighborhoods that had long had a violent rivalry, was heating up again.
Clark was deeply connected to the Cockburn Pen side through his long-standing friendships and his financial relationships with key figures there. One of the most important of those figures was a man known as Bitty, whose full name was Carl Hines, and who had known Clark from their days together in England. Bitty was a significant figure in the Cockburn Pen area and had reportedly remained loyal to Clark even when tensions in the community were rising.
According to street-level accounts that circulated in the weeks after Clark’s death, the trouble that would ultimately cost Clark his life began when a conflict around Clark’s own son set off a chain reaction. Clark’s son was allegedly involved in activity that created tension with men on the other side of the York Avenue divide. When retaliatory violence followed, men from the Cockburn Pen side lost people, that grief and anger needed somewhere to land.
The story, as it spread through the community and across social media in the days after Clark’s murder, was this: Bitty was killed in 2018, allegedly set up by someone he trusted. According to what circulated, some people blamed Clark, believing he had allowed the situation with his son to bring heat down on Bitti. Or worse, that information coming from Clark’s circle had gotten Bitti killed.
Others argue strenuously that Bitti was killed by men from within his own side who had decided he was too loyal to Clark and unwilling to go to war over what Clark’s son had caused. What was clear was that Bitti was dead and that at least some people held Clark responsible for it. Either directly or indirectly.
Allegedly, Bitti’s own son was among those who believed Clark had betrayed his father and vowed to settle that account. On the streets, that kind of blood debt has only one currency. There were also personal rifts much closer to Clark himself. In the days just before he died, Clark allegedly had a serious falling out with his nephew, a man known as Sucky, who had also been departed from the UK and had returned to Jamaica.
Sucky had been involved in the running of the British Link Up events and there was reportedly a dispute over control of the brand and the money tied to it. One version of events circulating after Clark’s death alleged that Sucky had directly told Clark that he believed Clark was responsible for certain debts and that the relationship between them had completely collapsed.
Whether this internal family rift played any direct role in what happened next nobody has ever confirmed publicly, but it added another thread to an already tangled web. Clark had also allegedly agreed, just days before his death, to give what would have been a major interview to a journalist from the Jamaica Observer. The journalist had met him at a mutual friend’s birthday gathering on a Tuesday in St.
Andrew and Clark had reportedly agreed to speak about his full life story, correcting false accounts, revealing things the public had never heard, and potentially sharing information about people he had done business with in the criminal world. The interview was scheduled for the following Tuesday at a location in the Constant Spring area.
Clark reportedly told the journalist that many media people had been asking him to speak, and he had always said no, but this time he was ready to talk. He never made it to that interview. The significance of that fact was not lost on anyone. The question of whether Clark’s willingness to finally talk played a role in his death has never been officially answered.
On the night of Friday, February 22nd, 2019, Owen Roy Farrell Clark was at a party being held at the Harry Joseph’s and Son Center on Grove Road in Kencot, St. Andrew. It was a bar and social spot that Clark frequented regularly. The night was lively. There were people everywhere, including children. Minutes before he was killed, amateur video footage captured Clark bopping along to Popcaan song Family, a track whose lyrics spoke directly against the killing of friends and close associates.
He was holding a drink, looking relaxed, looking like a man who had no reason to think that night would be his last. He was wrong. Shortly before midnight, at approximately 11:50 p.m., two men riding motorcycles approached the gathering. Without hesitation, they opened fire. Nine bullets hit Clark’s body.
He collapsed in front of his red Range Rover. An eyewitness said that people just heard pure shots, and that children and bystanders were everywhere, and the gunmen did not care. Clark was taken to hospital and pronounced dead. The official police report from the Half-Way Tree division confirmed the killing was carried out by armed men on a motorcycle.
No motive was officially established, no arrests were made. The Jamaica Constabulary Force launched an investigation. On social media and on the ground, a specific theory immediately took hold. The blame was pointed squarely at adversaries from the York Avenue side of the long-standing community conflict with Cockburn Pen. Senior police officials publicly acknowledged hearing this, with Superintendent Aaron Fletcher of the St.
Andrew South division said that while police were aware of what was being said, they did not have evidence to confirm it as fact. They maintained a joint police and military presence in the Waltham Park and Ken Cot areas in the days that followed to prevent retaliation. Then in April 2021, something new surfaced.
Sources reported that the illegal firearm seized from dancehall artist Tommy Lee Sparta had been forensically linked to the murders of both Owen Roy Fowl Clark and Alphanso Oniel British Harriott, a fellow British Link Up Crew member who was shot dead just days after Clark’s burial on March 29th, 2019 on Mountain View Avenue in St. Andrew.
The Jamaica Constabulary Force refused to comment on this report. When dancehall Mag reached out, saying curtly that they would not be addressing it. Tommy Lee Sparta denied any connection to the killings, and no one was ever publicly charged in relation to either murder. The gun link, however, suggested that the two killings were connected and that whoever ordered them had access to the same firepower.
Owen Roy Fowl Clark left behind eight children and a 97-year-old mother who his brother said was completely broken by the news. His brother, who refused to give his name, said he had warned Clark that there were people who wanted him dead and that Clark had brushed it off. He said his brother had even stepped in to cool down a situation just days before he died, telling men involved in a dispute to stand down, to go drink it out and keep the peace.
Clark believed he was protected by his relationships, by his history, by his name. His brother said Clark was a lover of life who took things too lightly. The question the title of this story asks has never been officially answered. No one has been charged. No one has been convicted. The police never publicly confirmed a motive.
What the evidence and the street accounts do tell us is that Roy Fowler died the way most men in his world eventually do, as the result of decisions made years before the night the bikes pulled up. Whether it was the York Avenue war, a betrayal linked to his son’s actions, the vengeance of Bitti Circle, or someone who feared what he might see in an interview he never gave, the world of Roy Fowler was one where those kinds of debts are never forgotten.
The man who burned 50-lb notes for fun and made thousands dance was found lying in front of his Range Rover in a pool of blood in KenCot with Popcaan song about friend killer still ringing in the air. The streets took what the streets gave.
