Southside Kingston, a place pressed tight between the general penitentiary and the sea, where politics and gunfire have walked hand in hand for generations. A community that has buried too many of its sons and watched too many of its leaders rise in blood, only to fall the same way. But out of all the men who came up through those narrow lanes and crowded yards, few left a mark quite like Franklin Allen, the man they called Chubby Dread, a don who was feared, loved, celebrated, and hunted all at the same time. A man who survived
things that would have killed lesser men 10 times over, only to be taken down in the most quiet, unsuspecting way imaginable. This is his story. Chubby Dread was not from Kingston. He came from the country, from the rural parishes that most inner-city men looked down on, but he brought something with him when he arrived in Southside that could not be taught and could not be bought, a presence.
People felt it when he walked into a room. He was a big man, wide in the frame, slow in the movement, easy in the spirit. That is where the name came from, Chubby Dread. It was not a taunt. It was a description, and it stuck because it fit perfectly. The dread part referred to his locks, his Rastafarian appearance, but anyone who knew him knew that the word carried a double meaning because behind that calm, easy exterior was a man who, when he needed to be, was something to be reckoned with.
He settled into Southside and made it his own. The community sat in the heart of Central Kingston, running along Hayle Bone Street and Gold Street, a stronghold that for years had been deeply aligned with the Jamaica Labour Party. This was not just politics in the way most people understand politics. In downtown Kingston, your political color determined who your enemies were, who would protect you, and in many cases, whether you lived or died.
Chubby Dread was a top JLP supporter, true and true. He understood that alignment as both a duty and a strategy. It connected him to the wider network of West Kingston in power, including the men from Tivoli Gardens, figures like Lester Lloyd Coke, better known as Jim Brown, the fearsome Don who founded the Shower Posse out of Tivoli Gardens, and became the chief political enforcer for the JLP in West Kingston after the death of Claude Massop.
Chubby Dread had links to that world, links that gave him credibility and connections that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Southside. But, to understand what Chubby Dread stepped into when he first arrived in Southside, you have to understand what that community had already been through. The trauma ran deep.
On January 6th, 1978, 14 young men from High Holborn Street and Gold Street were lured away from the community under the promise of jobs as drivers and bodyguards. They were picked up in the early hours of the morning and driven west, out toward St. Catherine, to the Jamaica Defense Force Artillery Firing Range at Green Bay.
What was waiting for them there was not work. Undercover agents from the Military Intelligence Unit, acting on behalf of the ruling People’s National Party government, had set a trap. The men were ambushed by JDF snipers. Five were shot dead. The others barely escaped with their lives. The official story at the time was that the men had been surprised during target practice.
That story did not hold. A subsequent inquest found that persons had conspired to kill the men at Green Bay and that members of the JDF bore criminal responsibility. Warrants were later issued by the Supreme Court for 10 soldiers on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The men were ultimately acquitted, but the community never forgot what happened at that re-elections.
It was that massacre, locals say, that turned South Side from a community with one or two armed men into the armed community it would eventually become. By the time Chubby Dread was cementing his position in South Side, the community was still carrying that weight. He moved through it with an ease that made people trust him.
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He was known to look out for the elderly. He would check on people who had nothing, make sure they had something. He was not the kind of Don who ruled purely through terror. People genuinely liked him. They called him the gentle giant and that name sat comfortably alongside everything else he was. He partied hard. If there was a dancehall session anywhere near South Side, Chubby Dread was either in it or he was the reason it was happening.
Heineken in hand, his spliff burning, just holding a vibes. He loved the music, the people, the energy and people loved seeing him there because his presence meant the area was calm. When Chubby Dread was in the dance, things stayed level. But beneath all of that community warmth was a man who understood power and how to hold it.
South Side’s main gathering spot was a corner people called Paul Corner. It was more than just a hangout. It was a social and strategic location, a place where information moved, where reputations were built, and where control of the street was on full display. At the time, that corner was run by a man called Barnabas. He held it.
He was the don of that space, but allegedly, Chubby Dread wanted it. And the way things work in downtown Kingston, wanting something like that meant either you took it yourself or you sent someone to take it for you. Chubby Dread had a close associate, a man known as Bogasu. According to what people in the community said, Chubby Dread allegedly influenced Bogasu to move on Barnabas, and that is what happened.
Barnabas was killed, and Paul Corner fell under Chubby Dread’s control. From that point on, he was not just a man with influence in Southside. He was the don. With Paul Corner secured, Chubby Dread turned it into something more than a corner. Right there in that space was a spot called Apollo. Apollo was a party venue, an open-air entertainment spot right there in the heart of Paul Corner, where the community came together to dance, drink, and enjoy themselves.
It became a symbol of what Chubby Dread represented to the people around him. He was not just a man of violence and calculation. He gave the community somewhere to breathe. And those dances at Apollo became legendary in the area. Then came the night that changed Southside forever, the night that would go into the history books as the Gold Street Massacre.
It was April 1980, during one of the most violent election years Jamaica had ever seen. The country was in the grip of a fierce and bloody political war between the JLP and the PNP. Southside being a JLP stronghold was a target. That night, there was a dance at a yard on Gold Street, just the kind of gathering that was common in the community.
People came out to enjoy themselves, to feel normal in a time when normal was hard to find. Then the men arrived, dozens of them. Reports said as many as a hundred, dressed in identical black military-style fatigues, armed with submachine guns, pistols, and what witnesses would later confirm were M-16 rifles.
They came from Rum Lane, fanning out through Tower Street, cutting off the escape routes before the shooting started. The gunfire began at approximately 1:40 in the morning. Four people died on the spot. A fifth would die later. At least 10 more were shot and injured. Walls, doors, and fences across Gold Street were riddled with bullet holes that would remain for years as testimony had happened.
In the middle of all that chaos, with bodies dropping and people scrambling over fences and through yards, trying to survive, Franklin Allen, Chubby Dread himself, was in that dance. The gunmen had come partly for him. They wanted him dead. What happened next became one of the most talked about stories in Southside for decades.
One of the injured men near Chubby Dread fell, and his blood soaked into the clothes of a man those who were there simply called Fat Earl. Fat Earl lay down on the ground, covered in someone else’s blood, and played dead. And the gunmen, believing he was one of the fallen, moved on. Chubby Dread, surrounded by the dead and the dying, reportedly did something similar.
He covered himself in the blood of a fallen man, smeared it across his face and hands, and lay still among the bodies. When the gunmen moved through, they looked over the scene, saw what appeared to be another dead man, and left convinced they had finished the job. The soldiers came later, real Jamaica Defense Force soldiers, but by the time they arrived, the gunmen were gone.
The real soldiers had come looking for Chubby Dread, too, but many of them did not know his face, so he lay there among the dead, and he survived. He walked away from the Gold Street massacre when five others did not, and that night did something to Southside that could not be undone.
As a community elder named Eastman later said, “Before that night, Southside had one or two men with firearms. After the massacre, the youth armed themselves. The community got vicious, and Chubby Dread, the man who had survived it all, stood at the center of that transformation.” The years that followed saw Chubby Dread consolidate his grip on Southside.
His gang was known as the POW Possie, named for the corner and the culture of the community. He ran it from High Holborn Street, where he also kept a bar. By 2004, his name was well-known, not just in the community, but to law enforcement. In November of that year, gunmen invaded his bar on High Holborn Street and shot him in his left shoulder as he tried to move out of their path.
He managed to escape more serious injury. He was taken to hospital and released. When the Jamaica Observer spoke to him afterwards, he was relaxed about it. He told them the shot had passed through. He was resting. The old bones needed a break. He had been taken into police custody a couple of weeks before the shooting, with Kingston Central Police accusing him of involvement in shootings in the area, but he was released after no one came forward to identify him in a parade.
That was the nature of his world. Things came at him and he absorbed them. And there had been many things coming at him for a long time. By this point in his life, Chubby Dread had been shot on multiple occasions. Men had tried to kill him more times than most people could count. One time, gunmen from the rival community of Dunkirk came for him while he was with his baby mother. They shot up the entire house.
When the smoke cleared, only his baby mother had been hit, a bullet catching her in the hand. Chubby Dread himself came out untouched. It was the kind of thing that built legends. People began to whisper that something protected him, that he was charmed somehow, that death kept finding him and kept missing.
He also had a shooter working with him, a man known as Nigel Paul. At some point, it is alleged that Chubby Dread directed Nigel Paul to go out and kill two men. Nigel Paul carried out the act and was eventually caught by the authorities. He was tried and sentenced. But what happened after that is the part that people in the community still talk about with a certain bitterness.
After Nigel Paul went to prison for something he allegedly did at Chubby Dread’s direction, the support that should have followed him into that sentence never came. Chubby Dread allegedly did not take care of Nigel Paul while he was locked away, did not provide for Nigel’s family. For a man who was known for taking care of the people around him, that is the contradiction that sat uncomfortably in the memory of those who knew the story.
But far more dangerous to Chubby Dread than any previous threat was what was building on the other side of Kingston. There was a man called Horace Ramsey, known in the streets as Poogoo, who headed a gang called the New World Order. Their territory operated out of Southside and Rema Town, sitting in the shadow of the general penitentiary on Tower Street.
Poogoo and Chubby Dread were enemies, but it was who Poogoo brought into the conflict that made it truly deadly. He reached east into Franklyn Town and linked up with a man named Delano Weit, 21 years old, known in the streets as Deli BoP. Records confirmed that Weit was wanted by police in connection with several murders, house fires, and robberies across the east and central Kingston areas.
He was a killer, and his signature, the thing that made him truly dangerous, was that he never looked like a killer when he struck. Deli BoP was a master of disguise. He had an ability to transform himself, to blend into a setting so completely that no one around him knew who or what they were standing next to. So, Poogoo gave the order.
He contracted Deli BoP to go and kill Chubby Dread. And what happened next was so elaborate, so cold and calculated, that the story spread across all of Kingston. Deli BoP put together a plan that only a particular kind of mind could conceive. He acquired a large old fridge. He found a man with a hand cart, one of the street vendors who pushed their carts through the lanes of downtown Kingston every day, a man that nobody looks twice at.
The plan was simple in its intelligence. Deli BoP climbed inside the fridge, closed the door, and rode the hand cart through the streets of Southside, hidden inside a household appliance on a cart being pushed by an ordinary-looking man. The cart man’s job was to watch for the car Chubby Dread traveled in.
The moment he spotted it, he was to push the cart out into the road so that it would collide with the vehicle. The idea being that the driver would stop, the people in the car would step out to check what happened, and in that moment, Deli Bop would burst out of the fridge and carry out the killing. And that is almost exactly what happened.
The cart man spotted the car. He pushed the cart into its path. The vehicle was struck. The doors opened, and Deli Bop exploded out of that fridge and opened fire. Several of the men in that car were killed, but Chubby Dread was not in it. He had not been in the car that day. Death had missed him again.
When word reached back to Tivoli Gardens about what was happening in Southside, a don with senior ranking gave the order. The war was to stop. The fighting between Chubby Dread’s people and Poogoo’s New World Order Gang. And the contract on Chubby Dread’s life were to be squashed. An order from Tivoli, from men connected to the Shower Posse and its political network, carried the kind of weight that most men in Kingston did not ignore.
The message went out, and nominally, the war cooled. But Deli Bop had not fully received that message in his bones, or maybe he had received it and simply did not care because he never truly stopped. It was 2005 when the final night came for Franklin Allen. He was at a party, exactly where he loved to be.
Music playing. The air thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and rum. He was in his element, smoking, vibing, holding himself the way he always did, big and easy and present. The dance was moving into the early morning hours, and then a man appeared at the edge of the crowd. He looked like a madman, disheveled, confused, wandering, the kind of man who shows up at parties sometimes in the inner city, looking lost, looking for a handout. Nobody paid him much mind.
He made his way toward Chubby Dread. He came close. He started to beg. Chubby Dread, being who he was, did what he often did for people in need. He turned, dipped his hand into his pocket to find some money for the man, and in that moment, the madman pulled a gun and fired multiple shots at point-blank range.
Franklin Allen, Chubby Dread, fell. He did not get up. The gentle giant who had survived the Gold Street Massacre, who had played dead among the real dead and walked away, who had been shot and lived to joke about it, who had laid still while a hundred armed men moved through a crowd of the fallen, could not survive this.
The madman was Deli Bo. He had been disguised one more time, and this time, he had found his mark. The order that came down after Chubby Dread’s death was final and swift. The same don from Tivoli who had ordered the water stop had one more instruction. Deli Bo, the man who had disobeyed the order to stand down and carried out the killing anyway, was not to be celebrated.
He was not to be remembered as a victor. He was to be buried next to the man he had killed, and that is exactly what happened. Delano Wait, Deli Bo, 21 years old, who had been found in the McGregor Gully area of East Kingston and was wanted across the parishes for murders and robberies and house fires was killed. And they put him in the ground beside Chubby Dread, side by side, the hunter and the hunted, buried together by the order of a man who answered to nobody.
The community Chubby Dread left behind continued to feel his absence for years. Gangs fought for the turf he had control. High Holborn Street, Gold Street, the lanes around Tower Street, all of it became contested ground again. His son Kareem Allen would later surface in the courts on a murder charge of his own.
His baby mothers were caught in the crossfire of what came after him and the New World Order gang that Poogoo had built next to the General Penitentiary would itself eventually be torn apart when Poogoo was shot and killed by security forces during a joint police and military operation on January 7th, 2011. Southside has had many Dons, many leaders, many names etched into its story, but none quite like Franklin Allen, a big man from the country who came to the city, survived what should have killed him a dozen times, built something real among people who had
nothing, and in the end was taken not by a soldier or a rival Don, but by a ghost of a man who turned himself into a madman on a dance floor. That was Chubby Dread and Southside has not forgotten him.
