In December 1976, two cars full of armed men pulled into a quiet yard on Hope Road in Kingston, Jamaica, and opened fire without warning. They shot the musician who lived there twice, once in the chest and once in the arm. They shot his wife in the head. They shot his manager five times. Their target survived barely.
His name was Bob Marley. And the guns those shooters carried did not come from Jamaica. They came from America. What nobody in Washington was willing to explain at the time was why the CIA had nine active intelligence officers stationed on a Caribbean island the size of Connecticut. why those officers were funneling cash and weapons to political gangsters in the Kingston slums.
And why within a decade, the very same gangsters would cross the Atlantic Ocean and build one of the most violent drug empires in American history. The US government spent years telling the world that Jamaica’s gang problem was Jamaica’s fault. that the violence was a Jamaican product, a Jamaican failure, a Jamaican shame.
But the paper trail tells a completely different story. And once you see it, the official version falls apart completely. If this is your first time here, subscribe right now. We cover organized crime and the real history behind it every week. You will not find these stories told this way anywhere else. To understand what the CIA did in Jamaica, you first have to understand what Jamaica looked like in the early 1970s.
Michael Manley had just been elected prime minister, riding a wave of genuine popular support. He was charismatic, educated, and unapologetically leftwing. He nationalized key industries. He pushed through land reform. He stood in front of crowds and called out the International Monetary Fund by name, calling it a tool of foreign exploitation.
And then he traveled to Havana and shook Fidel Castro’s hand and publicly called him a personal friend. In Washington, that handshake landed like a grenade. This was the height of the Cold War. America had watched Cuba fall to communism 90 miles off its southern coast. It had watched socialist movements gain ground across Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
And now a democratic election had placed a Castro aligned socialist in charge of a strategicallylo island sitting between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. An island with ports, air strips, and deep connections to the American coastline. From the CIA’s perspective, that outcome was simply not acceptable.
Something had to be done about Michael Manley. The man assigned to do it was Norman Descato, the CIA’s station chief in Kingston. In 1977, two investigative reporters uncovered what they described as a full destabilization program that Descau had been running against Manley’s government.
The program, as documented in journalism from that era and later confirmed by multiple CIA insiders who went on record, included covert arms shipments to Manley’s political opponents, selective political violence, bombings, assassinations, bribery of public officials, and a systematic effort to ferment labor unrest designed to make the Jamaican economy collapse under Manley’s watch.
According to the publication Covert Action, the CIA had nine officers working in Jamaica at the time these events were unfolding. By 1980, that number had grown to at least 15. For context, Jamaica’s entire population at the time was under 2 and a half million people. The CIA was running a near wartime operation against a peaceful democratic government because that government’s prime minister had shaken the wrong man’s hand.
Advertisements
The goal was simple. Make daily life in Jamaica painful enough that voters would remove Manley themselves. And if that didn’t work quickly enough, make things considerably worse. Subscribe if you haven’t already. We put out new content on organized crime and covert operations every week. And this is just the beginning of the story.
The opposition party the CIA chose to back was the Jamaica Labor Party led by a politician named Edward Seager. Seager was conservative, pro business, and firmly aligned with American interests. He was exactly the kind of leader Washington wanted in Kingston. But Serga’s power base sat in the garrison communities of West Kingston.
Dense and desperately poor housing projects where gang loyalty and political loyalty were the exact same thing. The most important of these communities was a place called Tivoli Gardens. And the most important man in Tivoli Gardens was a political enforcer named Lester Ko known on the streets as Jim Brown. Ko was not a politician by any stretch.
He was a gunman. He had risen through the violent hierarchy of Kingston Street life by doing the work that nobody else would do. Eliminating opponents, intimidating voters, protecting JLP territory with automatic weapons and absolute ruthlessness. He was Seagga’s enforcer, his muscle, his guarantee that West Kingston stayed in line.
And when the CIA decided that Seagar’s people needed weapons to escalate their campaign against Manley’s supporters, Ko’s people were the ones who received those weapons. Former CIA officer Philillip Agy later said it in plain language during an interview. The CIA was using the JLP as its instrument in the campaign against the Manly Government.
Most of the violence, he said, was coming from the JLP and behind them was the CIA in terms of getting weapons in and getting money in. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a CIA officer describing his own agency’s policy. The weapons flowed into Tivoli Gardens and the surrounding garrison communities throughout the mid 1970s. And as they arrived, the political violence in Kingston escalated to a level the island had never experienced.
The 1976 election cycle became an open war. PNP and JLP gangs fought gun battles in the streets of Kingston. Entire neighborhoods were carved into armed political territories. Civilians caught in the crossfire died with regularity. By the time election day arrived in December 1976, the body count from purely political violence ran into the hundreds.
Two days before Bob Marley’s Smile Jamaica concert, the Free Peace concert, Marley had agreed to play specifically to cool the violence and appeal for unity. Those two carloads of armed men drove into his yard on Hope Road. Marley survived. His wife, Rita, survived despite being shot in the head.
His manager, Don Taylor, survived after being shot five times at close range. Before one of the gunmen involved, was later killed in a Kingston ghetto court, he reportedly admitted that the job had been carried out for the CIA, paid for in cocaine and guns. The CIA has never confirmed or denied any role in the shooting, but the timing required no explanation.
Marley was publicly sympathetic to Manley. His concert would have softened the violence and improved Manley’s image 12 days before the election. and someone with the means and the motive wanted that concert stopped before it could happen. Manley won the 1976 election anyway. The CIA’s program continued.
The weapons that had been flowing into Kingston kept doing exactly what weapons always do once they arrive somewhere. They stayed. They changed hands. They gave lasting power to men who had no intention of returning to poverty once the political season was over. This is where the story shifts from a cold war covert operation into something the CIA could no longer contain or control.
The gangsters they had armed and financed began to realize slowly and then all at once that they did not need their political patrons anymore. The guns had given them something more durable than political favor. They had given them territory, fear, and leverage. And with the Colombian cocaine trade expanding rapidly through the Caribbean in the late 1970s, men who already had weapons, territory, and demonstrated willingness to kill were perfectly positioned to get enormously rich.
When Edward Seager finally won the 1980 election and Manley was pushed from power, the CIA got the outcome it had been working toward for years. But the men it had armed to get there kept right on going. Lester Ko merged several Kingston crews into a single consolidated organization. He named it based on how they handled their enemies. They did not shoot once or twice.
They showered targets with bullets until their weapons were empty. The shower posy was born. And it was born from guns that had arrived in Jamaica from America from a program designed in Washington and executed by a CIA station chief whose name most people have still never heard. Hit subscribe right now if you want to keep following this story.
We are just getting to the part where it crosses the ocean. By the mid 1980s, the Shower Posi had transformed from a Kingston Street gang into a full transnational criminal organization. Vivien Blake, Ko’s business partner and the operations strategic mind, had moved to the United States years earlier, settled in Brooklyn, and spent years quietly building a network of shower posy cells in Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
The organization was by then moving hundreds of thousands of pounds of marijuana and tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine up the eastern seabboard of the United States. And they were not moving it slowly. Blake ran the American side from a comfortable suburban home in Myiramar, Florida, while Posy members walked into Florida gun shops and bought weapons by the dozen, sending them back to Kingston, hidden inside Uship barrels, the same containers Jamaican immigrants used to send diapers and clothing to their families. Drugs came north, guns
went south. It was in a grim and ironic way the same model the CIA had pioneered a decade earlier. By 1989, federal authorities estimated that Jamaican posies as a whole controlled somewhere between 35 and 40% of the entire American crack cocaine market. Across America, federal agents attributed over 1,400 murders to the Shower Posi and its affiliated crews.
The director of the ATF called them publicly the most violent organized crime group in American history. And now here is the part of the story that should stop you. Cole. The United States government, the same government whose intelligence agency had spent the 1970s arming Lester Ko and his enforcers in Tivoli Gardens, was now deploying its full federal law enforcement apparatus to destroy the criminal organization those weapons had built.
In 1988, a federal grand jury in Miami handed down a 62count RICO indictment against 34 shower posy members, including both Ko and Blake. It was presented to the public as a major victory against organized crime. Nobody mentioned Norman Descatau in the press releases. Nobody mentioned the covert arms shipments to West Kingston.
Nobody cited Philip AG’s onrecord statement about CIA involvement in Jamaican political violence. The official version of events was clean and simple. Jamaican criminals had come to America and brought their violence with them. the considerably messier version in which American intelligence had spent years arming and financing the exact men who built that organization was left entirely out of the record.
Lester Ko was arrested in Jamaica in 1992 and held at the General Penitentiary in Kingston while awaiting extradition to stand trial in Miami. He never made it to that courtroom. In February 1992, a fire broke out in his cell. Guards took 15 minutes to respond after the first alarm was raised.
It took nearly 2 hours to get him to a hospital that was only minutes away from the prison. By then, the burns were fatal. Officials declared it an accident. Nobody in Kingston believed that. During the inquest that followed, a fellow prisoner broke down and claimed he had been pressured to cover for guards who had deliberately abandoned their posts while Ko’s cell burned.
The coroner returned an open verdict. The only thing anyone could say for certain was that Lester Lloyd Ko was dead. The assumption across Kingston was that people with something to lose had decided he would be far safer as a dead legend than as a living witness in an American federal courtroom. Dead men do not testify against politicians.
And Ko, if he had reached Miami and decided to talk, would have had things to say about people on both sides of the Atlantic. Vivien Blake fought extradition for 4 years before being brought to Miami in 1999. He pleaded guilty, served 8 years, and was deported back to Jamaica in 2009. He died of a heart attack the following year at the University Hospital of the West Indies. He was 53 years old.
Lester Ko’s adopted son, Christopher, known everywhere as Dudis, had already taken over the shower posi years before either of them died. He ran it from Tivoli Gardens for two more decades, maintaining such complete control over the neighborhood that Jamaican police had to formally request permission from his organization before entering.
When the US government finally demanded his extradition in 2009 on drug and weapons charges, Jamaica’s prime minister initially refused to hand him over. The standoff lasted 9 months and ended in a military operation that killed at least 73 people and required the largest deployment of the Jamaican army in the country’s entire history.
When Ko was finally caught, he was disguised as a woman in a wig and sunglasses trying to reach the American embassy to surrender on his own terms. The US government charged Christopher Ko with drug and weapons trafficking. The same categories of offense, more or less, that could have been filed against the CIA officers who first put guns into his father’s hands in the Kingston slums 30 years earlier.
That is the part that does not appear in the press releases. That is the part that gets dismissed as a conspiracy theory whenever someone raises it. Even though multiple CIA officers went on record, even though investigative reporters documented the program as early as 1977, even though Gary Webb laid out the connections in substantial detail in his book Dark Alliance, and even though you can draw a straight line from a CIA destabilization program in 1975 to the shower posi to 1,400 murders on American streets to a military battle in West
Kingston in 2010 that left dozens of civilians dead. Jamaica did not create its gun violence problem in isolation. That problem was seeded deliberately from the outside by people who believed they were containing communism and decided that the damage done to a small Caribbean island was an acceptable cost.
The Jamaican people absorbed that cost for 50 years. They are still absorbing it. Jamaica’s murder rate consistently ranks among the highest in the world. Kingston’s garrison communities, the same neighborhoods where CIA weapons first arrived in the 1970s, remain among the most dangerous urban areas in the Western Hemisphere. Generation after generation has grown up in communities shaped by the political violence, the drug trade, and the gun culture that a foreign intelligence operation deliberately planted there.
The men who made those decisions retired comfortably. The people of Tivoli Gardens did not. The guns that were meant to win a Cold War election never left Jamaica. They just changed hands. And every generation since has lived with what those hands have done. If you made it all the way to the end, subscribe right now and turn on notifications.
We drop organized crime and covert history content every single week. Stories that connect the real dots between power, money, and the people who always seem to walk away from accountability. The video on your screen right now is the one to watch next.
