The Shower Posse: Charles Lil Nut Miller and US Intelligence.

© Wade A Bailey.  From the book Shamanism As A Global Cultural Value System.

The shooting, that was carried out at 56 Hope Road, the address of Bob Marley, was a raid according to numerous sources including former CIA: that had the earmarks of definite CIA involvement. Timothy White in his book “Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley”, alleged that former New York City police officers told him personally, that the CIA, had contracted Carl “Byah” Mitchell, (a Seaga goon active in the West Kingston cocaine trade), to plant and instruct the men that led the raid on 56 Hope Road. The involvement of Byah was seen as evidence of a deeply laid CIA/JLP plot, that Michael Manley had “exposed” in the press (Operation Werewolf a JLP parliamentarian was caught on tape plotting the overthrow of the Manley government).The gunman Timothy White alleged who led the charge on Hope Road was a Seaga loyalist named Lester “Jim Brown” Coke: (father of Christopher Dudus Coke, whose funeral [Lester Coke] the US born Seaga attended), one of the founders of Shower Posse. 

Rastafari vigilantes were alleged by Timothy White to have exacted revenge for the attempt on Marley’s life, on the gunmen involved. Don Taylor in his book Marley and Me (published by Barricade Books INC.), claims that a neighbourhood goon squad held court and made him and Marley watch as they executed some of the men involved in the raid on Hope Road.

Gary Webb in his book (Dark Alliance) wrote that former CIA station Chief Norman Descoteaux: “began a destabilization program of the Manley government in the late 70s. Part of that plan was assassinations, money for the Jamaican Labour Party, labour unrest, bribery and shipping weapons to Manley’s opponents, like Lester “Jim Brown” Coke”. Author, Daurius Figueria writes in, “Cocaine and Heroin Trafficking in the Caribbean.” “In fact, it meant that illicit drug runners linked to the JLP were integrated into a CIA-linked illicit drugs guns and criminal trafficking pipeline.” Former CIA agent, Philip Agee, said “the CIA was using the JLP as its instrument in the campaign against the Michael Manley government, I’d say most of the violence was coming from the JLP, and behind them was the CIA in terms of getting weapons in and getting money in.” In 1995, Philip Agee also warned: “other targets which are coming up all the time in terms of the intelligence community are the rogue states – the so-called rogue states: Iraq, Libya, Iran, North Korea and, for some, Syria” (presently the American president Barack Obama is poised to intervene militarily in Syria and we know that Saddam Hussein was executed by the US Gadhafi was also defeated with US aid).

A Lester Coke associate and former Shower Posse member Cecil Connor aka Charles “Lil Nut” Taylor claimed the CIA trained him to fight political wars for the JLP through killing and spying. Connor would stuff ballot boxes and intimidate voters to help the JLP win elections. Connor would later testify against Lester Coke and other Shower Posse members in a US court. Connor gained a new identity (Charles Miller), with help from the US government; he entered a witness protection program, then somehow ended up in his native St Kitts.

Miller a notorious drug dealer known throughout the English-speaking Caribbean was alleged to be currying favor with the Kittitian Prime Minister Denzel Douglas. Miller the CIA asset was the subject of a news article in the Los Angeles Times newspaper that I will quote here: U.S. Says Trafficker a Former Witness: December 9, 1997; By MARK FINEMAN Los Angeles Times.

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts and Nevis — Back in the heady 70s, when alleged drug Baron Charles “Lil Nut” Miller was living in Jamaica's slums; he was Cecil Connor, a political enforcer.

That was more than a decade before the U.S. government indicted him, then protected him as a federal witness, only to have him emerge nearly a decade later as one of Washington's worst nightmares.

Today, Miller is the target of one of the U.S. Justice Department's most intensive extradition efforts. The two-year court battle in this Caribbean island nation has been made all the more confounding for U.S. law enforcement officials because Miller was once one of theirs.

Now an influential local soft drink and chicken distributor, Miller is cast by U.S. official sources as an ingenious former federal witness-turned-fugitive who has learned the inner workings of U.S. anti-drug intelligence, law enforcement and judiciary.

It was a crash course that climaxed on the witness stand in January 1989 when, at age 28 and testifying for the U.S. government as Connor, he told a Miami federal jury his life's story.

Working for Jamaica's Labor Party in Kingston, he said he had stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated voters, shot a clerk during a robbery and spent years in prison.

He also testified that he escaped the Jamaican prison using political connections in 1983 and came to the United States. He then became a trusted member of a Jamaican drug gang known as the Shower Posse. The gang's trademark was spraying victims with machine-gun fire, often killing and maiming bystanders.

As Connor, he told the jury, he smuggled marijuana and cocaine, attended gangland executions and laundered drug money.

Nine years later, in a criminal case filed in Miami, U.S. prosecutors and anti-drug agents accuse Miller of following the same pattern.

Miller has been indicted on charges of conspiring to use St. Kitts as a staging ground to ship hundreds of pounds of Colombian cocaine to the United States.

Miller said that he has been targeted in a political plot after working for the U.S. government for years.

He would neither confirm nor deny last week that he was once Connor. But U.S. officials said Miller is the man they once used as an informant and witness. And records on file at the legal registry in St. Kitts show that Cecil Connor officially changed his name to Charles Miller in July 1991.

U.S. officials said Miller slipped away from the U.S. federal witness-protection program several years ago.

Details about Miller's years in the Justice Department's witness protection program are, by law, secret. But official documents and court transcripts in New York, Florida, Jamaica and St. Kitts offer details of how he whether as Miller or as Connor apparently played on both sides of the law to become one of the Caribbean's wiliest wanted men.

Transcripts show that when he took the stand in Miami nine years ago, he was one of the government's most valued witnesses.

Connor was the key to dismantling one of the most vicious Jamaican possess, heavily armed drug gangs that U.S. officials blamed for at least 1,000 murders in U.S. cities.

Soon after, Cecil Connor disappeared from public view (end quote).

Connor conveniently and mysteriously disappeared from public view then reappeared in St Kitts. Connor’s notoriety was great enough to gain him his own spot on the BET show American Gangster, where the host went in depth into his background and his crimes in Jamaica and St Kitts, the power that Miller wielded was unbelievable even government officials judiciary and police personnel were all alleged to have been in his employ. Miller is a creation of American intelligence and was a key asset of the US intelligence apparatus pertinent to their Caribbean foreign policy.

The case of Miller is a Hollywood-worthy tale which I will probe even further in the following. When Miller resurrected his criminal career in St Kitts in 1993, the destitute Miller, returned to what he knew best “criminal predation”, robbing drug traffickers of drugs and money, murder, extortion et al. Miller, Zambor Lawrence and David Lawrence, murdered the son of the then Deputy Prime Minister of St Kitts, Vincent Miller and seized about 1500 kilos of cocaine from him. The case of Vincent Morris is not an exception it is the rule. Morris as a result of his “insider’s” lifestyle, as part of the political elite, was uniquely placed to play the role he played which was more than likely, a warehouse of large quantities of drugs for Colombians linked to cartels, such a person would in turn be paid usually with drugs.

The scenario described previously repeats itself adinfinitum throughout the Caribbean.  Miller to insure the compliance of the state agencies eventually targeted the police and judiciary. Miller was intimately linked to the then opposition Labour Party which eventually won the elections in 1995. He even put out a contract on the head of the then Police Superintendent Jude Matthews, which was successfully carried out. Duane Blake in his book “Shower Posse” insisted that it was Grisly Lawrence who murdered Matthews.

The murderer of Matthews was tried on three separate occasions, all resulting in a hung jury, he was eventually freed. Miller stood trial for the murder of Vincent Morris and freed for lack of sufficient evidence. Charles miller had by this time built himself up to become “The Don of St Kitts”, Miller was shipping cocaine to Miami via St Kitts using, Kittitians who were US citizens.

Needless to say the amount of power that Miller amassed was impossible, to achieve without his political connections locally, his Shower Posse affiliation (a creation of the CIA), and most importantly his status as a “prime asset”, of US intelligence.  Thus far we have seen how the US government has held the region in its thrall using criminal elements from within the Caribbean.

I have documented for the reader factual evidence that can be used to conduct further research. And now we come to a pivotal point in the Caribbean lest the readers think that the phenomena of Rastafari, politicians and radicals courting each other was unique to Jamaica I can show a regional pattern but I will focus on Grenada and Trinidad. The events were described previously though they might prove a bit burdensome were necessary in establishing the atmosphere that led to the introduction of Cocaine into Jamaica and the wider Caribbean as a neutralizer and a deterrent to revolution and as a means to maintain social control. The political climate in the Caribbean was becoming more volatile and Communism was viewed as a huge threat, particularly with Cuba being a major exporter of Communism throughout the region. In Grenada the Rastafari question had also erupted and was transforming that society.

The Rastafari in Grenada had been marginalized for forty years and the “Youth Black Movement” amongst the young Rastafari in Grenada was strong. Horace Campbell in his introduction for: (Rastafari as Pan-Africanism in the Caribbean and Africa), did an excellent analysis of the drug trafficking situation regionally. He wrote “The Rasta movement in the Caribbean like most popular movements suffered a severe blow by the reversals in Grenada in 1983”.

“The change in the direction of the Grenadian society after 1979 offered new possibilities for the Rastafari movement. That the Rastafari could be organized for collective and alternative forms of power intensified the pressures on Grenada, for, if the other island states in the region could harness the energies of the Rastafari, the Caribbean could be transformed. It was this reality which led to efforts to isolate the Rastafari from progressive ideas”. One of the ways to do this was for transnational capital to tie down young Rasta’s in the trade of Cannabis (Marijuana), thus diverting their energies. And in the specific case of Grenada, before the invasion, external elements had attempted to use the question of cannabis production to destabilize the Grenadian revolution.

Faced with the concrete impact of the potential to mobilize Rastafari and unemployed youth, there was a conscious attempt in the eighties to promote the anti-social and negative features of the Rastafari movement, especially resulting from the position of lumpens who took the physical appearance of Rastafari. This becomes most evident in the violence, guns, Cannabis export and cocaine trade which was becoming the foundation of the island economies”.

“Unemployment acted as a social sanction against the poor by depressing wages, but also ensuring that there was a pool of lumpens to act as enforcers or strike-breakers. In this period of the 1970's, lumpen elements found an alliance with capitalists in the USA to export Cannabis to the US mainland. By the end of the seventies the export of Ganja to the USA became the number one cash crop and the big agents made vast profits from this trade”. For additional information, see CRS Report RL33951, U.S. Trade Policy and the Caribbean: From Trade Preferences to Free Trade Agreements, and CRS Report R41215, Latin America and the Caribbean: Illicit Drug Trafficking and U.S. Counterdrug Programs.

Cambell wrote in his analysis about: COCAINE IN THE CARIBBEAN.

The excellent work that writers and researchers like Cambell produced have proven invaluable in their succinct analysis of the Cocaine, weapons trafficking and recently human trafficking realities in the Caribbean. Reportage of the type described is more valuable than thousands of UN reports that tend to focus more on the presence of Cocaine in the region rather than on the root causes and solutions to the dismal state of affairs. Cambell indicated in his work that the fetishisation of smoking Marijuana by young Rastafari was an aspect of popularization of the movement.

He went on extensively into the regional trade and as always Iam wont to include his statements verbatim: “The small trade to provide for urban dwellers in the Caribbean could be distinguished from the multimillion dollar trade which now exists across the Caribbean Sea. The chillum pipe and ganja, which were incorporated as part of the culture, had been superseded by the introduction of cocaine in the Caribbean”.

 “The cocaine problem of the USA was one of the signposts of the social and cultural crisis in that society. Instead of dealing with the root causes of the crisis which generated the trade and consumption of cocaine the USA has used the trade across the Caribbean Seas to intensify its military presence in the Caribbean and Latin America. Recent military maneuvers by US helicopter gunships in Bolivia was only the tip of the massive police, military, naval, and coast guard operations in the Caribbean in the era of revolution and democratic openings.

The Federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) of the US administration took the issue of narcotics transshipment in the Caribbean to carry out large scale 'interdiction' exercises, which were in fact US military intelligence operations. The DEA was integrated with the Central Intelligence Agency, Interpol, the El Paso Intelligence Agency, the US Coast Guard, the US Navy and the Federal Aviation Administration. In the context of the interdiction of the cocaine traffic, the US Naval and military presence increased the militarization of the Caribbean the extensive operations of narcotic agents, drug traffickers and US naval operations brought the Caribbean Sea back to the era of piracy in the region.

Similar to the era of primitive accumulation when the island societies were backyards for the illicit operations of the international capitalist system, now the mini-states are cluttered with off-shore banks where normal banking regulatory practices are not present. It is through these banks that the profits from cocaine are laundered. At the same time all sectors of the Caribbean society have been affected by the cocaine trade. It is not uncommon to hear of Prime Ministers being arrested in Miami on charges of trafficking in cocaine”. The statement, that Horace Cambell made about Prime ministers, other government functionaries, and in many cases members of their family being arrested for Cocaine trafficking, is indeed valid as I have shown innumerably, on my blogs and in my books.