A young, reformed gangster who said he committed his first murder when he was 14 years old confessed that during his days as a member of the Fatherless Crew he was contracted to kill Parliamentarian Dr Omar Davies.

But his refusal to carry out the order earned the wrath of the man who ordered the hit and who, in turn, tried to have the former gangster killed.

“Somehow I didn’t feel it was right, so I questioned it and he decided to get rid of me. He tried; he used family members, he has used my own, and even the female who I was with,” the former gangster said, adding that he has since fled the area, leaving behind all his ill-gotten gains.

The young man, who is now a Christian, made the revelation in an interview with the Sunday Observer in which he told how young boys in some of Jamaica’s toughest communities are being recruited into gangs by socalled dons.

“The recruiting process is simple,” he said. “There is nothing much to offer any young man who grows up in the community but the gun. Once you have the gun, you have power; and once you have power you can do certain things.”

The absence of a father, he reasoned, was probably the main factor in the decision taken by him and his young friends to get involved with the Fatherless Crew, whose original members have either been arrested or killed by the police or other gangsters.

“We didn’t have any father figure around us, and the don of that particular community saw that and used it to his advantage. He fed us, clothed us, we got money, jewellery, and any female that we chose,” he said.

According to the ex-gangster, he was among 27 teenagers recruited from Arnett Gardens and its environs into the Fatherless Crew — one of the deadliest criminal syndicates ever formed in West Kingston.

The former gangster’s hypothesis was supported by anthropologist and University of the West Indies researcher Dr Herbert Gayle.

“More than half of all gang members, I have found, have no father figure and have a very bad relationship with their mother,” he said. “Meaning that the bond between mother and son is just weak or non-existent, and it is caused from the mother being in prostitution or if she has more than one man in her life. It normally fractures a boy’s love, reliance on their mothers. Boys don’t like to see their mothers have more than one man.”

Gayle pointed to a 2008 study titled ‘Young Birds That Know Storm’, that looked at how teenage boys have navigated hardships in the inner-city communities.

“We have a bit of work now that we are focusing on multiple murderers, young men who have killed more than one person, and that is what we are finding,” he said.

Gayle also said that a 2007 study conducted by himself and Horace Levy from the Peace Management Initiative, as well as the late Professor Barry Chevannes’ 2001 study, called ‘Learning to be a Man’, spoke to the issue of the recruitment of teenage boys into Jamaica’s deadliest criminal gangs.

“The history of recruiting boys has been around for a long time. We first covered it in 1994 in Central Kingston where gangs were trying to recruit boys who were in prominent high schools, because they said that they don’t want just the regular foot soldiers, they also want intelligent youngsters within the gangs,” he said.

“All the gangs that we have studied do very direct and deliberate recruiting. The most vulnerable — the ones they recruit the most — are the ones who have lost their fathers, and have a mother who is not in control,” he added.

“They target these boys because these boys find somebody that they can trust and they will give their lives for their new ‘fathers’. Because the don now fills a void and there is no way to stop the dons from having complete control,” Dr Gayle said.

Deputy Commissioner of Police Glenmore Hinds agreed, saying that the recruitment of young boys into gangs is not new.

“I don’t know if you know the history of the Fatherless Crew, but these were persons in the Rema area whose fathers were killed either by criminals or by the security forces, hence the name fatherless,” he said.

Hinds said that the gang, which is reputed to have committed a number of murders and shootings in the 1990s, still comes up on the police radar, but it is not as prominent as before.

Last week, in his interview with the Sunday Observer, the former gangster said he couldn’t speak for others, but his engagement in crime had its genesis in a need to take care of his late mother, a breast cancer patient, who struggled by herself to take care of him and his younger sister.

“I got involved in crime at the age of 13, and I made my first ‘duppy’ (murder victim) when I was 14 years of age. From there it went on,” said the youth, who is now 29 years old.

According to the reformed gangster, there were only a few rules to which the group had to adhere: “You do not rape; you do not rob if you do not have to; and you never talk about your crimes.”

Added to that, he said, they had to remain humble during ‘training’ — the early years in which the youngsters learnt “how to use a gun, rob, kill, how to con your way out of any situation, and how to lie”.

His training, he said, lasted seven years, and during that time he and the others were contracted to commit numerous murders.

He declined to reveal the number of persons he had killed before giving his life to God last November.

“If I gave you a small number, that would not be correct, and if I gave you a large number, I would only be telling a lie on myself,” he said.

“I can state for the record, though, that I have never killed anybody who never deserved it. I have never taken an innocent man’s life,” said the young man, his gaze steady as he nodded in agreement with himself. “Persons who I have killed were persons who tried to kill me, or it was a case of gang war and it was just a matter of who draw first.”

The dramatic turnaround in his life, he said, was made after a gun battle between members of his gang who were returning from a robbery, and police who had mounted a curfew in a section of Wilton Gardens.

“I ended up losing four friends that day. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I also ended up getting shot in it,” he said, looking away as he noted that the four were among 31 friends he had lost to gun violence in West Kingston.

“I think the thing that really separated me [from crime], was just the love of God and the love that I had. I still had a heart, but I was in it (crime), and it wasn’t easy,” he said.

The reformed gangster said that he has attempted to apologise to some of his victims’ relatives, but noted that his attempts have been met with mixed responses. However, he is undeterred in his efforts. He said, too, that he has been offering counselling and prayer to some of his friends, many of whom have, on occasions, called him asking for guidance.

Maybe one day when he is a minister he will be able to go back into the community to preach, he said. For now, however, he is working to say out of trouble.

“I left with a lot of secrets and those secrets are forgotten, much like my sins are forgotten,” he said. “Certain things I just don’t talk about. I decided the day I got baptised that when I came up (from the pool) everything that is down, stays down. That life is done.”