With recent cocaine busts hitting them in the pocket, foreign-connected drug interests here have placed a US$1-million (J$60-m) bounty on the head of Jamaica’s narcotics chief, Senior Superintendent Carl Williams, Sunday Observer sources said.

Contacted by the newspaper, Williams confirmed the threats had been made on his life but declined to say how the threats were conveyed to him.

“Yes, the information has come to me that the threat is out there and it’s a US$1-million bounty that is on my head,” said Williams.

The threats have been made within the last three weeks, and Williams said as far as he was aware, “local drug interests with foreign connections” were involved.

Williams is the second senior cop to receive death threats in recent times, following threats against Police Commissioner Francis Forbes, which forced the top cop to increase security around him.

Williams, in the Jamaica Constabulary Force for about 20 years now, has developed a reputation as a clean cop. He recently declared that drug dealers had given up on trying to bribe him. “In the last two years, no one has even bothered to approach me,” he told a reporter in a recent interview.

He has served at the Special Branch, the intelligence arm of the force, at the Special Anti-Crime Task Force and was divisional commander in St Mary and St Catherine. He also worked at the Corporate Strategy Branch, and was divisional commander at Kingston Central before going to the Narcotics Division in 1996. He left soon after to return to Special Branch, but was again reassigned to head the Narcotics Division after the retirement of Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Berris Spence.

Since taking over the narcotics department, Williams has led a series of successful offensives against drug dealers, harvesting a sizeable volume of cocaine and cutting off earnings from the illegal trade -US$1.5 billion by conservative estimates, according to Sunday Observer sources.

In Jamaica’s biggest drug bust to date, narcotics cops grabbed over 3,000 pounds of cocaine with a street value of over half-a-billion Jamaican dollars, in an operation near Port Royal in August 2002.

Last year, police seized US$2,444,301 (J$146.6 million) from alleged drug dons. They also confiscated:

. 1,619 kilograms of cocaine;

. 1,897 kilos of hash oil;

. 2,949 pieces of crack cocaine;

. 36,603 kilos of ganja; and

destroyed 445 hectares of ganja.

In 2003, narcotics investigators also seized four aircraft, eight go-fast boats and 87 motor vehicles, while arresting 6,044 people in the process.

The big drug busts continued into 2004, highlighted a month ago when cocaine weighing almost 500 kilograms, with a street value estimated at US$15.9 million, was seized in a drug operation in Gimme-Me-Bit, near the old Vernamfield airstrip in Clarendon.

A kilogram of cocaine can fetch up to US$33,000 in the United States.

In a previous interview with the Sunday Observer, Williams estimated the size of the drug trade in Jamaica to be worth as much as three times the island’s Gross National Product (GNP).

Most of the drugs passing through Jamaica originate in Colombia and are destined for the United States, via Jamaica and the Bahamas.

In the face of heightened activities, Forbes earlier this month announced he would be transferring an undisclosed number of top-flight investigators to the narcotics division, on grounds that the volume and complexity of cocaine cases had warranted the move.

Sources at the time said Forbes’ decision was also prompted by the need to keep narcotics cops honest, given the temptations they face on the job.

In July last year, Williams and members of the Police Narcotics Division were fired upon by rotten apple police officers driving a marked vehicle on the premises of the Tinson Pen aerodrome at Marcus Garvey Drive in Kingston.

The narcotics police had gone to the aerodrome to conduct surveillance on a plane that was being loaded with suspected contraband. The plane took off from the aerodrome during the shooting, but returned hours later. Nine persons, including two policemen, were arrested, but the case against them was dismissed on technicalities.

Williams took the acquittals hard, and in a fit of anger lashed out at the judicial system, describing the court’s decision as “a triumph for drug runners”.

“I am here wallowing in my disappointment… This is a victory for the drug-trafficking community,” Williams told the Observer at the time.

News of the death threats against Williams also comes in the wake of the murder of Senior Superintendent Lloyd McDonald two Fridays ago and Special Corporal Ferron Burke days later. Both were killed by unknown assailants who attacked them and made off with their service revolvers.

Williams said he was taking the threats against him “very seriously”, and had reported them to his boss, Deputy Commissioner in charge of crime, Lucius Thomas.

He said his family was aware of the threats and were scared for him, but were treating them as a hazard of the job.