Conclusion of The rise and fall of Antonnette Haughton. Part one appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Observer.

A fortnight before her 48th birthday in 2002, Haughton formally launched the United People’s Party (UPP) to contest the October general elections of that year. In the run-up to the elections things had looked good. The Stone Poll conducted for the Observer newspaper by Mark Wignall in February 2002 showed she was fifth, with 7.8 per cent of the electorate favouring her as the choice for next prime minister of Jamaica, behind Portia Simpson Miller, Edward Seaga, P J Patterson and Peter Phillips, and ahead of Bruce Golding.

But on the campaign trail, it was a different story for Haughton and her UPP, with people like educator Horace Matthews, general secretary; and historian Betty Ann Blaine, vice-president. In what was her first major disclosure of that political episode since the elections, in an interview with the Observer, Haughton described the experience as “painful and potentially ruinous”.

The system heavily favoured the two main parties – the PNP and the JLP. When the UPP wanted government concessions to buy campaign vehicles and recruit invigilators, it was told to go get 50,000 backing signatures, in keeping with the constitutional electoral arrangements. Then the election authorities vigorously challenged 10,000 of those signatures. But Haughton fought on and on.

Beginning of the end?

The UPP fielded nine candidates overall and Haughton herself contested the Central St Mary seat from which the PNP’s Horace Clarke was resigning. She found the reception vastly different from 22 years earlier when she had led the campaign for Sam Lawrence. At one stage, she faced the might of the PNP’s election machinery, and ended up accusing the party she had worked for under Michael Manley of abusing her, at a function in Port Maria. A PNP crowd had surrounded her and hurled ugly invectives at her. “It was real hostile,” she told a reporter after the incident nine months before the elections. “They were cursing, yelling and calling me traitor. The police had to form a ring around me to protect me from potential harm. It was real bad I tell you, my brother.”

In the end, her UPP was obliterated on election day, with the party’s performance, like its third-party counterparts before, hardly showing up on the political radar. Haughton was crushed. She had thrown her hat in the ring, hoping to gain traction in an environment in which the people had seemed fed up with the old political order and appeared ready for new actors with clean hands.

“It made me realise how impossible and exclusive our politics is and bought out by powerful money forces,” she remarked on reflection. “If you can’t advertise, you can’t get votes because people don’t know about you.” Haughton also learnt something not so nice about the electorate – “that it was not just about what the politicians want to say, but that people want the politicians to tell them what they want to hear”.

“I am blessed because I did not leave embittered,” she was quoted as saying. “I just left wiser. What needs to change is the consciousness of our people.I walked that road because I needed to know what I now know. What I experienced was God. God just is and doesn’t care whether we believe in Him or not. God is life and love. It set me on a spiritual path. I know now that as a man thinketh so is he.”

But that election loss, some argued, marked the beginning of the end for the warrior.

After the elections, Haughton all but dropped out of sight, keeping a relatively low profile and busying herself with her legal practice. A celebrated case involving a patient who claimed to have been infected with HIV/AIDS brought her back into the glare of public attention. A year after the polls, she was invited by HOT-102 FM radio to host its mid-morning talk show, Disclosure, which Bruce Golding had hosted before returning to the JLP. There, Haughton’s approach was to promote an agenda of spiritual, social and financial issues aimed, she said at the time, at empowering people.

“We are now working on a project to get every school-age child in school. I believe that collectively as a nation we can do that. It doesn’t cost that much,” she was reported as telling a newspaper interviewer. “I believe we curse the dark

too much and we don’t try hard enough.”

The fall from grace

But Haughton never regained the dizzying heights attained on the Hotline. Then one Tuesday morning in February 2005, CVM Communications Group, owners of Hot-102, announced that Haughton was off, and claimed that she made statements that flouted editorial policy. The talk-show host was reported to have walked off the show while it was on air the day before.

The next news headlines would be worse. In the ensuing years, Haughton’s name would regularly come up on the other side of the law, this time not as defence lawyer, but as accused. In 2005, a newspaper report titled “Case against lawyer put off”, said that the lawyer was defending against a charge of “disorderly conduct and using abusive language to a police officer”, arising from an incident that was committed on March 4, 2004. Haughton pleaded not guilty to

the charge.

Ironically, Haughton’s client had the charge of disorderly conduct dropped against her when the court was not satisfied that the officer had enough evidence against her. Haughton had maintained that the officer had charged her client out of sheer malice and spite, rather than duty.

But it was all downhill after that. In one case, the attorney was arrested by Fraud Squad detectives and charged with defrauding one of her clients, 60-year-old farmer Samuel Rowe. “It is reported that on October 3, 2006, the Supreme Court had awarded Rowe $7 million in damages after he successfully sued the May Pen Hospital for negligence.

“The farmer, who was involved in a motor vehicle accident in 1999, lost one of his legs because of the treatment he received at the hospital. Haughton-Cardenas collected the cheque and allegedly pocketed the money,” read one

media report.

In April 2009, the Observer carried the headline: “Antonnette Haughton-Cardenas charged with fraud”. The Yallahs Police had charged her with two counts of fraudulent conversion.

“Police said that Cardenas collected $12 million from residents of Fort district, Leith Hall in the parish between 1990 and 2002, to assist in the acquisition of land. When she allegedly failed to represent them in court, a report was made to the police and an investigation launched.”

Last week, it appeared the end had finally come when the General Legal Council felt it had had enough and struck her off the roll of attorneys, alleging that she had misappropriated funds from one of her clients.

“Colleagues of the one-time politician and former radio talk-show host reportedly became suspicious after one of her clients complained that she had swindled him out of $2.3 million she had collected on his behalf from a real estate transaction,” the report said.

“A legal source indicated that several other complaints against Haughton-Cardenas were before the Disciplinary Committee of the GLC. She is also facing fraud charges in the Corporate Area and St Thomas Resident Magistrate’s courts.”

It has not yet been fully explained how, from

a champion of the voiceless masses, Antonnette Haughton-Cardenas has fallen to such levels of disgrace. Perhaps, with her consent, it is the next story we will tell.

Read Part One “The Rise and Fall of Antonette Haughton” Here