Last month Vivian Blake, one-time leader of the “Shower Posse” gang, died in the University Hospital of the West Indies. It is worth noting that very few foreign criminals’ obituaries appear in the New York Times. But Blake’s was carried and was captioned “Vivian Blake, 54, Founder of Jamaica Drug Gang, Dies”. This is a compliment of sorts. If one of America’s leading papers of record thought it important to record Blake’s passing, it demonstrates the impact his criminal career had.

The outline of his career is known to most Jamaicans. He was born in Tivoli Gardens and, being a bright boy, he got a scholarship to attend St George’s College. Blake later described how his poverty relative to his schoolmates’ wealth had an impact on him. He stated how he was the poorest child in the school and would walk miles to school when other children were driven in big cars by their parents. He implied this is what first awakened him to life’s injustices. Blake also claimed that in his early teens he came to the attention of the famous “don” Jim Brown who Blake said encouraged him to stay in school and wanted him to be a lawyer.

Whatever the real influence of Brown was on an impressionable teenager, Blake travelled to New York in 1973 as part of a cricket team and stayed on as an illegal immigrant. It was his illegal status and inability to get a legitimate job or to study that led him to a life of crime. He started importing marijuana into the United States. But he soon graduated from being just another marijuana trafficker to becoming the ‘CEO’ of the Shower Posse’s activities in North America. The United States authorities alleged that Blake was in charge of a marijuana and cocaine distribution network which stretched from New York to Miami, across to Los Angeles and as far as Anchorage in Alaska. They also claimed that Blake’s organisation was responsible for more than 1,400 drug-related killings.

In 1988 the authorities launched Operation Rum Punch and managed to arrest many of the key figures in the gang. But Blake himself lay low for a few months and then escaped on a cruise ship going from Miami to Ocho Rios. Once back in Jamaica, Blake reinvented himself as a respectable businessman. At one time he claimed to have the largest motorcycle rental business in Ocho Rios, a jet-ski business and went on to own Cactus nightclub. But the Americans did not give up.

In 1995 he was indicted again. Blake fought extradition for four years, but was eventually extradited to Miami where he pleaded guilty to racketeering, criminal conspiracy and drug possession. He served eight years in a US prison and returned to Jamaica last year. There were allegations that Jamaican police made an attempt on his life in September 2009, but Blake died last month from natural causes.

His is an interesting career. But what probably makes it worthy of an obituary is the particular style of criminal activity that the Shower Posse and others like them brought to the United States. In 2008 Black Entertainment Television (BET) featured a documentary about the Shower Posse as part of its series American Gangster.

One of the most striking things about the film is the way in which the American authorities spoke about the Jamaican criminals who came onto the American criminal scene in the eighties. They described Blake’s Shower Posse as both more violent and more organised than anything else they had encountered. They shot indiscriminately, not caring who else they killed. And the Jamaicans would not just shoot you in the head, they would riddle you with bullets and drive a car over you for good measure. They also did something that had been taboo in the United States up until then. They shot directly at the police and thought nothing of having public shootouts with them.

The United States is now engaged in a struggle to extradite Christopher “Dudus” Coke who is alleged to be the current leader of the Shower Posse. Recalling Vivian Blake’s history reminds us that the Americans have every reason to take the Shower Posse seriously and will persist as long as it takes in their efforts to bring Dudus back to the United States to face the charges laid against him.