PATRICK HO ‘Pat’ Rousseau says he will always remember the chilling experience of being held up at gunpoint in South Africa on November 26, 1998.

The then president of the West Indies Cricket Board had been forced to hand over valuables, and saw his wife Hester, and close friend, journalist Tony Becca undergo the same ordeal right next to him.

But that paled in comparison to what he considers a more life-threatening encounter on a fateful Tuesday night in 1977 when he was held up and kidnapped briefly by two of the most notorious gunmen at the time, who were working with Jamaica’s most wanted man, Dennis ‘Copper’ Barth.

“I had gone into Barbican one Tuesday night to play tennis and as I was coming out of the car, another car came around it and these guys stepped out with guns,” Rousseau recalled to the Jamaica Observer during an interview at the seasoned lawyer’s offices at the firm that he has served for over 50 years, Myers Fletcher and Gordon last week.

“It was my calmness that saved me. I had pulled up and parked on the bank. I took out my tennis bag and racquet and turned to walk towards Ishmael Robertson’s gate, as I was going to play with him, George Fatta and Charlie Johnston.

“As the men came out I held up the keys and said you can have them, boss, you can have the car, I just don’t want you to mess me up.

“One of them was a half-Chinese fellow and the other one I recognised as I went into the car and I just went on like I didn’t know who he was.

“When I held out the keys, the half-Chinese guy said ‘oh, you are willing to give me the car’, and then said ‘no, you have to drive me up to the end of the road.’

Rousseau said that the man asked him if he had a gun. “I said ‘no, I have no intention of owning one, because what would have happened to me tonight if I had one’.”

“By this time, Robertson and Fatta started to come from the tennis court which was at the back of the place. They couldn’t understand how I didn’t come in.

“The half-Chinese fellow said ‘drive me up to the corner’. I looked him in the face and said I can trust you, but can you trust me. He said ‘yes, jump in the car’, so I climbed in the car, he got in behind me and put the other guy, who I recognised as ‘Shabba’, a former jockey at Caymanas Park,” said Rousseau, a thoroughbred owner and breeder and former chairman of Caymanas Track Ltd.

That half-Chinese man was Donovan Chin Quee, Barth’s right-hand man, who was later captured, sent to prison, but escaped and was shot dead by other criminals soon after.

The other man was Dennis ‘Shabba’ Adair, a former jockey who had given up the track in 1974 for a life of crime.

“He (Shabba) jumped in the front seat with me and I drove off up the road. I tried to look in the rear view mirror and the guy behind me (Chin Quee), cool as ice, took his hand and straightened up my head and said ‘no, don’t look behind you’,” Rousseau stated.

A comment by Adair made Rousseau feel that he was closer to his maker.

“When we are driving along, this fellow named Shabba started getting excited and said ‘shoot the man, shoot the man, boss, shoot him, we wasting time’.

“The half-Chinese fellow said, ‘shut up, I don’t want to hear another word from you’.”

Rousseau said that when they got to the corner at Widcombe Heights, the half-Chinese man instructed him to turn right towards Matilda’s Corner.

“He said ‘stop’, and I pulled off. Then the other one opened his mouth again: ‘Shoot him’. And the half Chinese fellow said, ‘listen to me, didn’t I tell you to shut up. I don’t want to hear anymore from you’.

“With gun in hand he then turned to me and said ‘you can step out’, so I stepped out and said ‘thank you, man’, and he jumped into the driver’s seat.

“That was when I felt that I would not be harmed. It showed the kind of control that he (Chin Quee) had,” said Rousseau.

“Just before he could let down the handbrake and drove off my Toyota Crown, I said to him, ‘can I get my tennis bag, because I am going to play tennis’, so he said ‘yeah man’ and I picked up the bag and he drove off.”

Rousseau said he went to the Matilda’s Corner Police Station to report the robbery. There, a policeman took out a book of mug shots and while leafing through it Rousseau saw a photo of one of the robbers and pointed him out to the cop.

“He said to me, ‘you are a liar, man’. I said how ‘you mean I am a liar? I am a big, respectable lawyer’.

“The policeman insisted that ‘no, yu lie, that man couldn’t capture you and you are alive talking to me’. It was then that he told me that the man was Copper Barth’s right-hand man. He said that he killed about three people already,” Rousseau said.

The policeman reported the stolen car, but an anxious Rousseau heard nothing for the next two days, until drama unfolded at a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia along Spanish Town Road.

Copper and his men had gone to rob the bank. They killed a man who was walking out through the door as they were walking in, shot and injured a district constable as they were leaving, and shot at a man twice in the bank’s parking lot as they escaped.

A chase by police along Spanish Town Road ended with Copper and his men heading to Sligoville in St Catherine where they crashed Rousseau’s car along an embankment and escaped in a gully.

“I was chairman of United Motors then and when I got back the car, I didn’t know that anybody could ‘soup up’ (speed up) a Crown like that. I had never felt it so fast. That Chinese fellow and Shabba were Barth’s right-hand men and every vehicle they stole to do a robbery or a shooting, they ‘souped’ it up first.

“When I put my foot on the gas when I got it back, I nearly rammed into the wall. I couldn’t believe how fast the car was,” Rousseau said.

Barth was eventually killed at Caymanas Park on April 30, 1978. He was going up the stairs to rob one of the cashiers and a policeman who saw and recognised him pulled a gun and blew him off the stairs. Barth shot back though, injuring two policemen, one of whom eventually died.

Adair was shot dead by police on his 23rd birthday, May 23, 1978. The former Jamaica Labour Party activist and Fletcher’s Land resident was said to have killed about 20 policemen and soldiers, along with other civilians.

In an interview many years later with the Observer’s Online News Editor Karyl Walker, one of Adair’s brothers said that the criminal grew up to hate policemen after one with whom he lived constantly beat his stepmother.

Chin Quee was caught and convicted for robbery and the 1971 gun murder of Australian lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Lloyd Sierakowski. He was imprisoned in 1980, but escaped in 1981 and was killed by gunmen shortly after.

Barth had twice escaped custody at the General Penitentiary — in 1977 and 1978 — after his recapture. He had been given two life sentences for murdering two policemen before he had reached age 18.

Barth, a People’s National Party supporter whose stomping ground covered mainly Central Kingston and East Kingston, was known as the deadliest badman of the 1970s. He had killed several, including a Mr McDonald, the caretaker at Wolmer’s Boys’ School, who he said had ‘dissed’ him. He also shot dead a couple vacationing in Jamaica — Carol Feurtado and her husband — after they walked into the middle of a hold-up at the front desk of the Terra Nova Hotel.

Barth also gained further infamy when he walked up to the security post at the gate at King’s House and blew away a policeman posted there.

For Rousseau, things could have been different that night if Barth, the leader of the feared Hot Stepper Gang, was present.

“I would have been very worried about Copper being there, because he might have recognised me from Wolmer’s as he lived somewhere around Connolly Avenue and he used to go across to Wolmer’s,” said Rousseau. “We were in the height of the crime in Jamaica, so I was much more nervous.”

Still, the top shelf administrator and brilliant legal mind flatly rejects, to this day, the idea of having a firearm.

“I don’t believe in carrying a gun. I think it’s the worst defence you could have. If you are not professionally trained, a sidearm is the most dangerous weapon you can carry, because guys will see it and just shoot you and take it. So why would you want to carry a gun?” he argued.

As for the South Africa experience, that was spine-chilling. It was even more frightening as he was far away from home and was ignorant of the gun culture in that part of the world.

“Tony, my wife and I had arrived about the same time in South Africa. The first morning after I got there I told Becca that I had to go to the head office of South African Cricket at the Johannesburg ground, and that he should come with me. I was going to say a word to the CEO and say hello to (South African head of cricket) Dr Ali Bacher.

“So we got there and I had a chat with these guys and while we were there they were telling us how great this cricket ground had been developed in Soweto and what a wonderful programme they had,” said Rousseau.

“I said I would love to see it and they said to the development officer ‘take Mr Rousseau and his wife and Mr Becca out there. Call them and tell them that you are coming’. I didn’t realise the significance of that.

“We jumped into this guy’s Toyota Corolla and drove out to this cricket ground, so we get there, we do the usual walk around and one or two of the guys who ran the programme came to the ground to meet us.

“Just when we were leaving and coming around the side of the clubhouse, I saw three guys coming up the driveway and one of the guys who run the club said ‘I don’t like the sight of this’.

“When they got closer they drew guns and said ‘on the ground, face down’. So they took away my wife’s bag, took away Becca’s and my watches, took Becca’s wallet and then left.

“After they had gone, one of the guys at the club said ‘boy, they were lucky I didn’t bring my gun today’ and I said thank God you didn’t because you may have got us all killed,” Rousseau said.

Luckily for Rousseau, although the men took some of his personal effects, they left without the most valuable item of all.

“The funniest part is that I had gone to the bank that morning and cashed a hefty amount of traveller’s cheques, because when the Test match starts in two days’ time, you don’t want to be getting traveller’s cheques cashed.

“The cash was in my right pocket in my wallet, but I laid down on top of it, so they didn’t turn me over, they didn’t see it. I had about US$5,000 in Rand.

“Becca was a little tense and so was Hester, and I couldn’t blame them.

“Our guys called the police while the thieves walked away and I could see them way in the distance. A police car passed the guys on the way down, even hailed them and came up to us. When we explained to them, a white and black policeman, what had happened, they took off down the road, but they had no chance of catching them,” Rousseau said.

Rousseau lost his West Indies blazer, which he never got back, and his wife lost her glasses in her handbag and a small amount of money in it. She had locked the bulk of her traveller’s cheques in her hotel room safe.

South African authorities, including minister of sport and recreation Steve Tshwete, who spent time with Nelson Mandela as a political prisoner at Robben Island, were upset when they heard of the incident, which prompted a report to Mandela.

“Steve reported it to Mandela, and came to the hotel to apologise. We had a good three/four-hour chat and then Steve called Mandela and said to me ‘speak to the president’. So Mandela and I had a good chat on the phone and it was a little embarrassing for him.”

The generosity of the South Africans marvelled Rousseau, as they appeared to be going out of their way to try and set things right.

“Some of the South Africans were fantastic. The hotel manager took Hester to his friend, an optician, who made up a prescription in two hours. When I took out my wallet, the man said, ‘no, no, no … we were embarrassed, South Africans of all colours, you cannot pay’.

“Then Tony and I wanted back some watches, so we went into a jeweller and the man wouldn’t make us pay for the watches. So in the end Tony and I took two little cheap watches, just to work with for the time we were there.

“Next we went into a clothing store, because I wanted to buy some stuff and the people didn’t want us to pay. I said to Hester, we are done. I am going back to the hotel. This is crazy. Everywhere you go people giving you things for free.

“They really were concerned. I was amazed at how gracious all colours, black, white everybody, were about the incident,” Rousseau said.