SENIOR Superintendent of Police Terrence Bent has several tales about his coming face to face with the business end of guns wielded by some of Kingston’s toughest gunmen in shoot-outs.

But two of these cold-blooded killers stick out in the senior superintendent’s memory because they were cut down by the security forces at times when they were hell-bent on continuing their reign of terror.

One is known by his alias — ‘Sean Pelé’, who was given that nickname because he played football — although not as well as the legendary Brazilian star Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé). He hailed from Hannah Town.

The other was Michael ‘Killer Miller’ Miller, a resident of Denham Town.

Sean Pelé had committed about nine murders and other crimes, including rapes — one of the victims known to Bent — before he died violently.

“He was ruthless,” Bent said of the gangster. We had to manhunt him in a particular way. He had to leave Hannah Town and couldn’t come back and was eventually killed in a shoot-out with the police in the Hunt’s Bay area,” said Bent, who is in charge of the West Kingston police division.

Miller was the younger brother of Christopher “Nunu Puss” Miller, a well known ‘bad man’ who frequented Tivoli Gardens and who headed the police most wanted list in 2006.

Nunu Puss’s bullet-riddled body was found on Goshen Road, Bernard Lodge in 2008. He had been charged with murder in 2006, but witnesses did not come forward to testify against him and he was freed.

But for Bent, Killer Miller was just as deadly.

Their paths would cross in a strange way with Miller going home to face his maker after he engaged a police party, which included Bent, in a shoot-out in nearby Arnett Gardens (Concrete Jungle) in 1999.

“One day we were driving through ‘Jungle’, where Arnett Gardens was playing Tivoli Gardens in a football match over at the Tony Spaulding Complex. That Sunday in question, another policeman, Mr Watson and I drove up to ‘Top Jungle’ in a marked police vehicle. When we came up we saw a lot of people on bicycles, but this one man caught my eye, because he had on a white shirt, white pants and those bobby caps that police in England wear.

“So I said to Watson, ‘How come him have on police-looking things?’ and he said to me, ‘Boss, that is Killer Miller, he is wanted for murder and other things in Denham Town’.

“So we drove through the crowd and stopped at the intersection of Ninth Street and Collie Smith Drive. By the time I stopped the car and shouted out ‘police, don’t move!’, about four men started firing at us. We started firing back.

“It turned out that they shot four persons, all residents, and Miller, who was part of the group shooting at us, was shot and he died,” Bent said.

The death of Killer Miller triggered an almost immediate reprisal, as tempers flared in the community, and later that night gunmen attacked the Hannah Town police station with sustained firing, forcing the police to push back.

“At the end of that shooting,” Bent told the Jamaica Observer, “a woman came up to me and said she thanked the police because we brought closure to her life because that boy (Killer Miller) took away her daughter and raped her for three days, killed her and burnt her body.”

But that was not the end of the story, as Nunu Puss energised his troops and called gunmen from opposing political divisions to join hands in attacking the police, specifically targeting Bent.

“Nunu Puss called my cellular phone when Killer Miller died and threatened to kill me,” Bent said.

“I told him to meet me anywhere and anytime and that he should carry a handgun and a machine gun.

“I went further to suggest to him that he meet me at the Back Road at midnight the following night. He said to me, ‘Bwoy, you kill mi bredda, a must kill you back.’ So I said, ‘No man, don’t talk about it now, come me and you meet up one day and we will talk about it,” Bent said, emphasising how deadly the fallen Killer Miller was.

“Killer Miller was a dangerous boy. That was the time that the gangsters insisted that I must die.

“Men from Tivoli called a meeting with men from Arnett Gardens and Matthews Lane and said that one of their top men had been killed and nobody was reacting.

Bent said that he had to be assigned four bodyguards by former deputy Commissioner of Police Tilford Johnson at that time. “So four people were constantly around,” he said.

Bent also listed Marlon Palmer, alias ‘Marlon Sniper’, as a “very dangerous” man.

“We were always involved in shoot-outs, always firing shots at each other,” he said.

Palmer, who was wanted by local law enforcers, skipped the island for the United States where he was eventually held by that country’s authorities on a murder charge.

He remains in custody, pending a trial.