AT age 24, Omar Guyah was the envy of many at the organisation where he earned his bread and butter — the Jamaica Customs Department. Countless others on the outside joined the list too.

He had not only been appointed director, Customs Enforcement Team in 2009, but had been doing his job with utmost efficiency and professionalism which earned him accolades from those to whom he reported However, the Revenue Protection Division, an arm of the Ministry of Finance and Planning that was established in the 1990s primarily to handle alleged corruption and fraud at the Customs Department, thought of him otherwise and instigated action against him that a local court on Friday ruled to be improper.

Guyah, now 30, had been arrested on March 9, 2012 and later charged with 14 counts of breaches of the Customs Act, conspiracy to defraud, breaches of the Corruption Prevention Act and simple larceny in respect of alleged impropriety involving motor vehicles at Port Bustamante.

Although the court found him not guilty on all counts, the damage done to the former St Jago High School student’s reputation is, in his own term, irreparable.

He had to endure hellish conditions in two police lockups while anxiously awaiting the climax of the legal matter that was brought against him, and the anguish and pain that he said hit him flush in the face have changed his life forever. Guyah and fellow Customs Department employee Cordella Brown were set free by magistrate Simone Wolfe- Reece, daughter of former Chief Justice Lensley Wolfe, in the St Andrew Resident Magistrate’s Court after attorneys successfully argued for a dismissal of proceedings. Guyah was represented by Capt Paul Beswick and Georgia Buckley of the law firm Ballantyne, Bewsick & Company, while Brown had Carolyn Reid-Cameron as her legal mouthpiece.

Patricia Jackson prosecuted the case on a fiat from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), but she was later replaced by private lawyer Garth McBean, as lead counsel for the prosecution, also on a fiat (authorisation) from the DPP.

While Brown remains traumatised by what has transpired over the last three years, Guyah mustered the courage to verbally catalogue his period of suffering, which he described as the worst time of his life.

“I went through this for nearly three years. That first night at Freeport lock-up… I thought it was a nightmare. It was catastrophic. I slept on the floor.

I was in there with lotto scammers whom I had arrested, they threw pee all over the place… it was beyond description,” Guyah told the Jamaica Observer in his first interview since his return to the halls of freedom.

The Freeport lock-up in Montego Bay was the second stop on Guyah’s enforced tour of Jamaica under the command of RPD operatives and the police.

On the fateful March morning, at the crack of dawn, he was taken by a combined team from the RPD and the police from his parents’ home in Spanish Town where he had spent his boyhood years.

After a search of his office at Newport East, in South West St Andrew, he was transported by road to his house in Montego Bay, which was also combed in microscopic manner.

He was later placed in the lockup of the Freeport Police Station. What happened to him next was something that he had only seen in movies.

Guyah’s lawyer said that his client was denied the right to counsel, and was not told the reason for his arrest, neither was he informed of any charges against him.

His family did not know where he was until days after he was taken into custody. Guyah argued that he was not allowed to take his medication, and did not receive any substantial food while in custody.

In addition, he said that he was subjected to the most inhumane conditions, particularly at the Freeport lock-up, and faced ridicule from police personnel and other detainees, some of whom he had arrested.

He also cited a breach of Section 27 of the Bail Act, which requires that an accused be brought before a court or justice of the peace within 24 hours to have the issue of bail determined.

Guyah was dispatched to the maximum security facility, Horizon Remand Centre, on Saturday, March 10 and kept there for six days, although the law states clearly that there ought to be no custodial sentence for the charge which he was initially levelled at him.

His lawyer at the time, George Soutar, applied for a writ of Habeus Corpus under Section 26 of the Bail Act, which means a writ requiring an accused to be brought before a judge to investigate the lawfulness of his detention.

“The application was made on the Monday and for some reason, a writ to take me from the lock-up to the court just always went missing.

It went missing the Tuesday, Wednesday, the Thursday, so even though the order was served, they kept on holding it.

“It was on the Friday that [senior resident magistrate] Judith Pusey herself said that it will not go on another day and she sent a policeman from that court and said ‘go for him.

This court will not rise until he is here.’

This was all on the news, so that’s how I knew they were coming for me,” Guyah told the Sunday Observer. Interestingly, it was Jamaica’s most popular murder accused at the time, now a convict, Vybz Kartel (real name Adidja Palmer) who informed him that he would be going to court. Kartel, who was his nextdoor neighbour at Horizon, got the information from the radio.

“Kartel shouted to me from his cell and said ‘hear you name pon the news dey, boss’, because my cell was right beside his and there is a radio that most prisoners can hear.

“I have had a number of nervous breakdowns, irregular heartbeat, clinical depression, panic attacks caused by stress, especially when you know that you did nothing wrong,” Guyah went on.

“Before court dates I had to take medication to calm myself; suicidal thoughts entered my mind, which had my lawyer worried. “There is no one who is faced with immense stress over a long period of time who doesn’t, at some point, question why am I alive,” Beswick interjected.

“The case had a serious effect on his health.

It’s not that he was saying ‘I want to kill myself’, but there is no human being in his position who is not going to start questioning what’s his purpose and if he is here to suffer.”

The experience is one that Guyah said he will never wipe from his memory. Some of Jamaica’s notorious criminals were near to him and it was a world that he had not anticipated he would have been a part of.

“Tesha Miller and Joel Andem were on my block, which was guarded by soldiers.

Remember, my bail bond would have said for breaches of Section 210 of the Customs Act, which is no imprisonment,” Guyah said. Was he intimidated by the presence of so many hardened criminals in his midst?

“That’s an understatement,” Guyah responded. “I was the director of enforcement at Customs, so persons who are in custody in such a facility would have felt my hand.

I was the chief prosecutor for Customs, as the director of enforcement … that was part of my role and function.

“The offenders whom I prosecuted committed offences of an international nature, crossing borders of a very large magnitude in money laundering, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, which are serious offences.

So to be in the same place and at the same time with those people, it was beyond words.

“I didn’t eat for days. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep because you are feeling the roaches, the rats, the mosquitoes running all over you.

The smell of everything was there and it was so frigid and cold in the night… you are lying down on concrete, without covers, or sheets, you just can’t do anything, and at Horizon it was modern, far modern to Freeport, which had crowded cells. In addition, we languished in the courts for two years before I actually knew what charges were being brought against me,” he said.

“We were put in a position where we could no longer have a fair trial and there was tampering with evidence, which included removing items that we knew existed that we had two inspection hearings; they removed dozens of documents from the file.

They also deliberately failed to disclose the items that they had taken from us,” Beswick commented. “Omar, because of his penchant for storing details, had his own list of documents.

He knew that a lot of documents existed, so he was able to say ‘I want this document, that document, the other document’, and when you look in their files the documents were not there,” Beswick went on.

The defence team is of the view that the RPD had a concern that Guyah was in charge of an area of enforcement that the agency ought to have had. “He was doing it rather too well.

He was collecting billions of dollars for the Government of Jamaica,” Beswick said of the man who joined the Customs Department in 2003 as a teenager.

Upon reflection, Guyah said that the entire experience left him with sadness about how public officials are treated when they are doing honest work.

“Bail was granted under very rigid conditions. I was placed under house arrest and curfew order, meaning I could not go outside the house. I was on $3 million bail and my travel documents were seized,” he said.

“What I was charged with at the time was a breach of Section 210 of the Customs Act, which says if you deal in uncustomed goods you have to pay a fine of up to three times the value of the goods.

There was no imprisonment for the charge, yet I was in remand for seven days.

“The documents went missing from the file.

The file was fat when they seized it from me and it got thin shortly after. On the first day that I was brought to court to apply for bail, the only statement on the file was one from Winston Lawrence, the investigating officer, which said that the Government was defrauded of over $40 million.

Two court dates after, the prosecution admitted that there was no revenue loss.

“Cordella is beyond shambles. She has lost weight, her pride is shattered and she is someone who always maintains a very high level of integrity, very Christian woman.

This thing affects people deeply,” Guyah said.