TIVOLI ENQUIRY: Remnants of Presidential Click lingers in Tivoli – ex-cop
KINGSTON, Jamaica – Retired Senior Superintendent Delroy Hewitt testified in the Tivoli Enquiry today that there is still a remnant of the Presidential Click operating in Tivoli Gardens attempting to continue criminal operation in the West Kingston community.
Hewitt, who used to be in command of the West Kingston Police Division, said the group is calling itself the third generation, or something to that effect and is there enforcing the code of silence that existed in Tivoli Gardens before Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke’s arrest in 2010.
Hewitt, who was responding to questions from Commission Chairman Sir David Simmons, the culture of silence still exists in the community but not at the level pre May 2010.
He said that the majority of residents in the community are law abiding but that they are trapped within the system of criminality.
He said that Coke ruled with “an iron fist” and that anyone breaching his rules would pay with their lives. He said people were also beaten and cut with chainsaws.
The retired crime fighter said that it was the duty of the young women in the community to clean up the blood and pick up spent shells and come out on the front line with their babies whenever the police were coming.
He said also that women from Tivoli Gardens were used to traffic drugs out of the island on behalf of Coke’s gang. He said a number of them were held at the airport.
Additionally, he said that Tivoli Gardens gunmen would also take young girls out of their home by force, suggesting that they were sexually assaulted.
Simmons sighed when Hewitt testified that criminals had a burial area called Heroes Park where their important members were buried. Coke’s father Jim Brown and brother Jah T were buried there as well as a lieutenant of the gang named Kevin Reid.
Paul Henry