"Wanted Dread or Alive" Mark of the Beast

Entertainer and reggae star Bob Marley, Rita Marley and the manager of the Wailers, Don Taylor, are now patients in the University Hospital after receiving gunshot wounds during a shooting incident which took place at Marley's home at 56 Hope Road tonight.

How long shall they kill our profits while we stand aside and look?

The passing of another Jamaican superstar.

Reggae dynamo Peter Tosh, one of the original waiters, had passed away.

By the gun, by the gun.

Glory to John.

Let him be praised because his righteousness govern the world.

After almost six years in power, by 1986, Edward Seaga's economic promises had crystallized into that familiar illusion that ghetto people had witnessed so many times before, the shimmering mirage of trickle down prosperity that somehow never quite reaches parched lips.

I remember that last dawn in Kingston after working months at Tuff Gong Records how the morning light crept from the limestone hills surrounding the city, illuminating the stark divisions of wealth that no reggae song could ever really capture.

I watched those lavish estates high above Kingston as they caught the first golden light while the garrison communities below remained in shadow, a visual metaphor for Jamaica's economy itself.

Dawn always breaking for some before others.

In August of 1986, a Washington Post headline read Seaga's Troubles Mount in Jamaica.

And then on September 22nd, the New York Times prints a front page story.

Jamaican Leader, a US Ally Hard Pressed by Leftist In a world of media diplomacy where leaks, leads and scoops from anonymous sources to friendly reporters carry as much weight as official closed door meetings at embassies, someone was trying to get a message to Mr.

Get your shit together down there or you're gonna blow it.

Here is some of what the New York Times President Reagan's closest ally in the Caribbean, Prime Minister Edward P.G.

seaga of Jamaica, is in serious political trouble and an old rival who has embraced Cuba and criticized the United States policy in Central America is striving to replace him.

The result of recent nationwide local elections and a respected poll suggest to many Jamaicans and foreign diplomats that if the elections were held tomorrow, the winner would be Michael N.

Manley.

Mr.

Manley is a leader in international socialism who relinquished the office of prime minister to Mr.

Siaga six years ago after a campaign in which more than 800 Jamaicans were killed.

A return to power by Mr.

Manley, who conducted a flamboyant domestic and international policy that wrecked Jamaica's economy and kept him sparring with Washington, would be regarded by many as a defeat for the Reagan administration.

Mr.

Seaga was the first head of government to visit the newly elected President Reagan in the White House in 1981, and that year, Mr.

Siaga's first full year in office, United States aid to Jamaica jumped fivefold.

Since then, Jamaica, with 2.3 million people, has become the recipient of more United States aid than any other country in the Caribbean and one of the largest recipients per capita in the world.

Despite the huge amounts of aid and a variety of austerity measures, Mr.

Siaga has been unable to overcome a 50% loss in income from bauxite, which had been Jamaica's main foreign exchange earner.

The standard of living on the island has continued to fall, and his popularity has faded.

Mr.

Seaga, who graduated from Harvard and is now 56 years old, swept into office as Mr.

Manley's opposite, a button down, pragmatic problem solver advocating free enterprise and intimate ties with the United States.

Mr.

Manley has been calling for a general election since shortly after a snap election in late 1983 that he and his party boycotted.

Mr.

Siaga's strategy is to delay, hoping that some improvements in the economy in the first six months of the year will deepen and the benefit of his austerity measures will begin to be felt.

He's promised no further devaluation of the Jamaican dollar, which is now worth two thirds less than when he took office, and is restoring some of the subsidies and government services that had been cut.

Many Jamaicans and foreign diplomats are skeptical that Mr.

Syaga, who has laid off thousands of government employees, closed several schools and hospitals, can overcome a widespread perception.

He doesn't care about the little people.

As you can hear, the New York Times article laid bare what Edward Seaga's carefully crafted narrative obscured.

Jamaica's economic downturn during his leadership had deepened the wound of inequality rather than heal.

Turns out the medicine that President Reagan's closest ally in the Caribbean prescribed to fix the economy was just a placebo without the effect.

While inflation ravaged the purchasing power of ordinary Jamaicans and unemployment soared in downtown areas, the hills surrounding Kingston continued to sprout new estates, each more opulent than the last.

Concrete and glass testimonies to wealth accumulated, even as the IMF mandate measures hollowed out what remained of public service for the poor.

The New York Times notes that Jamaica has become one of the largest recipients per capita of U.S.

aid, receiving $125 million a year.

But where had all those millions gone?

Certainly not into the hands of the little people that Seaga was perceived as not caring about.

The growing frustration with Seaga wasn't just about economic numbers.

It was about dignity, about watching schools close while hillside pools filled with water.

It was about hospitals shuttering and nurses being fired while brand new Ford F150s navigated the well maintained roads of upper Kingston.

It was about getting a sense that after sacrificing 800 lives for a change in leadership, Jamaica was just exchanging one form of suffering for another.

And Edward Syaga, having tasted the sweet fruit of power for the very first time, was not about to relinquish it without a fight, not after so much blood had already been spilled to place it in his hands.

The question was how much of that blood was on his hands.

You see, just two days after that article about Siaga appeared in the New York Times, the paper printed another story on September 24, 1986, with the headline Jamaicans Report Killings by Police.

And listen to some of those highlights.

A high ranking Jamaican official says that each of the last seven years the police in the Caribbean nation have killed an average of 200 civilians.

The official made this statement in response to a new report by America's Watch, a human rights group, which cited the figure of 200 civilian deaths per year.

At the same time, the group, based in New York, accused the police of engaging in a, quote, regular practice of summary execution.

Winston Spaulding, Jamaica's minister of national security and justice, confirmed the deaths, but he denied the assertion by America's Watch that the Jamaican police seek out those they suspect of having engaged in crime or of possessing firearms and summarily execute them.

In a telephone interview, Mr.

Spaulding said the majority of victims had been armed criminals.

Others, he said, were killed while attacking police officers or civilians.

Mr.

Spaulding generally defended the police, saying they were not acting in a vacuum, but in relation to the high level of criminal activity in this society.

Mr.

Spaulding said the third largest island in the Caribbean had been torn for years by warring gangs wearing the colors of the two major political parties, competing drug barons and left wing terrorists who were trained in Cuba and who commit robberies, murders and shootings to create fear, insecurity and a great lack of confidence in the government.

Mr.

Spalding pointed out that Jamaica has organized special squads and that it must follow inexorably that if you have specialists in a position over a period of time in the front line against these elements, they will inevitably have more conflict with these criminals than others not engaged as they are.

Watch noted that Police deaths between 1980 and 1985 annually ranged from 4 to 22 and said it would have expected higher police casualties from a high number of shootouts they said in nearly half of the daily newspaper accounts of police shootings in 1984 collected by the Jamaican Council for Human Rights, no weapon was found on or near the victim.

In a significant number of cases.

A three member team from America's Watch concluded after interviewing witnesses and reviewing homicide statistics and police reports.

In Jamaica, the police mistakenly killed someone other than the suspects they are seeking.

In addition, the human rights investigators said they believe that some of the police killings in Jamaica may be the result of personal grudges.

Jamaica is the largest recipient of United States aid in the Caribbean and urged that aid to Jamaican police be suspended.

And, and how about the first beating?

Do you, do you know any, any details on that one?

That was in the 70s when he was writing Mark of the Beast.

Yeah, that the same kind of thing happened to jail and beat him then, but the cops hated him because he was in their face so much and making public statements about their brutality and illegalities.

I see the mark of the beast on their ugly faces.

When those gunshots shattered the quiet of Plymouth Avenue that September evening, they were silencing one of the few voices brave enough to name this shadow government that had turned Jamaica's police force into what many said was a death squad.

The chilling testimony from America's Watch paints a picture not of random violence, but of systematic elimination.

Police seek out those they suspect and summarily execute them.

And that some of the killings may be the result of personal grudges.

When Mr.

Spaulding defended the Special Squad's unusually high ratio of criminal to police casualties as merely specialists doing their job, it made me think of those stories that circulated on the street corners of Kingston and inside recording sessions for decades.

These were not just police officers.

They were judge, jury and executioner.

With that staggering statistic of 288 civilians killed by police in 1984.

And almost half of the victims had no weapons on or near them.

That strips away at any pretense of legitimate police actions.

Oh, and by the way, maybe it was the call for the US to suspend funding to Jamaica's police.

But just over a month after that article came out in the New York Times, Edward Seaga replaced Winston Spalding as Minister of Security.

Money talks.

Winston Spalding was a man who spent six years talking tough on crime, creating special squads to eradicate the criminal gangs, supplying these units with the deadly M16 assault weapons.

And yet one of the last official actions that comes from his Ministry of National Security, just weeks before he leaves office, is ironically facilitating an early release from prison for a violent Criminal convicted of shooting a police officer.

That convict was Denis Leppo Loban, who within a year would be right back in prison, this time for killing Peter Tosh.

I see the mark of the beast on their ugly faces.

In the fall of 1987, Peter Tosh found himself in a position that would have been unimaginable during the heyday of reggae's international explosion.

Broke and isolated, his income entangled in legal battles, his relationship with fellow musicians deteriorated, and his reputation in Jamaica was complicated.

Peter Tosh was a man whose revolutionary force still burned bright, but his material circumstances had dimmed considerably.

Yet this vulnerability and these personal struggles connected him more deeply than ever with the ordinary Jamaicans he long championed.

In fact, Edward Seaga's Jamaica had widened the chasm between rich and poor with economic policies that many felt abandoned the working class.

For Peter Tosh, whose upcoming album, no Nuclear War, channeled years of pent up frustration, this inequality wasn't just political, it was personal.

His financial struggles, despite his international fame, made him a living embodiment of the system's failures.

What made Peter Tosh particularly dangerous to the political establishment, in addition to his new album, was the platform his world tour would provide.

Tosh would have access to international media, radio interviews, newspaper features.

A chance to unleash his legendary outspokenness at a critical moment with Jamaica's elections looming.

For a JLP party already struggling to maintain power, Peter Tosh represented a voice they could ill afford to have amplified.

In Kingston's political landscape, where violence had become a tool of control, the question was not whether Peter Tosh posed a threat to Seaga and his JLP machine.

It was what price might be paid to silence him and who got stuck with the bill?

When examining any crime, one must first look at those quickest to point fingers and misdirect the narrative.

The age old he who denied it supplied it.

Theory.

The powerful have always understood that controlling the story means controlling how history remembers the truth.

This United Press international story, written April 17, 1988, just seven months after Peter Tosh's murder, reads like state supplied propaganda at its finest.

Pay attention to the deliberate attempt to mislead the public with a calculated confusion of motives for Tasha's kill feeling.

And take notice to who supplied those motives.

April 17, 1988 Tosh murder trial begins by Gayle Young.

When reggae superstar Peter Tosh's killers fled from his home last September, they left behind seven people face down in pools of blood and a swirl of questions that have yet to be answered.

They thought all of us were dead.

Everyone got shot in the head, survivor Yvonne Joy Dixon said in front of her pink tropical home, shivering slightly despite a strong afternoon sun.

It was like assassins, like it was a setup.

Since the execution style attack which killed Tash, 42, Yvonne's husband, disc jockey Free Eye Dickson, and herbalist Wilton Doc Brown, the Caribbean nation has churned with theories about Tasha's death.

Money, jealousy, drugs, even Satan has been named as possible causes.

Trial is scheduled to begin Monday for two men arrested for the murders, Dennis Loban and Steve Russell, but few Jamaicans believe it will shed much light on the killings.

On the night of September 11, according to police reports, Russell, Loban and two other men, both dressed in suits, created a commotion among Tasha's 20 snarling guard dogs when they arrived at the reggae star suburban Kingston home.

Michael Robinson, a friend of Tosh, led the three into the upstairs living room, where they pulled out 9mm automatic pistols.

The gunman demanded money, US dollars.

When Tosh and Marlene Brown said they did not have any, they pistol whipped the musician and kicked him in the head.

The gunmen seized the Dixons when they arrived at the house to celebrate the release of Tosh's album no Nuclear War on emi, which won him a Grammy Award.

The attackers ransacked the house for about 30 minutes looking for money and beating Tosh.

They scattered a small amount of Jamaican currency on the floor, then shot all seven people in the head, an act that many speculate meant they were hired guns.

Tosh was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Doc Brown was declared dead at the scene and Dickson died a few days later.

Loban, who turned himself into police shortly after the slaying, comes from the same Trenchtown ghetto in Kingston that spawned the wailers in the 1960s.

He served 15 years in prison for shooting and wounding a police officer.

After he was released, he gravitated towards Tosh, who surrounded himself with hangers on.

Marlene Brown, who described herself as Tosh's bookkeeper, said in interviews that the singer was broke, cheated out of royalties by US Record companies.

The week before his death, Tosh had gone to New York to meet with EMI executives.

Several sources said that Tosh was rumored to have returned to Kingston with a large amount of U.S.

cash.

National security Minister Errol Anderson said last fall there could be a connection between Tasha's murder and gangs involved in drug trafficking.

However, he refused to discuss the allegations with the press.

Police spokesmen have suggested that Tasha's bitter dispute over Marley's estate may have played a role in the killing.

Marley died of cancer in 1981.

However, no one has offered evidence that the murder was linked to the dispute.

Brown has her own theories about the killings.

She said in an interview that Satan killed Tosh because she and Tosh were going to conceive a baby that would be a powerful boy with the Star of David on his forehead.

Less than a month after the murders, Brown, who has been outspoken about the killings, was shot at by four armed men.

Okay, so there's a lot to unbox here, as the kids say nowadays.

And we will get to Marlene Brown's comments shortly.

But first notice how carefully positioned these explanations are within the text.

National Security Minister Errol Anderson, the one who replaced Winston Spaulding, offers the convenient suggestion of drug trafficking gangs involved in Tasha's murder.

And at the same time, unnamed police spokesmen float the idea of Tasha's bitter dispute over the Marleys estate.

These official voices plant seeds of doubt that grow wild in public imagination, conveniently pointing away from the state itself.

The so called gangs that Anderson referenced in Tasha's murder weren't separate from the state, they were extensions of it.

Criminal enterprises and assassination squads operating within the Jamaican police force itself.

These weren't rogue elements, they were tools of control.

Winston Spaulding and Errol Anderson presided over national security when Jamaica's police force was widely criticized for extrajudicial killings, corruption and operating as political enforcers.

The Jamaica constabulary force of that era was notorious for its special squads that blurred the line between law enforcement and organized crime.

A system that Tash himself had repeatedly criticized in his music and public statements.

The elegant simplicity of this deflection, by suggesting conflicts with nebulous gangs or the Marley Estate authorities created a comfortable distance between themselves and the violence that permeated Jamaica's music scene.

The bitter irony, Rita Marley, casually implicated by these theories, was merely the symbolic head of Tuff Gong in 1987.

The company and Bob's assets weren't hers to control.

They were locked in probate within Jamaica's court system.

The actual principals controlling Marley's estate, those who might genuinely fear Tasha's claim to royalties, were sitting in government offices.

The very same government whose representatives were suggesting alternative theories.

What I witnessed during my time at Toughcong in 1986 was the Shadow of state power moving through every aspect of reggae culture.

Each day I was there I would watch Bob Andy put his heart and soul into trying to make Tufcong a viable, well rounded label.

But he experienced constant pushback from court appointed administrators that wouldn't let him do his job.

These were corporate shills with no knowledge of music, not there to help, but to deliberately sabotage the company, make it seem as though Mrs.

Marley was incapable of running the label.

There was collusion between the judges, the lawyers, the administrators, all working together, trying to sell off the Marley estate as quick as possible to foreign interests before Mrs.

Marley could mount a counterattack and keep tough gung in Jamaica with the family.

Alright, so, like a lot of people, when I first read Marlene Brown's claims that Satan killed Peter Tosh, I dismissed it as the desperate ramblings of a grieving woman, perhaps unhinged by the trauma.

But examining this case in depth has given me a different perspective, one that makes me wonder if Brown was more calculated than anyone gave her credit for.

My friend Bunny Dredd, the elder statesman at Tuffcong, used to tell me that during the political violence of the 70s, when direct speech could get you killed, people learned to speak in parables, a code handed down from the days of slavery.

He said people in the community would reference Bible stories or folktales when discussing things too dangerous to name outright.

It was a survival mechanism, truth hiding in plain sight.

When Marlene Brown spoke of Satan killing Peter Tosh, perhaps she wasn't speaking of supernatural forces, but invoking Tosh's own symbolic language.

In his scorching 1973 anthem, Mark of the Beast, Tosh had already established his metaphoric framework.

The police were devils who had beaten him mercilessly more than once for simple herb possession, the beast of revelation leaving its mark on the oppressed.

This wasn't just artistic imagery.

It was Peter's lived experience translated into biblical language.

Maybe Marlene Brown's devil narrative wasn't delusional.

It was deliberate, a widow's desperate attempt to name the unnamable.

In a country where direct accusations against state violence meant signing your own death warrant.

Ironically, Satan became her shield, allowing her to point to the beast that Tosh had spent his career identifying while maintaining just enough vague distance to survive.

The true mark of the beast.

As Tash would have understood, it wasn't just physical scars left by police batons, but silence forced through violence and fear.

Marlene Brown may have found the only way to break that silence without paying with her life, Hiding her truth in a narrative so outlandish, the authorities helped spread it, unwittingly carrying her coded accusations to anyone who knew how to listen.

As the sun sets over red hills, I'm left with these fragmented pieces of a life cut short.

Court transcripts yellowing with age.

Survivor accounts that still quiver with fear, the haunting lyrics of a prophet who saw too clearly the real beast that stalked the Jamaican tree.

In two weeks, we have our finale, where I will share what these scattered pieces have revealed to me about the forces that silenced Peter Tosh's revolutionary voice.

Perhaps in understanding his death, we can finally give him what Jamaica had long denied him.

Not just recognition as a musical icon, but acknowledgment as a martyr who spoke uncomfortable truths to a corrupt power structure that would rather kill the messenger than hear the message.

I see them congregating in evil places they send me what have I done to be incriminated?

What have I done to be humiliated?

So you can go on go free my be smoke banja Cause I know they made pledges to destroy even their mother so you can imagine what he would do to my brother what have I done to be convicted?

What have I got to be coveted?

You know that my wicked.

They said.

We know them are wicked they don't have no mercy they know them are wicked I am so careful of them smiling faces Underneath them are some evil.

Traces produced by Henry K.