"Wanted Dread or Alive" Peter Tosh vs. Babylon

Foreign.

When I consider reggae's remarkable journey across our world, I'm always amazed by its extraordinary ability to transcend borders, connecting souls.

From Kingston's concrete jungle to Tokyo's neon streets, from the favelas of Brazil to the underground clubs of Berlin, this music, born of struggle yet radiating hope, carries within its rhythms the pulse of human resilience that speaks to something inside every one of us.

Reggae weaves together strands of social consciousness.

With profound spiritual insight, creating a music where love and pain dance together in honest expression.

It's this raw authenticity, its willingness to embrace life's full spectrum of emotions, that makes reggae not just a musical genre, but a living, breathing testament to the human spirit.

I sometimes wonder if those founding fathers.

Ever imagined the seeds they planted would.

Grow into a global forest of sound and consciousness.

Did they know they were creating an art form that would outlive them, that would inspire entire subgenres, that would become a voice for the voiceless, that their melodies would lift up the oppressed, offer comfort to the despairing, and fuel the dreams of countless individuals striving for a better world.

Kids like me, growing up in the suburbs of Long island, these musicians from Kingston's tenement yards somehow captured lightning in a bottle, transforming their suffering into something transcendently beautiful.

The alchemy of their creation continues to resonate across generations precisely because it speaks to both our wounds and our hopes.

Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh.

They gave everything to reggae music.

And in many ways, reggae music took everything from them.

After spending the past year exploring the circumstances surrounding Peter Tosh's death, I've come to realize there's something even more compelling than the tragedy of his ending, the fierce brilliance of his living.

His was a life consciously dedicated to the struggle to defiance, to artistic excellence.

A life given willingly to reggae music.

And last October, beneath the golden Westmoreland sun, where Peter Tosh drew his first breath, I stood on sacred ground.

The Peter Tosh Festival had drawn me to this humble corner of Jamaica, not just to celebrate his music, but, as it turns out, also to confront the shadows that have obscured his death for too long.

Standing before his modest birthplace, you can sense the weight of his journey.

A child rejected by his father, abandoned by his mother, forced to forge his own path through struggle and resistance.

In that moment, surrounded by the same hills that witnessed Peter Tosh's first attempts at creating sound, the decision to investigate his murder became more than just a super fan's curiosity.

It became a reckoning with my own complicity in the silencing of his story.

You see, for years, I allowed myself to be seduced by the rumors, those urban legends that slithered through Kingston streets and across oceans.

Peter betrayed a friend, they said.

Peter broke his word, they whispered.

Peter invited his own destruction, they concluded.

These poisonous narratives clouded my vision, as they were designed to do.

And sometimes, in moments of weakness or doubt, they almost had me convinced.

Almost.

But that's the terrible genius of Babylon.

The system that Peter spent his life fighting with every fiber of his being.

Its greatest weapon isn't the gun or the baton, but its ability to transform victims into villains.

In our collective memory, its machinery of distortion has been perfected over millennia.

Prophets are silenced, messengers are murdered, and then their deaths are repackaged as the inevitable consequences of their own actions.

Rather than calculated elimination, the system first breaks the body, then corrupts the story.

Even as this series has unfolded, our social media feeds are filled with those who still cling to these narratives of blame.

Voices insisting that a man tied up and executed in his own home somehow authored his own destruction.

Their certainty speaks not to the truth, but to the enduring power of the forces that challenged Peter Tosh.

What I've discovered through this journey, through court transcripts and witness testimonies, through staring at a painting that only reveals itself when you step back far enough to see the whole picture, is that Peter's death wasn't random violence or personal vengeance.

It was the systematic silencing of a voice that dared to speak equal rights and justice into existence in a world designed to deny both.

This is my closing argument in the case of Peter Tosh versus Babylon.

The final bullets in this fight will not come from the guns of his assassins, but from the words he preached and the truths he lived.

His voice, nearly four decades after it was silenced on Plymouth Avenue, still echoes with clarity that pierces through every carefully constructed lie about who he was and why he had to die.

The mark of the beast was never just the physical scars left by police batons on Peter's body.

It was the deliberate scarring of his legacy.

Today, we begin to heal those wounds with nothing more powerful than the truth he lived for.

And as we now know, this story begins September 1986, when headlines across American papers sent a chilly message across the Caribbean waters to Edward Seaga and his JLP party.

Whispers that carried warnings like autumn leaves before a storm.

The Washington Post's stark declaration, Siaga's troubles mount in Jamaica wasn't just news.

It was a harbinger.

There was a reckoning approaching on the horizon.

The bitter irony of Power was written all across Edward Seaga's face during those troubled months of 1986.

The very instruments of economic extortion and street violence that had carried him to Jamaica House were now circling back like hungry wolves demanding their due.

After six years of IMF mandated austerity measures that hollowed out what remained of public services for the poor, his grip on the island was slipping through his fingers like Hellshire beach sand.

And the panic set off a chain of events reverberating from his Tivoli Gardens stronghold to Kingston's general penitentiary lockup.

Michael Manley, more moderate and refined since his previous tenure, was poised to reclaim his position as prime minister.

The pendulum of power was swinging back and everybody knew it.

But when had the powerful ever relinquished their throne willingly?

The previous election's manipulation had proven effective.

And by fall 1986, the machinery to tilt the scales once more was humming with desperate energy.

Former US Ambassador to Jamaica Frederick Irving had revealed the intricate labyrinth of informants that constituted JLP's nervous system.

A network of ears and eyes stretching from Kingston's meanest streets to the corridors of diplomatic power where, Siaga boasted, previous ambassadors had kept him informed of private discussions with the manly government.

In this web of surveillance and control, I am sure that certain threads stood out as particularly dangerous.

I imagine the meeting where the Peter Tosh issue first arose, perhaps in some wood paneled room with ceiling fans spinning lazily overhead as power brokers in short sleeved shirts spoke in measured tones about what needed controlling before the election.

And Peter Tosh's name would have hung in the air like thick ganja smoke, impossible to wave away.

Siaga had never forgotten that April night in 1978 when Tosh stood before thousands at the One Love Peace concert and stated, I am not a politician, but I suffer the consequences, right to see Aga's face.

More than just personal humiliation was the dawning recognition of Peter Tasha as a speaker whose words could ignite a movement.

When Peter declared, I have come to set up this country to eliminate those shitsters.

Cause hungry people are angry people, it wasn't bravado.

It was prophecy.

And we know prophecy has always terrified those who cling to earthly power.

The JLP needed someone close to him.

An ear in the room, a presence at the table.

But Tasha's circle was tightly drawn, his nature reserved, his confidence carefully chosen and fiercely loyal.

Penetrating this sanctuary would take something beyond ordinary infiltration.

Then, like a dark blessing, comes word from prison informants about a man from Trenchtown serving time who speaks of connections to the whalers from back in the day, Denis Leppo Loban, convicted for shooting a police officer among other charges, languished behind bars with no chance of freedom for at least four more years.

Imagine Leppo in his cell, walls closing in, when suddenly a door opens where no door existed before.

All he has to do is reconnect with an old friend, keep his ears open, report back on Peter's political inclinations before the election in exchange early release.

Freedom's embrace, his woman's touch, his child's laughter.

What bitter seeds are planted in that moment of decision?

What currents set in motion will eventually carry blood across a living room floor on Plymouth Avenue?

The calculus seems simple enough.

Freedom in exchange for information, not betrayal.

Surely Peter himself would understand the bargain.

Hadn't he sung about the desperation prison creates, the way it bends men's souls until they break.

But bargains struck with Babylon rarely end where they begin.

The devil's contracts always contain clauses written in invisible ink, revealed only when it's far too late to renegotiate the terms.

Unlike the dark, foreboding figure who wore mirrored sunglasses and projected fierce bravado in interviews and on stage, Peter Tosh was the opposite.

Behind closed doors, measured, guarded, sensitive, funny, never far from that awkward, tall, dark skinned boy rejected by his parents, always seeking love.

The thunder of his public pronouncements concealed the gentle reign of his private soul, where childhood wounds still lingered beneath the revolutionary's armor.

Those who knew him intimately spoke of this duality.

How a man that could make politicians tremble with his words would sit quietly in his yard, carefully tending to his herb garden with the patience of someone who understood that all meaningful growth requires time and gentle attention.

It was only natural then, for a giving soul like Peter to help an old friend fresh from prison's gates.

He helped Leppo find a place, bought him a bed, even though Peter himself was navigating financial straits, hard up, not touring, fighting for royalties that seemed perpetually just beyond reach.

Yet he would never turn down a ghetto sufferer in need of a lift.

The revolutionary firebrand who demanded equal rights and justice on global stages could never deny compassion to someone who shared his Trench Town roots.

Leppo became a fixture at Tasha's Plymouth Avenue home, his lanky frame folded into Peter's living room furniture, smoke curling from spliffs as they reminisced about earlier days, sharing meals with Peter and his wife Marlene.

On his visits for almost a year, the rhythm of this relationship settled into something more complicated.

It would later emerge that Marlene had reservations about Leppo's constant requests for money.

But such tension was the familiar current running beneath any artist's household where inner circle and family space overlap.

By late summer 1987, a new energy surged through the Plymouth Avenue bungalow.

Like electricity before lightning strikes, the melodies of a new album, no Nuclear War, floated through open windows.

An upcoming tour, mapped out on paper scattered across tables, promised to carry Peter's voice to audiences hungry for his return.

After years wandering the wilderness of industry disputes and financial struggle, 1987 would be Peter Tosh's phoenix year, his resurrection before a world that never stopped needing his message.

This revival alone would have troubled those in JLP headquarters who monitored the movement of potential political influences like meteorologists track weather storms.

But what truly set alarms ringing was domestic ambition with revolutionary implications.

With proceeds from the upcoming world tour, Peter was in serious discussion with friend and confidant Jeffrey I.

Dixon, a brilliant social commentator and radio personality.

To birth something Jamaica had somehow never a 24 hour reggae radio station.

Rasta Reggae Radio, they called it.

In planning sessions that stretched well into the night.

Voices animated with possibility, their vision transcended mere entertainment.

They planned to intersperse the island's greatest musical export, reggae, with the wisdom of black leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Haile Selassie, Martin Luther King Jr.

And Malcolm X.

While commercial radio stations and street dances pushed dancehole music with its focus on material wealth, glorifying gangsters and gunplay.

Peter Tosh and Free Eye Dickson imagined airwaves carrying consciousness into every corner of Jamaica, from Kingston's concrete maze to the most remote mountain villages in a country where radio remained the most democratic medium, accessible to even the poorest citizens.

Such a station would be an alternative education system, a counternarrative to both government propaganda and the increasing glorification of violence.

The voice of Peter Tosh, already powerful in person and on record, would be multiplied exponentially, capable of reaching every ear on the island with just the turn of a dial.

And for those who arranged Leppo's early release, this development accelerated the timetable.

What began as surveillance was transforming into something more urgent and final, this next phase known only to those at the operation's pinnacle, men who understood that some threats cannot be merely monitored but must be permanently silenced.

The time had come to leverage Leppo fully, to remind him of the bargain that had opened up his cell door.

Even if he had grown to genuinely reconnect with his old friend, even if his conscience rebelled at what would be asked, Leppo had vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

His child, his girlfriend, whose safety represented the one realm where this hardened man remained soft and accessible.

Yet even as the machinery of silence shifted into its final gear, Leppo himself remained in partial darkness about the full scope of what September 11th would bring.

Like an actor given only a portion of his script, he wouldn't comprehend the full tragedy until he stood center stage.

When turning back would no longer be possible.

When the blood of the prophet would stain his hands forever.

I say everybody get down on the ground.

No.

You think this is a joke?

Get flat, mister.

Get flat, man.

Hey, Belly.

No the Ross to do it.

Tell me where the money that it's where the money that we not keep.

Money at the yard.

Leo, you can't do that to this thing.

I know.

Shut up your mouth.

Is you who cause this.

Hey, boy.

Or you let your woman control the money.

Or you let your woman control your money.

No, Le.

Don't do it.

Through the fog of time and a deliberate campaign of misinformation, that September night remains a mosaic of fractured truths.

Interviews, witness reports, newspaper accounts, all riff on the same major points.

But each should be approached with caution as witnesses began spinning various accounts almost immediately after the tragedy unfolded.

By far our most reliable source, the closest thing we have to an untainted record is Jamaica's Supreme Court decision denying Dennis Lepolo Band's appeal, which we covered in depth during our first two episodes.

Yet even this official document, with its judicial weight and sworn testimony, seems to create more questions than answers.

A text remarkable for what it omits as much as what it includes.

What we know with certainty is that three assailants entered Peter Tosh's home that night.

Dennis, Lepo Loban and two other individuals never identified to the public or in court records, according to several news reports.

And the Jamaica gleaner police commissioner at the time, Herman Ricketts, confirmed these two were brought in for questioning and then released.

These were ghosts who walked through justice halls without leaving footprints.

The court record tells us that after 30 minutes of being restrained at gunpoint, beaten, humiliated, a heated argument between Marlene Brown and Leppo climaxed with one of the unidentified assailants, known only as the Tall man, commanding Leppo to do what he came for.

The document states that after Leppo fired that first shot, which merely grazed Marlene, all men must have fired.

That's it.

That's all.

The Supreme Court committed to the official record.

Notice the deliberate ambiguity, the strategic vagueness.

The court doesn't specify that Leppo shot Tosh as later accounts would claim it doesn't say Leppo shot Doc Brown or Free Eye Dickson.

The only shot we know with certainty that Leppo fired was at Marlene Brown.

All the other victims were lying face down during what was described as a barrage of gunshots and mayhem.

Could it be that Leppo didn't kill anyone?

That he was merely a patsy used by these two unknown assailants?

Perhaps right up to that very last moment, he believed his handlers, that this was only a robbery with maybe one intended fatality, Marlene Brown, against whom they had carefully cultivated his resentment.

How easily could these professional manipulators control epo?

A man whose mental state, after years in Kingston's prisons, left him vulnerable to suggestion and direction.

Feed him enough stories about how Marlene was tightening the reins at Peter's house, how he'd soon be cut off from financial help, and watch how resentment blossomed into something darker.

Once again, music historian Roger Steffens on the state of Leppo's mind.

With Leppo, when he initially got out of prison, Peter took pity on him and.

And bought him a bed.

So he had a real bed to sleep on.

I have a letter, a handwritten letter from him that was submitted to the court saying that he had nothing to do with Peter Tosh's murder and he was completely innocent and he should be released from prison immediately.

And it's.

I think it's four pages of tightly handwritten script.

That's just insane, illogical.

So he.

He definitely had mental problems.

And.

And being in prison all those years couldn't have helped him very much.

True.

And.

And do you.

You never put any credit to that.

The old urban legend about, you know, him actually being in jail on a gun charge for Peter?

No, that rumor that he was taking a gun charge for Peter Tosh to keep Peter out of prison.

Absolute nonsense.

Yeah.

I mean, the facts wouldn't back that up.

Although maybe that's some way to kind of soften, make his.

Him look a little softer to the public, in a way.

But.

But on another note, you do mention his.

His mental state.

Could he have been manipulated easily because of his mental state?

Yes, especially if you subscribe to the theory that it was two policemen who came with him.

And again, I come back to the first thing they said when they got into the house.

Boy, Peter, you dead today for sure.

They were on an assassination mission.

They wanted to find the chest of money first.

But Peter, of course, had nothing at that point.

The lingering question, the elephant that has stalked this room for decades concerns these unknown assailants who move through the crime scene like spirits, untouchable and unmoved by consequences.

How do they walk away, unidentified and free, after being present at a triple homicide where they most likely fired the fatal shots?

They came dressed in suits, making no attempt to hide their identity or their faces.

They showed no fear of retribution, of being recognized.

And in Jamaica, everyone knows the only ones wearing suits and carrying guns, Our detectives.

After the trial, a conspiracy of silence descended, where all the surviving witnesses understandably signed on to the Leppo as soul killer narrative.

The other two assassins disappeared into the night.

Wouldn't you keep your mouth shut, too, if there was a murderer on the loose, known only as the Tall man, who knew where to find you and your family?

This contract of silence was sealed when Marlene Brown received four warning shots from M16 Rifles, standard police issue at the time.

Four shots and one message for each surviving witness.

It reveals the terrible ease with which Babylon could control not just life and death, but the very narrative that follows, shaping how a prophet would be remembered long after his voice was silent.

What other clues hint at a larger conspiracy, like fragments of a shattered mirror reveal themselves to those patient enough to piece them together?

After the murder, Marlene Brown described to the police and press that she specifically heard three motorcycles pull away after the crime, a detail reported in the New York Times within days of the shooting.

Yet we know the only other person tried for the murder was getaway driver Steve Russell, who drove a Volkswagen van, a vehicle whose gentle hum bears no resemblance to the distinctive roar of motorcycles slicing through the night air.

How is this discrepancy explained?

The prosecutor's mind asks.

Maybe both accounts are true.

The getaway car was indeed a Volkswagen van.

But could it be there were also motorcycles on the scene, Another team of assassins on hand as backup should the primary team fail?

This isn't paranoid speculation.

It's the methodical redundancy practiced by professional killers throughout history.

When silencing a voice as powerful as Tasha's failure wasn't an option, why was.

There another team of IMF agents at the embassy tonight?

I don't quite follow you.

Let's see if you can follow me around the room.

The drunk Russians on the ability embankment at 7, 8 o'clock.

The couple waltzing around me at the embassy at 9 and 11.

The waiter standing behind Hannah at the top of the stairs.

Bow tie, 12 o'clock.

The other IMF team.

And what of getaway driver Steve Russell, who mysteriously appeared at the home of Police Constable Leonard Austin the morning after the murder seeking advice.

An encounter that Austin later denied.

The same Leonard Austin who four years later was convicted of assassinating security guard Ludlow Campbell, who, like Tosh, was standing up to police corruption.

A murder that eerily paralleled the Tosh killing in method and execution.

A point blank shot to the head in front of family members, leaving no chance of survival.

Perhaps Russell knew more than he admitted.

His testimony crafted to position himself as an unwitting participant, allowing him to walk free while simultaneously protecting the masterminds of the murder.

A perfect arrangement.

By sticking to the script, Russell secured his freedom and his life.

Meanwhile, Leonard Austin becomes the missing link that connects the well documented state sponsored assassination squads cataloged by human rights organizations like America's Watch directly to Tasha's doorstep on Plymouth Avenue.

This disgraced officer, eventually uncovered by the persistent detective Dick Hibbert, still languishes in prison for Campbell's murder, while the man convicted of Tasha's killing has seemingly vanished into thin air.

As we've already explored, Dennis Lepo Loban's fate remains shrouded in mystery.

A friend working with Jamaica's Division of Corrections stated he died in prison, while an inmate who served alongside Leppo claims he was poisoned in the ghetto.

How is it that Jamaica's most notorious killer disappears into the prison system without so much as a death certificate or burial record?

In the absence of transparency, rumors fill the void like smoke, each version containing perhaps a particle of truth, but none the complete picture.

The legal system's response to these glaring inconsistencies speaks volumes.

When evidence contradicts the official narrative, that evidence doesn't reshape the story.

It simply disappears from it.

The motorcycles Marlene heard fade from court records.

The mysterious suited men blend back into the shadows of state power.

Witnesses find it prudent to adjust their memories when bullets whisper through their windows.

What we're left with is a prosecutor's nightmare.

A case built not on evidence, but on its strategic absence.

The truth about Peter Tosh's assassination doesn't reside in what was proven in court, but in what was deliberately left unexamined.

In the end, perhaps the most telling evidence is how perfectly Tasha's murder served the interests of those he threatened most.

His voice, which would have commanded international attention during a critical election period, was silenced.

His planned radio station, which would have broadcasted consciousness directly into Jamaica's most remote communities, never materialized.

Peter Tosh, the voice that once declared, I don't want no peace.

I want equal rights and justice was permanently stilled just as he prepared to amplify it beyond anything Babylon could contain.

In the great tradition of social movements that have inspired me over the years, and taking lessons learned from visionaries like Marley and Peter Tosh, we just don't want to tell history.

We want to reshape the future.

And sometimes that means rewriting history's lies with patient and persistent truth telling.

So we set up a petition@moveon.org demanding that the Jamaican government reopen the Peter Tosh murder case, finally unseal the files, reveal what dark secrets have been kept from the public view for almost four decades.

Let sunlight disinfect what has festered too long in the shadows.

As we've circulated the petition across social media platforms, a revealing pattern has emerged.

Reggae fans from across the US and the globe eagerly sign and share their passion for justice, undimmed by time or distance.

Yet among Jamaican reggae fans, we've encountered a more complex response.

A certain cynicism hardened by life experiences.

Comments like let sleeping dogs lie and what good would it do to open the case and thousands of people lose their life like Peter Tosh appear with troubling frequency.

These responses represent a real time reading on Babylon's most insidious victory.

Not just the killing of prophets, but the killing of hope itself.

This is the ultimate success of systematic oppression.

When people throw up their hands in resignation, when they accept brutality and criminality as immutable facts rather than changeable circumstances, when they've been beaten into such profound submission, they no longer believe justice is even possible.

But Peter Tosh was not a sleeping dog.

He was a man, a human being who spoke the universe through his fingertips and revolution through his lips.

He was a man who would have stood up for any person brutally killed in cold blood, as he was even a stranger.

His life's work was giving a voice to those who had been silenced, standing tall for those who had been forced to kneel.

The bullets that tore through his body on September 11, 1987, were meant to silence more than one man.

They were meant to silence the very possibility of resistance.

Each time we accept that his killers will never face justice, each time we counsel others to let it go, we complete their work for them.

This is why our petition matters.

This is why this podcast series matters.

Not because we can change what happened on that terrible night, but because in demanding accountability, even decades later, we reclaim something precious that Babylon tried to steal.

Our collective refusal to accept injustice as inevitable.

When we say Peter Tosh's name, when we demand the truth about his death, we're doing more than just honoring one man's name.

We are asserting that no system of oppression gets the final word.

We are declaring the mark of the beast can be erased.

Not by forgetting the wounds it inflicted, but by exposing them to healing sunlight.