He Crossed the Jamaicans in Brooklyn — 47 Bodies Later, Nobody Ever Crossed Them Again – HT
It’s August 4th, 1985 in Oakland, New Jersey. About 2,000 Jamaicans have gathered for a summer picnic. Music is playing, food is out, then someone pulls a gun. What started as a warm afternoon turned into one of the most violent gang battles in the history of the American Northeast. Elements of the Shower Posse and the Spangler Posse from Brooklyn and the Bronx opened fire on the Boston-based Dog Posse and the Tel Aviv Posse.
When it was over, three people were dead, nine were wounded, and police pulled 33 handguns from the scene. 33 at a picnic. And here’s the thing, for the Jamaican Shower Posse, that afternoon in Oakland wasn’t even their most violent week. By the time federal investigators caught up with them, the ATF was linking the Shower Posse to more than 1,400 murders across the United States.
US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh didn’t call them a drug organization. He called them a machine of urban terrorism. The ATF’s director in 1987 put it plainly, calling Jamaican posses probably the most violent gangs in the country. And investigators who had spent their careers tracking the Italian-American Mafia said they had never seen anything like this, not even close.
This is the story of the Jamaican Shower Posse in Brooklyn. How men who grew up in one of the most politically violent neighborhoods in the Western Hemisphere came to New York, took over the crack cocaine trade, and answered every challenge with a level of force so extreme that most rivals simply stopped challenging them.
And what happened to the few who didn’t. Before we get into it, if you’re new here and you like deep dive content on America’s most dangerous criminal organizations, hit that subscribe button right now. We drop these stories every week and you do not want to miss what’s coming next. Now, to understand who these men were and why Brooklyn never saw anything like them before, you have to start about 1,500 miles away in a neighborhood called Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston, Jamaica.
Tivoli Gardens was built in the 1960s as a public housing project. Concrete blocks, open yards, families packed tight. From the start, it was a stronghold for the Jamaica Labour Party, the JLP, and the neighborhood was surrounded by communities loyal to the rival People’s National Party, the PNP. In Jamaican politics, the line between a political party and a street gang was essentially invisible.
Local members of Parliament gave jobs, money, and weapons to the communities that voted for them. In exchange, those communities sent armed men to protect polling stations, intimidate rivals, and when necessary, kill them. By the time the 1980 general election rolled around, the violence between JLP and PNP communities had become a full-on war.
Over 800 people were killed in the political violence surrounding that election alone, the bloodiest democratic election in the Western Hemisphere. And Tivoli Gardens, sitting at the center of all of it, produced some of the most battle-hardened gunmen in Jamaica, men who had been shooting since they were teenagers, men who had watched friends buried in the yards they grew up in, men for whom violence wasn’t a last resort.
It was just a tool. One of those men was Lester Lloyd Coke. Everyone called him Jim Brown after the football player turned actor he admired in the film The Dirty Dozen. Lester Coke was the Shower Posse’s founding figure in Jamaica, an enforcer who turned a ragtag group of neighborhood gunmen into an organized army protecting the JLP’s most important community.
But the name of the gang, the Shower Posse, came from a specific idea. They didn’t just shoot at enemies, they showered them. Machine guns in public spaces, bullets coming from every direction. Innocent bystanders in the crossfire were not a concern. They were a message. But while Lester Coke was building the Posse’s muscle in Kingston, another man was quietly setting up the money side of the operation 800 miles north in Brooklyn, New York.
Vivian Blake arrived in New York City in 1973. He was a young man from West Kingston, smart enough to earn a scholarship to a private high school back home, and sharp enough to see exactly what was available in Brooklyn’s immigrant communities. He started small, moving Jamaican marijuana through personal networks. By the late 1970s, he had expanded into Miami using couriers who crossed from the Bahamas carrying up to 50 lb at a time stuffed in luggage.
By the early 1980s, the operation had outgrown marijuana entirely. Crack cocaine hit American cities like a flood. The demand was unprecedented. The margins were enormous, and most existing gangs on the East Coast were not organized or violent enough to dominate the market. Blake and the Shower Posse walked into that gap and locked the door behind them.
At their peak, federal investigators estimated that Jamaican posses controlled between 35 and 40% of the entire crack cocaine retail market in the United States. That is not a small operation. That is an industry. And Brooklyn, specifically Crown Heights and Flatbush, became ground zero for their New York operations with Blake coordinating the supply lines from his base in South Florida and his lieutenants running the street-level business throughout the borough.
The thing that set the Shower Posse apart from every other gang that tried to compete in the crack era wasn’t the quality of the product, though the hydroponic marijuana they moved before crack was genuinely elite. It wasn’t even the organization, though they were more structured than most people understood.
It was the violence, specifically the complete lack of hesitation around it. ATF agent James Brown, who ran the Miami District Office and spent years investigating them, said he had never seen a group operate the way the Jamaicans did. His exact words, “I’ve never seen a group splatter themselves like the Jamaicans do.
They actually try to take people out in public places. They don’t care if innocent people get hit in the crossfire.” This wasn’t bragging from investigators trying to justify their budgets. It matched the body count. And then, there was something worse than getting shot. If you were an informant or if you stole from the Posse, or if you crossed them in a way they considered unforgivable, there was a practice investigators documented called jointing.
Your body was dismembered at the joints using a hacksaw. The pieces were then sent to your family, not as a disposal method, as a statement, so that every person who loved you would understand exactly what happened and why, and what would happen to them if they made the same mistake. Nobody talked after that.
We’ll get back to what happened to the people who did try to cross them. But first, if this kind of deep dive into organized crime history is what you come here for, subscribe and turn on notifications. We’ve got stories lined up that are going to absolutely floor you. The link is right there. By the mid-1980s, Brooklyn’s Flatbush and Crown Heights neighborhoods had become Shower Posse territory in a way that was impossible to miss if you lived there.
Drug houses operated openly and forces moved through the streets with automatic weapons as a matter of routine. The TEC-9 machine pistol was a favorite. Rivals who tried to muscle into their corners found out quickly that the Shower Posses response to any challenge was not a warning. It was immediate, overwhelming, and public.
The 1985 picnic battle in Oakland, New Jersey that opened this video was one visible moment in a years-long campaign of violence the posse waged against competing Jamaican crews, the Dog Posse and the Tel Aviv Posse had tried to expand from Boston into the Shower Posse’s territory. The response was 33 guns and three bodies at a summer party.
The message was received clearly throughout the Jamaican criminal networks up and down the East Coast. There were also the smaller stories, the ones that didn’t make the evening news but that everyone on the street in Brooklyn and the Bronx knew about. The man who skimmed from a drug house and vanished.
The rival dealer who tried to poach a corner in Flatbush and was found the next morning. The enforcer who was sent to deliver a message and made sure it was the last message the recipient ever needed. One former member named Charles Miller, who went by Little Nut, eventually flipped and testified for federal prosecutors in 1989. He admitted his involvement in nine murders.
Nine. And he framed it in terms that explained exactly how the posse operated, describing himself as a political enforcer with connections that went beyond the gang itself, all the way back to the JLP machine in Kingston. He told the court, “The United States made me what I am.” He wasn’t entirely wrong. The Cold War, the CIA’s interest in keeping Jamaica’s JLP in power to counter Cuban influence in the Caribbean, the US-backed ganja eradication programs that destroyed Jamaica’s legitimate agricultural economy and drove young men
into the cocaine trade, all of it fed directly into the Shower Posse’s rise. By the time Washington started caring about the consequences, the posse was already in Brooklyn and Miami and Chicago and Kansas City. And they were not going to be easily removed. By 1988, federal investigators had seen enough. A grand jury in Miami returned a 62-count indictment against 34 members of the Shower Posse, including Vivian Blake and Lester Coke.
The charges covered racketeering, conspiracy, drug trafficking, and murder. Blake’s two half-brothers, Errol Hussing and Tony Bruce, who had been running the New York City operations directly, were also named in the indictment. For all the violence, all the territory, all the years of operating with what felt like impunity, the federal investigation had been building quietly the entire time.
But catching them and keeping them were two different problems. Blake fled the United States in 1988 on a cruise ship before he could be arrested. He slipped back into Jamaica and spent five years fighting extradition from Kingston. Lester Coke was arrested by Jamaican authorities. While awaiting extradition to the United States, he died in a mysterious fire at the General Penitentiary in Kingston.
The official explanation satisfied almost no one. His death may have been convenient for people with powerful interests in keeping him silent. Nobody was charged. In Jamaica, Lester Coke’s son, Christopher, picked up where his father left off. Christopher Coke, known in Kingston as Dudus, was 23 years old when his father died.
He had grown up inside the Shower Posse world, had been incorporated into his father’s inner circle as a trusted assistant from a young age, and he understood the business completely. Under his leadership, Tivoli Gardens became something that went beyond a gang stronghold. It was a state within a state. Jamaican police seeking to enter the neighborhood needed to request permission from Coke’s organization.
He distributed money to the poor, built community centers, created employment. He was beloved by the community he controlled absolutely. And he was still moving drugs and weapons across the Atlantic, funneling crack cocaine and marijuana into New York through the Shower Posse network while shipping guns back to Kingston to maintain the family’s military dominance at home.
When the United States finally demanded Christopher Coke’s extradition in 2009, Jamaica’s prime minister initially pushed back, questioning the legal basis for the request. The political ties between the Coke family and the JLP were still very much alive. But public pressure in Jamaica eventually forced the government to move.
An arrest warrant was issued in May 2010. What happened next was the largest military mobilization in Jamaican history. Government security forces moved into Tivoli Gardens to arrest Christopher Coke and were met with armed resistance from community gunmen loyal to him. The battle lasted days.
When it was over, at least 73 people were dead, and the neighborhood that had housed the Shower Posse’s headquarters for 30 years was in rubble. Christopher Coke was eventually arrested outside Kingston in June 2010, disguised in a woman’s wig and sunglasses, trying to reach the US Embassy to surrender on his own terms.
He didn’t make it. He was extradited to New York and sentenced in 2012 to 23 years in federal prison, two consecutive sentences for racketeering, conspiracy, and assault. The prime minister who had initially protected him was forced to resign after the Tivoli Gardens battle. The political machine that had shielded the Shower Posse for three decades finally cracked open.
As for Vivian Blake, the man who had built the Brooklyn operation from nothing in 1973, he was eventually extradited to the United States and pleaded guilty in 2000 to racketeering, conspiracy, and cocaine possession. He was sentenced to 28 years but served eight before being paroled and deported back to Jamaica in 2009.
He died of a heart attack in a Kingston hospital in March 2010, just months before the battle that destroyed his organization’s base. He was 53 years old. In the days before he died, he had been working on a screenplay about the Shower Posse, written in his own words, telling the story his way.
What he left behind was a record that still stands. According to ATF investigators, the Shower Posse was linked to more than 1,400 killings in the United States between 1984 and 1989. That is not a final number, including everything before or after that window. That is five years of documented murders.
No organized crime group in modern American history has been connected to that kind of body count over that short a period. Not the Italian-American Mafia. Not the Mexican cartels operating in US cities. Nobody. The people who crossed the Jamaicans in Brooklyn did not survive to cross them again.
The people who tried to compete with them for crack territory in the mid-1980s mostly lost and mostly disappeared. The informants who talked didn’t talk for long. The ATF director who said they were the most violent gang in America wasn’t exaggerating. He was reading the case files. By the mid-1990s, the combination of federal prosecutions and the internal chaos of the crack epidemic’s decline had significantly reduced the Shower Posse’s American operations.
The Jungle Posse and the Samakan Posse, both based in Brooklyn, picked up some of the territory the Shower and Spangler Posses left behind. But they never reached the same scale. The era of the Jamaican Posses as a dominant force in the American underworld was over, burned down by the very violence that had built them. But in Brooklyn, in the neighborhoods where they operated for 15 years, people still knew the name.
And they still remembered what it cost to cross them. If you want more stories like this one, right now, we are building one of the most complete archives of American gang and organized crime history on this platform. And we want you to be part of that. Subscribe, hit the notification bell, and leave a comment telling us which gang or organization you want us to cover next. We read every single one.
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