4 days ago
From tourism to terror: The Caribbean island torn apart by gangs and guns
The gang who shot up Anisa Rampersad's home just after midnight could barely see in the pitch dark. With the firepower they had, they didn't need to. In 60 seconds, they fired 53 rounds from three weapons, riddling her wooden shack with bullets. By the time they fled, four of her five children were dead.
'I woke up to loud explosions, and saw my older daughter's room lighting up with sparks from the bullets,' Rampersad, 40, recalls. 'We still don't know why they came; people spread stories, but we weren't involved in anything – no drugs, guns, nothing.'
The massacre in Arima, Trinidad – a satellite town of Trinidad and Tobago's capital, Port of Spain – is part of an epidemic of gun violence that has swept what was once a Caribbean idyll. It is fuelled by a toxic mix of gangs, the drugs trade and the proliferation of high-powered firearms.
It claimed the lives of Rampersad's children Faith, 10, Arianna, 14, Shane, 17, and Tiffany, 19, and injured five other relatives. All Rampersad glimpsed of the culprits was some shadowy figures vaulting over a fence, although there was little doubt about what kind of people they were.
At the children's funeral, even the pastor, Marlon Alvarez, broke down. Trinidad, he said, had sunk to a new low of 'callousness, cold-heartedness, ruthlessness, and lawlessness'.
The Arima killings, though, were almost two years ago – since when it has sunk further still. Last year, Trinidad and Tobago, a nation of 1.5 million, saw a record 623 murders, nearly half of them gang-related. The islands' health security is being undermined, not by disease or poverty, but by bullets.
The number of killings is more than five times higher than 30 years ago, when Trinidad still enjoyed a reputation as one of the Caribbean's most tranquil, tourist-friendly corners. Today, the murder rate has overtaken Jamaica's, and is second in the Caribbean only to Haiti, where gangs have ruled the streets since the assassination of its president in 2021.
Thugs no longer confine themselves to night-time hits in run-down areas. Brazen shootings in broad daylight in downtown Trinidad locations are commonplace, leading the government to impose a state of emergency for the first four months of this year. Reports of armed robberies and home invasions fill the local paper, the Trinidad Daily Express, which keeps a running murder toll. An island long famed for its night life and street parties now goes to bed early.
'Now you can't stay out beyond 9pm because you're worried about a stick-up or getting robbed,' says Rajesh Ali, 22, whose own home was raided by robbers dressed as police two years ago. 'Crime affects everyone's daily lives.'
Citizens are clamouring for gun laws to be eased so they can defend themselves. The gangs, meanwhile, have all the weaponry they need, much of it linked to the growing presence of cocaine cartels from nearby Latin America. Trinidad lies just seven miles off Venezuela and, with its historic links to Britain, is a potential transit point for Europe-bound cocaine.
Drugs, though, aren't the only problem Trinidad's gangsters are sending Britain's way. The surge in violence has also caused a huge spike in UK asylum claims, some from people caught up in gang feuds. Last year, 439 asylum applications were made – a nine-fold increase in a decade.
Among them were Anisa Rampersad's surviving relatives, who scraped together money for plane tickets to Britain and lodged a claim on arrival. But The Telegraph has learnt that a number of gangland figures have also applied, seeing the UK as a safe haven from which to continue operations.
A Trinidad police dossier sent to British authorities described one of them as 'a serious and immediate threat to the safety and security of the United Kingdom', according to the Express.
The spike in claims led to Britain imposing a new visa requirement for Trinidadian nationals in March – a huge inconvenience for law-abiding Trinidadians visiting British relatives. While London said only that there had been an increase in 'unjustified asylum applications', a Trinidadian minister admitted that some involved people fleeing 'accountability to the law'.
'There's big drug lords in Trini who are killing people, and when it's time to face the consequences they are claiming asylum in England, saying there's people trying to kill them,' Rampersad says. 'Gang leaders who put themselves in harm's way are running for asylum, while the people who really need it aren't getting it.'
Some are thought to be lieutenants of the Seven gang, whose turf war with the rival Sixx Gang sparked the state of emergency at New Year. It started with an ambush on alleged Sixx gang leader Calvin 'Tyson' Lee, in which one of his associates died. The next day, five men were gunned down in a reprisal attack in Laventille, a sprawling slum where Trinidad's steel-pan music was born.
The state of emergency, which gave police increased search and arrest powers, ended in April, with murders already down. The Express's toll for 2025 so far is 203, compared to 303 by this time last year. Nobody, though, thinks that's the end of the matter – not least the US government, which, to the dismay of tourism chiefs, advises Americans to 'reconsider travel to Trinidad and Tobago due to serious risks from crime'.
So what has happened to Trinidad, an island long known as a laid-back holiday paradise, famed for its annual street carnival? In fact, the gang problem has long been there – and actually has roots in the steel-pan music scene. Although steel-pan bands serenaded Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Trinidad in 1966, it was originally regarded as the music of ne'er-do-wells, like early rock'n'roll.
'It was considered bad music, played by bad people,' says Derrick Samuel, a community worker in gang-affected neighbourhoods. 'Families would want their kids to have no part in it.'
Bands such as the Laventille Desperadoes and Woodbrook Invaders would attract their own groups of rival followers – nicknamed 'badjohns' – who would fight with cutlasses and cudgels. They soon morphed into mini-mafias, with businesses paying them protection money and politicians using them as street muscle and vote mobilisers.
What really consolidated their power, however, was when governments began giving gang leaders contracts for public works in their neighbourhoods. Officially, this was to create employment by building community facilities and roads. In practice, it was to buy peace in gang neighbourhoods, allowing leaders to line their pockets through 'jobs for the boys' rackets.
This started with a now-notorious meeting at Port of Spain's Crowne Plaza hotel in 2006, when the late Prime Minister Patrick Manning allegedly signed up scores of warring gang leaders for a peace pact, called 'It Must Work'. It didn't. The bloodshed simply increased as gangs squabbled over the contracts, and factionalised further to get signed up for more.
'The hotel meeting was a turning point,' says a retired Scotland Yard officer who was advising the Trinidad police at the time. 'Previously, there was an element of discipline among the gangs, but within two years of that meeting it had all broken down. In 2006 there were 38 known gangs – by 2010 there were 105.'
Another complicating effect of the contracts was to blur the line between criminal and 'community leader'. Many listed as gangsters in police files simply regard themselves like old-school neighbourhood headmen, who help run parts of town where the police writ runs thin.
Take, for example, Akido 'Sunday' Williams, who lives in Basilon Street, a ramshackle housing district sprawling over the hills of east Port of Spain. Its community centre has just been refurbished, teaching local youths carpentry, mechanics, and other alternatives to a life of crime. Reopening it in April, the then Minister of Youth Development, Foster Cummings, said bluntly that he hoped it would encourage local youths to 'stop killing each other'.
Williams insists he is just a regular Trinidadian, who enjoys holidaying in England, where he is fond of Clacton-on-Sea. But as a youngster, he served prison time for theft and drug dealing, and in 2019 he was briefly detained on suspicion of acting as a consiglieri to the Seven gang – a charge he denies. And to this day, people still knock on his door if they have disputes, seeing him as a peacemaker.
'I remind them that we're all poor together, and there's no point in fighting,' he tells The Telegraph. 'But when you deal with the community, it's easy to get labelled by the cops as a gang leader. Do you see anyone, though, carrying a gun in my home, or watching my back? The police have just branded me, like a Gucci watch.'
Some feuds, though, seem beyond Williams's peacemaking powers – such as the Seven gang's New Year bloodshed with the Sixx. Williams grew up with 'Tyson', the alleged Sixx gang leader, who is currently in custody to prevent further reprisals. The two are no longer friends, however. 'Tyson will be telling the cops that I have done all sorts of things,' Williams claims.
At his offices downtown, acting commissioner Junior Benjamin, the country's new police chief, is sceptical of anyone claiming to be a ghetto 'Robin Hood'. 'These people see themselves as heroes, and regard their time in jail like soldiers getting pips on their shoulders,' he says. 'While I am in charge, there will be no talks.'
A pastor, he says family breakdown is partly to blame for the crime problems. He also blames 'Trinibad', a form of Jamaican dance-hall music, whose singers make the old steel-pan bands look like choirboys. Their music videos often feature artists brandishing guns and making threats against rival gang factions. A dozen have been murdered in the past five years.
'What goes into a person's head is also what comes out,' Benjamin says. 'To incite violence is just unacceptable.'
To counter public perceptions that the police aren't up to scratch – and can themselves be somewhat trigger happy – the commissioner allowed The Telegraph to join a Friday-night search operation around Laventille.
Before going out, the 20-strong, heavily armed squad huddled for prayers. 'Thank you, Heavenly Father, for always watching over us,' said one commander. As a back-up to the Almighty, they also had a drone overhead – a tactic the gangs now use too, to keep an eye on police patrols.
'They copy everything we do, from the drones to the high-powered weapons,' said Sergeant Johannes Josef, as we drove past buildings daubed with Seven gang graffiti.
The operation passed off uneventfully, save for a police dog sniffing out a quarter-pound of marijuana hidden behind a lamp-post, and a high-speed dash to a shooting that seemed to have been a false alarm. Searching a shebeen where someone had been shot two nights earlier, police also found a machete and homemade balaclava.
Not every patrol goes so quietly. Gang leaders sometimes post snipers around their HQs, and aren't afraid to open fire. When the police themselves use their weapons – last year saw more than 30 fatal police shootings – riots frequently erupt, with gangs blockading neighbourhoods. Many gangsters, Sergeant Josef adds, don't even bother with balaclavas any more.
'They have total control over their members – sometimes they'll send them to shoot someone in downtown Port of Spain in daytime, with no masks, even when the area is full of CCTV.'
Yet be they cold-blooded killers or 'community leaders', the gangsters are part of life in Port of Spain, and sometimes pragmatism is the only approach. One of Benjamin's predecessors as commissioner was Gary Griffith, a Sandhurst-trained former soldier, who served from 2018 to 2021 with crusading zeal.
He famously described gang members as 'cockroaches' who would multiply to 100,000 if left unchecked, and had harsh words too for his own force, which he said hadn't changed since the 1960s. But crime fell under his modernising watch, earning him acclaim from the public – and a $200,000 price on his head from the gangs. Even he, though, sometimes tried to harness gang leaders' influence.
'Giving them state contracts was always a bad idea, because we knew they would just use the money to purchase more guns and drugs,' Griffith says. 'Having said that, when I was commissioner, I noticed that many of the gang leaders were brilliant young men, in terms of their ability to lead others. I always told them that if I saw them involved in crime, I'd arrest them. But I also tried to change their mindset – to tell them to use their organisational talents for good rather than bad.
'As time went on, we established dialogue – they'd let me know, for example, about members of their own gangs who were out of control. I think they came to respect me as the Big Brother, calming everyone down.'
Some, though, fear that if Trinidad's gangs become properly enmeshed with international cocaine cartels, not even the police will be able to play Big Brother. Diplomats believe traffickers are upping their presence there, possibly to avoid an anticipated clamp-down by Donald Trump on routes through Central America.
'Trinidad is not the place I used to know – now every Tom, Dick or Harry has four or five assault rifles,' says David Maillard, a former cocaine trafficker himself, who now works as a community leader in gang neighbourhoods.
Maillard, 62, knows Trinidad's street gang scene well, having been part of yet another colourful chapter in its history. In 1992, after stints in prison, he joined the Jamaat al-Muslimeen, a radical Muslim street movement inspired by Malcolm X's Nation of Islam.
Two years earlier, it had launched a bloody armed uprising against the government – the only Islamic coup attempt in the Western hemisphere. While that failed, its thousands of footsoldiers were still a force to be reckoned with, and won respect for clearing the ghettoes of drug dealers. They also found a ready audience for their conservative message, which disapproves of music like Trinibad.
'Are these really the people who we want to represent our culture?' asks Maillard. 'Folks who tell Trinidadians to kill each other?'
The Islamists' street influence, however, is now waning, and Maillard admits that even at their peak, they would struggle to tempt young men away from the cartels. 'The profits involved are so huge that there is no doctrine that can compete with that,' he says. 'To get a man to embrace Islam, you must feed him first.'
So what is to be done? Junior Benjamin, the police commissioner and pastor, is putting his faith in improved, intelligence-led policing, targeting prolific offenders, and using social-media tools to anticipate flashpoints.
Others wonder whether that will be enough, especially looking region-wide. Jamaica, which has cut its murder rate in recent years, wants gang crime treated as a global threat; earlier this month Prime Minister Andrew Holness reiterated his call for 'a war on gangs with the urgency and scale of the war on terror'.
Britain, meanwhile, fears that cartels could also spread to smaller Caribbean islands such as the Turks and Caicos, for which it is still directly responsible. Asylum-seeking Trinidadians have also committed crimes in Britain: in May, two were jailed in London for robbing a Knightsbridge department store.
Some Trinidadians, meanwhile, no longer expect the state to protect them. The government is facing growing pressure to make it easier to obtain a firearms certificate, allowing private citizens to defend themselves. Many wealthier people already have guns, and hone their skills on personal protection courses run by the likes of MH Tactical Response Group, a training company and firearms dealer.
Among them is Dr Barrie Landreth-Smith, 67, a surgeon. He has suffered three home invasions, and treated countless gunshot victims, including children. 'We are now the ones who live in a prison, putting in bars on our windows, reinforced doors, and extra locks,' he says. 'Meanwhile the criminal element does not fear jail – when they go there, they form alliances.'
Gone, he sighs, are the simple joys that once made Trinidad a paradise. 'I love fishing, but I can't go to remote beaches with my wife and kids any more, unless I hire private security to keep watch. The days of pleasures like that, sadly, are over.'
