By who else?
"Jamaican drug lord gets 23 years" by Benjamin Weiser |
new york times, June 09, 2012
NEW YORK - Christopher M. Coke, the Jamaican drug lord
whose extradition to the United States in 2010 followed a furious
manhunt in his homeland that led to the deaths of more than 70 people,
was sentenced Friday in Manhattan to 23 years in prison, the maximum he
faced.
I'm wondering if it was frikkin' worth it.
Coke, 43, had pleaded guilty to charges including
racketeering conspiracy; at the time, he admitted that he led an
organization called the Presidential Click, which distributed crack
cocaine and other drugs in Jamaica and the United States and also took
guns from the United States into his country.
Did he get them from a U.S government agency, too?
Prosecutors charged that Coke’s force was about 200 armed
“soldiers.’’ He was based in Tivoli Gardens, a garrison community in
Kingston, where he enforced his brutal disciplinary code and was so
powerful that he enjoyed “virtual immunity from the reach of law
enforcement.’’
At
a hearing last month, a former high-level member of his gang, Jermaine
Cohen, who has been cooperating with the authorities, described a
half-dozen brutal killings which prosecutors said Coke carried out on
people who owed him debts or had stolen from his group.
Are you s***ting me?
Cohen described
how Coke disappeared with victims into a “jail’’ made of cement slabs,
taking with him a power saw, hatchet, or gun; Cohen said he later found
the victims’ butchered remains.
Yeah, but when you do it waging over over a crock of lies.... sigh.
“Coke assumed the role of judge, jury, and, at times,
executioner,’’ the office of Preet Bharara, the US attorney in
Manhattan, wrote Thursday to Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr. of US
District Court.
So do governments with their detention camps, and so does Obama with his missile strikes.
Time to legalize and end the brutality, but of course that would mean removing the black profits that bolster bank earnings so it's a no go.
The government had also filed a 26-page statement from a
former senior adviser to Coke, identified only as John Doe, who said he
had become “in essence, a trusted senior counselor to the
organization.’’
Another instigator, 'er, informant, or case officer, or whatever.
In court Friday, a prosecutor, Jocelyn E. Strauber, cited
the anonymous witness’s account of yet another barbaric killing in the
jail, in which Coke and two others shot a man in the groin area.
“These were brutal, sadistic, deliberate murders,’’ Strauber said.
So are wars based on lies planned out at the highest levels.
One of Coke’s lawyers attacked the credibility of the
government witnesses.
Can't imagine why.
But Patterson said the bad conduct to which Coke
had admitted when he pleaded guilty tended to corroborate statements by
the government witnesses.
Was that before or after the torture?
He had done some good things, the judge said,
but his bad conduct was such that it offset the good Coke had asked him
to consider.
Isn't that true of all of us in one form or another?
--more--"
Related: Come to Jamaica and Feel Alright
The White Ghost of Jamaica
Jamaican Drug Dealer Too Doped Up to Fight
Jamaican Jive
Also see: Coke bottles may require cancer warning label if drink ingredients not changed
Didn't see that anywhere in my morning Globe, but maybe I should go take another sip.
