By Elliott West
“Later, one of our main figures got shot and that is when we started a war with the Yardies. We let it go on them and triumphed”.
Gang member
Introduction
Numerous stories have been written and films made about how the Kray Twins ruled East London with fear, protection rackets and violence but little has been said about the equally fearsome Jamaican Yardie gangs. The once-good spirit of the Windrush Generation was tainted with a small but disillusioned group of people who turned to gun crime and drug dealing. Prevalent in London in places like Brixton, Harlesden, Hackney and Tottenham, these Jamaican gangs built up a cocaine empire in the 1980s that controlled the drug market in London, awash with this deadly narcotic.
By 1987 the police had seized 400kg of cocaine, a massive rise from 80kg in the years before. With this increase in drug dealing, came a massive spike of violence on the streets of London. The body count piled up with rivals taken out in point-blank shotgun executions. This dangerous trend led the Metropolitan Police to double its manpower in Operation Lucy, a unit set up specifically to tackle the Yardies and their links with the powerful US branch. A unit that was eventually wound down for unknown reasons. Although the Metropolitan Police denied that it ever existed in the first place.
Point Blank
The start of this violence came with the death of Innocent Egbulefu who was thrown out of Islington tower block in 1986. He still had his television remote control in his hand. The Nigerian drug dealer had ripped off Jamaican musician, now gang leader Rankin Dread, selling him cannabis that was made of herbs and tea leaves. Egbulefu was in the toilet at the time Dread’s associates arrived and it is still not clear whether he was pushed or fell.
Sadly this violence spilled out onto the police themselves. The Yardies’ most notorious killing came in 1993 when they shot and killed PC Patrick Dunne. The Metropolitan Police constable was on duty in Clapham when he was shot in the chest by Gary Nelson. Dunne had been investigating the sound of gunshots coming from the house of a club security guard, William Danso. It transpired that Danso had refused Nelson entry to the Brixton nightclub. Nelson was subsequently sentenced to a prison sentence of at least 35 years for murder.
Culture Warfare
As the Yardies’ power rose, so too did they clash with other cultures. In the 1990s, British-born gangs had a running battle with their Jamaican rivals. Although these white gangs respected women, children and innocents, they killed anyone who walked into their manor and injured or killed one of them. This was turf warfare of the most violent degree and would lead to a number of Yardies working with these gangs because they were constantly being robbed. In the end, they just wanted to be safe and soon the penny dropped they could no longer reign the streets with terror as they had in Jamaica. Yet the ironic thing was that these white gangs adopted some of the Yardie culture. One rule is that retaliation has to be within 24 hours.
This unrest caused hotspots to form in London with Harlesden becoming the capital of killings. Yet this was the peak of this sorry state of affairs and it would sever the control the Yardies once had. That’s not to say that white and black gangs don’t still exist but the Yardie factor has all but disappeared. Sadly now, we live in a country where knife and gun crime has dramatically risen. Many innocent people have died as a result especially in London, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a crime cancer that has infiltrated this country from the USA. A crime spree that hasn’t been helped by dwindling police numbers due to efficiency cuts and the move away from having physical police officers on the beat.
