Organised crime is thriving now

Mar 15, 2012 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
Please allow me the space within your column to comment on an article published in the Sunday Stabroek of March 11, entitled, Guyana, ‘fertile ground’ for gangs and organised crime.
This was a warning by Taylor Owen and Alexander Grigsby, “In Transit” Gangs and Criminal Network in Guyana. A working paper supplied by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey.
I am not sure if the authors know exactly what “organised crime” is, due to the fact that they have indicated that Guyana is a “fertile ground” for organised crime. It seems to me that their article is based mostly on the criminal gangs, who traffic in people and illegal drugs.
Due to my expertise on Organised Crime, garnished from Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States and from working with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, I am in an authoritative position to state that there are major players in Organised Crime within the ruling administration in Guyana.
The definition of Organised Crime as used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation is:
An organised crime is any crime committed by a person occupying, in an established division of labor, a position designed for a commission of crime providing that such division of labor also includes at least one position for a corrupter, one position for a corruptee and one position for an enforcer.
At this stage, I have to take the authors of this article to task, concerning some very erroneous, unconfirmed, unsubstantiated and damaging remarks made in (paras: 4-5), in which it states that the two main political parties in Guyana, namely the PPP and the PNC, facilitate the criminal gangs operating in Guyana, in smuggling drugs and weapons from neighbouring countries to markets in Europe and North America.
What I would like to request urgently of these authors, is for them to provide statistical data, which indicates that during the reign of the PNC in Government from December 7, 1964, when the PNC formed a coalition with the United Force to oust the PPP, to the day the late President Desmond Hoyte lost the elections, there were these gangs, as they claimed operating with impunity and protected by the PNC.
I would like to refer the authors to a part of the PNC’s history, when criminals started to use a, “kick down the door strategy”, killing persons in their quest for easy payloads, and Mr. Hoyte answering them with his own anecdote, “A Neck For A Door”, which certainly saw an end to those criminal networks.
The authors also made mention of Roger Khan’s drug trafficking and killing episode, with the notorious “Phantom Squad”,  and again they choose to mention the PNC as a facilitator of some of these  heinous crimes, when it was established by George Bacchus’s admittance that he was involved in many execution-style killings, at the behest of a then Minister of the PPP Government who was only exonerated by the Commission of Enquiry, because the main witness, George Bacchus, was brutally executed in his bed, just before he was to give damming evidence before the said commission.
What I tried to establish in my previous paragraphs is that the high incidence of corruption, drugs, guns and people trafficking only reared its ugly head during the administration of the PPP Government.
I must also make it clear to the authors and those who may have read the article, that Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham had a straightforward policy in dealing with any form of illegal activity or corruption.
“God help those who help themselves, but God help those who are caught helping themselves in here.”
I am not going to be so stupid and naïve as to say that during the reigns of the PNC, there was no corruption by persons in and out of authority, acting against the stated principles of the PNC and the Government, but I can assure you that upon being caught and positively identified, they were made to face the full brunt of the law.
This is contrary to what operates in this ruling administration, where persons within the higher circle are positively identified as acting outside of the ambit of the law and more often than not, they are given a “slap on the wrist” and in a worst case scenario, moved from one position to another.
There was a former Minister who was involved in many atrocities, e.g. discharging his firearm in a crowded area, because of jealousy, hitting down a serving member of the Guyana Police Force, with his vehicle, leaving the scene of an accident and then instead of facing the full brunt of the law, is chosen to be an envoy.
If this is not corruption, then I would like for someone to tell me what is.
My submission is that for there to be a curtailing and semi-eradication of organised crime, being that it is so entrenched in Guyana in all circles, an Accountability Committee has to be formed by the National Assembly, which in turn will establish the Forfeiture Act.
Aubrey Gill
Criminal Psychologist

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