Born Fi'dead: A Journey Through the Jamaican Posse Underworld

Among the ethnic gangs that rule America's inner cities, none has had the impact of the Jamaican posses. Spawned in the ghettos of Kingston as mercenary street-fighters for the island's politicians, the posses began migrating to the United States in the early 1980s, just in time to catch and ride the crack wave as it engulfed the country. Feared and honoured for being "harder than the rest", these Jamaican cocaine syndicates laid claim to their new American, and subsequently British, territories with outlaw bravura and a ruthlessness that was immortalized in song; the raw dance hall music born of their world defined "gangsta" culture for a generation of angry sufferers in Jamaica, America and Britain. The voices of the young soldiers go unheard, silenced early in life by the guns that both distinguish and destroy their lives. This study records these voices. Laurie Gunst is the author of "The Nation", "Spin" and "The Stories that Shape Us: Twenty Women Write About the West".