LAST week saw the drive-by shooting death of “Trini”, the bodyguard of the late Ricardo Rodrigues, on Laluni Street in Queenstown. He had just exited the driveway of another associate when three men drove up and pumped bullets into his body. He was later taken to the Georgetown Hospital, where he died. His death comes in the wake of five others who were connected in some way or the other to the drugs underworld. Gruesome and frightening deaths, I must agree, but predictable nonetheless because, as the saying goes, “when you go a crab dance yuh gaffa get mud ah yuh skin.”

And that’s exactly what is taking place right now. A lot of those dirty, hidden deals and associations that were made in the past are now being paid off with the price of blood.
 I guess all those who were part and parcel of the big drugs empire are shivering in their boots at the moment. These latest killings have sent shock-waves through their ranks, as they ask the question: “Who’s next?” “Who’s next?” is the cry.

To answer this question I will pose another: “For whom do the bells toll?”, because I am sure there will be more executions coming. It is not that I will lose any sleep when these fellas die; far from it, for the wages of sin is death. It is sweet relief when these guys die. Certainly, it is less work for the police, as citizens breathe a sigh of relief that there is one less irritant in the kingdom of drugs to worry about.

The strange thing about the underworld is the cruel and exact way they carry out their punishment. Whenever there is a falling out between members, the answer is death – swift and brutal. It then boggles the mind why people still persist in this reckless and brutal form of living. The answer to that is the allurement of big money.

But big money also carries with it big deaths too. This is something those fools fail to take into consideration. It leads me to recall the Dole Chadee years in Trinidad, when one of the orders given was “kill everything that moves” the dog in the passageway got the worst of it when he moved.

There is only one disturbing element to these killings, and that is the certainty of innocent people getting hurt. The last shooting saw bullets piercing the walls of a nearby pre-school. It was school hours and kids were at school, only to be traumatised by the reckless shooting by these crazy gunmen.

In the mad reprisal rush to finish each other off, passers-by, or innocent kids for that matter, can get killed. This is what very nearly happened last week.

There is no quick fix to this problem, but I can make one suggestion: Those in the underworld must be ostracised. We know them, we see them, they live in our communities, these so called businessmen who flaunt big gold chains and drive expensive vehicles.

Alert law enforcement of their presence, so that surveillance can be carried out to determine their true identities. Society must put aside the opposition notion of hating the police; this will do society no good. We must work with the police and the Home Affairs Ministry to bring these fellas in. There is a public call-in number there, and you can pass on valuable information anonymously to the authorities. This is one sure way in which we can take back our communities from these dubious characters.