Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (21 page)

Another English politician had here
run into the thorny problem of Anguillan democracy. We dwellers in the
metropoli have been calling our republics "democracies" for so long
that we tend to be baffled and uneasy when we run across the real thing. We are
more comfortable with somebody like George Thomson, Secretary of State for
Commonwealth Affairs, who announced the Interim Agreement to the House of
Commons at the end of January (six weeks after Fishers embarrassment in
Anguilla
)
with the words, "We have made some progress towards finding a solution to
this difficult problem. I think in some ways the less I say about some of the
details the better."

"I'll be judge, I'll be jury/' said cunning old Fury; "I'll
try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice
's Adventures in Wonderland

Back in September, three months
before Fisher and Chapman's
Caribbean
trip, Colonel
Bradshaw had gone to
England
.
He had told reporters in
London
,
"I am going to tell the Commonwealth Office that
Britain
should act with military force to disarm the rebels and land a force on
Anguilla
.
We must go back and disarm the people who have the guns there." He also
said
Anguilla
was controlled by "a group of gunmen
financed by dirty money."

Shortly after his arrival in
London
,
a solicitor's clerk interrupted these pronouncements by serving several writs
on him; one from James Milnes Gaskell and two from Diane Prior-Palmer. Milnes
Gaskell wanted damages for false imprisonment and Miss Prior-Palmer wanted her
diary back.

The Colonel returned to St. Kitts.

The detainees had been there all
along. After popping in and out of jail all summer, life had quieted for them,
too, until at last the trials started on October 16, four months and six days
after the detentions began. Judge Eardley Glasgow, who was to have presided,
asked to be excused for "certain reasons," which he didn't go into, and
was replaced by Judge St. Bernard, from the
island
of
Grenada
.

The first defendant was an
Anguillan, Collins Hodge, who was charged with "shooting with intent"
while wearing a plastic Batman mask. A confession was introduced, but Hodge
said he'd signed it while a pistol was being held to his head. The trial en
ded in an acquittal. A "spontaneous
demonstration" objecting to the verdict was immediately delivered to the
Blake-ney Hotel, where the judge and the defense attorneys were staying. The
judge immediately got in touch with the Government and said that if something
wasn't done about that mob at once he'd contact
England
and ask them to send in a warship. The spontaneous demonstration spontaneously
went away.

The
Beacon
had some
interesting things to say about the trial of Collins Hodge. From the issue of
October 21:

On
the Monday afternoon of October 16th we were all tuned in to the radio station
of St. Kitts, feeling sure we would hear some news of the trial. All we heard
were some trivialities and advertisements, but of the trial—nothing. But thanks
to Radio Antilles we heard the truth; that the Government of St. Kitts had been
reprimanded for keeping the accused in prison; for not letting their counsel
see them; and that they were all released on bail. We have heard eyewitness
accounts of the ovation they received as they joined the crowd outside the
court; the kisses from the women; the handshakes from the men.

A week later:

With
great joy we welcomed back to Anguilla Mr. Collins Hodge, the
first
of the
accused in the St. Kitts trials to be found not guilty. Dr. Herbert's father
took him to the LIAT plane at St. Kitts, bound for
St. Martin
. He then came on a chartered plane to
Anguilla
on Wednesday, the 25th. He was taken on a motorcade through the island,
visiting the homes of the other accused. Asked what his plans were, he said
that he would take a few days' holiday and have some sea bathing, and then go
back to work at Expan Company here in
Anguilla
.

And in an editorial the week after
that:

With
the return home of Collins Hodge, freed, every true Anguillan rejoices, and
feels a change in the heavy atmosphere which has hung over our little island
during the last few months. Earnest lawyers from St. Kitts and other
Caribbean
countries are diligently employing legal procedure, well-learned from
British jurisprudence. Before this onslaught, false implications and lies are
withering away.

The falsity apparently included
bribery and coercion of prosecution witnesses. One police officer testified
he'd been ordered to lie in court. An Anguillan, Clarence Rogers, told of being
bribed to give false statements about Billy Herbert. According to an affidavit
signed by
Rogers
, the bribe was
paid in a hotel room on
St. Thomas
,
and the bribers were two men connected with the St. Kitts Government, plus an
American couple, John and Vera Randall.

Enter the Randalls. Not long before
the rebellion, the Randalls had bought a piece of land on
Anguilla
from the St. Kitts Government. Apparently they'd used most of their savings to
do it and were planning to build guesthouses as well as a home for themselves.
They got their own house built, the rebellion broke out, and they put their
money on the wrong horse. They backed St. Kitts, and apparently even took an
active role once or twice on St. Kitts's behalf. The fact that four years later
they were still alive and intact and living in the same house on
Anguilla
—particularly
after the Clarence Rogers story and some other rumors that traveled around the
island-is a fair indication of the savagery of the Anguillans.

But back to the trials. In addition
to the spontaneous demonstration, the judge also got a telephone call and a
letter threatening him with death if there were any more acquittals. So there
were more acquittals.

The second trial, with five
defendants, was simply a choral repeat of the Collins Hodge solo, and all five
were found not guilty. Three of those acquitted were Anguillans; as they left
the court on November 13 after the acquittal, these three were immediately
rearrested and charged with taking policemen's rifles back on May 30. The crowd
outside the courthouse was pro-defendant, but the police held it at bay with
cattle prods.

The next day, Colonel Bradshaw did
an odd thing, considering there were more trials coming up. He called his House
of Assembly, led a debate on the trials, broadcast live on ZIZ, in which
matters that hadn't been decided yet by any court were presented as facts, and
rammed through a resolution that said that the House of Assembly of St. Kitts felt
a "lack of confidence in the administration of justice in this
State." Colonel Bradshaw also caused to be created a document called
"Complaint Against the Judge," accusing Judge St. Bernard of
"bias," "maladministration," "perversion of
justice" and corruption. The document was sent to the Chief Justice of the
Associated States Supreme Court, who replied six days later by slamming the St.
Kitts Government up, down and sideways, accusing St. Kitts of contempt of
court, attempting to prejudice a fair trial, using the Government-controlled
radio and newspaper as clubs against the court, and general lack of decent
behavior. The Chief Justice also said he was making his response public with
the full knowledge and approval of all the other judges on the High Court.

At the third trial there were seven
defendants, including Billy Herbert. But the prosecution announced it didn't
have any evidence to offer beyond what had been presented in the first two
trials, so they might just as well find the defendants not guilty right at the
beginning. Which they did.

Thus ended the trials—or almost.
There were still the three Anguillans who'd been rearrested behind cattle prods
and charged with taking policemen's guns away from them. They were out on bail,
and so was a fourth Anguillan, Lemuel Phillips, who had been detained from the
beginning but had never been tried for anything. The bail money had been raised
from friendly Kittitians and legally the Anguillans were required to stay on
St. Kitts until the Government could figure out some way to try them, but one
dark night they stepped aboard a northbound schooner and went away from there.
(After a short rest in
Anguilla
, they headed farther
north, to
St. Thomas
, to earn
enough money to pay back to their Kitti-tian friends the bail money that had
been forfeited.)

Just after the final trial, the
six-month period of the Emergency Regulations was up. As expected, Colonel
Bradshaw got his House of Assembly to renew them for another six months. He
also announced that all Kittitians who had been defendants would have their
passports withdrawn. This was reasonable and justifiable, he explained, because
the defendants had been charged with plotting against the state. That they'd
been found not guilty didn't matter.

He also expressed again his
irritation with the way the trials had gone and increased his reputation as a
statesman by saying, "Next time, evidence will be picked up in blood in
the street."

But nobody was entirely happy about
the conduct of the trials. The Bar Associations of ten Caribbean islands had a
meeting to discuss the trials, at the end of which they published a paper
condemning the St. Kitts Government's actions "as being contrary to the
principles of the Rule of Law and being inimical to the due administration of
Justice and as constituting an affront to basic human rights and dignity."
They documented their charges with six specific points and sent the paper
around to lawyers and judges and government leaders all over the world.

But the legal profession wasn't
through with Colonel Bradshaw. The next thumping was delivered by the
International Commission of Jurists in a report on the St. Kitts trials; it
said, among other things, "The indictment against the St. Kitts Government
is a long one: it has repeatedly shown contempt for the courts, has refused to
accept their decision and has flagrantly attempted—by threats and the misuse of
the mass media —to use the courts as an instrument of its policy. When the
courts proved to be instruments of the Rule of Law, it resorted to government
by emergency regulation and trial by 'Commission of Inquiry.'"

But let s give the last word on the
St. Kitts trials to Atlin Harrigan, in the
Beacon:

There
lingers in the minds of thinking Anguillans a feeling of shame, shame that we
have ever been associated with St. iStts' Government as it stands today; a
system so deteriorated that a police state has resulted . . . That Government
is one of hate which uses its laws as weapons to castigate, muzzle and punish
any hapless individual brave enough to stand up against the system . . . Did we
really rebel? Or did the St. Kitts Government, weakened by ailing politican
conditions, lose its wavering grip on us and slip back into its quagmire of
corruption (with just a little local help)?

Nouns of number, or multitude, such as Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House
of Commons, Regiment, Court of King's Bench, Den of Thieves, and the like.

—William Cobbett,
English Grammar

The most dramatic event of 1968
took place on January 1; that's the kind of year it was. The event itself was
dramatic enough: a mysterious murder. A nineteen-year-old girl, Robena Diego,
was shot by a bullet from a .38-caliber gun and died on the way to the
hospital. She had been walking along the road with her boy friend, a
twenty-year-old former Kittitian. His story was that they had been strolling
together, he pushing his bicycle with the hand that wasn't holding hers, and
suddenly she fell down. However, as there didn't seem to have been anyone else
in the general vicinity, the boy was arrested by the Anguillan police and
charged with murder.

The gun was quickly found; a
revolver in a brown paper bag behind a low wall thirty feet from where the girl
was shot. Roger Fisher's young assistant, Frank McDonald, spent a few days
flying around the
Caribbean
with this gun, trying to get
some island's police force to check it for fingerprints, but nobody wanted to
cross Colonel Bradshaw, so he finally had to give up. Also, since a murder
charge was far above Peter Adams' even theoretical jurisdiction, and since the
Anguilla Police Department had no experience or training or equipment for
investigating a case like this, there was little anybody could do. The boy
friend stayed in jail, the gun was locked away in the police safe, and Robena
Diego was buried.

Meanwhile Tony Lee was on the
island, waiting for Lord Shepherd in
England
to finish the formalities of setting up the Interim Agreement. This finally
happened on January 16. Now everybody had a year in which
Anguilla
would be run more or less directly from
Great
Britain
, with Tony Lee as our man in
Anguilla
under the title Senior British Official.

Nothing had been changed
legally—the murder charge, for instance, still couldn't be tried anywhere but
in St. Kitts—but there was'a temporary period in which everybody had agreed not
to raise a fuss, the idea being that the Interim would be spent trying to find
a solution with some permanence in it.

Very very slowly passed 1968. On
March 8, the anniversary of the burning of the Warden's house, Dr. Hyde's house
was burned. Dr. Hyde understandably took his wife and mother and children and
went home to
England
.
Anguilla
was at loose ends for a doctor until an
American, Dr. Felix Spector, arrived to take over. Dr. Spector was a
Philadelphian with twenty-five years' medical experience, but he had run into
some trouble with the law concerning an operation that is legal in some parts
of the world but not in the particular place where Dr. Spector performed it. He
was tried and convicted, and the judge sentenced him to two years' practice in
an undeveloped part of the world in lieu of jail.

Also in 1968
Burrowes
Park
underwent a name change. This
was the place where Ronald Webster made all his public announcements, and
several of his followers decided the park should bear his name. And so it was
done, and
Burrowes
Park
became Ronald Webster's Park.

It was also the year that British
journalist Colin Rickards asked Colonel Bradshaw why, since Anguilla was a
financial drain on him and he didn't like Anguillans anyway, he didn't let them
go ahead and secede, to which the Colonel replied, "That would not be
statesmanlike. There would be fragmentation throughout the
West
Indies
.
Barbuda
would secede from
Antigua
,
Tobago
from
Trinidad
, possibly
Carriacou from
Grenada
and even Bequia from
St. Vincent
. It is up to me as a
Caribbean
statesman to prevent this from happening. I must shoulder my responsibilities.
Anguilla
is the cross that I must bear."

It soon became obvious that what
the British intended with the Interim Agreement Year was to play a game of
Masterly Inactivity, waiting for the Anguillans to calm themselves and march
obediently back to St. Kitts, as though this were simply a case of hysterics.
Tony Lee soon came to understand that there was no way to make the scenario run
like that and kept telling his superiors so, but there must be something
peculiar in the air of Anguilla—Great Britain can t hear anybody from there.

Possibly because a connection with
Great Britain now seemed so much more hopeful, or possibly because of tensions
aggravated by the passage of time, various relationships on the island began to
undergo a change; practically none of them for the better. The Island Council
decided it didn't want Frank McDonald around any more and also told Roger
Fisher they'd let him know if they ever needed
him
again. Relations
between Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan became increasingly strained as they
moved more and more into new roles, Webster becoming the solitary leader,
shrugging off the restrictions of working with the Island Council and
eventually packing the Council with yes men, and Harrigan becoming the
island's— and Webster's—Jiminy Cricket, sniping away at local errors and
peccadilloes via the
Beacon.
On March 2, for instance, he wrote,
"What is happening to our Council Members? How many more pieces of bad
legislation will be passed? Cannot any of them think before they make a
move?"

But Harrigan didn't confine himself
to watchdogging Webster and the Island Council. Very early in 1968 he saw what
a foot-dragging operation the Interim Agreement really was and began
complaining about it. On February 24 he published an "open letter to Lord
Shepherd," which said in part:

Two months have passed since
Anguilla
accepted the interim agreement, and with the presence of Mr. Tony Lee on the
island we realize that there is no longer a danger of overt hostile action
being taken against us ... In other respects there has been no alleviation of
our difficulties. The savings of many hundreds of Anguillans are still frozen
in the Treasury of St. Kitts . . . the share of the U. K. grant which should
have come to Anguilla last year never reached us . . . Mr. Tony Lee is here in
Anguilla (in the words of your letter of January 16th, 1968) "to assist
with the administration of Anguilla, with the object of working towards an
agreed long-term solution for the island." Both these objectives are being
hindered by the delay in settling these eight-month-old grievances*.

The bank had also been a problem,
but that was in the process of being resolved—not through any activity on the
part of the British, however, whose Inactivity was at that time at its most
Masterly.

There had originally been two banks
on
Anguilla
, one a local branch of
Great
Britain
's Barclays Bank and the other the
Mid-Atlantic Bank with its home office in
Basseterre
.
Barclays had shut its doors very early in the proceedings, while the
Mid-Atlantic was still open and trying to do business without any money.

But the Mid-Atlantic Bank was a
strange little outfit, straight out of an Eric Ambler novel. It was started in
the sixties by a man named Sidney Alleyne, who has the kind of past history
that makes frequent use of the word "alleged." He is from Barbados
and was involved with a racist-cwm-Communist political party on Jamaica in
1962, none of whose candidates got enough votes to save their deposits; you put
up a deposit and if you don't get an eighth of the vote you lose the money.
They lost the money.

It is alleged that in
Trinidad
he passed counterfeit money. It is also alleged that he did some gunrunning to
various African nations in the sixties; for this or some other reason, he was
named an Honorary Colonel in the Algerian Army. He also got involved in
politics in his home
island
of
Barbados
in 1964, but it is alleged he passed some queer money on a high official and
had to go somewhere else.

From somewhere in this forest of
allegations, Alleyne picked up nearly half a million dollars. With this money
and some personal contacts in the St. Kitts Government, he set up the Mid-Atlantic
Bank and became its major shareholder. The original idea was that it would be
an investment bank with numbered accounts (shades of Jerry Gumbs!), but since
there wasn't at that time any other bank on
Anguilla
the
Mid-Atlantic became a general-purpose bank.

Enter, in dramatic lighting, a
Swiss citizen named Walter Germann, who lived in
New York
and had started the Bank of Panama. (If only Sydney Greenstreet were alive to
play the role.) The Bank of Panama had been put together with Nazi money from Argentina,
Teamsters Union money, Nevada and Puerto Rico gambling money and (here comes an
"alleged") alleged Mafia money.

But the finest asset of the Bank of
Panama was a piece of paper. It was letterhead stationery from a reputable
American geological survey and assaying company, and it said that rich gold-ore
deposits had been found in
Ecuador
on a piece of land owned by the Bank of Panama. This letter was signed by a
well-known member of the firm who had recently died, so nobody could ask him if
that was really his signature.

I'm not suggesting that anybody was
out to sell gold-mine stock, not in this sophisticated day and age. You don't
need a gold mine, and no gold has been mined on that bit of land in
Ecuador
;
all you need is the piece of letterhead stationery. You borrow all the money
you want and put up the land as security.

These two bankers, Alleyne and
Germann, allegedly met when both were wearing their gunrunning hats. Germann
had a Swiss corporation called Interhandle, and it is alleged that Interhandle
handled the gun sales to Boumedienne in
Algeria
,
Tshombe in the (Belgian)
Congo
and Colonel Ojukwu in
Biafra
.

Back in the
Caribbean
,
Germann saw what a nice little bank Alleyne had on St. Kitts, and one way or
another he hustled Alleyne out and took over the operation himself. It is
alleged Alleyne lost a lot of money and was very bitter about it. Germann sent
down two assistants, improbably named
Labe
and Schwarm, to run the Mid-Atlantic Bank for him.

Unfortunately, a little difficulty
had come into Walter Ger-mann's life. A Federal Grand Jury in
New
York
decided that much of what he was doing,
particularly with the Bank of Panama, required their attention. This was in
March of 1965. Germann said he really couldn't give comprehensive answers to
their questions unless he looked in his account books, which were in
Switzerland
;
could he go get them? The Grand Jury said Yes. Walter Germann went to
Switzerland
and refused to come back, putting him in contempt of court in
New
York
. He didn't seem to mind.

The end of the Walter Germann
story—or maybe it isn't the end—is also imitation Eric Ambler. Germann
committed suicide by shooting himself in the face so that he was no longer
recognizable. The final allegation is that the body in Walter Germann's grave over
there in
Switzerland
is somebody other than Walter Germann.

So that's the bank. The miracle is
that the Kittitians didn't wake up one morning and find the whole building
gone.

Early in 1968, the Bank of America
stepped in and bought the Mid-Atlantic Bank, from whoever was left to sell it.
The Bank of America agreed with the Anguillans that their branch would not be
administered from St. Kitts, but from
St. Croix
, one of
the U.S. Virgin Islands, a shift in responsibility that made banking possible
once again on
Anguilla
.

It also made it possible at last
for Anguillans to withdraw their savings, which just about all of them did. The
result was a run on the bank, ending with the only instance in the history of
the Bank of America that one of its branches had to shut its doors. The closing
was only temporary. More money was brought in from another branch, and when the
Anguillans saw that this bank was businesslike in its behavior most of them
deposited their cash right back in again.

A murder, a bank opening; the story
of
Anguilla
had shifted from international politics to
small-town commonplaces. At the end of August, with more than half the year of
grace already gone, Tony Lee went back to
London
and met with officials there. Sluggishly the bureaucratic machinery began to
respond to reality. In October, Mr. Willian Whitlock, Parliamentary
Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs—and a Labour
M.P.—invited Ronald Webster and Robert Bradshaw to London to talk things over.

The talks started on October 14.
But nobody was sure what would happen if Webster and Bradshaw met face to face
so the first week was spent with everybody simply talking to Whitlock. The
Kittitians chatted with him in the morning, and the Anguillans chatted with him
in the afternoon. Finally Whitlock offered both sides three possible plans for
ending the stalemate; Webster liked only plan one, Bradshaw liked only plan
three.

The
Trinidad Guardian
summed
up the meetings: "Interim report on the current interim Conference on the Interim
Agreement' on
Anguilla
:—No progress, no confrontation,
no compromise, no cash, no comment."