Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (24 page)

Please
reconnoitre
SANDY
BAY
and THE ROAD areas first light tomorrow (12 March)

"Snowi?" Senior Naval
Officer,
West Indies
. "(Flag)" means flagship.
"FCO" is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to whom Whitlock wanted
a copy of the message sent.

Two words from the original were
crossed out and replaced, both of them in the first line. The phrase "9
persons" had originally read "seven," meaning that somebody had
been a little to*o shaky to count heads right on the first try. And the word
"surrounded," with all its implications of melodrama and derring-do,
had been put in place of a much odder and perhaps more accurate
word—"isolated." Whitlock, and his misconceptions, and his assistants
handing out oranges at a children's party, had been isolated. Which happens to
rude people the world over.

Not long after the bank manager had
slipped through the enemy lines by the clever stratagem of getting into his car
and driving to the bank, Sergeant Thomas Ryan of the
Anguilla
police went to the Howard house and told Whitlock that Webster would like to
see him.

A word about Sergeant Ryan and the
Anguilla
police generally. The people of the island had had their fill of hard-nosed
Kittitian cops. The Peacekeeping Committee, forming its own police force, had
gone out of its way to find peaceable friendly men who could be relied on to
calm disturbances rather than start them. When I was on the island in the
spring of 1970, the police motor pool consisted of one green Volkswagen beetle,
which would start only with a push. Twice in three days I saw that beetle
rolling slowly down the road, one blue-uniformed policeman seriously at the
wheel and another earnestly pushing from behind. On both occasions I was in my
rented jeep and was able to give them a push. I have never been as fond of any
police force as I was of those two cheerful indefatigable officers, and I was
happy on my visit in 1971 to see that they now had a black Volkswagen capable
of starting with no outside assistance at all.

So we have Sergeant Ryan, a
slow-moving and soft-bodied man with a round face and cherubic smile, a man who
likes peace and dislikes trouble. Sergeant Ryan is not your typical terrorist
agitator.

Webster had gone to Howard's house
and talked to Whitlock, and Whitlock had done most of the talking. Now Sergeant
Ryan was there to say that Webster wanted Whitlock to come up to the house on
top of the hill. Whitlock said he definitely was
not
going up there to
talk to Webster in the middle of an armed mob. Ryan stepped out front and
bellowed this news up the hill.

Rushford tells us what happened
next. "Someone blew a whistle and there was a fusillade of shots fired
from the house on the height. They may have been fired into the air. I don't
think they were aimed at the house. You can hardly miss a house, can you? There
were at least four distinct shots. Someone said to us: 'The General wishes you
to leave.'"

So they left. They got into their
cars and drove to the airport and flew away.

Or, as Whitlock himself was later
to describe it, "After several threats and the bringing of more and more
nasty armed men and the firing of shots I was hustled off the island."

Man is made for error; it enters his mind naturally, and he discovers
a few truths only with the greatest effort.

—
Frederick
the Great

"Force is the only solution to
the problem," said Colonel Bradshaw. "Minister Whitlock's expulsion
from
Anguilla
, part of my country, is tantamount to an
expulsion of
Britain
herself. The dastardly act fully substantiates what I have been saying for two
years, namely that the
Anguilla
rebels are the front men
of a sinister external gangster element and that only the use of force can
properly bring
Anguilla
back to constitutional rule
within the State."

For two years, Colonel Bradshaw had
been practically alone in talking about gangsters and
Anguilla
in the same breath. But now watch the Mafia come leaping center stage, in its
black shirts and white ties and snap-brim hats.

The first claim in the British
press that
Anguilla
was run by mobsters came in the
magazine
Private Eye
, a satirical muckraker that is a kind of cross
between the American magazines
Ramparts
and
Mad.
In its issue for
January 17, 1969
,
two months before the Whitlock visit,
Private Eye
offered this little
item:

The
controversy between plucky little
Anguilla
and the
tyrant Brandshaw, Premier of the St. Kitts Federation, has its roots in the
American underworld, notably in the so-called Mafia, led by Meyer Lansky in
Florida
. Lansky has recently been making a bid to break
British monopoly control over gambling casinos in the
Bahamas
, and has already taken some of the casinos over. It
was Lansky's "mechanic," Dino Cell
ini, who
visited
Anguilla
the year before last with an offer to build a casino
there in opposition to the Bradshaw plan to build a casino on St. Kitts. The
"independence movement" is, in the main, financed by Lansky and is
believed to be not entirely a question of freedom.

That came from a young man named
Paul Foot, who is the son of Hugh Foot, whom we have already met under his more
official name, Lord Caradon. The question arises: Does Paul Foot talk too much
to his father or too little?

In a full-page piece called
"Last Year s Bradshaw" in
Private Eye
for
March 28,1969
, Foot offered the following:

Hardly
anyone reported a meeting on
2nd August 1967
between Bradshaw and Peter Adams the elected MP for
St. Kitts, in which Bradshaw undertook to establish an Anguillan local council.
Adams
, delighted with the agreement, sailed for
Anguilla
to promise his people everything they had been asking for. He was
thrown out of the island by armed thugs. He has not been able to return since.

I don't know which Peter Adams he
has in mind. The one I've met was never thrown off the island, never delighted
with anything about Bradshaw, and never able to sail to
Anguilla
from anywhere with a promise that his people were going to get everything they
had been asking for.

In the same article, Foot had this
to say about the trials on St. Kitts: "The other prisoners came to trial
after six months in jail (only marginally more than the average wait-for-triaT
period in
Britain
).
Their trial evoked a quarrel between Bradshaw's Government and the judges, as a
result of which the trial was suspended, and the prisoners released."

Suspended?

Here's Foot on Ronald Webster.
First he mentions the Dino Cellini visit to the island, and then: "Several
months after the visit, Ronald Webster, the self-styled leader of Anguilla,
told Lord Lambton, Tory MP, that the island's monthly deficit was £3,000 and
that this had been bridged 'by sale of property.' (Evening Standard: 19.2.68)
He did not say to whom the property was being sold."

I guess we're all supposed to leap
to the assumption that the land was sold to Dino Cellini. However, since the
land was on
St. Martin
, Foot's concern seems a little
curious. Even if it
was
Dino Cellini who bought that land on St.
Martin—it wasn't —what good would that do Meyer Lansky in his evil plan to take
over Anguilla?

One final bit of Footwork. In
Private Eye
for
April 11, 1969
,
appeared the following item:

More
light on the "arms for
Anguilla
" rumours. In the July of 1967, a BBC producer,
working on a film in
Havana
, made the casual acquaintance of a rich entrepreneur
with a large loud pseudo-American accent and three passports (Canadian,
Israeli, Dutch) called Van Gurp. Van Gurp entertained the producer on his
85-ft. luxury yacht, and showed him round the inside of the hold. Proudly, he
uncovered cases of Ml carbines and repeater rifles.

"This
was God-Damn full to the brim," boosted Van Gurp. "Full to the brim.
But I've just got rid of almost all my stock doing a roaring trade in a little
island not far from here . . . somewhere I'd never heard of before . . . called
Anguilla
."

What a lovely picture that makes:
an itinerant arms seller traveling back and forth in the
Caribbean
in a yacht loaded with rifles, shooting off his mouth to passing strangers and
making deals with people he'd never heard of before. Does Paul Foot really
think that's the way illegal arms are moved from seller to buyer in this world?
And if the mob was running things on
Anguilla
, don't
they have weapons sources of their own? Is the Mafia really dependent upon some
passing nut with a shipful of carbines? Van Gurp says he'd never heard of
Anguilla
before; does Foot contend that if Van Gurp hadn't stumbled on
Anguilla
in July of 1967 the whole Anguillan rebellion wouldn't have happened?

Nearly two-thirds of "Last
Year's Bradshaw" is devoted to PAM. Foot suggests PAM is dominated by evil
landowners trying to bring down an upright trade unionist (Colonel Bradshaw)
and that PAM created the Anguillan rebellion itself as a roundabout way to
defeat Bradshaw.
Private Eye's
Foot behaved here like what has been
called a "knee-jerk liberal"; he leaped to his liberal political
stance before being sure of his facts. On the one side he saw a black (check)
who was a union leader (check) and head of something called the Labour Party
(check). On the other side he saw white exploiters of black men (check) with
upper-class English friends (check) and supporters in the British Conservative
Party (check). That's all Paul Foot needed to know, and I think it's obvious
it's all he ever found out.

In the course of preparing this
book I spoke with or wrote to several journalists, needing clarification on
things they'd reported or attempting to unravel contradiction between different
reports on the same event. Of them all, only Paul Foot showed any reluctance to
talk to me. I phoned him and I visited the offices of
Private Eye
on
Greek
Street
, and I got nowhere. It had all been a long
time ago, he didn't remember the articles well enough to talk about them, and
he wasn't really that interested.

So the Mafia, which had first been
talked about by Colonel Bradshaw and then very briefly mentioned by Lord
Shepherd, entered British print in January of 1969 via Paul Foot and
Private
Eye.
The next mention was by William Whitlock in an interview on the BBC:
"I think there is a danger that in certain islands at any rate,
undesirable elements can take over. Remember that there are so many small
islands in the
Caribbean
scattered around which might be
occupied or taken over by almost Mafia-type elements who would form a threat to
the security of the
Caribbean
."

Whitlock made that remark in
February, before the
first
of his
Caribbean
trips
and almost a month before he landed on
Anguilla
. It
suggests attitudes that might already have been in his head when he did land
there.

We know what was in his head after
he left. "I will say, unhappily," he told the first reporter he met,
"that a small number of people dominate the affairs of
Anguilla
,
and that they are armed." He was asked about the Mafia, and said, "I
have no doubt at all that this type of organization is on the island."

When he got back to
London
he called a press conference at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and said,
"The Anguillan people are completely dominated by gangster-type
elements." He also said they were "gangster-like characters who are
holding the Anguillans in complete subjection." When he was asked about
the Mafia he was only slightly more restrained: "This I don't know. I
think the phrase which has been used is 'Mafia-type elements.' We have no proof
that in fact they are members of the Mafia. The general feeling throughout the
Caribbean
—I
don't know if anyone has proof-is that they are somehow like Mafia characters.
We know their names. But we have no knowledge that they are part of the Mafia
at all. All that we do know is that Webster is accompanied and advised much of
his time by an American."

That was Jack Holcomb, of course.

But saying "Mafia-type"
and "gangster-like" is a little too subtly seedy; it's like calling a
non-sports car "sporty" or a dog food full of cereal
"meaty." The British press simply dropped the shabby qualifiers and
had a field day.

From an editorial in the
London
Daily Telegraph
for March 14: "
Anguilla
finds itself
in the grip of a bunch of about 50 gangsters of American origins who want to
set up gambling and other rackets."

From the
London
Sun
for March 13: "American gangsters linked with the Mafia have made
approaches to Mr. Webster, hoping to set up gambling casinos on
Anguilla
."

A headline in the
Sun
on
March 14: "
Gangsters
'Control Breakaway Islanders.' "

A headline in the
London
Evening Standard
for March
14:
"
Gunpoint
Island
Puts Mr. Wilson on the
Spot."

From the
Daily Telegraph
of
March 14: "Officials are now inclined to believe reports that have been
circulating in the
Caribbean
for several months that the
American Mafia or associated crime interests are interested in
Anguilla
."

From the
London
Times,
a headline on March 13: "
Anguillans 'Ruled by Fear.' "

My personal favorite is from the
Evening Standard
on March 14: "There are about 6000 people on the
island. Most of them are believed to have guns." If we remember that
thirty-five hundred of the six thousand are children and two thousand of the
remainder are women—if, in fact, we remember that British and Kittitian neglect
have resulted in an island run by remittance, in which most able-bodied men
must spend years in exile to send money home for their families to live on—that
particular line becomes first funny and then merely stupid.

Desperate deeds of derring do.

—W. S. Gilbert,
Ruddigore