Rude Boy

Thomas had to figure it out for herself. One day Michael was driving her car way too fast for Thomas' nerves. She asked him to pull over.

"What did you say?" Michael asked. In a fraction of a second his easygoing demeanor had transposed to rage. Before Thomas had even figured out what happened, she felt her head snap to the side and found herself looking at her own blood and saliva sliding down the passenger-side window. He'd smacked her so hard, so fast, "he knocked the spit out of my mouth."

Thomas tried to tell her mother about the real Michael, but Mom couldn't reconcile what she heard with her picture of that meek, respectful boy. And it only got worse, till one night Michael stalked her at her apartment, ran in the door while she was opening it, shoved her to the floor and beat her until she called the apartment security. Then, like a scared possum, he skittered away.

Earlier that night, John had asked her to be his girl. She told him she already had a boyfriend.

"Tell him you found somebody," John said.

"I wish I could," Thomas said. "He likes to fight."

"He fight you?" John asked, seemingly astonished.

"Yep."

"He won't fight you no more."

In an instant, Thomas reached for her escape. She'd found a protector. "If you tell him that," she said, "if you tell him that and he leaves me alone, then I'm yours."

Thomas found herself driving to the Briarcliff apartments late that night. She'd been with John only a short while when her bulky, battery-pack mobile phone rang.

John picked it up. It was Michael.

The Jamaican kept it short. "I'll kill you if you ever call her again."

Invasion

Dallas police weren't ready for the Jamaicans. If they'd known more about the posses, they would have understood that the city was ripe for invasion. For one thing, the climate was enticing, more so than Philadelphia, Kansas City and other stops along the posse trail. Most important, though, it was virgin territory, under the sway of no single drug-trafficking entity and possessing a large, concentrated population of black residents to hide behind.

The posses took control before anyone could see the big picture. They were tightly organized, imposing ruthless discipline on their workers and adjusting fluidly to law-enforcement tactics and changes in the market. Street cops understood it from their level, but one investigator says racial attitudes kept the higher-ups from grasping the magnitude of the problem. "Most white cops, when you have people who come from the islands, they will never think those people can be smarter than they are," says the investigator, who asked that he not be identified. "They're speaking broken English, they come here, and you try to tell people, 'These people have a business. They are organized. They know what they're doing.'

"There was a lot of ignorance. No one listened until there were enormous numbers of murders."

That was happening by 1988, when Dallas police attributed 55 killings to Jamaican drug trafficking. Only later would the business model come into clear focus, how the posses put sophisticated systems in place to ensure profits. At first they imported workers and product from New York to Dallas, a costly arrangement. Soon enough they began recruiting local kids and renting multiple units at single, fairly small apartment complexes--Dallas has an abundance of these, unlike New York--where the manager could be bought off or intimidated into looking the other way. One or two units would be set up as traps, or retail outlets for crack like the one at Briarcliff, and others would be stash houses, where the Jamaicans kept inventory. There was usually a "cool-out" unit, where workers could get some R&R--watching TV, napping, smoking weed. The location of the trap could change every day, making it extremely difficult for narcotics officers to obtain the search warrants they needed to build cases.

"I'll never forget we found a piece of paper one time, and it was a handwritten list of rules," the investigator says. "You report to work on time. You clean up. Don't take coins. Don't have women in here during your shift. If you want something to eat, call us. We'll bring it to you.

"I don't think we'll ever see anything like the Jamaicans again."