Rude Boy

In quieter moments, he confided to Thomas that she reminded him of his mother, whom he'd lost as a little boy.

Though it's impossible to pinpoint when it began, Soldier was losing his grip on anything resembling a normal life. First came the rumors, the late-night callers with a confession to make: Toni, stay away from John. He's on crack. Thomas didn't pay too much attention to it; she'd never seen John use crack or any hard drug. "I thought people were lying on him because they were jealous of me or him," she says. "Basically, I was like, I know my man. You think you do. And I mean, I got calls all the time."

Soldier, by then, was well beyond his early days in a Briarcliff trap. He'd quickly progressed to running workers of his own. A former associate remembers him from Regency Village and the Dallas Inn, a wretched motel near Briarcliff that still stands. (Two murders took place there just this year.) The associate measured things this way: Unlike the other Jamaican dudes, Soldier didn't ask the boys on the street how much they'd sold that night. He was above that. "He would come and talk to us, almost intimidate us," says the man, who sold crack as a teenager. "It seemed like he dictated a lot of the other Jamaicans."

With his reported role as enforcer came new enemies. When he and Thomas went to the clubs where the Jamaicans hung out, like Club Exodus in Deep Ellum and the Sandpiper in Southwest Oak Cliff, John always positioned himself by the back door for quick exits. When he danced, he always maneuvered behind her, never taking his eyes off the crowd. Both joints, in fact, hosted plenty of shootings along with the Jamaican DJs and booming dancehall reggae. Thomas was at Club Exodus once when bullets were flying, but an uglier incident sticks in her mind.

One night a deaf girl whom she knew from the beauty shop walked up to her at Exodus, trying to tell her something. The girl was dating a Jamaican. Thomas had a hard time understanding her; she thought she'd said something like, "You look cute." Then the woman's sister walked up to interpret. Thomas, she said, was wearing the deaf girl's jewelry--a necklace, bracelet and rings.

Soldier, she claimed, had beaten her up, robbed her and raped her in the back alley at Exodus.

"I was like, 'He gave this to me last night,'" Thomas says. "She said it happened last night."

Thomas questioned John about it. His denial didn't exactly put her at ease. "He said he didn't rape her, but he robbed her and was gonna beat out her 'blood clot' [tampon] because she got in his business."

Bloodbath

Like most of the Jamaicans who made it to Dallas, Randy Shawn Brown was brought up in Kingston, a city of scrap-metal slums and glass houses on hills, where the trench between rich and the many more poor is exceptionally deep. Like Soldier, Brown was raised in straitened circumstances in a hardworking family. His father had a decent job; he worked as a police sergeant in Alman Town. But when the family immigrated to the United States when Randy was 10, there wasn't nearly enough money to amply feed and clothe five children to New York City standards. Randy couldn't keep up with the day's fashion trends, and the American kids teased him viciously. He didn't understand his parents' struggle, that they were doing the best they could, and the teasing "had an enormous effect on me," Brown says today. "I wanted to dress nice and have money in my pocket and be accepted."

In the shadows around his home, though, he observed a means of escape: the fast money kids were making in the crack cocaine game.

That's how Brown ended up in Dallas in late 1988; he was 18. At one time, Brown hints from the visiting room at a Texas prison, he was affiliated with a certain notorious posse, one of the most lucrative Jamaican drug operations in the United States. But contrary to the stereotype, not all the Jamaican boys owned BMWs or closets full of silk leisure suits and BK shoes. Theirs was a boom and bust cycle, with many busts and bouts in Lew Sterrett Justice Center--or Parkland, recovering from gunshot wounds--that left them dead broke. Brown, a talented lyricist, would sometimes DJ Jamaican-style at Club Exodus under his stage name Trouble Ranking, but after getting seriously injured in a car wreck, he found himself short of cash most of the time. One day he was hanging out in South Dallas at an apartment on Gould Street, one of the roughest areas of town, then and now.