Delroy Edwards | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers

Delroy Edwards grew up poor in the tough, stifling shantytowns of Kingston, Jamaica. In 1980, at the age of 20, he went to work as a street enforcer for the Jamaica Labor Party of Edward Seaga. Seaga was locked in a bitter election duel with the People's National Party, headed by Michael Manley, and each side was forming armed gangs to intimidate the other.

The gangs did their job only too well, killing 800 people by election day. After his victory, Seaga launched a crackdown, and many gang members, feeling the heat, headed for the United States. Among them was Delroy Edwards. Slipping into Brooklyn on a tourist visa, he eventually made his way into the marijuana business, selling nickel bags out of a neighborhood storefront.

At the beginning of 1985, Edwards learned to make crack. Soon he was selling little else. He worked out of two ''flagship'' spots in Brooklyn - one, a two-story house, the other, an abandoned brownstone near a housing project. Enough poor blacks coughed up enough $5 bills to enable Edwards to buy a $150,000 home on Long Island - and to pay for it in cash.

That wasn't enough for Edwards, who began looking to expand his business. Unfortunately, New York was already crowded with crack dealers; outside the city, however, lay plenty of virgin territory. In Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, for instance, crack was just beginning to catch on. Enterprising local dealers would travel to New York, buy a few ounces of cocaine, return home, convert it into crack, and sell the product for three or four times the New York street price.

In the fall of 1986, Edwards traveled to Washington and set up shop; by the following spring his lieutenants had established thriving businesses in Philadelphia and Baltimore as well. At its peak, Edwards's organization, known as the Rankers, employed 50 workers and made up to $100,000 a day.

The glory days did not last. Edwards - nicknamed ''Uzi'' for his taste in weapons -was pathologically violent. People who crossed him were pistol-whipped, beaten with baseball bats, shot in the legs. One 16-year-old worker, suspected of cheating, was beaten unconscious with bats, scalded with boiling water, and suspended by a chain from the ceiling until he died.

Eventually, the police caught up with Edwards, and in July a Brooklyn jury convicted him on 42 counts of murder, assault, kidnapping and drug dealing. Edwards is now awaiting sentencing. The Rankers have disintegrated.

But there are 40 other groups just like the Rankers, running crack out of New York and Miami to points across the country. Posses, they're called, after their members' affection for American westerns (and the guns used in them). Most, like the Rankers, took shape as gangs during the 1980 Jamaican election, then fled to the United States and regrouped. Here, their 10,000 to 20,000 members, organized in posses with as few as 25 members and as many as several hundred, keep incessantly on the move, slipping in and out of the many Jamaican communities scattered across the country.

To maintain loyalty, each posse generally restricts membership to the residents of a particular neighborhood in Kingston. Posse members travel with fake IDs, making it tough for policemen to identify them. Sometimes, as a cover, they attach themselves to reggae groups touring the country. Today, Jamaicans are believed to control 35 percent to 40 percent of the nation's crack network.

''They're very good businessmen,'' says John A. O'Brien, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (B.A.T.F.), the Federal agency that most closely monitors the posses. ''They follow the law of supply and demand. When they see that a vial of crack selling for $5 in New York will get $15 in Kansas City, they'll move in.''

New York is their ''training school,'' O'Brien says, ''like going to Wharton. They'll take a guy doing a good job in Harlem and send him to open an office in the Midwest.'' On his arrival in the new area, the posse sales rep will rent a motel room and conduct a market survey of sorts to determine the most lucrative spot in town. Then he'll rent an apartment or, better yet, get a single female to lend him one in return for crack.