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From the Wall Street Journal
See how crime mash up our country.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704532204575397882614635158.html?K EYWORDS=jamaica
Here is an easier to read version.
By JOEL MILLMAN
COMFORT CASTLE, Jamaica—Two elderly pensioners in this mountaintop village joined hundreds of Jamaicans with a grisly fate: expatriates who spent their working lives abroad, then moved home only to be killed.
Jamaica has the highest homicide rate in the hemisphere, and retired returnees from all over the globe are feeling targeted. WSJ's Joel Millman reports.
Neighbors say they heard 84-year-old George Passley, a retired bus conductor from the U.K. , screaming last November as his home burned but couldn't rescue him. Eight days later, Mavis White, an 80-year-old widow who also returned from Britain , died in a house fire a mile from Mr. Passley's. Authorities are investigating both cases as arson.
"Returned Residents" like Mr. Passley and Ms. White dreamed of retiring in their homeland, only to discover it wasn't the Jamaica of their youth. The country they left behind was poor, but relatively safe. It is still poor, but shockingly violent.
This verdant island has one of the higher homicide rates in the world with 62 murders per 100,000 residents in 2009. Rising violence is an issue throughout the Caribbean , largely fueled by narcotics trafficking, according to a 2007 joint report by the United Nations and the World Bank.
Jamaican criminals sometimes target returnees, waiting until their monthly pension checks arrive from abroad before striking. One of the gangs preying on the returnees was led by police officers.
The number of returning retirees—1,170 last year—has dropped in half since the 1990s. That's a big deal in Jamaica , which counts on retirees and their money to help pump up its troubled economy.
Some 2 million Jamaicans live abroad, nearly as many as the 2.7 million who live on the island. Their exodus began in 1946 and continues today.
The Jamaican diaspora stretches from North American cities such as Miami , New York and Toronto to big British cities like London , Manchester and Birmingham . Many of the hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans living abroad long planned to stretch their modest pensions by moving back to their much cheaper native country.
To be sure, there are other factors besides crime that could be pushing down the number of returnees to Jamaica . Many retirees now have children and grandchildren in the U.S. and the U.K. , and want to stay close by. There also are growing Jamaican communities in places attractive to retirees like Florida .
View Full Image
Associated Press
Jamaican soldiers enforced an island-wide state of emergency after a May raid on a gang leader provoked a huge gun battle.
Ronald Robinson, head of overseas residents' issues for Jamaica 's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, attributed the drop in expats moving back to demographics, not crime. He said many of the Jamaicans from the first big waves abroad already had returned to their native land, and the "pool of Jamaicans likely to return has shrunk correspondingly."
In addition, crime hasn't stopped the growth of Jamaica 's tourism industry, which generated over $1.9 billion last year, and is on track to surpass that this year.
Still, crime news is widely disseminated among expats, and it causes many U.S. Jamaicans to rethink their retirement plans, says Robert DeSouza, a Jamaican immigrant whose Trans-Continental Express Shippers of Queens, N.Y., specializes in moving Jamaicans. He handles about 50 moves to Jamaica a year, he says, down from over 200 a year in the 1990s.
The robbers are "targeting returned residents," Mr. DeSouza says. He says he knows of two elderly couples who moved home to Jamaica then fled back, one to Georgia and one to Florida .
View Full Image
Joel Millman/The Wall Street Journal
Retiree Cynthia Edwards, shown with husband Ephrain, regrets moving back to Jamaica because of the crime.
Many expat retirees, however, say they don't have the money to move back to the U.S. or U.K. Unable to sell in a depressed local market, they instead endure a kind of silent captivity.
"My neighbors, I share what I have with them," said Shirley Passley, George Passley's widow, who fled Comfort Castle for Montego Bay after her husband's death. The elderly couple hadn't insured their home, she said, and lost everything in the fire. Now, her daughters are trying to get her an emergency passport so that she can return to Britain .
Another potential threat to returnees: their own families. Distant cousins, barely known to retirees, sometimes see returned residents as bank accounts to tap. Ethlyn Hyman-Dixon, a 69-year-old returnee from England , was stabbed to death in 2008 by a nephew who was convicted of the slaying last year.
Boxer Trevor Berbick, the last man to beat Muhammad Ali in the ring, was hacked to death in Portland Parish by a nephew, later convicted of the murder. Mr. Berbick was 54.
Crime has hit a retirement community called Southaven in the town of Yallahs , about 15 miles east of Kingston , that caters to returned expats. With its broad boulevards and white-washed stucco walls, Southaven could be any seniors' district in Arizona or Florida —except that many homes are abandoned.
"People are scared. They're leaving," says Cynthia Edwards, 71, who bought a place in Yallahs with her husband in 2005. Toiling 11 years at a Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Hotel in Orlando , Fla. , the Kingston-born woman had managed to scrape together $90,000 for a retirement home.
The moment she arrived in Southaven , she says, she realized her mistake. That first evening, she was robbed of nearly $500. "There was two gunmen who came in at us and took my bag from my shoulder and my friend's bag from her shoulder," she recalls. "I was out tugging at it and they said to me 'Gimme the bag because I don't want to kill you.' I let the bag go and they ran."
Mrs. Edwards filed a complaint. Police canvassed for witnesses, but made no arrests. They later found Mrs. Edwards' discarded bag on the beach.
Since then, the Edwardses have paid thousands of dollars to add electronic security to their home. They have hired armed guards to patrol their neighborhood at night. The couple sleeps with a "chopper," or machete, at their bedside, which they once used to jab at a trespasser's hands after a screen was yanked from its frame.
The Edwardses say they can't afford to move. Even if they could find a buyer for their home, their combined monthly income of less than $500 from U.S. Social Security and an English pension isn't enough to support them in retirement in the U.S. , Mrs. Edwards says.
Returnees say they often are targeted by squatters. Last year Jamaica 's Ministry of Water and Housing formed a special anti-squatters unit to deal with the estimated 600,000 Jamaicans living on land where they have no legal right. However, unit leader Basil Forsythe says he is only allowed to go after squatters living on public lands. Elderly returning residents, he says, "have to go through courts on their own. I advise them to engage a lawyer."
Crime exploded into open warfare this past May, during a manhunt for a top gang leader, Christopher Coke, the "don" of Kingston 's Tivoli Gardens ghetto. Instead, his "gun men" erected barricades against army patrols. As gun battles raged, nearly a hundred people were killed; many more were burned out of their homes. An island-wide state of emergency finally was lifted in July.
The crackdown hasn't made Jamaica 's 30,000 returned residents feel safer. "They're really afraid now," says Percival LaTouche. The former London gas station operator is the president of Jamaica 's Association of Returned Residents. The 69-year old retiree has documented the murders of 345 fellow returnees since 2001.
Pounding his desk in a tiny office in Morant Bay , he says pensions act like magnets for criminals, especially in provincial backwaters like Comfort Castle , where he investigated the murders of Mr. Passley and Ms. White last year. Both received pension checks on Oct. 30 and were murdered in early November.
Mandeville cop Horace Roberts was busted stalking elderly returnees arriving on the night flight from London 's Heathrow airport five years ago, and following them home to rob them at gunpoint.
Meanwhile, police found a second gang, this one with soldiers targeting fresh returnees on flights arriving from London . "It's a copy-cat crime," acknowledged Deputy Superintendent Cornwall "Bigga" Ford, head of Kingston 's anti-robbery strike force, who made one arrest in the case in March 2009.
Jamaica tracks statistics on its returnees, who get generous breaks on customs duties and other fees when repatriating household goods and cars.
Back in 1994, almost 2,600 retired Jamaicans returned to their country. The number of returnees dropped more than half by the early 2000s. It has remained relatively flat every since, even though the number of Jamaicans at retirement age abroad has risen substantially. Just in the U.S. , almost 200,000 Jamaican immigrants are now over the age of 60, up from 82,000 Jamaican immigrants who either were retired or were approaching retirement 10 years ago.
For decades, Jamaican governments have counted on money from expats working in England or North America . Eighty percent of the country's college graduates work abroad, according to a World Bank study.
If expatriates give up on their native country, they are less likely to send money, to invest in businesses there, to buy land for retirement homes. Badrul Haque, the World Bank's Kingston representative, calculates returned residents' pensions contribute more hard currency to Jamaica —$10 million per month—than almost any industry save tourism and mining.
Jamaica's National Housing Trust has engaged the Kingston office of PriceWaterhouse Coopers to market a 429-acre parcel near Montego Bay as Jamaica 's first dedicated retirement village. It would target higher-income retirees and protect them behind guarded gates.
Darren Singh, of PWC Kingston, concedes that crime comes up as a concern among focus groups. But he expects the tales of arson and murder, in a perverse way, to bolster the appeal of a gated community.
"People can't afford U.S. villages," he says. " Jamaica is a market opportunity at half the cost of the U.S. "
Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com
.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704532204575397882614635158.html?K EYWORDS=jamaica
Here is an easier to read version.
- <LI style="COLOR: black" class=ecxyiv198829017yiv1447757691MsoNormal>AMERICAS BUSINESS NEWS
- AUGUST 11, 2010
By JOEL MILLMAN
COMFORT CASTLE, Jamaica—Two elderly pensioners in this mountaintop village joined hundreds of Jamaicans with a grisly fate: expatriates who spent their working lives abroad, then moved home only to be killed.
Jamaica has the highest homicide rate in the hemisphere, and retired returnees from all over the globe are feeling targeted. WSJ's Joel Millman reports.
Neighbors say they heard 84-year-old George Passley, a retired bus conductor from the U.K. , screaming last November as his home burned but couldn't rescue him. Eight days later, Mavis White, an 80-year-old widow who also returned from Britain , died in a house fire a mile from Mr. Passley's. Authorities are investigating both cases as arson.
"Returned Residents" like Mr. Passley and Ms. White dreamed of retiring in their homeland, only to discover it wasn't the Jamaica of their youth. The country they left behind was poor, but relatively safe. It is still poor, but shockingly violent.
This verdant island has one of the higher homicide rates in the world with 62 murders per 100,000 residents in 2009. Rising violence is an issue throughout the Caribbean , largely fueled by narcotics trafficking, according to a 2007 joint report by the United Nations and the World Bank.
Jamaican criminals sometimes target returnees, waiting until their monthly pension checks arrive from abroad before striking. One of the gangs preying on the returnees was led by police officers.
The number of returning retirees—1,170 last year—has dropped in half since the 1990s. That's a big deal in Jamaica , which counts on retirees and their money to help pump up its troubled economy.
Some 2 million Jamaicans live abroad, nearly as many as the 2.7 million who live on the island. Their exodus began in 1946 and continues today.
The Jamaican diaspora stretches from North American cities such as Miami , New York and Toronto to big British cities like London , Manchester and Birmingham . Many of the hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans living abroad long planned to stretch their modest pensions by moving back to their much cheaper native country.
To be sure, there are other factors besides crime that could be pushing down the number of returnees to Jamaica . Many retirees now have children and grandchildren in the U.S. and the U.K. , and want to stay close by. There also are growing Jamaican communities in places attractive to retirees like Florida .
View Full Image
Associated Press
Jamaican soldiers enforced an island-wide state of emergency after a May raid on a gang leader provoked a huge gun battle.
Ronald Robinson, head of overseas residents' issues for Jamaica 's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, attributed the drop in expats moving back to demographics, not crime. He said many of the Jamaicans from the first big waves abroad already had returned to their native land, and the "pool of Jamaicans likely to return has shrunk correspondingly."
In addition, crime hasn't stopped the growth of Jamaica 's tourism industry, which generated over $1.9 billion last year, and is on track to surpass that this year.
Still, crime news is widely disseminated among expats, and it causes many U.S. Jamaicans to rethink their retirement plans, says Robert DeSouza, a Jamaican immigrant whose Trans-Continental Express Shippers of Queens, N.Y., specializes in moving Jamaicans. He handles about 50 moves to Jamaica a year, he says, down from over 200 a year in the 1990s.
The robbers are "targeting returned residents," Mr. DeSouza says. He says he knows of two elderly couples who moved home to Jamaica then fled back, one to Georgia and one to Florida .
View Full Image
Joel Millman/The Wall Street Journal
Retiree Cynthia Edwards, shown with husband Ephrain, regrets moving back to Jamaica because of the crime.
Many expat retirees, however, say they don't have the money to move back to the U.S. or U.K. Unable to sell in a depressed local market, they instead endure a kind of silent captivity.
"My neighbors, I share what I have with them," said Shirley Passley, George Passley's widow, who fled Comfort Castle for Montego Bay after her husband's death. The elderly couple hadn't insured their home, she said, and lost everything in the fire. Now, her daughters are trying to get her an emergency passport so that she can return to Britain .
Another potential threat to returnees: their own families. Distant cousins, barely known to retirees, sometimes see returned residents as bank accounts to tap. Ethlyn Hyman-Dixon, a 69-year-old returnee from England , was stabbed to death in 2008 by a nephew who was convicted of the slaying last year.
Boxer Trevor Berbick, the last man to beat Muhammad Ali in the ring, was hacked to death in Portland Parish by a nephew, later convicted of the murder. Mr. Berbick was 54.
Crime has hit a retirement community called Southaven in the town of Yallahs , about 15 miles east of Kingston , that caters to returned expats. With its broad boulevards and white-washed stucco walls, Southaven could be any seniors' district in Arizona or Florida —except that many homes are abandoned.
"People are scared. They're leaving," says Cynthia Edwards, 71, who bought a place in Yallahs with her husband in 2005. Toiling 11 years at a Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Hotel in Orlando , Fla. , the Kingston-born woman had managed to scrape together $90,000 for a retirement home.
The moment she arrived in Southaven , she says, she realized her mistake. That first evening, she was robbed of nearly $500. "There was two gunmen who came in at us and took my bag from my shoulder and my friend's bag from her shoulder," she recalls. "I was out tugging at it and they said to me 'Gimme the bag because I don't want to kill you.' I let the bag go and they ran."
Mrs. Edwards filed a complaint. Police canvassed for witnesses, but made no arrests. They later found Mrs. Edwards' discarded bag on the beach.
Since then, the Edwardses have paid thousands of dollars to add electronic security to their home. They have hired armed guards to patrol their neighborhood at night. The couple sleeps with a "chopper," or machete, at their bedside, which they once used to jab at a trespasser's hands after a screen was yanked from its frame.
The Edwardses say they can't afford to move. Even if they could find a buyer for their home, their combined monthly income of less than $500 from U.S. Social Security and an English pension isn't enough to support them in retirement in the U.S. , Mrs. Edwards says.
Returnees say they often are targeted by squatters. Last year Jamaica 's Ministry of Water and Housing formed a special anti-squatters unit to deal with the estimated 600,000 Jamaicans living on land where they have no legal right. However, unit leader Basil Forsythe says he is only allowed to go after squatters living on public lands. Elderly returning residents, he says, "have to go through courts on their own. I advise them to engage a lawyer."
Crime exploded into open warfare this past May, during a manhunt for a top gang leader, Christopher Coke, the "don" of Kingston 's Tivoli Gardens ghetto. Instead, his "gun men" erected barricades against army patrols. As gun battles raged, nearly a hundred people were killed; many more were burned out of their homes. An island-wide state of emergency finally was lifted in July.
The crackdown hasn't made Jamaica 's 30,000 returned residents feel safer. "They're really afraid now," says Percival LaTouche. The former London gas station operator is the president of Jamaica 's Association of Returned Residents. The 69-year old retiree has documented the murders of 345 fellow returnees since 2001.
Pounding his desk in a tiny office in Morant Bay , he says pensions act like magnets for criminals, especially in provincial backwaters like Comfort Castle , where he investigated the murders of Mr. Passley and Ms. White last year. Both received pension checks on Oct. 30 and were murdered in early November.
Mandeville cop Horace Roberts was busted stalking elderly returnees arriving on the night flight from London 's Heathrow airport five years ago, and following them home to rob them at gunpoint.
Meanwhile, police found a second gang, this one with soldiers targeting fresh returnees on flights arriving from London . "It's a copy-cat crime," acknowledged Deputy Superintendent Cornwall "Bigga" Ford, head of Kingston 's anti-robbery strike force, who made one arrest in the case in March 2009.
Jamaica tracks statistics on its returnees, who get generous breaks on customs duties and other fees when repatriating household goods and cars.
Back in 1994, almost 2,600 retired Jamaicans returned to their country. The number of returnees dropped more than half by the early 2000s. It has remained relatively flat every since, even though the number of Jamaicans at retirement age abroad has risen substantially. Just in the U.S. , almost 200,000 Jamaican immigrants are now over the age of 60, up from 82,000 Jamaican immigrants who either were retired or were approaching retirement 10 years ago.
For decades, Jamaican governments have counted on money from expats working in England or North America . Eighty percent of the country's college graduates work abroad, according to a World Bank study.
If expatriates give up on their native country, they are less likely to send money, to invest in businesses there, to buy land for retirement homes. Badrul Haque, the World Bank's Kingston representative, calculates returned residents' pensions contribute more hard currency to Jamaica —$10 million per month—than almost any industry save tourism and mining.
Jamaica's National Housing Trust has engaged the Kingston office of PriceWaterhouse Coopers to market a 429-acre parcel near Montego Bay as Jamaica 's first dedicated retirement village. It would target higher-income retirees and protect them behind guarded gates.
Darren Singh, of PWC Kingston, concedes that crime comes up as a concern among focus groups. But he expects the tales of arson and murder, in a perverse way, to bolster the appeal of a gated community.
"People can't afford U.S. villages," he says. " Jamaica is a market opportunity at half the cost of the U.S. "
Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com
.
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