George McKenzie was assassinated on Monday night by a lone gunman. Junie Balls, Balls, or Junior, was 33 years old. For a long time, Junior was considered the leader of the Crips in Belize, who were thought to be based mainly in Majestic Alley and Mayflower Street.
The gang situation in Belize is no longer a straight Crips vs Bloods thing, as it was in 1992 when the Crips leader, Itza, was killed at the National Stadium in Belize City, and the Crips retaliated three months by murdering the Bloods leader, Tunan, in New York City.
In the years when weed was the only real “drug” in Belize, there was no need for gangs. If you wanted to smoke reefer, you went across the Yarborough bridge or you went to Pink Jungle (between Lovely Lane and Pickstock Street), and other little spots in town. The fact that weed was and is illegal, meant that these “spots” were considered unrespectable parts of town.
Cocaine came on the scene here as early as the middle 1970’s, when discos were introduced. But it was only powder cocaine. Later in the 1970’s and the early 1980’s, the various pills, such as valium, became common. This was when we first started hearing about Plues Street.
In 1985, the newly elected, pro-Washington UDP government sprayed Belize’s marijuana fields with paraquat. This was a disaster for Belize’s weed smokers, who had generally resisted the lure of cocaine and the pills. Now all that was available was green weed. No good. Some people began to mix it with cocaine to make something called “primo.” This was the thin edge of the wedge for many long-time weed smokers, a lot of whom got hooked on crack cocaine in 1986 and after that. The gangs came on the scene right after that, in 1987 or so, and it soon became Majestic Alley Crips and George Street Bloods in the “main event,” so to speak.
Cocaine is a drug which is much more valuable than weed. After all, to begin with, cocaine is an imported product. As Smokey Joe is always telling us, weed used to grow wild in Belize. The gangs sprang up not only to protect crack cocaine distribution outlets, but also as ad hoc “jackers” of intra-city shipments.
Partridge Street is just a couple hundred yards west of Mayflower Street. When Amandala set up shop back here in 1972, after filling a piece of swamp land, there was no crack and no gangs. George McKenzie, Jr. was born in 1974, June 19. At Mike’s Club on Regent Street West, which is right next to my family home, I had become friends with Miss Deltrude Uter, the common-law wife of Alvin Diamond, who took over the club after its founder, Mike Zayden, died. The late Miss Deltrude, a slim and serious lady, was an original Mayflower Street resident. Immediately to her left lived Lester “Bailar” Smith and his family. The late Bailar was Mayflower’s most famous resident, because he had founded the Lakers football team which had grown into the championship Berger 404 club. Bailar was a Lake pioneer. “The Lake” did not exist before the 1960’s. It was just “Prisoner Creek.”
My late younger brother, Michael, had joined Bailar’s Berger 404 for the 1974/75 season, which would be the Lake’s first championship season. For most of the season, he played left wing for Berger. But the Berger left wing had been James Adderly, the legendary Garrincha Adderly’s older brother.
James was a very good player, who would later become so good he led the league in scoring while playing for White Label. But in 1974/75, he had not yet become a superstar. On Mayflower, however, he was very large, because James, an S.J.C. Sixth Form graduate, was a Customs officer “at the border.” So he was the richest player on Berger. Sandra Trapp, Miss Deltrude’s oldest child, was probably the most beautiful young lady on Mayflower. She became pregnant for James, and gave birth to Anthony “Trigger” Adderly on August 11, 1974.
Miss Deltrude asked me to be Anthony’s godfather. Sandra had nothing to do with this. I barely knew her. James had nothing to do with this. He had another serious relationship going on, with one of Ray Locke’s daughters, and sometime during the whole scenario he got married to the Locke lady. (To show you how small Belize is, the late Ray Locke was a distant cousin of mine.)
At some point, James lost his job at Customs. The Comptroller of Customs at the time was Telford Vernon, a man who is so close to my family as to be like an uncle to me.
For whatever the reason or reasons, James became hostile to me, and that’s the way things have been ever since. In fact, we became very hostile to each other in late 1990 and early 1991, when James, as the Radio Belize sports reporter, led the fight against semi-pro football.
His son, Anthony Adderly, was gifted both in school and in football. But he dropped out of ACC and became a part of the Mayflower scene. This was a tragedy. All I could do was give him a job at this newspaper.
Trigger became a part of the Crips scene. Several of the Mayflower Crips worked at Amandala, but a couple of the George Street Bloods had sold our newspaper as children, so Partridge Street itself was never attacked by the George Street Bloods.
Anthony Adderly was murdered in 2000, while Junior McKenzie (his brother-in-law) was in jail, placed there by a special prosecutor appointed for the first and only time in Belize’s history.
Junior came out of jail a few weeks after the March 2003 PUP general election victory. It is now clear to me that, with Anthony Adderly dead and Junior in jail, the Mayflower Crips had been infiltrated by a powerful faction of the ruling PUP, politicians and cronies who wanted to bring Kremandala “under manners.”
So it was that Amandala went through a period of crisis on Partridge Street where people we had known from childhood and who had been our employees, began to step on us, me specifically. Junior McKenzie was in a difficult situation, because loyalty to one’s gang comes before friendship with any outsider. I believe, however, that if Junior had gone all out against me in 2003, the situation on Partridge would have become quite violent.
I think the murder of Junior McKenzie is a very serious act of violence. I can not see how any leader as mature and reasonable as Junior McKenzie can emerge. The chances are that a Dessalines-type will emerge to lead the Crips, or let us say those people who have been Crips.
As a friend of Junior McKenzie’s, I mourn his death. Most of you only knew him as a street gangster. I knew this man from the time he was a little boy. George was like a son to me, always respectful. In the mean streets of the city without pity, he did whatever he had to do. Respect and rest, Junior. Respect and rest.