Davidson, Bill.The Mafia:
Shadow of Evil on an Island in the Sun

SE Post Feb 25, 1967 vol 204 issue 4 p. 27 - 37

When he hears the charges that the islands are harboring the Mafia, Sir Ralph Grey, Royal Governor of the Bahamas by appointment of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, replies to critics: "We can't police the world. No one has yet shown me any clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing."

But even the unskilled and bewildered local police on Grand Bahama have discovered that organized prostitution and narcotics—two traditional enterprises of the Mafia—have followed gambling to the island. The authorities recently deported three Americans for trafficking in girls and drugs. The men were Nate Saunders, Rudolph DiBeradino (alias Rudy Apollo) and John Sidoruk (alias John Rush). Both DiBeradino and Sidoruk have police records and Mafia affiliations back in New York.

The main job of these three men was importing girls, but they also indulged in some interesting specialties on the side. Sidoruk, for example, was charged with using two of the Las Vegas-trained girls to lure casino winners into a room in the King's Inn (one of the island's plushest hotels) where Sidoruk would "roll" them and relieve them of their winnings—$1,900 in one case. Sidoruk and his cohorts also inaugurated a Mafia-type extortion business, terrorizing local businessmen with threats and beatings if they did not pay protection money to the gangsters.
The American thugs had a Bahamian Negro partner in these enterprises, a big, muscular 27-year-old 'enforcer' named Gadvill Newton, who, interestingly enough, is the body guard and associate of Sir Stafford Sands. Newton calls himself Skiboo, and the name is known throughout the Bahamas. He wears sharp Miami Beach-type clothes, and he always carries a beautiful black-leather-and-silver riding crop. The riding crop is weighted with lead, and it serves effectively as a blackjack.

The Skiboo-Sidoruk alliance was finally broken up when the gentle and inexperienced local police found that they couldn't cope with the flagrantly open/ racketeering and they sent to Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, for help. The Bahamas' toughest cop, Assistant Superintendent Paul Thompson, a native of Trinidad, was sent in and he soon developed cases justifying deportation orders for the Americans. But Skiboo escaped because of his political affiliations and is now a "security officer" at one of the big Grand Bahama hotels. Discussing Saunders, DiBernadino and Sidoruk, Superintendent Thompson, a shrewd realist, says sadly, "They are only the advance guard. And I only have six men and myself."

The police-state overtones, with a few Mafia touches added, were growing before the recent elections. Prime targets were the American reporters, who are frequently called "muckrakers" on the island and are blamed for stirring up the whole mess "in their quest for sensationalism." The Post team of reporters and photographers was under constant harassment. Mail sent by us to reporter Don Richards in Freeport arrived with the envelopes blatantly slit open, and officials in Sands's ministry of tourism revealed to us that they knew the contents of the letters even before Richards had received them. Sands's officials also knew the details of our private phone and hotel-room conversations-indicating that we were both wiretapped and bugged.

The Mafia touches showed up in two attempts at "the frame," a traditional stratagem to trick the reporter into a compromising situation so that he can be later discredited as being unfit to pass moral judgment on others. This is a ploy which has been used before with varying degrees of success, against reporters investigating organized crime in the United States. Our first exposure to "the frame" came on Grand Bahama, when reporter Richards was invited to a party at an isolated private home at which, he was told, "people inside Bahamas Amusements. Ltd., would reveal all about the company's books." Richards, under orders, did not go. We learned later from an informant that the party was a homosexual affair at which Richards was to be drugged and "set up" for photographs.

The second attempt at "the frame" took place in Nassau, where the Post team consisted of myself, my wife (writer Muriel Davidson), and Richards. We returned to our hotel one day after a full schedule of interviews to find out that Richards had been checked out of his room by the management and checked into our room, without our knowledge or permission. A cot had been squeezed into the already overcrowded cubicle. While we discussed the situation, a key was turned in the lock of the door and a man burst in. He surveyed the scene for a moment or two, then left. There was a small camera around his neck, and he obviously had menage-à-trois photography in mind—but Muriel was primly talking on the telephone, Richards was in a chair poring over papers, and I was in the bathroom. We checked Muriel out of the hotel immediately, and since all other Nassau hotels were closed to us, spirited her to the home of a friendly white Bahamian family, where she spent the night.

In the morning her hosts expressed shame and outrage at what had happened. A descendant of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the Bahamas, the husband said, "This gambling situation is a real rat's nest. It's all the decent Bahamian talks about. The government tells us that gambling is increasing tourism, but most of us feel the number of tourists would have increased anyways. Gambling is just bringing in the wrong kind of tourist and driving the respectable ones away. It's all so incredibly stupid and incredibly crooked."

Then the man who had helped my wife pleaded with us: "Please don't judge all of us Bahamians by the few who are doing this. It happens because the white people fear them. The colored people hate their guts."

Up to that time—December, 1966—the Negroes of the Bahamas had been able to mount only a weak threat to the white rulers because of the voting provisions of the Bahamian constitution, which was cleverly engineered by Sir Stafford Sands. As in Great Britain, the government is formed by the party that wins the most seats in the legislature. Under a Boundaries Commission authorized by the constitution, the ruling white United Bahamian party had gerrymandered the election districts so that it takes a little as 150 votes to win a seat from the poorly-populated "out islands," where the poorest Negroes live, and as many as 2,500 votes in the heavily populated districts of Nassau, where the better-educated Negroes are centered. By granting small favors—money, whiskey, a new roof, a pair of shoes, occasional medical care—white politicians have always been able to carry enough of the "out islands" to more than offset their losses in Nassau.
In the 1962 elections the Negro opposition parties scored heavily in Nassau and won nearly 65 percent of the total popular vote in the Bahamas, yet because of the misapportioned constituencies they ended up with only 9 of the 33 seats in the House of Assembly. The United Bahamian Party was firmly in control with 24 seats.

Actually, however, that 1962 defeat proved to be fateful for the Bahamas, because it brought to the fore an aggressive young Negro, Lynden O. Pindling, who won a seat in New Providence and became the leader of the opposition. A chunky, tiny man of boundless energy, Pindling, 36, is the son of a policeman. He is a lawyer, educated in England at the University of London. In the 1962-1966 period he became the firebrand leader that the Bahamian Negro population had always lacked.

Pindling railed against the iniquities of the U.B.P.'s electoral system and carried his complaints to the United Nations. When the Meyer Lansky situation emerged into the open, he went to England to request a Royal Commission to investigate not only the gambling operations but also the alleged white-ruler corruption which had fostered them. He told the British government, "We do not wish violence; nor do we condone it. W do not wish the fate of China or Cuba or Nigeria to befall us in the Bahamas. The time is now for skillful surgeons to wield a sharp political scalpel to save the Bahamian body politic from cancer. The cancer is corruption."
At home Pindling gleefully cooperated with any American and British reporter investigating gambling in the islands. By December, 1966, Sir Stafford Sands and his fellow ministers in the U.B.P. apparently decided to crush Pindling and his Progressive Liberal Party (P.L.P.) once and for all. Although they were not required to call an election until as late as November, 1967, the U.B.P. decided to conduct one on January 10.

Pindling, at first stunned by the premature election campaign, soon turned it to his advantage. He told his people, who are deeply religious, "In the Bible, in the Book of Exodus, the Lord said to the Children of Israel that He would deliver them from the Egyptians on the tenth day of the first month, and when is our election? The tenth day of the first month." He warned them that this would be their last chance to save themselves from the fate of the Negroes of Rhodesia. "The U.B.P. is already filling civil-service positions in the government with Negro-hating whites from South Africa and Rhodesia," he said (which was true), "and they're playing South African government programs on the Bahamas radio station. They're planning to set up an independent, white republic." Wherever he went, he talked about the Meyer Lansky infiltration of the gambling casinos.

The white U.B.P. candidates ran a routine campaign, reminding people of the prosperity they were enjoying. They did not even seem disturbed when Pindling acquired a helicopter from an American supporter and hopped from island to island, matching the best they could do with their own air transport. On the eve of the election they predicted the U.B.P. would win at least 25 of the 38 seats in the legislature. All American political observers in the island agreed with them. Barring a miracle, Sands and his party seemed sure to continue their control over the Bahamas and life would go on much as before.

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