Con, corruption in Caribbean

BAYOU OF PIGS

By Stewart Bell

John Wiley & Sons, $24.95,

272 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN WEISMAN

In March 1979, Grenada’s prime minister, Eric Gairy, flew to New York for meetings at the United Nations. In his absence, a London-trained Grenadian lawyer named Maurice Bishop, “six feet, three inches tall with a big smile and big ideas, part of the generation of students deeply moved by Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution,” staged a coup. Mr. Bishop and his left-wing ‘revos’ took over the Caribbean island and invited Fidel Castro to support him.

In May of that same year, a ne’er-do-well former Marine, white supremacist, and staunch anti-communist named Mike Perdue saw an article in a news magazine about the Grenada coup and learned that the ousted president was seeking arms and foreign mercenaries to take the island back from Marxists. Mr. Perdue, who often bragged about his battlefield experience in Vietnam and other conflicts, decided he was the right man for the job.

Mr. Perdue flew to San Diego, where Mr. Gairy was staying. The former PM was “noncommittal, and neither accepted nor declined the proposition, but Perdue sensed that Gairy was interested, and that was good enough.”

To raise money for the coup, Mr. Perdue sought out former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, who “gave Perdue a few names and numbers to get him started. One of them was in Canada … and it belonged to a man named Donald Clarke Andrews.”

Don Andrews, a virulent anticommunist, had been the leader of a white supremacist group called the Western Guard. “Its mission was to ‘preserve and promote the basic social and spiritual values of White People.’” Jailed for neo-Nazi activities in 1978, Mr. Andrews subsequently founded another pro-Aryan organization, the Nationalist Party of Canada.

Mr. Andrews was familiar with Grenada’s neighboring island of Dominica, where he had considered some business investments. He suggested to Mike Perdue that Dominica might make a good staging area for Mr. Perdue’s Grenada coup.

It made sense to Mr. Purdue. Dominica was small, poor, and remote. Dominica “was all mountains and rivers. Before Columbus had named it after the Christian holy day, its name was Waitikubuli, which means tall is her body. Legend has it that when Columbus returned to Spain and described Dominica, he crumpled a sheet of paper and threw it on the table.”

The Island was in ruins. It had been devastated by Hurricane David in August 1979. It was plagued by Rastafarian violence: A group of hardcore Rasta known as Dreads, who kidnapped young girls, terrorized farmers and attacked whites.

Best of all, so far as Mr. Perdue and his partner, Wolfgang Droege, were concerned, Dominica was politically unstable and unlike Grenada, which was receiving military assistance, financial support and foreign aid from Fidel Castro, there was something of a power vacuum on the poor island.

Dominica’s pint-sized, left-leaning former prime minister, Patrick John, had been thrown out for corruption. A 5-foot-1 populist known for his firebrand speeches, Mr. John detested Eugenia Charles, his right-wing, pro-American successor. Mr. John wanted his power back. Badly enough to grab it by force.

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