Con, corruption in Caribbean

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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.