Carl Hill – from gangster to writer

WESTERN BUREAU:

CARL HILL tends to weep silently whenever he thinks of his younger days in the 1960s and 1970s when gangsters in Montego Bay, St James, died due to violence, a fate he himself could have shared as an active gang member at the time.

Hill, 75, reminisced about those days while sitting down for a recent interview with The Gleaner, during which he contemplated the experiences that led to him losing a leg and, much later, to taking on writing as an avenue for his philosophies borne of his experiences on the wrong side of the law.

“In life, the man that is not living with a reason or a plan will be misled at any time. Why spend your money on guns when you have better means?” said Hill.

“It is time to use your greatness in positive means, not to destroy, but to build. We need a complete change, and if we do not educate the young, the change cannot come, so we have to love ourselves enough to love our race and make our race better.”

That nugget of wisdom has been a hard-won philosophy for Hill, who was born in 1948 and raised as the second of 10 children for parents Henry and Isis Hill at Albion Lane in Montego Bay, even though he started life wanting to help out his family.

“In my life growing up, I wanted to be like both of my grandfathers, who were independent businessmen and who were into farming. I was just anxious to reach the age where I could help my mother,” Hill recounted.

“I was selling suit lengths and suit materials, then I moved to selling Irish moss, and then I got into selling plastic materials for windows and table covers, and I was out there seven days per week.”

But life took a dramatic turn one day when, on his way to buy groceries, he came in contact with a man known as Lloyd Campbell, alias Spider, who would later become a significant figure in Montego Bay’s gang culture during the 1960s.

“One night my girlfriend told me that it seemed as if Spider was monitoring me. Another evening I met him coming along, and I cautioned him, and from that time I did not get any more complaint from my girlfriend. But deep down, I don’t know if it was destined for this man to be in my life, because he came to be a gang leader, a gang called the Lane Gang,” said Hill.

The Lane Gang, which according to Hill had 2,000 members across Montego Bay at one point, was at frequent loggerheads with another group called the Beatniks Gang, with both sides frequently clashing along the North Gully section of the city’s downtown district. That war often spilled over at dances that Hill had set up at North Gully and later at Green Pond, forcing him to close both locations.

Amputation of leg

In 1970, Hill’s life was changed forever when he was ambushed and shot while undertaking plans for construction of a new building.

“The same Friday night when I got the estimate for the new building, I was coming from a club, and a gang member shot me. While I was in the hospital, I was tired of this gang and ‘badman’ business, and I was planning that when I got out, I would join the police force and travel with six guns, but the tables turned when I lost my leg as a result of the shot,” said Hill.

“After amputation of my leg, some guys in a few communities joined forces with the Beatniks Gang and fought the Lane Gang. While the men were looking to me as a gang leader, my idea was that all I needed was a 12-man death squad, a well-trained squad,” said Hill. “The war had started, my business was closed, and I could not function as before, so I resorted to the illegal world, selling weed.”

However, those plans got turned upside down when Hill lost some 2,000 pounds of ganja with which he had intended to finance his proposed death squad. It was at that point that he had an epiphany about the insanity of his ambitions.

“In the process of making the money to have a soundproof shooting range and facility to house my death squad, I lost 2,000 pounds of weed, and this gave me the idea now that my idea was only a higher standard of madness. Being a gang leader is like being a character in the story Don Quixote, who became crazy and attacked the men he believed were invaders,” said Hill.

“In 1972, after several failed peace meetings, there was one Mr Cecil Chuck who finally brought about peace. But although the peace took place here in Montego Bay, it continued in some major states in America and The Bahamas. It was so devastating; mothers had to receive their sons’ bodies in coffins on a weekly basis,” Hill added, struggling to keep his emotions in check.

“It was really mind-boggling, knowing so many people died for nothing. Spider’s gang was nearly 2,000-strong; could you imagine how different Montego Bay could be, having 2,000 men doing positive things?”

By the time 1990 came around, Hill had decided to take on a different weapon atypical of the gangster lifestyle – the pen, which the popular proverb says is mightier than the sword.

“Although I had lost my leg, I could not allow them to have me begging for bread. The surprising part is that I never knew anything about writing, but it occurred to me to use writing as a weapon,” Hill explained.

“I started to write my first screenplay, ‘One Jamaican Posse’, in 1991, and I just built a story about a Jamaican weed dealer in New York. In all, I wrote six screenplays, including one titled ‘John Doe the Vampire’, about a vampire who contracted AIDS.”

Three books based on his past

Although none of his screenplays were ever published or submitted for film creation, Hill went on to write and publish three books on Amazon.com, all based on his past gangster experience and written with the aim of guiding children away from negative lifestyles.

One of his three books, ‘Don’t Touch It, It’s Dangerous’, is a children’s story that warns about the dangers of gun usage, while another, ‘Grandpa Says So’, discusses the effects of drug use. The third book, ‘Stages of Life’, is a collection of poems based on Hill’s experiences with his family and the gang landscape.

Hill also had plans in 2015 to create a documentary on gang wars in Montego Bay’s inner-city communities. However, those plans had to be scrapped after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Regardless, Hill still wants Jamaica’s young people to consider clear and positive options for their lives as opposed to being stuck with a life of criminality.

“Why kill your own race that is going through the same struggles as you? It is redemption time now, and it is time to build up yourselves, your family, and your country. We all were born great, we are all a masterpiece, but we just don’t know it,” said Hill.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com