As former PLP parliamentarian Edmund Moxey said during the Commission of Inquiry, "Pindling and his crew make the Bay Street Boys look like schoolchildren." And a report by the US State Department concluded that the drug trade accounted for at least 10 per cent of the Bahamian economy, including political payoffs, overheads and investments.Įverette Bannister had returned to the Bahamas from the US after the PLP won the 1967 general election.
The sheer scale of corruption was unprecedented. He also testified before a US Senate subcommittee on narcotics trafficking in 1987. Gorman Bannister, the son of Pindling's longtime "consultant" and bag man, was one of those who helped the authors of the Cocaine Wars write their story. Witnesses told of the "incalculable millions of dollars taken and received by every corrupt official and politician in Everette Bannister's pocket-and by 'the Man', the prime minister who always got his share." Other investigations turned up even more startling evidence. Explanations for some of these deposits were given. According to the Inquiry: "The prime minister and Lady Pindling have received at least $57.3 million in cash.
They were Prime Minister Sir Lynden Pindling and his cigar-chomping crony, Everette Bannister.Īccording to the authors of the Cocaine Wars, "it is fair to assume that they both felt they were owed something by the Bahamas because, when the time was right, they pursued those schemes with the rapaciousness of creditors out to collect a debt long overdue."Īs the authors note, "If in 1979 there was an incursion of armed criminals, by 1980 it had become an invasion."Ī review of Sir Lynden's personal finances by the 1984 Commission of Inquiry in Nassau found that he had spent eight times his reported total earnings from 1977 to 1984. "The Bahamas is being deluged with drugs."Īnd the plain fact is that all of the evidence collected over the years has identified two men - both now dead - as chiefly responsible for this unfortunate state of affairs. "The security of this country is being threatened by armed foreign criminals," a confidential report noted in early 1979. One famous Miami-based trafficker, nicknamed Kojak, told the Senate investigation that he had paid off Bahamian authorities "from the lowest ranking officers to the highest politicians." In fact, the chief of the Bahamian police drug task force himself, ACP Howard Smith, was on Kojak's regular payroll, according to testimony.
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