By DAVID SMITH
Posted
Tuesday, March 26
2013 at
02:00
It was in Dagoretti in 1986 when I first saw Patrick Shaw in
action, a friend of mine recalled. A gang of five had robbed a shop and
taken off in a getaway car. The Flying Squad and Shaw showed up in
minutes and encircled the area, trapping the suspects.
Shaw parked his trademark Volvo and laid in wait
along a road that was the only known way out. As the officers from the
Flying Squad began to flush out the suspects, they radioed to Shaw that
their vehicle was enroute towards him. Soon, the thugs’ getaway burst
through a corner, bearing down on him.
Shaw jumped into the middle of the road, a pistol in each hand, and began to unload on the occupants of the car.
“The driver was the first to he hit, bringing the
car to an abrupt halt,” the eyewitness remembers. “His passengers tried
to escape, but they were also shot down.”
One by one, the bodies of Shaw’s victims were
turned over for identification. As a crowd gathered, Shaw called the
fallen criminals by name, then turned to the crowd and, as he always did
on such occasions, warned them to stay off crime.
In the midst of all this madness, the Flying Squad
dragged in, alive, another suspect, still clutching onto the loot.
After perusing through the contents of the bag, Shaw asked the police
officers to step aside, raised his pistol and... kablam!
The crowd gasped in horror, unable to believe how a
man of the law could execute a suspect in cold blood — and in the full
view of the public.
But that was not Shaw’s most famous encounter. It
came in 1977, when he gunned down Nairobi’s most infamous gangster
Nicholas Mwea, alias Wakinyonga.
Wakinyonga was huge, very rough and tough. He
stood out from the crowd courtesy of his dreadlocks, jewellery and fancy
clothes. In the ‘70s, a man in dreadlocks stood out like a billboard.
After a spate of violent robberies, the
culmination of which was the murder of the CEO of Total Kenya in broad
daylight, Wakinyonga became Kenya’s most wanted criminal, and Shaw
started hunting him down.
The man had a colourful history with the police
and the law courts, but when he learned that Shaw was trailing him, he
knew that the end was nigh.
The Standard reported that, as Shaw
closed down on him, Wakinyonga dug his own grave in the backyard of the
house he lived in and went on a spending spree, buying people crates of
beer at Nyakombani Night Club in Nairobi’s Kangemi area.
One night, as he was enjoying his beer, Shaw
stepped into the club. Wakinyonga looked up and beheld the burly man
smile coyly at him. This was going to be easy for the crime-buster,
after all.
After a shoot-out during which several patrons
were injured, Wakinyonga lay in a pool of blood, dead. But, even though
the official story is that it was Shaw who fired the fatal bullet, an
aging taxi driver who says he witnessed it all says Shaw happened into
the scene minutes after Wakinyonga had been shot dead by the police, and
that the ‘grave’ in his backyard was actually a newly dug pit latrine.
But the drama was not over yet in the Wakinyonga
script. At the funeral, as the fallen criminal’s casket was being
lowered into his grave, Shaw led a group of police officers into the
scene and ordered everyone to lie face-down. Many were arrested for
questioning.
That was trademark Shaw. Whenever he gunned down a
suspect, he always made a point of showing up at the funeral, where he
would arrest a number of mourners, including family members, for
questioning. He would then proceed to warn anyone who looked ‘suspect’
to never step in Nairobi, or else...
Many have questioned why the man operated as if he
was above the law, why he broke the very rules he was supposed to
uphold by playing the role of investigator, judge and executioner.
The explanation given at the time was that Shaw
knew that, should the men he arrested be sent to jail, they would come
out hardened and even more dangerous. The correctional facilities of
the 1970s were nothing to write home about, as were the courts. Many
thugs could somehow bribe their way out of the tightest of cases.
In an era where the capacity of the police and the CID was
limited, and where corruption and crime were rampant even within the
police ranks and the Judiciary, Shaw’s crime-fighting techniques had to
be equally unethical and brutal.
One criminal named George Kamau, alias “Slim,” a
protégé to Wakinyonga and leader of a gang known as the Disciples of
Jesus, knows that all too well where he sleeps, forever.
Slim is alleged to have killed 52 people in the
late 1970s and 1980s. After getting off on a series of technicalities or
because of scared witnesses withdrawing their testimonies, Slim was
finally put away for six years for three separate violent crimes in
1981, but not before threatening to kill Shaw.
A month before Slim was released, Shaw visited
Kamiti prison and warned him that, once free, he was to leave Nairobi
forever. Slim, of course, ignored the warning and proceeded to do
various ‘jobs’ in the city.
It was not long before Shaw decided to put things
to rest. One night, as Slim and another suspected criminal named Stephen
Mbaraka Karanja whiled the evening away in the city, they were accosted
by a team of police officers who bundled them into a car and headed to
Karura Forest. There, it is alleged, the two were shot dead on the
orders of Shaw.
So, was this man a crime-buster or a psycopath let loose on the streets of Nairobi... with a loaded gun?
Many who spent time with or near him say they were convinced the man had a split personality.
“Despite the extrajudicial killings and his
run-ins with the darker side of Nairobi,” one of his informants says,
“the man would every now and then exhibit the traits of a humanitarian
angel. For instance, he was able to set aside his psycopathic ways and
become the principled, fun-loving guy at Starehe Boy’s Centre.”
A police officer he worked with described Shaw as
“completely out of control” and “out of bounds of the constitutional
description of what an officer should be”.
“He did not report to any particular police
station, he used his personal car, and had no fixed jurisdiction,” the
retired police officer says, but admits that it was this nature of
self-deployment that made Shaw so effective.
To counter the claim that the man reported to no
one, and was thus some sort of a one-man vigilante, a former informant
cites that Shaw’s rank was Senior Superintendant of Police, and that his
position as a police reservist justified his modus operandi.
Despite roiling and toiling with Nairobi’s most
wanted, none of them ever got the best of Big Pat Shaw. But in July
1979, the man had his closest shave with a thug.
One Friday afternoon, a gang of three Ugandans
stormed into the house of Dr Gulam Mustafa while the family was having
lunch. They shot death the Mustafas’ house-help Simon Ngeresa, his wife
Jane and Mustafa’s wife Parvin before ransacking the house for loot,
after which they harassed Mustafa’s two daughters and a nephew of the
family.
While they were still in the house, Shaw pulled up
at the family gate. One of the gang members fired through the window of
Shaw’s car, hitting him in the shoulder. Shaw sped to Nairobi Hospital
for treatment, but the police arrived shortly afterwards to clean up the
mess.
One of the gang members was gunned down while
bystanders and police captured another. A sub-machine gun was found on
the dead suspect, later identified as Marua Wakamune, but Patrick
Walimba, the man blamed for shooting Shaw, escaped.
After having the bullet removed, Shaw refused to
spend the night at the hospital, upon which Dr Geoffrey Griffin,
Starehe’s Director, was called in to talk to his friend.
Griffin arrived at the hospital to find Shaw
pacing the hallways. “An assistant administrator with gangrene would be
of little use,” Griffin told Shaw, and eventually persuaded him to stay
one night and to take it easy.
In 1981, Shaw finally caught up with Walimba and,
in the presence of other officers, gunned-down the gangster at a bar in
Jerusalem Estate.
It is difficult to estimate, even modestly, how many suspected gangsters Shaw killed.
“Literally hundreds,” one former informant estimates. “At least one fatality a week.”
But the man was, like all men, still mortal. On
February 14, 1988, while visiting a friend named David Rowe, Shaw
started feeling weak. His heart was failing. It is said he was reading a
newspaper when he stood up shouting and fell to his knees, his gun
still in its holster. He was rushed to Nairobi Hospital where he was
pronounced dead, aged 52.
The next morning, all three major newspapers run
front-page stories on the man who was known simply as “crime-buster”.
Over the course of the following week, condolences were telephoned and
wired in from around the world.
On Saturday, February 20, 1988, the once
indomitable Patrick David Shaw was laid to rest. The Starehe school
chapel, where the funeral service was held, “was packed to absolute
capacity, while hundreds more sat on the grass of the quadrangle”, a
newspaper reported.
A group of boys, some of whom considered Shaw
their father, carried his coffin past the buildings built under his
supervision and through the funds he helped to raise into a hearse. The
cortege of police cars and motorcycles that accompanied the man on his
final journey to Lang’ata cemetery was two miles long.
“It was like a royal procession,” remembers his sister.
Chief Justice Cecil Miller read a message of
condolence from then President Daniel arap Moi, praising Shaw for his
“constant, selfless, sacrificial and untiring service to law and order
for the benefit of his fellow men”.
Shaw’s close friends, including the late Geoffrey
Griffin, scoffed at the notion that Shaw died from anything other than a
heart attack. But most in Nairobi, including the students at Starehe,
believed foul play was at hand, that the man who lived by the sword had
to have died by the sword.
These rumours were only compounded when the
students were prevented from viewing the body, a decision Griffin made
to prevent the funeral proceedings from being sensationalised.
Later, the Weekly Review, at its time the
foremost political magazine in Kenya, carried a story on Shaw
highlighting his prowess as a civil servant and crime fighter.
“Mystery always seemed to surround him and the
police were probably content to leave matters so in order to enhance the
aura of invincibility that surrounded him,” the Weekly Review wrote. One photo of Shaw looking smug was included, with the caption reading simply: “Shaw: awesome reputation”.
**********
The JM Kariuki mystery
“The sun shines for both the evil and the good,
but there are those who keep their faces to the sunshine and cannot see
their shadow,” Shaw is reported to have once said.
At the time, he had come under scrutiny over his
extrajudicial killings and the omnipresence he exhibited in the criminal
underworld. It was, however, the disappearance and later murder of
politician J M Kariuki that sent shivers down the hitman’s spine. His
character had been called to question by MPs, who wondered how the man
was always the first to arrive at scenes of crime, way before the police
did.
When word went around that Shaw had been involved
in the arrest of JM, the world started crumbling all around him.
Suddenly, he was no longer a revered crime-buster, but a likely criminal
himself.
In 1981, John Keen, then Assistant Minister in the
Office of the President, was summoned to give testimony to Parliament
on the progress the government had made in controlling crime.
“Nine hundred and eighty one gangsters were
arrested in the past year,” he testified. In a supplementary question,
one MP asked: “And why is it that Patrick Shaw is always the first to
arrive on the scene of a crime and not African police?” Parliament
erupted in laughter, but, begrudgingly, Keen responded by saying that
all police officers, both Black and White, were “doing a fine job.”
Still, the country was not convinced that the
fellow was such a “fine policeman” as claimed, and henceforth viewed him
with suspicion.
**********
Did you know?
During the 1982 coup attempt by officers from Kenya Air Force, Shaw was in Europe fundraising for Starehe.
On August 1, a Corporal from KAF named Ngatia was
assigned to arrest president Moi. But before doing so he and his fellow
rogue officers decided to first head to Starehe and take out Patrick
Shaw.
James Dianga, author of the book Kenya, 1982: The Attempted Coup,
says Ngatia’s mission to kill Shaw was also fuelled by the fact that
Shaw was investigating Ngatia for his role in a series of bank
robberies.
Cpl Ngatia was a supporter of Spt Hezekiah Ochuka,
one of the senior coup plotters. Ochuka had helped to delay Shaw’s
request that the KAF hands over Ngatia for interrogation. In exchange
for his assistance, and knowing that Ngatia was in a tough position,
Ochuka handed Ngatia the task of arresting president Moi.
Upon hearing of the plot, Shaw immediately flew
back to “help sort out the mess”, says his sister. He immediately
started interrogating the key suspects, and is said to have been behind
the torture of many who were arrested in connection with the failed
coup.
Dear reader, David Smith is researching the
life of Patrick David Shaw. If you wish to share any information,
stories or anecdotes on his personal or professional life (as an
agricultural officer, administrator at Starehe and police reservist) or
of the real-life characters covered in this story, please email him on
david_smith_247@yahoo.com. The identities of sources will be kept
anonymous and in strict confidence.
Malawian lawyer (Seodi White, WLSA) fights for girls
Fighting child marriage in Malawi
habari
