JAMAICAN GANGSTER: Rambo — The FBI Top Ten Fugitive and the LA Massacre

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Welcome to another episode of Jamaican Gangster. On today's episode, we're featuring Rambo, the man the FBI would name Marlon Jones, the FBI top 10 fugitive behind the LA massacre. If you're not following us, we would be honored if you would consider doing so.

[00:00:17]It costs you nothing to hit that button so that you'll be notified every time we release a new episode. Now, let's get into it. It's just after midnight on Rimpow Boulevard in the West Adams district of Los Angeles, October 15th, 2016. And the house at the 2900 block is not really a house anymore. It's a kitchen. It's a sound system. It's a birthday party with about 50 people inside, smelling of oxtail and curry goat and rum. And from the outside, the only thing that gives it away is the cars on the street and the base through the walls. The owner is a 63-year-old Jamaican man who came up from Kingston in 1994 and has been running a catering business out of this converted home since 2003.

[00:01:06]On Facebook and in the neighborhood, people know the spot by one name, Dilly's Kitchen, Dilly's Jamaican Kitchen. By the time the LAPD gets the first call around 12:30 in the morning, the kitchen is a slaughter house. Three men dead on the floor. A fourth fighting for his life and bleeding out into the carpet. 11 maybe 12 other people shot.

[00:01:31]Men and women. Some still inside the converted living room. Some out on the driveway. Some trying to drive themselves to the hospital with bullet wounds because they don't trust what the ambulances will bring with them. A handgun on the ground. Magazines. Shell casings from at least two different weapons. Sergeant Frank Priciato of the LAPD will later tell the Times that when officers walked in, there were people running in every direction and the only thing they could do at first was count bodies. One of those bodies is the reason all of this is happening. He doesn't have his American name on him.

[00:02:08]He doesn't have his Jamaican name on him either. Not yet, because nobody in the neighborhood is going to give that to the police. But within 48 hours, in a city 7,000 km away, in a one- room community along Maxfield Avenue in St. Andrew, Jamaica, there will be men with paint brushes working on a wall, sketching out a portrait of him, getting the eyes right, getting the chain right.

[00:02:34]His name is Robert Davis. The streets call him Rodigan. According to the Jamaica Constabularary Force, he is the main financier of the Ratbat gang and of the Sunlight Street gang that operates with it in the Maxfield Avenue corridor of Kingston. The Jamaican police say Rodigan led the gang from Jamaica, then continued to lead it from the United States, providing financing, direction, and access to weapons for its members back home. He came to Dilly's kitchen to eat. He died on the floor. The man who killed him, the FBI will eventually decide, is a ghost. That is where this story has to begin. Not with the shooter, but with the absence of the shooter. Because in a Los Angeles homicide investigation in 2016, the LAPD typically has a name, a face, a fingerprint, a database, a record. In this case, the bureau gets all of that.

[00:03:30]They get him in their fingerprint system. They get him on wrap sheets in New York and New Jersey. They get him on prison intake records. And every time they look, the name on the paperwork is a different name. A [clears throat] man charged with crimes in New Jersey under the name Rashene Brantley. A man who served prison time in New York under the name Floyd Evans. A man who has used the name Anthony Howard. A man who has used the name Anthony Winter. A man who has used variations on both. and a man the FBI's own special agent Scott Geriola of the Los Angeles Fugitives Task Force will eventually tell reporters this about we're calling him Marlon Jones based on his criminal history in New York but at this point it's anyone's guess what his actual birth name is he is a US citizen that's the mystery hold it we will come back to it because the West Adams kitchen did not become a battlefield by accident. It became one because two systems collided over a single table in a single converted living room in the early hours of a Saturday morning. And one of those systems came in carrying enough guns to kill four people and wound 11 more in a matter of seconds. To understand what walked through that door, you have to walk first along Maxfield Avenue in St. Andrew on Sunlight Street in the area where the boy who would grow into Rodigan was raised. You have to understand the corridor. The one the Jamaican police describe as one of the most contested in the corporate area.

[00:05:08]The one where Western Kingston bleeds into St. Andrew South. The one where the names of the streets are also the names of the gangs. Sunlight Street is not just a street. Sunlight Street is a gang. The Ratbat Gang is not just a name pulled out of the air. The ratbat is the dominant force in that pocket of Maxfield. And according to the police high command, Robert Davis was its money. He was the one who could send weapons home. He was the one who could send instructions home. He was the one who could send people home or keep them away depending on what the situation required. And then there is the rival.

[00:05:46]The Jamaican police describe a feud between two factions for control of the Sunlight Street. Trenchtown, Maxfield Avenue, and Gem Road areas, Ratbat and Sunlight Street on one side, the Raspberry Gang on the other. Years later, in 2021, the Jamaica Gleer would report in a lead story that the alleged leader of the rival faction by then publicly named as the leader of what the Gleaner calls the Bird Nation gang is Aaron Birdie Thompson. Originally of Gem Road in Kingston 13, now resident in the United States, flagged as a person of interest by the Jamaican police as far back as 2016 and described by the head of the police information arm, senior superintendent Stephanie Lindsay, as overseas fueling the problems here, providing support and resources to the local gang. Two financiers, both operating from American soil, both pumping resources back into a four street war that had not led up in years.

[00:06:50]That is the system. That is the gravity.

[00:06:53]That is what bent the night of October 15th toward Renpow Boulevard. And in the middle of it, walking into a converted house on a quiet street in Los Angeles, was the man the FBI would eventually call Marlon Jones. The man with the New York criminal history, the man with five paper identities, the man American investigators believed was, in their words, part of a Jamaican criminal group based on the US East Coast involved in the illegal distribution of ganja.

[00:07:23]According to FBI special agent Scott Garola, Marlon Jones and his crew were in Los Angeles to settle a dispute with a rival Jamaican crew. The bureau didn't yet know whether the two crews had once been business partners or whether the fight was strictly over territory. The bureau knew this. They knew he was armed. They knew he was extremely dangerous. They knew he had a violent record. They could trace under at least four different names in at least four different states. strong ties to New York and New Jersey with documented connections also stretching to Connecticut, Tennessee, the Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. They knew he was the kind of operator who could move through six jurisdictions, leave fingerprints, and still walk out the other side with a clean legal name no one could verify. What nobody told Robert Davis eating in West Adams that night was that the man walking into Dilly's kitchen was that operator. To understand that fully, you have to understand what Maxfield Avenue produces and what it exports. The corridor has been contested territory in Kingston's political geography for decades. St. Andrew South, the police division that covers it, sits between the Western Garrison communities and the central parishes.

[00:08:44]It is not the most famous flashoint in Kingston's history. It doesn't carry the brand of Tivoli Gardens or Matthews Lane, but in terms of sustained, low-grade, highly organized violence between rival gangs with diaspora financing, it is one of the most persistent. The Jamaican police have described the Maxfield Avenue corridor as a place where gang structures replaced community structures. Where the dawn is the authority, the gang is the economy and loyalty is enforced not by choice but by geography. You were born on Sunlight Street. That made you Sunlight Street. What the diaspora added to that system was reach. When the young men who came up inside those structures migrated to New York, to New Jersey, to Hartford, to the Virgin Islands, they didn't leave the system behind. They became its remote arm. They became the money. They became the weapons supply line. They became the decision makers operating from apartments and stash houses in American cities while the local soldiers carried out the orders in streets that the American police would never patrol. A financier like Rodigan could live in the United States, send cash and guns back to Kingston, and remain untouchable by Jamaican law because he was never physically in Jamaica when the violence happened. That is not a theory. That is what the Jamaica Constabularary Force said publicly about him on the record in the days after his death. And that is exactly the architecture that Marlon Jones or whatever his real name is was operating inside on the night he walked into Dilly's kitchen. He was not a local Los Angeles criminal. He was an East Coastbased operator on a specific mission in a city he did not live in. He had come to West Adams to settle something. A dispute the FBI described as likely involving a rival Jamaican crew. He came with at least two other people. He came armed and he executed the mission. Inside the music is loud, the food is hot and the room is packed.

[00:10:53]About 50 people by the LAPD's count, a birthday celebration, a community gathering. The Times would later quote Captain Peter Whittingham of the LAPD describing what happened next and the kind of language cops use when they are still trying to figure out the order of things.

[00:11:12]Three men leave the restaurant. The three men come back and when they come back, they come back armed. The story goes like this. Two men confront another man inside the kitchen. There is a dispute. The dispute, in Whittingham's words, is likely about a drug deal gone bad. The man being confronted is the target. The bullets find him first. A hail of bullets the captain will say later. The kind of gunfire that is not designed to wound, only to end. He drops. People around him scream. Some of them are caught in the crossfire as it begins. And then the room makes its choice. A second group. The people loyal to the man on the floor, return fire.

[00:11:58]The kitchen turns into a closed room firefight. 50 bodies crammed between a counter and a wall. Two crews exchanging shots inside a converted living room.

[00:12:09]Civilians trying to get under tables.

[00:12:12]Women screaming. Men dragging friends toward the back door. Food on the floor mixing with blood on the floor.

[00:12:19]According to the LAPD, the gunfire continues out into the driveway. By the time it ends, three men are dead in the immediate aftermath. 12 more are shot. A fourth will die of his wounds within 48 hours. Nine men and six women are hit in total. The shooters are gone before officers arrive. The owner of the house, the one who calls himself only Dilly, will tell the Times that this is not the first time. He will say that another shooting happened at this location in 2011. He will say that the man who died in that earlier shooting was his friend.

[00:12:57]He will say that he believes he just lost another friend in this one. He has been cooking out of this house for over a decade, serving Jamaican food on Saturdays, hosting birthday parties, hosting community, and twice now he has watched his own kitchen turn into a crime scene. Bill Scott, the LAPD deputy chief speaking to the cameras at the press conference, uses words that almost don't land on the first hearing because of how plainly he says them. "I have 35 years in law enforcement," Scott tells reporters. In my time, I've never seen an incident with 15 gunshot victims.

[00:13:35]Four of them perished. A man who has spent his career in one of the most violent cities in the United States is telling the public on camera that this is the worst single mass casualty shooting he has ever personally worked.

[00:13:48]That sentence gets buried under headlines about the FBI's most wanted list. but hold it next to what was happening inside that kitchen and it tells you everything about the scale of what those men brought with them when they walked back through that door. By the next day, Sunday, the LAPD has two men in custody. Moane McKay, 33, Diego Reed, 25, both Jamaican nationals, both arrested at hospitals where they were being treated for gunshot wounds. LAPD would say later that they consulted with prosecutors before making those arrests, that they believed the evidence was strong enough at the time, and then within days, the LAPD's case against McKay and Reed falls apart. Both men are released without charges. The shooters who killed the first victim are still at large. The LAPD has, in Captain Whittingham's words, street names, but not real names. The people in the room either don't know the killers or they aren't telling. Meanwhile, in Jamaica, a different reckoning has already begun.

[00:14:55]By Monday, October 17th, the Jamaica Constabularary Forc's Police High Command has issued a public statement appealing for calm. Their intelligence tells them what's coming. The Maxfield Avenue corridor is preparing for war.

[00:15:11]People loyal to Rodigan are planning what the police describe as coordinated attacks on members of the Raspberry Gang. The targets are men they believe were behind the killing, specifically overseas figures, they say, are responsible. The Jamaican police are publicly telling them they have no evidence to support that conclusion. The LAPD and the FBI, they say, have found no evidence linking overseas members of the rival gang to the shooting at Dilly's Kitchen. But evidence in a war like this one is not what moves the next bullet. Belief does. Western Kingston, St. Andrew Central, and St. Andrew South, three police divisions where the JCF says recent killings and shootings have already been spiking due to feuding between Rat Bat and the rival gang are on the edge. A killing in Los Angeles in a converted kitchen on Rimpow Boulevard is about to ripple back across the water and detonate in the streets where Rodigan grew up. This is what the Jamaican police mean when they say diaspora is not a metaphor. It is a relay, a command line stretched across an ocean that transmits both money and consequences in both directions. By Thursday, October 20th, men are painting Rodigan's face on a wall along Maxfield Avenue. Family and friends are planning to hold a wake for him that Sunday on his block in his stronghold. The police know what that wake would become. Senior Superintendent Arthur Brown, the head of the St. Andrew South Division, tells the gleaner directly that no permit will be granted. There is no application yet.

[00:16:52]There is no intention of granting one.

[00:16:54]The police know the wake could be used as cover for reprisal attacks. A funeral for a financier becomes a mobilization for a war. The state denies the gathering. In Los Angeles, the FBI is now 7 weeks into a case where their primary suspect has vanished. They believe he has already left California.

[00:17:15]They believe he has used the network he was placed inside to disappear back across the country, possibly to the east coast where his ties run deepest, possibly farther. They have him under five names. They have witnesses who saw him. They have ballistic evidence. They have a hospital list of victims. And they have a city, more than one city, that is watching what they do next. And now the mystery comes back. Because sitting with what the FBI has, five names, no confirmed identity, no confirmed citizenship, a birthyear range that spans a decade, you start to understand what kind of system produces a man like this. This is not someone who made a mistake and ran. This is someone who was designed through years of movement and deliberate identity layering to be essentially invisible to the American legal system. He moved between states the way ordinary people move between neighborhoods. Every time one jurisdiction touched him, he slipped the name and handed the next one a different file. New Jersey knew one man.

[00:18:23]New York knew a different man. Tennessee and Connecticut and the Virgin Islands each knew their own version. Nobody talked to each other and he knew it.

[00:18:33]That's not luck. That's architecture.

[00:18:36]That is what a transnational diaspora soldier looks like from the inside of a fingerprint database that was never designed to find him. On December 1st, 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announces that the man it is calling Marlon Jones has been added to its 10 most wanted fugitives list. He is the 510th person in the bureau's history to make the list. A reward of up to $100,000 US is announced for information leading to his capture. The bureau describes him as armed and extremely dangerous in the country illegally. A member of a Jamaican criminal organization on the US East Coast moving Ganja, a man with an extensive violent record under five different paper identities and no confirmed birth name. The press conference is where Garyola says the line that will follow this case forever.

[00:19:30]The line about how it's anyone's guess what his real name is. Then less than 24 hours later, they get him. The capture is fast, but it is not clean. On Friday evening, December 2nd, 2016, the FBI's Los Angeles Fugitive Task Force and the LAPD receive a tip. A vehicle on the 110 freeway near downtown Los Angeles. A male passenger inside. The task force stops the car near the Adams Boulevard exit. The driver, a woman, is removed from the vehicle. The male passenger doesn't wait for what comes next. He bails out. He goes off the side of the 110 freeway, drops onto 33rd Street below, runs about a block and a half on what is almost certainly a damaged leg, and tries to disappear into the streets of Exposition Park. He doesn't get a block and a half before he is on the ground. He is loaded into an ambulance, limping and injured from the fall. The FBI posts the announcement before the press conference is even organized. The bureau says in its own words, "Suspect believed to be top 10 fugitive Marlon Jones in custody by FBI fugitive task force at LAPD headquarters after pursuit one day after being placed on the list.

[00:20:51]He has been on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for less than 30 hours. The reward money will be paid out. The man with five names is now in handcuffs under the name nobody can fully prove is his. On December 6th, 2016, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office files capital murder charges. The man identified in the official press release as Marlon Jones, date of birth April 14th, 1975, is charged in case BA451058 with four counts of murder along with the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders, making him eligible for the death penalty. The case is assigned to Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman of the Major Crimes Division. He is arraigned. He pleads not guilty to all four counts. That is the documented end of the public case file we can verify at the level this series demands. He is charged. He is in custody. He has pleaded not guilty.

[00:21:53]Beyond that, the story shifts from the man to the system. Because what this case actually exposed, what it forced into public view in a way most diaspora crime cases never get was the architecture of the network around him.

[00:22:08]When the LAPD said Jamaican gang, when the FBI said East Coast Jamaican Criminal Group, when the Jamaican police on the very night of the shooting started naming Maxfield Avenue and Sunlight Street and Trenchtown and Gem Road as the ground this killing was actually being fought over. What they were describing was a single system stretched across an ocean. The Ratbat Gang in Kingston, financed and directed from American soil. A rival gang in Kingston, financed and directed from American soil. A war that lives in a four street box in St. Andrews South, but is funded, armed, and decided in apartments and stash houses in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in Hartford, in Newark, in Memphis, in the Virgin Islands, and out in West Adams. The shooters fly to Los Angeles. The weapons get cleaned in Los Angeles. The bodies hit the floor in Los Angeles. And the reprisals get planned on a wall along Maxfield Avenue painted under the watch of the St. Andrew South Police. That is what Marlon Jones, Rashene Brantley, Floyd Evans, Anthony Howard, Anthony Winter, whatever his real name is, actually represented when the FBI put him on that list. He was not just a shooter. He was a node. He was a man whose criminal record, viewed through any one of his five identities, looked like a series of unrelated incidents in unrelated states. viewed all at once with the names stacked together. The record looked like the resume of a transnational soldier, a man whose entire purpose, the FBI concluded, was to move on behalf of his crew across state lines, settle disputes with rival crews, and dissolve back into the diaspora when the work was done. And the cost of that work is what gets lost when you tell this story without slowing down. Four men died at Dilly's Kitchen.

[00:24:08]The names of three of them never got pulled forward into the headlines the way Rodigans did. 11 other people were shot. Some survived only because they made it to a hospital fast enough. Some came out with injuries they will carry for the rest of their lives. The owner of the house, Dilly, has now watched two friends die in his kitchen. The neighborhood around the 2900 block of Rimpow Boulevard, which residents have always described as quiet, woke up on a Saturday morning to a homicide scene with 15 victims on a residential street.

[00:24:42]The Jamaican consequence is larger and harder to count. After Rodigan's killing, the Jamaican police openly said the recently attained peace in Western Kingston and St. Andrew South was now under threat. The police high command warned on the record that loyalists were planning coordinated reprisal attacks on the rival gang. The state had to physically block a wake from happening on the dead man's home block because they knew the wake was a recruiting event. By 2021, the Jamaica Gleaner would report that the man named by Rodigan's loyalists as the alleged orchestrator of his death, Aaron Birdie Thompson, was still in the United States, still flagged as a person of interest, and that local law enforcers in Jamaica were now actively seeking the support of international partners, including Interpol, to bring him in. The same Gleaner story would report that the Jamaica Constabularary Force counted 262 active gangs in the country at that time, the majority operating in the corporate area, with St. Andrew South ranked as the most murderous of the 19 police divisions in 2020. A killing in a West Adams kitchen in October 2016 was being absorbed 5 years later into the JCF's case for emergency anti-gang legislation. That is the long shadow of a single name on a single wall. Now the mystery thread, the one we left alive at the beginning. Who exactly was the man the FBI captured on the 110 freeway?

[00:26:13]This is what the verified record actually says. The FBI publicly stated that they did not know his true identity. They believed he was Jamaican, but could not confirm citizenship. They believed he was born sometime between 1970 and 1981. But he had given them every birth year in that range under different names. They processed him under the name Marlon Jones because that was the name his New York rap sheet used most often. The DAW's office charged him under that name with a date of birth of April 14th, 1975.

[00:26:48]Beyond that, the bureau's own special agent told the press on the record that anyone's guess about his real name was as good as theirs. That is the part of this story you cannot resolve with another paragraph. The American legal system has a man in custody. It has charged him with four counts of murder.

[00:27:07]It has filed for capital eligibility and it does not by its own admission know whose son it is holding. That is what a diaspora gangster looks like when he is finally on the booking sheet. The streets called him Rambo. The FBI called him Marlon Jones. New Jersey called him Rashene Brantley. New York called him Floyd Evans. He was also sometimes Anthony Howard and sometimes Anthony Winter. One body, five names. One night that turned a converted kitchen on Rimpow Boulevard into one of the worst single mass casualty shootings the LAPD had ever worked. one financier dead on the floor in a city he wasn't from in a country he was running through with his face about to be painted on a wall back home that the police would never let his family mourn at. In 30 hours the FBI took him off the streets. The streets on both sides of the water are not finished. That was the story of Rambo, the man the FBI named Maron Jones, the man the system caught without ever knowing exactly who it had. If this episode moved you, if it taught you something, if it kept you up, share it.

[00:28:21]Follow us if you haven't already and stay close because on the next episode of Jamaican Gangster, we are going somewhere you are not ready