A former member of the Klansman gang yesterday rebuffed suggestions from a defence attorney that his motivation for turning State witness against the criminal organisation was to avoid prison time.

“If I wanted to save myself, I would book a [plane] ticket,” said Witness One, the man who has been giving spellbinding details about the chilling operations of the St Catherine-based gang in the ongoing trial of 32 men and one woman accused of being members of the outfit.

According to the witness, who said he was forced to join the gang in 2016, he had never been a person of interest and was not on the radar of the police at the time he decided to approach the cops with information about the criminal organisation, even though he was eventually anointed the “don” in charge of the Lauriston community in the parish.

“As the don, the police began to have an interest in you, because your name was being called in relation to criminal activities,” Denise Brown, attorney for the accused Dillon McLean, put to the witness during cross-examination yesterday.

“My name wasn’t being called in criminal activities, believe mi, Miss,” the witness insisted while admitting that his name had become known in the community by “a few” people because of his position in the gang. He, however, claimed that his reign was not marked by the autonomy enjoyed by other dons of similar standing.

The witness, who has been testifying from a remote location, has on several occasions referenced being traumatised “trying to keep safe” as he worked alongside undercover cops to help them gather evidence against the gang.

Yesterday, in further rejecting suggestions from a defence attorney that he had deliberately doctored the information he gave the police and the court in order to incriminate members of the gang, the witness said details he might have omitted at points and included at others could be because of the stress brought on by “being hunted”.

“I’ve been hunted, hunted down to kill mi. I have been through a lot,” he told the court.

He further dismissed suggestions that he had received any spoils as a gang member.

“I didn’t benefit in no form of way, no Ma’am, I didn’t get any money. I can only recall getting money two time,” the witness said.

Asked by the attorney whether he knew about “lootings, shootings and killings in Lauriston”, as the don, he said “Ma’am, sometimes after it happen.”

Under cross-examination from another attorney earlier in the sitting, the witness had claimed that while he was a top-tier member of the gang he did not have a personal gun because he was “not into the badness”.

Asked by the attorney if he was saying he had “never been sent to do murders” he retorted, “I was sent to run the road, never sent to pull the trigger.”

The witness, who said he was made a don “between 2017 and 2018”, had earlier testified that when he was asked to take the reins of power for Lauriston he had objected, telling alleged gang leader Andre “Blackman” Bryan that such a life did not blend with being a married man and that he wanted out of the gang. He said Bryan told him then that the only way out was the graveyard or prison.

Yesterday morning, the ex-gang member said he had given the police the intelligence that led them to the discovery of the gang’s burial site in 2020.

At the time, lawmen found the remains of at least two people from a cold case in addition to other human bones.

He made that claim during cross-examination by attorney Shadae Bailey, who represents accused Pete Miller, otherwise called Smokie.

Bailey had challenged the witness’s account of an incident in Rivoli, St Catherine, wherein he claimed that he had seen her client in the company of other men beating two men from the Denham Town community in Kingston, and who they subsequently killed and buried. According to the attorney, the witness had lied since 2018 when he took the police to that area to search for the bodies and the search turned up nothing.

“The first time we went we didn’t find anything, but they find it the second time,” the witness shot back confidently.

In a Jamaica Observer report of that incident in 2020, Deputy Commissioner of Police in charge of Crime Fitz Bailey told the newspaper that intelligence had led lawmen to an area dense with vegetation known as Waterloo Close, bordering Rivoli in the old capital, two years after investigators had first visited the location but had come up empty-handed. The senior cop said four femur bones had been discovered among several other human remains, including a skull, suggesting that at least two people had been buried there.

“We did the excavation, and we actually came up with at least two bodies. We found four femur bones so that’s at least two bodies; we believe there could be more because we found like a skull and we have found several other body parts,” Bailey said at the time.

The trial resumes on Monday morning with the continuation of the cross-examination Witness One.