A coup that fizzled
It sounded like a sitcom version of The Dogs of War, after rewrites by V.S. Naipaul and Woody Allen. Even the feds joked about a "Bayou of Pigs." Ten men, mostly Southerners and mostly Ku Klux Klan members, were arrested last week by federal agents at a marina near New Orleans and charged with organizing an expedition against a friendly nation.
The cast of characters in the plot was, well, odd. The conspirators included a gay vigilante, a mystery-man gunrunner with the novelish name of Sydney Burnett-Alleyne, a nurse cum spy with Irish Republican Army connections, and an ousted Prime Minister with alleged ties to South African industrialists. The gang, it appears, was intent on a coup to capture the impoverished Caribbean island of Dominica (pop. 81,000), a true banana republic (70% of exports) that is physically no bigger than Lexington, Ky.
The roots of the fiasco stretch back to last July, when Eugenia Charles, 61, was elected Prime Minister of all-black Dominica. Among those she defeated was a predecessor, Patrick John, 44, driven from office in 1979 after a BBC documentary charged that his plans for island industrialization included an oil refinery that would benefit South Africa. John's go-between was said to be Burnett-Alleyne, a convicted smuggler who once recruited mercenaries to invade Barbados. The Charles administration believes the ten Americans, who were apprehended with an arsenal of automatic weapons and plastic explosives, were to enforce a government takeover by John—in cahoots, perhaps, with the island's marijuana growers.
John was arrested in March for plotting to overthrow the government. Detained earlier were two officials of Dominica's 100-man army, one of whom wrote a letter that the government intercepted.
The letter described a planned "main strike" on the police station and mentioned one "Mike Perdue in Texas."
Meanwhile, U.S. agents learned of the invasion scheme and, posing as seamen, won the confidence of the group's ringleader—a macho, Cadillac-driving Houston homosexual named Mike Perdue. Apparently reconnoitering for the invaders was Mary Ann McGuire, a 26-year-old Irish-Canadian nurse with ties to the I.R.A., who had flown to Dominica on April 15. She is now in police custody there.
Like everyone else, Prime Minister Charles is somewhat bewildered by the plot, and especially by the financing of the operation. "I don't know if anyone in Dominica has that much money," she said puckishly. "If there is someone who wants to waste money out there, I wish he'd give it to me so I could fix the roads."