Carisa Lee

Act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Mc­Don­ald Ja­cob says they are look­ing in­to how the founder of Drugs Sou Sou (DSS) Ker­ron Clarke opened a pawn­shop.

On Mon­day, Clarke post­ed a pic­ture to his In­sta­gram page an­nounc­ing that he was now li­censed to con­duct busi­ness as a money­len­der, pawn­bro­ker and deal­er in pre­cious met­als, gems and stones.

“Some will con­grat­u­late me, oth­ers will hate…Wel­come to A-to-Z pawn­shop. We are of­fi­cial­ly opened for busi­ness,” he cap­tioned it.

Ja­cob said the po­lice, af­ter see­ing the post, start­ed in­ves­ti­gat­ing the le­git­i­ma­cy of Clarke’s busi­ness ven­ture.

“We are deal­ing with the whole as­pect of the pawn­shop, whether or not it was au­tho­rised and all of that and who did the au­tho­ri­sa­tion,” he said.

As pre­dict­ed by Clarke, the open­ing of his pawn­shop evoked mixed emo­tions among peo­ple who in­vest­ed their mon­ey in DSS.

One per­son said, “Hope the busi­ness grows from strength to strength and you’ll con­tin­ue fight­ing, work­ing and help­ing us as a peo­ple. “

An­oth­er asked his fol­low­ers if they were not con­grat­u­lat­ing him on his new busi­ness be­cause, “Preeze open that pawn­shop with my mon­ey in­no (sic).”

Clarke wrote that he was proud to be the youngest pawn­bro­ker of the first black pawn­shop in this coun­try.

Act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Ja­cob en­sured the pub­lic that these in­vestors will get jus­tice. He told Guardian Me­dia that the DSS in­ves­ti­ga­tion was com­plet­ed and was now in the hands of Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions Roger Gas­pard, SC.

“With the DPP, with our Fi­nan­cial In­ves­tiga­tive Bu­reau (FIB) head­ed by Su­per­in­ten­dent Lu­cas, we can as­sure them that there will be con­tin­ued pos­i­tive re­sults,” he said.

He said there were some mat­ters be­fore the Ap­peal Court in re­la­tion to the seizure of DSS funds and that may be a stum­bling block.

“We are wait­ing on that out­come. We have to wait on the tim­ing of the court so that we can go for­ward with oth­er charges that may be rec­om­mend­ed by the DPP,” he said.

DSS was first raid­ed on Sep­tem­ber 21, 2020, by of­fi­cers of the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Re­sponse Team (SORT). Some $22 mil­lion in seized mon­ey was re­port­ed­ly tak­en to the La Hor­quet­ta Po­lice Sta­tion but re­leased hours lat­er.

In Oc­to­ber, DSS was again raid­ed, this time by of­fi­cers of the Fi­nan­cial Bu­reau and ap­prox­i­mate­ly $7 mil­lion was seized.

Ac­cord­ing to a post on so­cial me­dia by Clarke, the state has ap­plied to con­fis­cate the mon­ey and the mat­ter will be heard in Jan­u­ary 2022.

Since the first raid, Clarke, al­so a Lance Cor­po­ral in the Trinidad and To­ba­go De­fence Force (TTDF), was charged with two counts of mon­ey laun­der­ing on Feb­ru­ary 9 and was al­so sent on 83 days an­nu­al leave from the TTDF.

Four po­lice of­fi­cers were al­so sus­pend­ed due to the probe.