Am I suppose to feel sorry for these guys...

[Nole795]

....because I dont!!!


For Haitian deportees, American-style 'grills' mark them as targets for violence, hate

By Ruth Morris
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted December 29 2006


PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- When authorities deported Marc-Henry Petion from West Palm Beach he was a chubby kid nicknamed Pillsbury who spoke almost no Creole and sported a grill -- a line of gold caps affixed to his front teeth that served as his flashy, street-smart calling card.

Three years later, he has picked up the language and altered his appearance. The dreadlocks he once wore are stuffed in a plastic bag in the tiny cinderblock room he rents on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. He lopped them off to avoid calling attention to himself as a deportee, a classification that carries a heavy stigma on Haiti's unstable streets. He's also forgone the oversized clothes he wore in South Florida, another telltale sign of his U.S. upbringing.



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But he doesn't have the money to remove his grill, so has learned to keep his mouth shut, literally.

In Haiti, where deportees are widely thought to fuel gang violence and kidnappings, the struggle to assimilate is a perilous one. A misplaced pronoun can give you away, subjecting deportees to outright hostility. But no physical trait advertises a deportee's status more loudly than grills, which are virtually non-existent here except in the mouths of youths who have lived in the United States. Some deportees have gotten rid of them to avoid discrimination -- and thugs looking to extract the gold and sell it.

"It's all I have as a token of the United States. It's like a trophy," said Petion, 27, who left Haiti with his family as a toddler and grew up in South Florida as a permanent resident. Federal officials deported him after he served a nine-month sentence for driving with a suspended license and signing a false name to a traffic ticket.

Wearing a grill in Haiti, "you don't know what might happen," he said. "I don't walk the streets."

To underscore his point, he mentions a friend who had a grill and was abducted seven months ago. The kidnappers pulled off the caps one by one, with pliers.

Once made for corrective dental procedures such as crowns and fillings, gold-capped teeth became popular in the late 1970s. By the early '80s, some of hip-hop's emerging stars began to wear them, making grills a popular part of street culture.

Also known as "fronts," they sometimes come with pricey diamond inlays. While some people opt for removable caps that snap into place, others, including Petion, have permanent caps fitted with an adhesive. They range in price from $20 to thousands.

Herby Charles, 29, from Miami, said he removed his grill before being deported to Haiti. With it, he wasn't sure what kind of a welcome he'd get.

Even without it, he said, people shouted and cursed the bus that carried him and other recent arrivals to the National Penitentiary the day of his removal. Like Petion, he was deported three years ago.

"They're judging a book by its cover," Charles said. "Imagine you're going inside the country and people are already calling you dogs. What's it going to be like for you?"

Haitians account for a relatively small percentage of deportations from the United States. But community activists in South Florida have complained that federal officials are putting deportees at risk by sending them back to the troubled nation during violent flare-ups.

They've also asked for the government to extend temporary protected status to Haitians already living in the United States, which would allow them to stay here while their country recovers from cycles of political strife.

Haiti has been known to temporarily jail criminal deportees even if no charges are pending against them in their homeland. Authorities say the measure is precautionary, since crime is already rampant. Haiti's roller-coaster ride through rebellion and lawlessness has included reports of deportees popping up in the ranks of insurgent gangs.

"They are killing us," said Gregory Basile, standing at a lottery ticket stall in Port-au-Prince, expressing a common view of deportees.

"They should not send them here. These guys are very good. They know how to use firearms. They can just lean against a car and open it without using a key."

Once released, criminal deportees face an uphill battle to assimilate. When Petion and Charles arrived, their homeland was a foreign place to them. Petion was two years old when his parents left. Charles was eight. Neither spoke much Creole.

They became friends and now they share the scrapings of American culture that come their way: a care-package of Oreo cookies and pancake mix, a jar of peanut butter. They say they have both had difficulty finding work in Haiti's shipwrecked economy, in part because of the stigma of deportation. And they've learned to stop speaking English around police, whom they mistrust.

Michelle Karshan, executive director of the Alternative Chance counseling program for criminal deportees, said grills spark fear and can even provoke malice in Haitians, who usually associate the gold caps with hardcore criminality. But many deportees are not hardened criminals. Some simply overstayed tourist visas. Among criminal deportees, convictions range from misdemeanors to felonies, the majority related to street-level drug sales.

"I know guys that don't speak, they don't smile, if they have the gold teeth," Karshan said. "You don't have free movement in your own society."

The issue prompted Karshan to call a Fort Lauderdale dentist who fitted some of the deportees' grills to ask if he would voluntarily remove them. He was under review by licensing authorities, she said, and hung up on her.

While the gold caps represent one of the most ostentatious barriers to fitting in, deportees say dreadlocks, accents, and even posture can give them away.

"They even walk differently. They're physically different because they are healthier than the general population, and a lot have come from prison so they've lifted weights," Karshan said.

"The word criminal implies assassin in Creole," she added. "That alone puts you on the wrong foot. There's a perception they're all killers."

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/loc...home-headlines

[Taz_bb2]

I don't feel sorry for them. They want to emulate punks, let them be treated like one.

[Group9]

I don't feel sorry for them either. The last wreck I was in, in Miami, I got hit by a carload of them driving down the median. All were either illegal or recently green carded, and before they realized they had hit the po-po, one more from somewhere, jumped in the car and tried to say he was in it when they hit me.
(After they realized it, the one who had jumped in, a seventeen year old girl, didn't even want to give her name out). :D

[Drummadude]

Were you on-duty? If so, they must be some stupid people.
I don't feel bad one bit about this guy. It's his actions that eventually sent him back to Haiti.

[chewy]

Any moron who puts all gold teeth in the front of his mouth trying to look like a "banger" deserves what he gets.


I like the comments about lopping off his dreads and not wearing the baggy cloths so as to not draw attention to himself.... Now if we could just get OUR citizens to stop dressing like a slobby punk then maybe we could start having a little more hope for future generations!!!! :D

[TXCharlie]

Why doesn't he have them removed, and then give them to the dentist as payment? I bet dentists are cheap down there, especially the unlicensed ones with rusty vice-grips :D

[Drummadude]

I bet a dentist down there would grab his tongue with some pliers and hold on. That's what that guy's scared of, it's quite obvious........

[Nole795]

What pisses me off about that article is that it mentions the guy was deported after serving a 9 month jail term for DWLSR and Signing a False Name...nobody gets that much time for 2 misdemeanors unless they have a more extensive criminal history; which is never mentioned in the article.


What a crap article!!!

[TXCharlie]

[BP348]

What pisses me off about that article is that it mentions the guy was deported after serving a 9 month jail term for DWLSR and Signing a False Name...nobody gets that much time for 2 misdemeanors unless they have a more extensive criminal history; which is never mentioned in the article.


What a crap article!!!

I agree. I don't feel sorry for them at all.

[Scruit]

So LMGTS...

A person breaks the law, thereby gaining monetary advantage, but is caught and punished, and now that he has returned to his old life he thinks he's hard done by?

I'm going to cry myself to sleep tonight. No, really. :D


Reminds me of the ep of Cops when the shoplifter protested at the officer confiscating the stolen property:

Crook: "Those are mine, I worked for them!"
Cop: "You stole them"
Crook: "Yes, but that's my job, so I EARNED them." :rolleyes:

[gringoscott]

Haiti's a hellhole right now. No joke. If I were this guy, the fear of being deported back to that crap would have kept me on the straight and narrow. I'd rather go to prison in the US then have to live in the slums of Haiti.

[ScottLee]

yep, prison here will be better than his home. I've heard stories about Haiti

[RemyG]

I'm moderate, partly liberal, and I still don't feel sorry for him...