Dickson C. Igwe. Photo: VINO/File

This was a son and member of the Road Town elite. This writer alluded to this tribe of Virgin Islanders in a satire he penned a few days ago.

Ok, culture is very difficult to change, if not impossible, as it entails re-educating the national mindset. Changing the behaviour of a society is a hugely difficult task. It is analogous to turning around a massive ocean liner with manual effort, as opposed to modern technology.

The mafia-type cultures of Virgin Islands young men and youth are terribly destructive. But this writer believes that at this time the idea of changing the mindset of our youth to detest and quit this sub-culture is a fairy tale. The ‘gangsta’ is romanticised in the Virgin Islands: he is a hero.

Changing the GANGSTA culture is not possible at this time: this is a culture driven by guns, gunmen and associated criminal elements in the drug trafficking and arms dealing micro-community. Its tentacles spread and are found everywhere.

This is certainly not to imply that the two recent murders were drugs related. However, the fact that guns were involved in these deaths links the deaths to the perverse culture of criminality and the gangster that in this Ole Boys view is the greatest challenge the Virgin Islands faces.

Now, like in many world cultures, crime is a historic fact.

Here in the Virgin Islands, the British had forts in strategic locations overlooking the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

The seas surrounding the islands were ruled by pirates, swashbucklers and privateers and their vessels. Early literature in Britain depicted men such as Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson as heroes. They were, in reality, gangsters who commandeered ocean-going vessels in search of loot.

Smuggling and illegal activity were a fact of life. These were men who were in the employ of the landed gentry back in the Kingdom where the Kings and Queens of England ruled.

Post slavery and the plantation era, we all know of tales of rum smuggling, from which the trade in marijuana, cocaine, and guns evolved. So, the culture of criminality is an entrenched subculture that is part of the wider culture. It is hundreds of years old

If our native young men are to be saved from destruction by the culture of the GANGSTA, the only option is better data collection, forensic-type investigations, proactive exertions by law enforcement, and so on and so forth, that will be assessed in a following story.