Danger Man flick appears as prosecutors shelve his case

Gang symbols --- or was Danger Man spastic?

Some eight months after his murder

Danger Man documentary debuts as prosecutors give up on solving case

One of the Panamanian entries that was chosen for its debut at the 2008 ICARO Central American film and video festival was a documentary by Rafaela Moreno, "Historia de Barrio: Producto del Ghetto - Danger Man." It's about the brief life and times of Panamanian rapper Alonso Blackwood, better known to the public by his entertainer persona Danger Man.

Blackwood was gunned down by four assailants last February 21 as he was leaving the home of his cousin in the sprawling Panama City corregimiento of Juan Diaz. One of the people with whom he had been meeting just before he walked out the door and into a hail of bullets was his manager, Manuel de Jesús Caballero Castillo, who was slain by a hit man in San Miguelito this past June.

On September 10 prosecutors moved to close the investigation of Danger Man's assassination as an unsolved case. It was hinted that there are theories of what happened that can't be discounted, but neither can they be sufficiently proven in a court of law.

So what's the bochinche on the street? The most commonly cited theory is that Blackwood had some first-hand knowledge of a gang with outposts in Colon, Panama City, Miami and New York that was, among other things, dedicated to bank robbery and heroin smuggling; and that after some of the members of this gang were arrested in the United States he was suspected of having been the informer who fingered the suspects for the DEA.

Panama has asked for information from the US government about the case, but for reasons good and bad they hesitate to share information about their "War on Drugs" with supposedly allied governments and even when they do provide information often let foreign criminal cases wither and die through only partial cooperation. This is sometimes to protect sensitive sources of and means of collecting information, but sometimes it also appears to be for the purpose of concealing corruption or incompetence within US government agencies. In any case, cooperation has not been sufficient to verify or rule out the theory that Danger Man was killed for being a DEA snitch.

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