Lawrence Anini: a robber even the police dreaded

By Michael Jimoh

1. At one time in Benin City, for about five months from mid-nineteen eighty-six, some policemen knew better to go to work and return home in mufti, sometimes substituting their top wears with civilian shirts. Those who dressed to work were sensible enough to tuck extra clothing in a bag. It was not out of shame for their uniforms or disrespect for the law (wearing them is mandatory unless during undercover operations) but for security reasons.For many of them, it was the wisest thing to do if they wanted to stay alive. Out of duty, they simply slip into them on their way home or wherever they choose to go – Aduwawa, Airport Road, Akpakpava, Ekenwan Road, First Circular, Ikpoba Slope, New Benin, Ogida, Okhoro, Ring Road (exit and convergence point of major thoroughfares in the ancient city) Sapele Road and just about anywhere. It was something of an irony then, for those empowered by law to prevent, curb crime, arrest and prosecute criminals to now start shedding their identities so as not to be in the sightline of bandits they hoped to catch. And yet, it was the safest thing to do, a means of survival, never to be surprised anywhere in the city by one particular man and his gang of armed robbers who, by then, had shot and killed several policemen and were looking for more to take out. By law, the police should go after offenders/ criminals, catch them, detain and send them to jail if found guilty. It is so in most policed communities where, by unanimous agreement through the Constitution, citizens give them powers to maintain peace, law and order. But this was not exactly the case in those intense five months in Benin City, capital of old Bendel state, when the most wanted man in the state ran exasperating rings round the police tracking him, making them not only look incompetent but always managing to stay a step or two ahead. It wasn’t the criminal’s disappearing act that bothered the police most – they knew they were going to get him in the end. It was his readiness to kill as many policemen as he could before they got him. Add a number of his gang members who were similarly inclined and you will understand why many policemen resorted to such self-defensive measures, just a change of clothes.Even so, the police – some senior officers – were in desperate search of the bandits, only to see who will pull the trigger first – because they wanted to silence the robbers and not be implicated by them. In face-to-face confrontations and sneak attacks, the robbers were almost always first on the draw leaving behind a couple of bullet-riddled policemen and, of course, without their guns.The cops-and-robbers game went on for some time. And then the police wised up. By trading their uniforms for civilian shirt, they could always return unharmed to wife and kids and maybe live long enough to enjoy their pension, a far better option than being shot in the back of the head by a vengeful criminal they ought to have put behind bars in the first place.Besides, the robbers had an advantage, the advantage of anonymity, of not being known except to those few desperate senior officers. And since it had become public knowledge they swore vengeance on men and officers of Bendel State Police Command then, why expose yourself to unnecessary risk if changing your uniform can save your life?It is possible that singular act saved so many lives in a command that once incorporated the entire police force of Delta and Edo states. The man who instilled that fear in them, who brought about that sartorial survival strategy was not a public office holder but a notorious and very cunning criminal, Lawrence Nomayagbon Anini, school drop-out, driver-turned-armed robber and, as his own mother described him, “a very stubborn child.”The stubborn child would go on to bring ignominy to the family in his short but eventful criminal life – he died at 27 along with eight of his gang members when they were executed by firing squad on Valentine’s Day in 1987 at Ekenwan Barracks in Benin City.In recounting her ordeal and the rest of the family to Ndubuisi Okwechime of Thisweek magazine published on February Sixteen 1987, Anini’s mother did everything to put him in school, to force him to learn something that will better his future – sometimes accompanied with beatings. He resisted and ran from home, making up with bad friends and eventually leading one to earn a place in the history of crime in Nigeria as the most audacious, most brutal armed robbery gang with a publicly-sworn grudge against the police.The police themselves were un-relentless in pursuit of Anini and his gang, combing every nook and cranny in town, erecting many stop and search checkpoints in and around Benin, complimented with special anti-robbery police squads and military personnel deployed to the state. Under the military administration of Colonel John Mark Inieger, the state slammed a Twelve midnight to Six am curfew in Benin, which the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Etim Inyang, extended to cover the entire Bendel state for as long as Anini and his gang were on the loose. Night life ceased in the city. Taxis and buses were off the roads as early as seven or eight in the evening. Filling stations shut down even earlier. Some homemakers were surprised, and delighted, their spouses returned home earlier than before, not out with the boys anymore.Such was the fear of Anini that anyone resident in Benin then would have felt the heat one way or the other. In October of Nineteen Eighty-six, for instance, students of the University of Benin had just resumed from the long break, along with freshers. One evening, a Fine Arts undergraduate, Enim Inyang, in Ekenwan Campus where his department was, took an evening walk to know the town better. A fine chalk pastel portraitist who’d finished at Igbobi College, Lagos, Inyang was stopped by a detachment of police along Ekenwan Road. With his angular and unsmiling visage, Grace Jones haircut, in jeans and trainers, the stop and search crime fighters mistook the student for one of the toughies in town. His university identity card saved him. Many more people in Benin may have been subjected to similar fate as Inyang in the manhunt for Anini – with or without as much luck.But first, who was Lawrence Anini, the faceless criminal who terrorised Bendel state for so long and whose identity remained unknown until he was captured?Little is known of his early years apart from what his mother told a journalist. True, he was a renegade right from the get go, shunning school for street life, fetching up as a driver and, in the end, joining an underworld gang of which he became primus inter pares. There was Monday Osunbor, his deputy, described as a sadist. He was the trigger-happy guy who always wanted to, and did, eliminate some of their victims because, as he often cautioned his leader, “dem don see we face.” Contrary to reports about Anini’s ruthlessness in killing his victims, it was Osunbor who wielded the gun and most times used it arbitrarily. In one infamous incident, he persuaded Anini that they should do away with the medical doctor who used to treat them since he had seen their faces and knew who they were. Anini overruled him, insisting that the medic had been good to them. But Osunbor would not listen. And so, one day they traced the doctor to his house, a big surprise to the doctor who never treated them at home. On sighting them, the medical man took fright and fled. The thieves caught up with him and then pow, pow, pow. It was Osunbor, Anini’s self-styled deputy, who wasted him. Not only that, Osunbor was said to be fascinated, to take some perverse pleasure from the bullet dance his victim’s bodies made while he shot them. There was also Solomon Ukponwan alias Ofege, Friday Abeju, Johnbull Ahunwa alias JB, Moses Idahosa alias Smally and Philip Iwebelua also called Smally – all of who would be publicly executed. Idahosa and Iwebelua were both 22, the former was an electrician while Iwebelua, like Anini, was a school drop-out. Although Anini lacked formal education, he more than made up for that by putting to good use what every professional criminal knows: to operate successfully, you need the law on your side. So, Anini befriended DSP George Iyamu and Sergeant Sunday Irowa. Both sold guns to the gang and also tipped them off before police raids. But the union between cops and robbers was an unequal match from the beginning. As Anini himself told his men in their hideout somewhere in Ikpoba Slope around 1am, where the investigative journalist happened to be, they were just working for the police. The sharing formula was something like 80/ 20. You needn’t ask who was getting the twenty.Also, the robbers would be the ones doing the dirty jobs, sustaining injuries during robberies or even getting killed. Iyamu? With the pile he was making from them, he bought properties here and there in Benin. When the heat became too much, and after beating his half-brother to death in detention, Anini turned on the same police that had offered him and his gang protection. In the great manhunt for Anini however, two of his police accomplices, Iyamu and Irowa (unknown to the public at the time), and a batch of police traced Anini to his natal village, Orogho, about fifty kilometres from Benin City, where they arrested his mother and some of his relatives. Anini’s mother didn’t know where her son was but Iyamu and Irowa never believed her. Detained for six months, she was beaten and tortured: “For police detention,” she told Okwechime, “we see pepper. Dem beat me, even sef put bottle for my yansh (private part.)”She was not the only relative to suffer the humiliation her son’s robbery escapades brought on them. Anini’s younger brother was tortured and beaten to death in detention. Anini’s uncle working at the University of Benin was advised to stop until the police found their man. Anini’s two younger sisters would have suffered the same fate but where married then and using their spouse’s name. Anini’s family home was not spared, though. Villagers in his community set it on fire as if exorcising from their midst a place of unmentionable evil. Described by the journalist as a woman “in multiple grief,” Anini’s mother summed up the ordeal they went through, how, for instance, from then on, even neighbours started looking at them somehow, like they had all done something abominable: “I know no as the other children go take live dem life,” she rued to Okwechime. “Maybe dem go change their papa name from Anini. Lawrence don spoil that name. Na thief eye, robber eye dem de take look dat name now.”Not that Anini himself cared much for that unenviable appellation. Rather, he reveled in it, carrying out stunning robberies one after the other with deadly precision. On 21st October, 1985, Anini and his gang surprised the staff of African Continental Bank in Agbor, an hour or so drive from Benin. Their loot? Forty-four thousand, Six hundred and Fifty-three naira. Victims? Two dead policemen and a bank staff. (The military rifle used for this particular operation was sold to Anini by DSP Iyamu for Eight thousand naira.) The bank is where the money is”The bank is where the money is.” A career bank robber reportedly said he chose to steal where most of us keep our money. A redoubtable and adaptive thief from New York, Willie Sutton denied ever making that statement, insisting that an over eager journalist who interviewed him once made it up to embellish his copy. Anini probably didn’t know who his counterpart from New York was, or his sagely response on why he targeted banks. But he knew for certain that if you wanted fast money and plenty of it the place to look was the bank. And so, Anini and his crime partners stormed and raided banks from one end of the old Bendel state to another.In August Nineteen Eighty-six, Anini and co raided a branch of First Bank in Sabongida Ora in the northern part of Bendel state. They got a paltry Two thousand naira, barely enough to lavish on a demanding mistress. The robbers also targeted filling stations where they surprised attendants randomly. In another daring raid, Anini and his gang drove to a police station in Abudu, shot and killed some policemen there and then freed the detainees, among which was said to be a former member. Fleeing from the station, Anini and co were pursued by the police but the thieves got as far as Ekiosa Market in the centre of Benin and mixed with the women in the market. There, he declared his willingness to die but not without some policemen and a few market women. Afraid to shoot back because of the women around, the police could do nothing but watch in despair as Anini got away once more thus strengthening the myth that he has magical powers of disappearing. Known by two famous aliases, “The Law” and “Ovbi’gbo,” Anini’s criminal exploits would for long grip the public’s imagination in Benin, the spectacle itself, Anini’s daring robberies across the length and breadth of the state, the manhunt for him and his gang, the sheer audacity of the outlaws in not only defying the police but also picking them off like a hunter in target practice. Such was Anini’s elusive nature he became the subject of discussion in a State House Meeting of the Armed Forces Ruling Council at Dodan Barracks, Obalende, Lagos, over which General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida presided as military president. As reported then, worried about Anini’s brigandage for so long and failure of the police to capture him and his gang, Babangida was said to have turned to the Inspector General of Police and asked: “My friend, where is Lawrence Anini?”Bendelites and, indeed, Nigerians were collectively asking that question, too. Despite a price tag of N10, 000 on him, Anini continued to dodge the police, prompting a leading magazine of the time, Newswatch, to crown him “Outlaw King of Bendel.” Anini, the magazine wrote under that headline, “is far more than a notorious outlaw. He has such a grip on the psyche of Bendelites, particularly those in Benin City, that he could cause them to shutter themselves indoors for one day just by announcing it on radio – if he could do so…Anini is today the most talked about Bendelite in Bendel state. He has become a legend even before his death.” Like the several policemen on the criminal’s trail in Benin City, the IG must have thrown up his hands in frustration or responded to IBB that his men were on the matter and there would be results pretty soon. Of course, the results came finally when Anini was arrested and shot in the leg in early December of Nineteen Eighty-six. The popular belief that the evasive robber was caught pants down with half a dozen or so prostitutes is pure fallacy. Nothing like that ever happened.As the investigative journalist, Okwechime, recalled of Anini’s capture, the thief was at a party with some of his gang members. After all, what do thieves do after successful operations? Enjoy their loot. So, on the day in question, the robbers were having a good time when, suddenly, out of intuition or some gut feeling, Anini stepped out of the venue in an upstairs building and proceeded down the staircase where he was accosted by some policemen led by Parry Osayande. By this time, the police had no exact photograph of him let alone what he looked like which was why Osayande asked him if Anini was in the apartment.”Yes,” Anini replied. “He is upstairs with some people,” and was almost walking away when Osayande himself recalled an unwritten order given by Fulani Kwajafa, AIG and police crime boss that if anyone was found among robbers, he could also be counted as one. The inference is that if you keep company with robbers, then you are likely to be one. On that premise, Osayande shot Anini in the leg to demobilise him and then proceeded to the apartment where the rest of the gang were promptly arrested. It was only after the police came down that they knew the man Osayande shot earlier was Anini himself. But for Osayande’s recollection of Kwajafa’s instruction, the man they had spent months looking for all over Bendel state would have gotten away once more thus making stronger the myth about Anini vanishing into the air once law enforcement agents closed in.That was another fallacy, of the robber’s ability to disappear. Unknown to the police except his collaborators, Anini depended on his anonymity to slip in and out of police barricades. For instance, he and his gang simply abandoned a vehicle they had stolen and operated with and walked away, only to regroup and strike again.While Anini planned and executed the robberies, he was also doing all his best to be a family man by fathering a child with Gladys Ogbomo that was only nine days old when the great trial began under the apt name First Benin Armed Robbery & Firearms Tribunal presided over by Justice James Omo-Agege. There was also a Second Benin Armed Robbery & Firearms Tribunal which Justice JB Amissah chaired. The trial that followed – of Anini, Osunbor, Ukponwan, Abeju, Iyamu, Irowa, Ahunwa, Idahosa, Iwebelua – was and remains the most celebrated criminal trial in the history of Nigeria. To begin with, nobody believed they could be caught let alone prosecuted. But there they were, in the first pew of the courtroom, handcuffed, Anini in a wheelchair with his left knee shot and amputated. It was only during this trial that the public got to see in person for the first time the gang that had caused them sleepless nights, the villains that had tormented them and made their lives miserable.To everyone’s relief, the court found all of them guilty and sentenced them to death by firing squad. On the morning of February 14, 1987, a throng of residents in Benin City found their way to Ekenwan Barracks where the execution of Anini and his gang members was to take place that same day.Recognised as lover’s day worldwide, very few people in Benin gave much thought to presenting a rose or chocolate to a partner all through that weekend. What dominated most peoples mind was the attraction of the execution. Mike Oputa, a journalist with The Nigerian Observer, captured the situation so well in his report of February 15. “An unprecedented number of curious spectators jogged for more than three kilometres to the new execution ground on Ekenwan Road…to watch the execution of dismissed DSP Iyamu, six members of the notorious Anini gang and two brothers,” Oputa wrote.The spectators, Oputa continued, “ran out of patience when buses plying the route were unable to cope with the number of passengers who did not want to be late at the execution ground…There was traffic jam and the joggers moved faster than the vehicles. Some of the joggers were disillusioned when they discovered that the arena had been jam-packed by spectators who thronged the place as early as 7.30am.”By 11am, with a red flag flying at the entrance of the barracks, a 21-man firing squad positioned themselves before the nine men lassoed to the stake and filled them with lead, thus bringing to an end Anini’s reign as “Outlaw King of Bendel.”