The canine cop and Carlo

DEBBIE JACOB

WHEN I heard that Hector “Pee Wee” Lewis had died, I thought about all the history he carried with him as an early canine police officer back in the 1960s. I am the lucky journalist who had the opportunity to interview Lewis. His stories are now in a history of Trinidad and Tobago’s police dogs that will be published later this year.

I first visited Lewis on March 2, 2009 in his cramped office nestled among the boutiques of Town Centre Mall on lower Frederick Street, Port-of-Spain. There, Lewis ran Confidential Investigation, which specialised in insurance investigations. In his desk, he kept pictures of canine officers and their dogs participating in the Independence Day parades during the 60s and 70s.

For years I visited Lewis to hear his stories. It never took much to trigger his memories of his life as a canine officer. Mostly he spoke about Dog #22, Carlo, a tracking dog who had a defective eye with a growth of hair on the pupil.

Carlo, only about a year old at the time Lewis paired up with him, caught a thief who stole $27 worth of peppers, tracked men gambling outside of cinemas and caught a man fleeing from a murder scene. Carlo and Lewis accompanied police officers serving warrants. They often accompanied police searching cane fields for nefarious characters.

“No one wanted to run when they saw Carlo,” said Lewis.

Once, Lewis and Carlo followed a woman from Sea Lots taking food to a fugitive. Carlo surprised them in a car.

Carlo worked what Lewis described as “a nice robbery” in Santa Cruz at the Stollmeyer Cocoa Estate.

“Every Friday the foreman paid the workers. One day, a guy brought some washcloths to the house on a hill where the workers received their wages. He asked to enter the premises to sell them. When he got inside, he whipped a gun from a washcloth and stole the money from the paymaster handing it out.

“Police said they wanted a dog to track the culprit, and Carlo and I came from Besson Street for the exercise. Carlo found the trail and tracked the suspect through the bush and onto the road where the guy took a car from the scene, jumped on a boat and headed for Tobago. The mistake he made is telling his brother he just made a hit.

“They charged the same man for murder in 1961 or 1962 when he killed the owner of Honeycomb Fried Chicken on Duncan and Prince Street. People used to line up in the night to buy chicken there.”

For much of 1962 and 1963, Lewis and Carlo worked at the Besson Street Police Station and tackled gangs in Port of Spain.

“There were gang wars like the Applejackers against the Lawbreakers and the Renegades from Observatory Street. It all started with the steelband clashes,” said Lewis. “Carlo liked his work – chasing and holding fellows running through the yards. They were shooting and chopping one another, and I apprehended a lot of fellows with the dogs.”

Then Carlo and Lewis got transferred to San Fernando.

“One day I said, ‘I’m going on patrol.’ Carlo and I saw the Guardian newspaper manager Norman Philip outside of the station. He liked police and police dogs. Norman said, ‘Come, we goin’ by my girlfriend. I want her to see the dog.’

“Carlo and I got in the car. Some of the fellows from the police station saw me and thought I was leaving the patrol to go and lime with Norman. As we were driving, I saw a fellow named Blue Boy, a known criminal, walking on the pavement. I told Norman, ‘Drive ahead a little,'. Norman had a siren and a police light he’d put on top of his car so Norman put on the siren.”

Lewis’s stint in the Dog Section stretched from 1961 to 1973. He never knew why he got transferred.

“It was good while it lasted,” said Lewis.

There, in his office, Lewis sobbed when he recalled how Carlo had died from distemper.

I will always remember Lewis telling all of those crime stories that captured an invaluable and often invisible part of Trinidad and Tobago history.

Carlo’s fat police file filled with detailed reports backed up Lewis’s stories. Those files from the first four dogs in 1952 to the dogs of the 1980s did not survive the Caroni flood of 2018, but I had transcribed many of the reports.

Lewis and Carlo’s stories remind me how much history there is to discover and write in this country.