“We had a kinship”: the harrowing gunpoint robbery of Johnny Cash
From intercepting Soviet messages during the peak of the Cold War to battling drug addiction and creating a beloved discography of timeless tracks, Johnny Cash truly saw it all during his time on Earth. For all the jubilation and success that the Arkansas songwriter witnessed, however, his life was also punctuated by tragedy and hardships. It is no surprise, therefore, that Cash spent much of his free time away from the road, basking in the sunlight and fresh air of Jamaica.
To say that Cash adored the Caribbean island would be a gross understatement. He often spoke of the island’s unique power, its welcoming people, and how the fresh air and greenery took him back to simpler times during his childhood. “Jamaica has renewed me more times than I can count,” Cash once wrote. During the mid-1970s, Cash bought a property on the island, Cinnamon Hill, where he would often spend the winters surrounded by his family and friends.
Initially built in 1734 as part of a sugar plantation, Cinnamon Hill has been a constant fixture of the landscape in Jamaica, surviving countless hurricane seasons and being one of the only plantations not to be destroyed in slave uprisings. In the modern age, the surrounding land of the building, which once housed vast sugar fields tended to by countless enslaved Africans, now houses a golf course, and the building itself is kept as a kind of shrine to Johnny Cash, whose love of the Caribbean island lasted for the remainder of his life.
Despite Cash’s love of the place, his time in Jamaica was not always harmonious. In fact, the picturesque surroundings of Cinnamon Hill once played host to a dramatic armed robbery, which put the lives of Cash and his family in danger. As the ‘Man in Black’ revealed in his autobiography, the action took place on Christmas Day, 1982, when Cash, his wife June Carter, their son John Carter Cash, along with various friends, visitors, and staff, were settling down for a wholesome Christmas evening.
All of a sudden, three young men burst into the house, armed with knives and a gun, and with their faces obscured by stockings. Reportedly, the trio ordered everyone in the house to lie face down on the ground before declaring, “Somebody’s going to die here tonight!” At the beginning of this heist, the thieves demanded $1million from Cash, but this plan quickly changed. Even at the peak of his success, the songwriter wasn’t walking around with $1m dollars in cash on his person, and even if he did, he wouldn’t be allowed to enter Jamaica with it.
So instead, the ringleader of the robbers thrust his gun to John Carter’s head, and marched the family around the house, stealing any money and valuables they found along the way. Bizarrely, though, this two-hour house tour rendered the thieves fairly personable. At one point, with his gun still to the young John Carter’s head, the ringleader asked, “What do you do down here? What do you like to do in Jamaica? Do you snorkel?”
After hours of turmoil and fear, the three men finally left, after barricading Cash and the rest of the attendees in the basement of Cinnamon Hill. Given that Cash was a high-profile figure who did a lot of charity work on the island, officials in Jamaica were keen to bring justice to the three thieves, fearing that the experience might have prevented Cash from returning to the Caribbean island.
Depending on who you ask, there are a few different versions of what happened next. Either the three thieves were caught at Montego Bay airport a while later, attempting to fly to Miami, or the ringleader was apprehended the same night as the robbery, while the other two followed a few weeks later. Regardless of which of these tales was the truth, all three men were dead within weeks of the robbery. According to Cash, the police in Jamaica sought to make an example out of them.
This harrowing near-death experience certainly stayed with Cash throughout the rest of his life, but he seemed perpetually conflicted about its outcome. In his memoir, the songwriter mused, “How do I feel about it? What’s my emotional response to the fact (or at least the distinct possibility) that the desperate junkie boys who threatened and traumatised my family and might easily have killed us all (perhaps never intending any such thing) were executed for their act or murdered, or shot down like dogs, have it how you will?”
“I’m out of answers,” he concluded. “My only certainties are that I grieve for desperate young men and the societies that produce and suffer so many of them, and I felt that I knew those boys. We had a kinship, they and I: I knew how they thought, I knew how they needed. They were like me.”
For Cash to be so calm and well-rounded about what was undoubtedly a terrifying time is reflective of his profound outlook on life. He had seen it all, and he took everything in his stride. In every hoodlum, thief and criminal he met, he could see the deeper story; one of loss, desperation, and personal struggle. After all, it was these same attributes that made his discography so universally beloved.
