Ranking Dread (born Winston Brown; c. 1955 – 1996)[1][2][3] was a Jamaican reggae deejay and was born in the Jamaican parish of Trelawny but grew up in the Kingston ghettos of Rema and Tivoli.
[1] He had a minor UK hit in the early 1980s with "Fattie Boom Boom", but in the mid-1980s, he faded from the music scene and became more notorious for his criminal activities, where he was labelled "the most dangerous man in Britain and the number one Yardie Godfather".
[4] This was backed up by his appearance on a British television programme in the late 1980s entitled The Cook Report.
He travelled to the United Kingdom, where he lived under several aliases including Errol Codling, became the head of a Hackney drug-dealing and armed robbery gang,[6] and was wanted by the police there.
[8] In 1990, after being deported from the United States, he was arrested in Canada for allegedly slashing his girlfriend's face with a knife after entering the country illegally on a fake passport, and attempted to gain refugee status there, claiming that he feared for his life in Jamaica due to his political affiliations.