Bayou of Pigs: the True Story of an Audacious Plot to Turn a Tropical Island into a Criminal Paradise.

Sidney Allinson is a Victoria-based communications consultant, Canadian
news correspondent for Britain’s The Army Quarterly and Defence, and
author of The Bantams: The Untold Story of World War I.

As this book’s subtitle says, it tells the true story of an audacious plot to turn a tropical island into a criminal paradise. The title’s play on words refers to the 1961 failed CIA invasion of Cuba and the 1979 copycat conspirators gathered in Louisiana.

Author Stewart Bell is an award-winning Canadian journalist and author of three previous books related to terrorism. This time, he explains how the tiny Caribbean country of Dominica was the hopeful target for political takeover by a laughably inept gaggle of Canadian and American would-be mercenaries.

They were a strange crew, motivated by an odd mixture of gangster greed, militant Leftism, and vague admiration for Nazi ideology. The plotters were ill-equipped for success; with the sole exception of a one-armed veteran of the Vietnam War, the gang members had no prior military experience. Their co-conspirators on Dominica were equally inept, so the planned political coup was doomed from the start.

As Bell aptly says, “It was Manifest Destiny gone stupid.” Almost from the very beginning of their enterprise, the co-conspirators were under surveillance by Canadian and American security agents. Inevitably, it all ended in failure, arrests, imprisonment, and one execution by hanging.

Bell obviously did a good deal of original research, judging by his ability to quote interviews with a score of acquaintances and accomplices of the failed filibusters. However, as the author’s disquieting epilogue mentions, they are out of jail by now, some believed to be following their old Nazi dreams again.