Here, he quickly recast himself as the Mighty Viking - a sobriquet borrowed from a Sixties Jamaican group - and spun records in local clubs. Despite little formal education, he left his boyhood home of Westmoreland, Jamaica, for Miami in the early Seventies. You mention the Mighty Viking and everybody falls silent.'Īffable and hard-working, Clark was considered the pioneering voice of Jamaican radio in South Florida, and something of a Horatio Alger story. 'People are still scared to talk about the Viking. 'That's the crazy part about this whole thing,' says Clint O'Neil, who replaced Clark as South Florida's pre-eminent reggae DJ. But more than four years since his body was discovered, bullet-riddled and bound, in his truck in a North Dade parking lot, local Jamaicans still regard the killing as an unsolved crime, the dark reminder of an era when drug posses struck anywhere, anytime, and anyone. Police now insist the slaying was nothing more than a robbery-turned-homicide. None of the tales is true, of course, and yet all somehow reflect the macabre mythology that has clung to the popular disc jockey's legacy like the stubborn stench of formaldehyde.Ĭecil Clark, known to the thousands who tuned in to his radio show as the Mighty Viking, was murdered in July 1988.

'I heard they cut off his genitals and stuck them in his mouth.' 'The Mighty Viking - that was something the drug posses did. 'He'd just been with a lady, you know, and he went to take a shower. In the clubs and restaurants of Miami's Jamaican community, they still tell stories about the Mighty Viking.

The mighty vikings