Elpert Fitzwarren, Business Writer

SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX?: 'Focus', (left foreground), carries on his shoulder a leather bag in which he stores mobile phones and other valuables that visa applicants cannot carry into the consular office of the U.S. Embassy in New Kingston. Focus scores his business from the daily lines of people at the embassy. - photos by Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer

Oliver Clarke held up his passport impishly to show the photograph on his recently renewed non-immigrant United States visa.

It had been taken by one of the photographers who hustles for business outside the consular offices of the United States embassy on Oxford Road in Kingston.

"I am happy to say that I used the service and found it very efficient," says the Gleaner Company chairman, who, with a bevy of photographers in his newspaper operation would be the last person you might expect to have a picture for official use taken under a tree on the side of a busy Kingston street.

Yet, Clarke is among a large number of people who find themselves using the services of the entrepreneurs who set up business outside the consulate. They not only take pictures using cameras, but provide Internet services, and keep, for a price, a range of implements and gadgets, including mobile phones and lap-tops, that are forbidden entry to the consulate.

It is after 2:00 p.m. this Monday and the queue that forms outside the consulate for the afternoon appointments has thinned out. There are a few stragglers who the milling service providers remind what they may or may not take inside. They offer to keep what cannot go in.

Quick photo

And, inevitably, there are persons who having already gone inside, come hustling out for a quick photo. This time, it is a police inspector, who used to be a bodyguard to former Jamaica Labour Party boss Edward Seaga and is now part of the security detail of the Opposition leader, Bruce Golding. The photograph he presented was more than six months old.

"I need it now," he says to a photographer, hustling across the busy street to the vacant lot with the trees where the picture will be taken.

In short order he is back, taking short, quick steps past the security posts, heading back to his interview.

"I was lucky there," he says later, explaining that the photo taken for his new passport was rejected.

"It's just service," says Nord Newman, the tall, slender, middle aged Rastafarian armed with a small digital camera.

Newman has been taking photographs of visa applicants for more than a quarter of a century.

"Yes, I make a living," he says. "You know that you not working for anybody but yourself, so you have to hustle."

This Monday has been relatively slow for Newman. He has had only four customers, which, at J$350 a shot, means he has grossed $1,400 for the day. But he will get only $600 of that.

There are two men across the road with portable, battery-powered printers, who provide the hard copies of the pictures taken by Newman and the others. They are paid about $200 a print. Paper and ink mean that they have higher overheads.

Newman, who, these days, has up to seven competitors, says some days are better, when he has up to a dozen customers.

"For the week, though, you can average work a $5,000-$6,000," he says. "It depends."

Tax authorities

Newman is the most forth-coming of the group. Most of the others are cagey. They prefer not to give their real or full names and not to talk about earnings. They fear robbers. But they are most concerned about attracting the attention of the tax authorities.

"We don't want Omar Davies (the finance minister) up here," says one.

Baju is one of the cagey ones. He mostly offers Internet service, and prints photographs.

Baju connects his lap-top to a mobile phone on the Digicel network to log onto the U.S. embassy website where he accesses on-line visa forms and other pertinent information for his clients.

His 'staff' may help clients with their online applications and the setting of appointments.

He and others who offer such services from under the trees at Oxford Road - a stone's throw from the Development Bank of Jamaica which finances entrepreneurs, but not those of the ilk of Baju and Newman - say their major competitor is Audrey Marks' Paymaster Limited, the bill payment company which the U.S. embassy has contracted to collect its visa application fees. Paymaster, independently, also offers on-line visa application support services.

"On average, we are doing five a day," says Baju of his Internet business. "We charge like Paymaster."

In fact, they are more expensive. They charge $1,000 against Paymaster's $800.

But Baju rationalises the difference between his price and that of Paymaster, which has outlets across the city and elsewhere in Jamaica.

"What we do is an emergency service," he says. "Sometimes they come to an appointment and find they have a problem. It is a 10-minute service. People have to hustle."

Focus, too, is suspicious of reporters and how what they write may impact his business. And he doesn't want the taxman snooping around even though he insists that "I don't earn that much anyway."

"Yes, that's the name - Focus. That is the name they know me by. Don't worry about anything else."

There is a black leather bag slung over Focus' shoulder. In his left hand he holds small, green cardboard squares with numbers on them.

A tallish, casually dressed, but well-groomed man emerges from the courtyard of the consular premises onto the sidewalk. He offers Focus a green card similar to the ones the businessman has been holding. This man's card has the number 24 written on it.

Transparent plastic

Focus delves into his bag and extracts a thin, transparent plastic bag into which a slimline, Sony Ericsson mobile phone fits snugly. In the bag is also a corresponding ticket with the number 24.

This man is Robert Lawson the manager of the Liguanea branch of Victoria Mutual Building Society. He is retrieving the phone that he couldn't take inside and left with Focus for a fee of $100.

"I felt a bit uncomfortable doing it," admits Lawson. "But I suppose they are here everyday."

"There is no thieving around here," insists Focus. "It is honest. It really an honest living, man."

The special constable standing guard on the sidewalk seems to agree.

"People have concerns," he says. "But I never hear of people losing anything yet. If people did they (the service providers) wouldn't be here."

Over the next 40 minutes or so mobile phones, umbrellas and other small gadgets are retrieved from Focus, the young woman who sits across the way engaging in deep conversation with a heavy-set lady, or from Donovan Bacchus who sits in the shade under a big tree on the other side of Oxford Road.

Bacchus claims to have got the whole safe-keeping venture going outside the consulate. That was in November 2003 when he was a taxi driver seeking fares from an empty lot adjacent to the consulate. These days people have to pay to park on that empty lot. There is a private operator there - whether formal or not is unclear.

Hedges

What Bacchus says he noticed back then was that people, on discovering that they couldn't take their mobile phones inside were attempting to hide them in hedges in the consulate's front garden.

"I know they hide it, so I go over and say, 'Phone service'," he says. His taxi-driving days were at an end.

"What I offer is honesty and trust," says Bacchus. "If you come from Hanover and Westmoreland and you can't take your phone inside, you can't just leave and come back later or the next day for an appointment. And you can't just leave your phone on the roadside."

This used to be a business with very decent returns. But Bacchus no longer has a monopoly. The market has opened up and he faces competition.

"The business used to be good," he says. Now it share up. It is five of we out here now."

- business@gleanerjm.com