The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (48 page)

Ricot Dupuy, of Radio Soleil d’Haiti, told me candidly, “There are Haitian groups who have toyed with the idea of taking the law into their own hands and killing him.”

Constant claims that he has a small coterie of supporters who keep an eye out for him. “I can tell you, when they come in front of my place, fifty per cent of the people out there are my people,” he said. “They pass by in case there is any trouble.”

Though it is hard to know the precise numbers, Constant maintains some hold over a small following of former
FRAPH
members, Tonton Macoutes, soldiers, and Duvalierists who also live in exile. Demonstrators say that in at least one instance a car showed up outside his house to monitor them. “They came by taking pictures of us, and we took pictures of them,” Ray Laforest told me.

“I don’t want to play a deadly game,” Constant said of Laforest, “but I have stuff on him, and . . . ” He let his thought trail off.

One day, I was sitting with Constant in his house, reading a chapter of his book, when his phone rang. After he took the call and hung up, he said, “You’re here for a part of history. The verdict came out. I’ve been sentenced to life imprisonment and to hard labor, and they’re taking over all my property in Haiti.”

He dropped into his rocking chair, lighting a cigarette and looking around the room. The jury had deliberated for four hours and had found sixteen of the twenty-two defendants in custody guilty, twelve of them for premeditated murder or for being accomplices to murder. Those who had been tried in absentia were convicted of murder and ordered to pay the victims millions of dollars in damages. “I hate to lose my things back home,” Constant said, “because eventually my mother has to go back there.”

He lit another cigarette and drew on it deeply. “I better call J.D.,” he said, referring to Larosiliere. He picked up his cell phone, trying to concentrate. “They have a verdict against me,” he said into the phone, leaving a message for his lawyer. “I need to speak to him. O.K.? They have sentenced me to life and hard labor!”

A few minutes later, the phone rang, and Constant picked it up in a hurry. But it was a reporter asking him for a comment. He managed a few words and hung up. The phone rang again. It was Larosiliere. “What do you think’s going to happen here?” Constant asked nervously. “O.K. . . . yes . . . O.K.”

He handed me the phone. I could hear Larosiliere’s voice crackling through the receiver before I put it to my ear. “I have one word to say about all this: bullshit.” Larosiliere said that the Haitian government would now try to extradite Constant, claiming that a legitimate tribunal had convicted him with the blessing of international observers. But, he said, they still had to show that the verdict was fair and prove in a U.S. court that Constant deserved to be sent back.

Constant called me a few days later. His voice was agitated. “There are all these rumors out there that they’re about to arrest me,” he said. “That they’re coming for me.” He said that he had to check in with the I.N.S. the following day, as he did every Tuesday, but he was afraid the authorities might be planning to seize him this time. “Can you meet me there?”

By the time I arrived at the I.N.S. office in Manhattan the next morning, he was already standing by the entrance. It was cold, and his trench coat was wrapped around him. He told me that his mother, who was in Florida, had called to tell him that other Haitian exiles had been arrested. I could see circles under his eyes. Pacing back and forth, he said that he had stayed at a friend’s house the night before, in case the authorities showed up at his house to arrest him.

I followed him into the elevator and up to an office on the twelfth floor. Constant tried to check in at the front desk, where a poster of the Statue of Liberty hung, but an I.N.S. official said they weren’t ready for him yet. He sat down and started to ponder why he had been kept free for so long: “A friend of mine told me one day—he works for intelligence here—and he said there is somebody, somewhere, that is following everything about me.”

A few minutes later, a clerk yelled out his name, and Constant leaped to his feet. He approached the desk with his I.N.S. form and checked in. The official took the sheet of paper and walked into a back room, where she consulted with somebody. Then she returned and, just like that, Constant was smiling, leading me to the elevator, calling his mother to say that he was O.K., and rushing across the street to buy a new suit in celebration of his freedom.

The next week, two dozen Toto Watchers gathered outside the I.N.S. carrying signs that showed alleged
FRAPH
victims: a murdered boy with a shirt pulled over his head; two men lying in a pool of blood. “We are here to demand that Toto Constant be sent back to Haiti,” Kim Ives, a writer for the Brooklyn-based newspaper Haïti Progrès, yelled through a bullhorn. “If you’re opposed to war criminals and to death-squad leaders living as your neighbors in New York City, please join us.” There was a sense that this was the last chance to persuade the U. S. government to deport Constant—that if it wouldn’t do so now, after the conviction, it never would. A U.N. expert on Haiti, Adama Dieng, who had served as an impartial observer at the trial, had already called the verdict “a landmark in [the] fight against impunity.”

Outside the I.N.S. office, several in the crowd were bent over, trying to light candles in the freezing wind. “How can they not send him back?” a Haitian man asked me. “He has been found guilty by a Haitian court. Why is the C.I.A. protecting him?” Suddenly, there was a loud, unified chant from the crowd: “Toto Constant, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!”

A
U
R
EVOIR?

At one of our last meetings in 2001, after Jean-Bertrand Aristide and George W. Bush had each been sworn in to their respective offices, Constant called and said that he had to see me. His legal status remained unchanged. He had been talking to his “advisers,” he said, and he needed to tell me something. The political terrain had shifted in both countries, he said. There was more and more resistance to Aristide, even in Queens. Bombs had recently exploded in Port-au-Prince, and the regime had blamed Constant. He denied any role, but he said that Haitians from all over were calling, waiting for him to act, to step up.

At the Haitian restaurant where we met, he told me that people had “been publishing articles, and they say, ‘Look at this guy who has been convicted for murder in Haiti and he’s getting stronger and stronger every day.’” He sipped a glass of rum. “A lot of people in Haiti are watching me. They haven’t heard from me. They don’t know what’s going to happen, but everyone has their eyes on me, and people are sending me their phone numbers from Haiti. People here try to reach me. Political leaders are trying to reach me. There is a perception that if . . . Aristide is on the go, I’m the only one that can step in. I can’t let that thing get to my head. I have to be very careful and analyze it and make it work for me.”

As people entered the restaurant, Constant looked over his shoulder to check them out. He waited for two Haitian men to sit down, and then he turned back to me and said that he had to do something dramatic or he would be a hostage in Queens for the rest of his life. “If I stand up and make a press conference, and even if I don’t say anything but I just attack Aristide, that’s going to give strength to the opposition down there, that’s going to give strength to the former military, that’s going to give strength to the former
FRAPH
members, that’s going to give strength to everyone who didn’t have the guts because they didn’t see who would take the lead.”

He had recently received a new spate of death threats, he said. Someone had gotten hold of his cell-phone number and had warned, “I’m going to get you no matter what you do.”

I asked if he was afraid of what might happen if he so brazenly broke his gag order and called a press conference. He said that he wasn’t sure what would happen, but it was his destiny. “I’ve been prepared since young for a mission, and that’s why I’ve stayed alive,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder again, and then he leaned toward me. “I’m either going to be President of Haiti,” he said, “or I’m going to be killed.”

—June, 2001

In July, 2006, Constant met a more mundane and unexpected fate: he was arrested in New York for defrauding lenders of more than a million dollars in an elaborate real-estate scam. This time, none of Constant’s connections could protect him from the law. Tried in New York, he was found guilty and sentenced to up to thirty-seven years in prison. The state’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, said, “Constant will no longer be a menace to our society.”

Author’s Note

Nine of these stories first appeared in The New Yorker. Three were published elsewhere: “Giving ‘The Devil’ His Due” in The Atlantic; “Which Way Did He Run?” in the New York Times Magazine; and “Crimetown, U.S.A.” in The New Republic. Some of the pieces have been updated and revised.

Acknowledgments

As always, I am indebted to David Remnick and The New Yorker, where nine of the twelve stories first appeared. Without Remnick’s fierce commitment to narrative journalism, his keen editorial judgment, and his unwavering support, these pieces would not have been possible. At every turn, I have benefitted not only from his help, but also from that of the magazine’s other extraordinary editors. Daniel Zalewski, whose invisible fingerprints are on nearly all of these pieces, has infinitely improved my work, and made me a better journalist. I am equally lucky to have in my corner Dorothy Wickenden, Henry Finder, Susan Morrison, Pam McCarthy, Elizabeth Pearson-Griffiths, Ann Goldstein, Mary Norris, Carol Anderson, Virginia Cannon, and Amy Davidson. The New Yorker fact-checking department, led by Peter Canby, is a writer’s secret blessing.

I am also grateful to the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The Atlantic. Many editors with whom I worked have had a profound and lasting influence on me: Peter Beinart, Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, Albert Eisele, Joel Lovell, Adam Moss, Cullen Murphy, Christopher Orr, Martin Tolchin, and Jason Zengerle. Perhaps no one has had a deeper impact on me as a writer than the late Michael Kelly, whom every day I miss as a mentor and a friend.

My agents Kathy Robbins and David Halpern at the Robbins Office continue to be my best and most devoted allies, always managing to steer me in the right direction. The same is true of the irreplaceable Matthew Snyder at CAA. I am also grateful to Katie Hut, Ian King, and the rest of the Robbins Office, as well as to Susan Lee, who has helped me with research and fact-checking.

It was Bill Thomas at Knopf Doubleday who first read these stories in disparate form and thought they would work as a collection. His editorial vision and immaculate editing made this book a reality. Sonny Mehta championed this project and helped bring it to fruition. And the entire team at Knopf Doubleday once again proved to be an author’s greatest asset. In particular, I want to thank Bette Alexander, Maria Carella, Janet Cooke, Melissa Danaczko, Todd Doughty, John Fontana, Suzanne Herz, Rebecca Holland, Coralie Hunter, James Kimball, Lauren Lavelle, Beth Koehler, Lynn Kovach, Beth Meister, John Pitts, Anh Schluep, Steve Shodin, Suzanne Smith, and Anke Steinecke.

My deepest debt is to my children, Zachary and Ella, and to my wife, Kyra, who is not only one of the best journalists in the business but also the wisest and the most decent. There are no acknowledgments that could ever express to them my gratitude and love.

Copyright © 2010 by David Grann

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The pieces in this work originally appeared in slightly different form in
The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic
, and
The New Yorker
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grann, David.
The devil and Sherlock Holmes : tales of murder, madness, and obsession / by David Grann.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Collection of the journalist’s articles previously published in various periodicals.
I. Title.
PN4874.G672A25 2010
081—dc22  2009042230

eISBN: 978-0-385-53316-4

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