by David Grann
A “TELL-ALL AUTOBIOGRAPHY”
One day, after our initial meeting in Larosiliere’s office, Constant invited me to his house in Laurelton, where he was living, as he put it, “like a hostage.” Part of a long row of nearly identical English Tudors, the house had fallen into disrepair: the façade, once white, was weather-stained, the front steps needed paint, and the storm window overlooking the porch was shattered. Haitians had told me, among other things, that Constant kept the bones of his victims in his room, practiced late-night voodoo rituals, stored C.I.A. arms in the basement, and shot trespassers.
As I hesitated on the stoop, the front door suddenly opened and Constant appeared, holding a cigarette. “Come on in,” he said. I followed him into the living room, which was musty and dimly lit; the walls were covered with Haitian art, and the couches and chairs were draped in plastic. Constant sat across from me in a rocker, swaying back and forth as he smoked. During our initial encounter, I had pressed him about FRAPH murders and rapes. He said that there was no evidence implicating him and that he could not be held accountable for every member of such a sprawling operation. “If somebody the day of the vote killed another individual in the street of New York, and they found he just voted Democrat, they’re not going to make Clinton responsible,” he said. He insisted, “My conscience is clear.”
Now, as I started to ask him more questions, he took a tape recorder from his pocket and said that he was working on a book about his life. “I went to take a class about self-publishing your book, and one of the things the guy told me was if you’re talking about your past, then record yourself,” he said. I thought he wanted to make sure I quoted him correctly, but a moment later he handed me a book proposal: “This proposal offers a ‘hot’ new ‘tell all’ exposé on Emmanuel ‘TOTO’ Constant code name ‘GAMAL,’ and FRAPH. . . . The market analysis suggests that with at least 2 million Haitians in the U.S. and at least 50,000 others in the U.S. who have interest in Haiti . . . this book could easily sell over 1 million copies.” The book was tentatively titled “Echoes of Silence.” He had drawn up a dummy book jacket that said:
Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, notorious leader of FRAPH . . . and alleged murderer, rapist, and terrorist thug, breaks the yoke of silence. Speaking from his heart, he exposes the real man behind the villainous images. Interesting, provocative, informative and sensitive, “Echoes of Silence” candidly portrays the complexities of life in Haiti, where nothing is simple. It might lead one to conclude: The political frenzy in Haiti, as addictive and dangerous as any narcotic, keeps the masses alive mentally and emotionally even while it kills.
This was Constant’s latest attempt to earn a living. Since his release from prison, he had tried all sorts of ways to set himself up. He had taken computer classes. He had sold used cars. But, each time he had found employment, the other Haitian immigrants in the community had risen up and driven him from his job. “The worst time is when they came in front of the real-estate office . . . because I really had a good situation,” he said.
Since that day, he had become what he called an “investment consultant,” which seemed to mean selling and renting properties as covertly as possible. Whenever I was with him, his cell phone would ring with a prospective client. Once, I listened to him raise and lower his voice like an auctioneer: “Hello. Oui. Oui . . . I saw the apartment. . . . They were asking one thousand one hundred dollars, and I’ll bring it down to a thousand. . . . Everything is included. . . . O.K.? . . . It’s Cambria Heights, very nice neighborhood, very quiet, very, very safe. . . . I’m working very hard for you.”
His wife had moved to Canada with their four children out of fear for their safety. “My wife is leaving me,” he told me at one point. “We’re having discussions about the kids. I wanted them to come the way they used to, and she doesn’t want them to. So we’re having an argument, but everything will be O.K.”
After a while, his phone rang, and I asked if I could look around the place. “No problem,” he said.
I headed upstairs, past several cracked walls and closed doors. Constant’s room was on the third floor. It was small and cluttered with videos and men’s fashion magazines. By his bed was a framed picture of him from his appearance on “60 Minutes.” In one corner was a small shrine. Candles and figurines of Catholic saints, which often play a role in voodoo, were arranged in a neat circle.
As I bent down to inspect them, Constant called out my name. One of the statues was the patron saint of justice; on its base was inscribed, “Be ever mindful of this great favor and I will never cease to honor thee as my special and powerful patron.”
Constant called my name again, and I hurried downstairs. “Let’s go out,” he said, putting on a leather jacket.
As we walked through Laurelton, the sound of compas, Haitian dance music, blared from grocery stores. We passed several men smoking in the cold, chatting in Creole. “I need some meat,” Constant said, heading toward a butcher shop.
The store was packed, and we could barely fit inside. A small circle of Haitians were playing cards in the back. As Constant pressed up against the counter, I realized that everyone was staring at him. “I need some goat,” he said, breaking the sudden silence. He pointed at some enormous hind legs hanging from a meat hook. He glanced at the back, where several people seemed to be saying something about him, but he appeared unfazed. The butcher began to cut through the bone and gristle of a goat leg. His thick arm pushed down, slicing in clean strokes. “Everybody here knows who I am,” Constant said on the way out. “Everybody. They’ve all read about me or seen my picture.”
He darted across the street to a barbershop. A “Closed” sign hung on the door, but we could see the barber inside, and Constant banged on the window, pleading with him to take one more customer. “There’s another barbershop down the street,” he told me, “but if I went there they’d slit my . . . ” His voice trailed off as he drew his fingers across his throat and let out a strange laugh.
A COURTHOUSE IN HAITI
The trial was more than a thousand miles away from New York. On September 29, 2000, a Haitian court began trying Constant on charges of murder, attempted murder, and being an accomplice to murder and torture—charging him, in effect, with the Raboteau massacre. I went there with J. D. Larosiliere a few weeks later, as the trial was reaching its climax. Twenty-two people—mostly soldiers and FRAPH paramilitaries—were being prosecuted in person. Constant and the leaders of the junta were being tried in absentia.
Although the U. S. invasion had stemmed the bloodshed, the country remained in shambles. Eighty per cent of the people were unemployed, and two-thirds were malnourished. Gangs roamed the streets. Drug-running planes took off and landed with impunity. Even the heralded new democratic system was believed to be rife with fraud. Aristide, after having put a protégé in power, was running for the Presidency again amid allegations that he was trying to pack the parliament with his supporters. Political thuggery and assassination, this time from both the right and the left, were beginning to occur again. “Now everyone knows I was right,” Constant told me later. “Everyone has seen what has happened under Aristide.”
The trial itself was a potential flash point for violence. The U.S. Embassy warned Americans to stay away from the area for fear of “large scale demonstrations, tire burnings, rock throwing and worse.” As our plane landed, Larosiliere told me that he had been warned about potential assassination attempts. “If they attack me, it will only help me prove my case,” he said. “If I’m not safe, then how can my client be safe?”
At the airport, we met a muscular man with mirrored sunglasses and a military bearing, who would serve as Larosiliere’s “attaché.” “You cannot depend on the police to have security,” the attaché told me. “So you need to be armed to protect yourself.” The attaché pushed our way through a crowd of taxi-drivers, bag handlers, beggars, and pickpockets. I smelled flesh and sweat and food, and as we rushed to the car I tried to deflect the arms outstretched to he
lp me with my things. “Welcome to Haiti,” Larosiliere said.
The city of Gonaïves, where the courthouse was situated, is only seventy miles from Port-au-Prince, but, because nearly all the roads in Haiti are unpaved, it took us half a day to get there. The courthouse was in the center of the city, surrounded by tractor-trailers—a makeshift barricade to prevent mobs from rushing in. We entered a small, squat building, where armed guards searched us for weapons; the attaché told me he had left his gun behind, but he stayed close to Larosiliere’s side. We passed through one room and then another; finally, to my surprise, we headed into an open courtyard, where the trial was being held under a billowing white canopy. The judge sat at a table, wearing a black robe and a tall hat with a white band. He had a bell in place of a gavel. The twenty-two accused sat nearby, behind a cordon of armed guards. Larosiliere joined the other defense lawyers, and the attaché and I found a place in the back with the scores of observers and alleged victims.
I had barely sat down when a lawyer for the prosecution began to scream at Larosiliere, jabbing his hand in the air and demanding that Larosiliere tell the court who he was and why he was there. The attaché, who had been at my side, was on his feet before Larosiliere answered. The crowd filled with murmurs: “Toto Constant! Toto Constant!” People looked around as if Constant might be under the canopy. The lawyer began to bark again at Larosiliere; the attaché now stood by Larosiliere’s side, his arms crossed on his chest.
Most of the alleged victims had already testified that on April 22, 1994, soldiers and FRAPH members had descended on the village of Raboteau, known for its staunch support of Aristide. They described being driven from their homes, forced into open sewers, robbed, and tortured. In past attacks, the villagers had fled to the sea, where their fishing boats were tied up. But when they did so this time, they said, the attackers were waiting for them in boats and opened fire. “I climbed aboard my boat,” one of the villagers, Henri-Claude Elisme, said in a sworn deposition. “I saw Claude Jean . . . fall under the soldiers’ bullets.” Abdel Saint Louis, a thirty-two-year-old sailor, said, “I fled . . . into a boat. . . . I then saw Youfou, a FRAPH member, piloting a group of soldiers. They fired in my direction. I called for help. They arrested me, beat me, and forced me to guide the boat. Seeing other people in a boat, the soldiers fired in their direction and hit two girls: Rosiane and Deborah.”
By the end of the assault, according to the prosecution witnesses, dozens of people were wounded and at least six were dead; the prosecution estimated that the actual toll was much higher. Most of the bodies had allegedly been buried in shallow graves along the sea and washed away. “When I went down to the shore, I saw [my brother’s] boat covered in blood,” Celony Seraphin testified. “I only found him on April 28 . . . tied up with Charité Cadet; both had been murdered. I was not authorized to remove the body. . . . I demand justice for my brother.”
The testimony occasionally elicited angry shouts from the spectators, and the judge would ring his bell, trying to quiet the courtyard. That afternoon, Karen Burns, a forensic anthropologist from the United States, was sworn in. A Canadian expert on DNA was scheduled to follow her. It would be the first time that forensic evidence and genetic evidence were introduced in a Haitian court, and the courtyard fell silent. Burns stood in the center of the gathering, surrounded by the skeletal remains of three people, excavated from the edge of the sea in Raboteau in 1995. As she spoke, spectators and jurors craned their necks to look at the bones. Burns held up one and said, “This is the pelvis right here.” She put it down and picked up another bone. “This individual was found with a rope tied around his neck, and this is the rope that was retrieved.” As she held up the rope, there were several gasps.
Larosiliere—who, like his client, maintains that the massacre was fabricated as propaganda to discredit FRAPH and the military regime—remained unimpressed. “I live for testimony like this,” he told me that night, drinking a glass of rum, as we sat with the attaché at the hotel restaurant. “She did a scientific study on a site with no integrity. Everyone and everybody walked around it. Come on. You know I can go to graveyards and pick up skeletons from anybody and put them down.”
Refilling his glass, Larosiliere said that if there had been any organized military involvement at all no evidence would have been left on the beach. “Those bodies would be put on a truck, and they’d be taken out on the Rue Nationale—”
“You got it,” the attaché agreed.
“—or the highway—”
“At night,” the attaché added.
“—and dumped into—”
“The Source Puante,” the attaché said.
“Sulfur ditches,” Larosiliere explained. “The best place, because the sulfur eats the body.”
As he spoke, several international human-rights observers sat down next to us, and soon one of them began to argue with Larosiliere about Constant. Larosiliere said, “If for one instant, sir, I believed that Haiti could sustain a true trial for my client, I’d be the first one to throw him on the plane.”
Later, Brian Concannon, an American human-rights lawyer who had spent most of the previous five years in Haiti spearheading the trial, told me that the trial was extraordinarily fair by any standard. Indeed, he said, it had become a kind of prototype for the judicial system in Haiti. Perhaps most important, despite Constant’s fears that he would be killed, not a single defendant so far had been harmed in prison or in a courtroom. “The defendants were given the benefit of all their rights under Haitian law and under international treaties to which Haiti is a party,” Concannon said. “They were allowed to present witnesses, alibis, and exculpatory evidence.”
As for Constant, Concannon said, the case was based on the same legal precedent used to prosecute Nazi leaders after the Second World War and, more recently, war criminals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. “Constant started an organization that was specifically designed to [carry out]—and in fact carried out—massive violations of human rights,” he said. “He was in charge of a criminal organization and is responsible for the crimes of that organization.”
On the second day of our visit, Larosiliere decided to stage a protest.
In the middle of the proceedings, he rose from his chair and stood stiffly in the courtroom. The trial came to a halt, and everyone stared at him. Then he marched out the door, the attaché a few feet behind him. There was an angry chorus of murmurs. A prosecution lawyer denounced the move as merely a ruse, a sign that Constant’s lawyer had intended from the outset not to use the tribunal for justice but only to discredit it. (“My understanding of an adequate murder defense is that you spend more than a few hours at the trial,” Concannon told me. “We’ve worked on this case full time for four and a half years.”)
After Larosiliere left, I sat for a while and stared at the dozens of alleged victims sitting on the back benches. Many of them had bought suits for the trial. The young women, some of whom had been shot, wore white dresses that somehow stayed pristine in the dusty heat; they sat with their backs perfectly straight. On several occasions, these people had walked miles to the capital to pressure their government for justice. They had written songs about what had happened. And they sat there now, as rain began to fall, and as a clerk collected the bones strewn on the table, and as rumors filled the country that another coup attempt had been thwarted in the capital.
As I finally rose to go, a young man who had seen me arrive with Constant’s lawyer stopped me. Before I could say anything, he spat at my shoe and walked away.
THE VERDICT
“They tried to get me to come out to beat me up,” Constant told me shortly after I returned. He was eating a piece of chocolate cake in a Queens diner. Tensions in the community had intensified since the beginning of the trial. Larosiliere had instructed him to leave the house during such demonstrations, to avoid confrontations. But Constant always remained nearby. “I have to protect my mother and aunt in case one of them go crazy,” he told me.
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sp; 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!”