by Jon Ronson
“Yes, observing people is one of my biggest assets,” he said. “I always observe.”
“Why?” I asked. “What are you looking for?”
There was a short silence. Then Toto softly said, “I want to see if people like me.”
“If people like you?” I said.
“I want people to think I’m a gentleman,” he said. “I want people to like me. If people don’t like me, it hurts me. It’s important for me to be liked. I’m sensitive to people’s reactions to me. I’m observing people to see if they really like me.”
“Wow,” I said. “I never thought you’d care so much about whether people like you.”
“I do.”
“That’s really surprising,” I said.
I scowled inwardly. I had driven all this way and there was nothing psychopathic about him at all. He was self-effacing, humble, emotional, self-deprecating, strangely diminutive for such a large man. True, there had been admissions—a few moments earlier—of Item 11: Promiscuous Sexual Behavior, but that struck me as a rather chaste addition to the checklist anyway.
“I’m a ladies’ man,” he had said. “I always had a lot of women. Apparently I’m good company.” He shrugged, modestly.
“How many children do you have?”
“Seven.”
“With how many mothers?”
“Almost as many!” he laughed.
“Why so many women?”
“I don’t know.” He looked genuinely perplexed. “I’ve always wanted lots of women. I don’t know why.”
“Why not stick with one woman?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is because I really want people to like me. So I learn how to please people. I never disagree with anyone. I make them feel good so they like me.”
“Isn’t that a weakness?” I finally said. “Your desperate desire to have people like you. Isn’t that a weakness?”
“Ah no!” Toto laughed. He animatedly waved his finger at me. “It’s not a weakness at all!”
“Why?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you why!” He smiled, winked conspiratorially, and said: “If people like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to do!”
I blinked.
“So you don’t really want people to like you?” I asked.
“Oh no.” He shrugged. “I’m giving you my deepest secrets here, Jon!”
“When you said, ‘If people don’t like me, it hurts me,’ you don’t mean it hurts your feelings. You mean it hurts your status?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“How does it work?” I asked. “How do you make people like you?”
“Ah, okay,” he said. “Watch this . . .”
He turned to the elderly inmate whose children and grandchildren had just left.
“You have a lovely family!” he called to him.
The man’s face broke into a broad, grateful smile. “Thanks!” he called back.
Toto grinned covertly at me.
“What about empathy?” I asked. “Do you feel empathy? I suppose empathy could sometimes be considered a weakness.”
“No,” said Toto. “I don’t feel empathy.” He shook his head like a horse with a fly on its nose. “It’s not a feeling I have. It’s not an emotion I have. Feeling sorry for people?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t feel sorry for people. No.”
“What about emotions?” I said. “You said earlier that you were an emotional person. But feeling emotions might be considered, um, a weakness.”
“Ah, but you select the kind of emotion you want,” he replied. “You see? I’m really telling you my deepest secrets, Jon.”
“How about those three women who testified against you in court?” I asked. “Do you feel any emotions at all about them?”
Toto exhaled crossly. “Three ladies said masked, unidentified men tortured and raped them and left them for dead and blah blah blah.” He scowled. “They assumed they were FRAPH members because they were wearing FRAPH uniforms. They say I raped for power.”
“What did they say happened to them?”
“Oh,” he airily replied, “one said they beat her, raped her, left her for dead. A ‘doctor’ ”—when he said “doctor,” he did that dismissive quotation mark thing with his fingers—“said one of the attackers got her pregnant.”
He said none of the accusations were true—not a single one—and if I wanted to know more about the untruths, I should wait to read his thus far half-completed memoir, Echoes of My Silence.
I asked Toto if he liked the other inmates and he said not really. Certainly not those who “whine or complain. And thieves. Call me a murderer or an assassin but don’t call me a thief. Also I don’t like people who are lazy. Or weak. Or liars. I hate liars.”
He said his behavioral controls were nonetheless unimpeachable. Often was the time he’d like to punch a fellow inmate’s lights out, but he never did. Like just yesterday in the canteen. This inmate was slurping his soup—“slurp slurp slurp, oh my God, Jon, it was getting on my nerves. Slurp. Slurp. Slurp. Oh, I felt like punching him, but I thought, ‘No, Emmanuel. Wait it out. The moment will be over soon.’ And it was.” Toto looked at me. “I am wasting my time in here, Jon. That’s the worst thought of all. I am wasting my time.”
Our three hours were up. On my way out, the guards asked me why I’d come to visit Toto Constant and I said, “I wanted to find out if he’s a psychopath.”
“Nah, he’s not a psychopath,” replied two of them, in unison.
“Hey,” said another. “Did you know he once had dinner with Bill Clinton?”
“I don’t think he ever did have dinner with Bill Clinton,” I replied. “If he told you that, I’m not sure it’s true.”
The guard didn’t say anything.
As I drove back to New York City, I congratulated myself on being a genius, on cracking him open. The key had been the word “weakness.” Whenever I’d said it, he’d felt the necessity to reveal his hardness.
I was surprised at how easily I’d surrendered to him until then. He had presented me with a little self-effacing charm and I’d instantly labeled him a non-psychopath. There had been something reassuringly familiar about him at the beginning. He’d seemed diminutive, self-deprecating, nebbishy, which are all the things I am. Could he have been mirroring me, reflecting myself back at me? Could that be why partners of psychopaths sometimes stay in bewildering relationships?
Bob Hare said psychopaths were skillful imitators. He once told the journalist Robert Hercz a story about how he’d been asked to consult on a Nicole Kidman movie called Malice. She wanted to prepare for a role as a psychopath. Bob told her, “Here’s a scene you can use. You’re walking down a street and there’s an accident. A car has hit a child. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child’s lying on the ground and there’s blood running all over the place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, ‘Oh shit.’ You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you’re not repelled or horrified. You’re just interested. Then you look at the mother, and you’re really fascinated by the mother, who’s emoting, crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes you turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimicking the facial expressions of the mother. That’s the psychopath: somebody who doesn’t understand what’s going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened.”
But Toto Constant was engagingly enigmatic, too, a quality that flourishes in absence. We are dazzled by people who withhold something, and psychopaths always do because they are not all there. They are surely the most enigmatic of all the mentally disordered.
The drive from Coxsackie to New York, past Saugerties and New Paltz and Poughkeepsie, was flat and bleak—like an alien planet from an old Star Trek episode—and I suddenly felt incredibly paranoid that Toto might turn against me and ask one of his brothers or uncles to come after me. I felt lashed by anxiety, like
the sleet that was lashing the car, and so I spun it off the road and drove over to a Starbucks that happened to be right there.
I pulled out my notes—I’d scribbled them on hotel notepaper with a prison-issue pencil—and read the part where he’d told me he was all alone in the world, that his family and everyone who had ever loved him had now abandoned him.
“Oh well, that’s okay, then,” I thought. The realization that his brothers and uncles had deserted him and were therefore not likely to track me down and retaliate made me feel a lot less anxious.
“I suppose that is a bit Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy,” I thought. “But under the circumstances, I don’t care.”
I bought an Americano, jumped back in the car, and carried on driving.
I supposed it shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that the head of a death squad would score high on Bob Hare’s psychopath checklist. I was more interested in Bob’s theory about corporate psychopaths. He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people’s anomalous amygdalae. He had written a book about it—Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work— coauthored with a psychologist named Paul Babiak. Human resources magazines across the world had, on its publication, given it rave reviews.
“All managers and HR people should read this book,” read a typical one from Health Service Journal, the in-house magazine for the National Health Service. “Do you work with a snake on the make? These people can be found among those impressive but ruthless types who cut a swathe to the jobs at the top.”
All that talk of snakes adopting human form reminded me of a story I once did about a conspiracy theorist named David Icke, who believed that the secret rulers of the world were giant, blood-drinking, child-sacrificing lizards who had shape-shifted into humans so they could perform their evil on an unsuspecting population. I suddenly realized how similar the two stories were, except in this one the people who spoke of snakes in suits were eminent and utterly sane psychologists, respected around the world. Was this a conspiracy theory that was actually true?
As I approached New York City, the skyscrapers of the financial district growing larger, I wondered: Might there be some way of proving it?
6.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
Shubuta, Mississippi, was a dying town. Sarah’s House of Glamour (a beauty salon), the Jones Brothers Market Basket Meats and Groceries Store, the Bank of Shubuta, all boarded up, alongside other storefronts so faded you couldn’t even make out what they once were. The odd teddy bear or inflatable Santa peering through a dusty window display offered some clues to the abandoned business. Even the Shubuta Masonic Lodge was overgrown and rotting. So much for the power they thought they wielded! It didn’t save them.
The jail was gone, too, its iron cages crumbling and corroding inside a stone building just off Main Street, near a decaying old basketball hoop.
“You know you’re in a depressed place when even the jail has shut down,” I said.
“Depressed is right,” said Brad, the local man who was showing me around.
Decomposing timber protruded violently from abandoned homes, looking like that photograph of the blown-apart face Bob Hare had shown us back in the tent in West Wales, with the gore and gristle bubbling through what remained of the man’s skin.
Shubuta was not empty. A few remaining residents still wandered up and down. Some were drunk. Some were very old.
Shubuta had once been a thriving place.
“Bustling!” said Brad. “Every day! Unbelievable! It was always real busy. It was wonderful growing up here. Crime was low.”
“We rode our bicycles everywhere we wanted to go,” added Brad’s friend Libby. “We rode on roller skates. Our mothers never worried about us.”
“Everyone worked up at Sunbeam,” said Brad.
Sunbeam, the local plant, made toasters. They were beautiful, Art Deco–looking things.
A Sunbeam toaster.
Brad and I climbed over rubble and into a long building in the middle of Main Street. Its door hung from its hinges. The exit sign lay in the dust on the ground. Torn-off strands of what looked to have once been red velvet curtains hung limply from masonry nails, like a scene from an abattoir.
“What did this place used to be?” I asked Brad.
“The old movie theater,” he replied. “I remember when it opened. We were all real excited. We were going to have a movie theater! We were going to have something to do! They showed one movie and that was it. They shut it down.”
“What was the movie?” I asked.
“Night of the Living Dead,” said Brad.
There was a silence.
“Appropriate,” I said.
Brad scanned the remnants of Main Street. “Al Dunlap doesn’t understand how many people he hurt when he closed down the plant,” he said. “To a small town like this? It hurt.” His face flushed with anger. “I mean, look at this place,” he said.
The old Sunbeam plant was a mile out of town. It was big—the size of five football fields. In one room three hundred people used to make the toasters. In another room three hundred other people used to package them. I assumed the place would be abandoned now, but in fact a new business had moved in. They didn’t have six hundred employees. They had five: five people huddled together in a vast expanse of nothingness, manufacturing lamp shades.
Their boss was Stewart. He had worked at the plant until Al Dunlap became Sunbeam’s CEO and shut the place down.
“It’s good to see productivity still happening in this room,” I said.
“Mm,” said Stewart, looking slightly concerned that maybe productivity wouldn’t carry on happening in here for long.
Stewart and his friend Bill and Brad’s friend Libby gave me the tour of the plant’s emptiness. They wanted to show an outsider what happens when “madmen take the helm of a once great company.”
“Are you talking about Al Dunlap?” I asked.
“At Sunbeam there was madman after madman,” said Stewart. “It wasn’t just Dunlap. Who was the first madman? Buckley?”
“Yeah, Buckley,” said Bill.
“Buckley had a little security guy with a machine gun following him around,” said Stewart. “He had a fleet of jets and Rolls-Royces and $10,000 ice sculptures. They were spending money freely and the company wasn’t making much money.”
(I later read that Robert J. Buckley was fired as Sunbeam CEO in 1986 after shareholders had complained that even though the company was flailing, he kept a fleet of five jets for himself and his family, installed his son in a $1 million apartment at company expense, and put $100,000 on the company tab for wine.)
“Who came after Buckley?” I asked.
“Paul Kazarian,” said Bill. “I believe he was a brilliant man. Smart. A hard worker. But . . .” Bill fell silent. “I have a story I could tell you about him, but it isn’t for mixed company.”
We all looked at Libby.
“Oh, sure,” she said.
She took a long walk away from us across the barren factory floor, past cobwebs and broken windowpanes and dumpsters that were empty except for dust. When she was far out of earshot, Bill said, “One time I was failing to get some sale and he screamed at me, ‘You should suck this bastard’s DICK to get the sale!’ Right in front of a room full of people. Why would he act that way? He was a foul-mouthed . . .”
Bill’s face was red. He was shaking at the memory.
According to the John Byrne book Chainsaw, which details the history of the Sunbeam Corporation, Paul Kazarian would—during his tenure as CEO—throw pints of orange juice over the company’s controller and fire a BB gun at executives’ empty chairs during board meetings. But he was also known to care about job security and workers’ rights. He wanted the company to succeed without having to close down plants. He brought production jobs back from Asia and started an employees’ university.
We indicated to Libby that it was okay for her
to return. She did.
“And after Paul Kazarian?” I asked.
“Then it was Al Dunlap,” said Stewart.
“I’m seeing him tomorrow,” I said. “I’m driving down to Ocala, Florida, to meet him.”
“What?” Stewart said, startled, his face darkening. “He’s not in jail?”
“He’s in the opposite of jail,” I said. “He’s in a vast mansion.”
For a second I saw the veins in Stewart’s neck rise up.
We headed back to Stewart’s office.
“Oh,” I said. “I was recently with a psychologist called Bob Hare. He said you could tell a lot about a business leader if you ask him a particular question.”
“Okay,” he said.
“If you saw a crime-scene photograph,” I asked, “something really horrifying, like a close-up picture of a blown-apart face, what would your response be?”
“I would back away,” Stewart replied. “It would scare me. I would not like it. I would feel sorry for that person and I would fear for myself.” He paused. “So what does that say about me?”
I glanced out of Stewart’s window at the plant floor beyond. It was a strange sight—a tiny huddle of five lamp shade manufacturers inside this great, bleak expanse. I had told Stewart how gratifying it was to see a business flourishing in here, but the truth was obvious: Things weren’t great.
“So what does that say about me?” Stewart said again.
“Good things!” I reassured him.
Sunbeam was, in the mid-1990s, a mess. Profligate CEOs like Robert Buckley had left the company flailing. The board of directors needed a merciless cost-cutter and so they offered the job to someone quite unique—a man who seemed to actually, unlike most humans, enjoy firing people. His name was Al Dunlap and he’d made his reputation closing down plants on behalf of Scott, America’s oldest toilet-paper manufacturer. There were countless stories of him going from Scott plant to Scott plant firing people in amusing, sometimes eerie ways. At a plant in Mobile, Alabama, for instance, he asked a man how long he’d worked there.