The Annals of Unsolved Crime (31 page)

DSK pleaded not guilty to all the charges. He was then granted bail on conditions tantamount to house arrest. The case was adjourned to July 18, 2011. In the interim, the prosecutors continued to subpoena records, including cell-phone transmissions, credit-card records, and CCTV videos. However, as they gathered this evidence, the case became, as one person in the prosecutor’s office said, “curiouser and curiouser.” On June 7, Diallo’s lawyer, Ken Thompson, who was a former prosecutor himself, delivered an unexpected bombshell. He
told the prosecutors that his client had been untruthful in her interviews with the prosecutors in describing her background and circumstances. Specifically, he said that she had fabricated the story she had told them about being raped by soldiers in Guinea. While she had not told this story under oath, and it had no bearing on the DSK case, the revelation stunned the prosecutors. Among other things, it meant that she could provide a convincing description of a sexual encounter that she had invented. But why would she have been untruthful about such an embarrassing event? It was initially suggested that she had told this false account to support a similar account she had used in her immigration application. But when prosecutors then examined her immigration records, they found that she had told no such story. When re-interviewed on June 8, Diallo admitted that the prior rape story was untrue. Then the prosecutors found that she had told a far more damaging untruth, since it was about the DSK case itself. Diallo testified to the grand jury that immediately after she had been assaulted, she had fled the room and gone to the far end of the 28th-floor hallway. This was the story that she had also told to police and prosecutors. When she was asked why she had not used her keycard to go into another room from which she could call for help, she said they all had “Do Not Disturb” signs on their doors. But when the prosecutors obtained the electronic key records from the Sofitel hotel for the rooms on the 28th floor, which was not until late June, they showed that Diallo had entered another room, 2820. If so, she had been untruthful under oath about her whereabouts before her outcry. The prosecutors could not immediately re-interview her because, for more than a week in June, she refused to speak further to them, claiming she was ill. Finally, on June 28, Diallo admitted that she had been untruthful about not going into 2820. She now said that she went directly into 2820 after running out of the presidential suite, and that she then spent considerable time cleaning and vacuuming
the room. This version would explain where she had been between 12:13 and 12:30 p.m. (when she met the other maid). The problem here is that the key records show that she did not use her key to enter room 2820 until 12:26 p.m., thirteen minutes after the encounter. When confronted with this discrepancy one month later, she changed her story yet again. On July 27, in what the prosecutors describe as “Version 3,” she says she waited in the hallway for most of that time. Then, when she saw DSK leave the presidential suite, which was at 12:26 p.m., she entered 2820 to pick up her cleaning equipment, which she had left there earlier. And she then went back to the now-empty presidential suite.

The prosecutors now had to contend with the fact that not only had she been untruthful under oath to the grand jury about this case, but that she had concealed her visit to room 2820 from the police, which had effectively obstructed the investigation. The prosecutors noted that if she had mentioned her visits to 2820, that room would have been declared part of the crime scene and searched for fingerprints and DNA by the police. But she did not do so, and the room was immediately rented out.

In addition, it also developed that soon after DSK had been arrested, Diallo discussed with her fiancé DSK’s ample financial resources. Since her fiancé was in prison on drug charges at the time, the conversation was recorded. While a victim is entitled to recover financial damages, this conversation might be used by DSK’s lawyers in cross examination to suggest that she had had a financial motive. She was also vulnerable because she had made possible fraudulent statements elsewhere for financial gain. For example, she admitted that she repeatedly excluded her earnings from the Sofitel from her low-cost housing applications so as to be eligible for lower rent. After extensive interviews, the prosecutors noted “In sum, the complainant has been persistently, and at times inexplicably
untruthful in describing matters of both great and small significance. In our repeated interviews with her, the complete truth about the charged incident and her background has, for that reason, remained elusive.” Diallo was not a witness whose credibility they could recommend to a jury.

Nor did the other evidence prove that force had been used. The DNA samples taken from Diallo’s clothing and the carpet of the interior hallway in the presidential suite showed that there had been a sexual encounter between Diallo and DSK, but they in themselves did not show that it was forced. Neither did the medical examinations. Diallo claimed that DSK had dragged her around the suite, but when both parties were examined at the hospital and scrapings were taken from under their fingernails, doctors could find no clear signs that force was used by DSK to overpower Diallo. Five weeks later, Diallo’s lawyers reported that an MRI showed a “SLAP type 2 tear” in her left shoulder, but when the prosecutors’ expert orthopedic surgeon examined the MRI, he concluded that the injury had not been sustained during her encounter with DSK, but well afterward, and in his opinion had been self-induced by “repeated overhead use of the upper extremity.” So the prosecutor could find no medical evidence, other than an injury that its own expert said was caused by Diallo herself after the incident, that proved the encounter was not consensual.

By the end of July, Diallo had changed her story on this chronology at least three times, leaving it uncertain which, if any, of the versions was true. The prosecutors came to the conclusion that they could not bring the case to trial. In August, the task of preparing a recommendation for dismissal of all the charges was given to Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, a well-regarded prosecutor who by June had become “second chair” to McConnell.

On August 22, the prosecutors submitted a twenty-five-page recommendation for dismissal of all the charges. It was signed
by Illuzzi-Orbon and McConnell, who wrote in the submitted motion, “the nature and number of the complainant’s falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt.” They said that Diallo “has given irreconcilable accounts of what happened,” and had told untruths not only to the prosecutors but under oath to the grand jury about her whereabouts after the encounter. It was a startling turn of events for prosecutors to discredit their own star witness. The judge had little choice but to approve the motion. DSK had been indicted on the basis of testimony of a witness who had been untruthful under oath. DSK then left the court, an innocent man in the eyes of the law. (Diallo’s later civil suit against DSK was settled in December 2012 for an undisclosed sum.)

But there may have been another crime committed in the effort to end DSK’s political career. The French spy agency
Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur
, or, as it is called, the DCRI, reportedly made DSK a target of its surveillance. According to the 2012 book
The President’s Spy
by Didier Hassoux, Christophe Labbé, and Olivia Recasens, the director of the DCRI, Bernard Squarcini, had set up “a special group” in collaboration with the Élysée Palace (the French equivalent of the White House) to focus on DSK in March 2011—two months before he was arrested in New York. The authors, all investigative journalists with the French weekly
Le Point
, based their findings heavily on interviews they had with present and former members of the DCRI. They describe in detail the capabilities of the DCRI to intercept emails and to monitor tablets and computers. If this was true, Sarkozy’s staff was likely privy to the intelligence that was being collected by the DCRI at the time DSK arrived at the Sofitel in New York. Such surveillance might also explain why, ninety seconds before his taxi pulled up to the Sofitel hotel at 7:08 p.m. on May 13, its arrival was apparently anticipated by the hotel staff.

There is also the mystery of DSK’s missing IMF BlackBerry.
Twenty-three minutes after DSK departed the hotel, his phone was still there. But the police did not find it there when they searched the presidential suite. Nor was it found in the corridor, elevator, checkout desk, or lobby. The room was locked at 12:51 p.m. and not reopened until the police arrived later that afternoon. It is reasonable to conclude that some unknown party took the phone between 12:14 and 12:51 p.m.

Assuming the police search was thorough, and they were specifically looking for the phone, its disappearance presents a locked-room mystery. One possibility is that DSK left it behind in the rush to meet his daughter. That would account for the continued signals from the Sofitel. But if that was the case, the phone would have been found in the room after he departed at 12:26 p.m. We know that the door was locked, because Diallo swiped her key to reopen the suite at 12:26 p.m. Aside from Diallo, the only employees to use their electronic keys to enter the room were the head housekeeper, who entered the suite at 12:38 p.m. along with Diallo, according to her statement, and the head engineer, who entered the suite at 12:45 p.m. and a second time at 12:51 p.m. But none of these employees reported seeing the phone. Nor did the police who then entered the suite.

The other possibility is that the phone was taken before DSK had left the presidential suite. Since it is a large four-room suite—pantry, dining room, living room, and bedroom—it cannot be ruled out that someone else was in the suite, possibly even before Diallo had entered at 12:06 p.m. That person could have taken the phone from DSK’s briefcase or elsewhere while he was getting dressed, and had it taken somewhere else in the Sofitel. In that case, the phone would continue to send out GPS signals from the hotel—as it did—until it was disabled at 12:51 p.m. The phone has never been found. We don’t know who took it from the room, when it was taken, or why it stopped sending GPS signals at 12:51 p.m.

Another mystery proceeds from the key records. When analyzed together, the records produce three intriguing possible interventions.

First, there is a possible intruder in DSK’s suite. DSK arrived at the Sofitel on the evening of May 13. At 7:13 p.m., after checking in, he used his newly issued electronic key to enter the presidential suite on the 28th floor. The suite had been prepared for him earlier in the afternoon, and the maid on duty, O.Y. Fong, had turned down the bed at 5:47 p.m. Then, at 6:13 p.m., just as DSK’s plane was landing at the airport, a person entered the suite using the electronic key belonging to a Sofitel employee named A.C. Chowdhury. The hotel’s personnel records, however, show that Chowdhury was not working that evening. If so, an unknown person used an employee’s ID to gain entry. At 6:54 p.m., there was another unidentified entry by a person using the generic “HK1” key, kept in the housekeeping department. This key does not identify the individual.

Second, there is the issue of the double entry. A maid cannot clean a hotel room without the cleaning equipment on his or her cart. For that reason, a maid normally takes a cart to the room he or she is about to clean and leaves it parked outside the door of the room while cleaning it. On May 14, however, Diallo did not have her cart when she went to the presidential suite after noon. It will be recalled that she had left it in the room on the other side of the elevator bank, room 2820, where it remained until 12:26 p.m. Yet the key records show that Diallo entered the presidential suite not once but twice within one minute at 12:06 p.m. She entered the first time, according to her account, because a room-service waiter told her that the room was empty. Since the electronic key records do not record seconds, we do not know how much time she spent on her first visit or how much time she spent in the hall afterward.

The room-service waiter, Syed Haque, who had entered the room only one minute or less before Diallo’s first entry, may
possibly have still been in the suite. He told prosecutors that he had entered the suite to remove the breakfast dishes. These dishes were in the dining room at the far end of the suite. Wherever Haque was at 12:06 p.m., Diallo did not remain long after that first entry. It is also possible that she met someone else outside the suite between her first and second visits.

If she still intended to clean the room, she needed her cart of cleaning equipment. But she did not get that equipment. Instead, she returned to the presidential suite without it again. Whatever reason she had for returning to the room, she did so without the means to clean it.

Third, there is the issue of the room across the hall, 2820. If the prosecutors had been given the key records on May 14, room 2820 might have been less of a mystery. It was not until late June that the prosecutors learned that Diallo had gone into room 2820, and, by that time, the room had been rented out many times, and it was too late to find evidence. Prosecutors found her concealment of her presence “inexplicable.” In doing so, she prevented the police from searching room 2820. It was not only Diallo who did not provide the authorities with this information about room 2820. The hotel would not identify the registered guest other than to say he was a “French businessman.” There was no key entry between 11:37 a.m. and 12:26 p.m., so, if Diallo was telling the truth to the prosecutors in June that she ran directly to room 2820 after leaving the presidential suite, an unknown person in room 2820 may have opened the door for her at 12:13 p.m. But given Diallo’s conflicting accounts, all that we really know for certain is what the electronic key records disclose: Diallo entered room 2820 three times before the registered guest left and once afterward at 12:26 p.m. We don’t know if anyone else was in the room when she was there, why she left her equipment there before the guest had checked out, or, if her June version is true, how the door was opened at 12:13 a.m. without leaving a swipe record.