The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (46 page)

But Lynn Garrison recalls that when Constant was trying to start a secret police force, even before
FRAPH,
Collins told Garrison directly, “Let’s let it play out and see where it takes us.” A U.S. government official involved with Haiti during the military regime goes even further, saying it was common knowledge in intelligence circles that Collins was involved with
FRAPH
long before it became an official organization (by which time Collins had left the country). “If he didn’t found
FRAPH,
he was at least very, very close to it,” this official told me. Trying to explain why the C.I.A. or the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) might form such an alliance, this official added, “People are always looking for counterbalance, and at that point Aristide was not in power. I’m not excusing it, but they didn’t quite know what
FRAPH
was going to become.”

Despite the existence, at the time, of internal State Department documents portraying the organization’s members as thugs and assassins, Constant says that his handlers never asked him about
FRAPH’S
alleged rapes and murders. What’s more, he says, the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. encouraged him to help derail Aristide’s return and even knew beforehand about his demonstrations against the Harlan County, which helped to delay the invasion for nearly a year. A C.I.A. spokesman denied to me that the agency pushed its own foreign-policy goals in Haiti, but Lawrence Pezzullo, the U.S. envoy to Haiti at the time, along with other U.S. officials, publicly accused the C.I.A. of exaggerating the threat of the Harlan County, thereby derailing Aristide’s return and, in essence, pursuing its own agenda. Constant told me, “If I’m guilty of all these things they say, then they are guilty of them, too.”

T
HE
B
REAKUP

Toto Constant’s relationship with U.S. intelligence, according to both Constant and several C.I.A. officials, continued undisturbed until the spring of 1994. It was then, Constant says, that Kambourian called and said they had to meet. He told Constant to bring the radio. “I’m sorry,” Constant remembers Kambourian saying, “but we can’t see you anymore.”

“Why?” Constant asked.

Kambourian said that, in the wake of the Harlan County incident and Constant’s rhetoric against the President, Washington wanted to sever its ties.

U. S. officials say that intelligence contacts with Constant were more or less cut at this point. Cooperation between
FRAPH
and the U.S. military was eventually curbed as well, and in October of 1994 American forces stormed
FRAPH
headquarters. Afraid for his life, Constant went to meet Lieutenant General Henry Shelton, who was in charge of the occupation. Constant recalls, “I told Shelton straight out, ‘I’m a son of a general, and I inherited his honor and dignity, and that’s why I’m here to ask what the rules of engagement are, because I don’t understand them.’”

According to a transcript of an oral history that General Shelton recorded during the invasion, Shelton had no desire to meet with Constant. But Shelton and Major General David Meade decided to see if they could get from him what they wanted: first, that he provide a complete list of
FRAPH
members and the location of their weapons caches; second, that he call each one of his key thugs and tell them to surrender their arms; and, third, that he publicly accept Aristide’s return and transform
FRAPH
into a peaceful political party.

“We were using a little bit of psychological warfare on Constant,” Shelton, in his oral history, disclosed. “I sent Meade in first. Meade was to go in and tell [Constant] that he was getting ready to meet the big guy. . . . I gave Meade about twenty or thirty minutes to set the conditions, and then I arrived and my security guy, the
SEAL,
entered the room . . . rattling the doors and kicking on doors to make sure the place was secure before I came in, as they always did. But Constant saw all this, and it was kind of like seeing a meeting with the Godfather being set up . . . and so he got very nervous at that time, and his eyes got very big.” It was then, Shelton said, that Meade walked out and he walked in. “[Constant] immediately stood up and smiled and stuck out his hand, at which time I just said to myself, ‘Remember two things—force and death they understand.’ So I looked at him and I said, ‘Sit down!’ and he immediately sat down, and the smile left his face . . . and I said to him, ‘I understand that you have agreed to all the conditions that we have set for you to keep us from hunting you down and members of your organization.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, I have no problem with any of that.’ And then he started, ‘But Haiti is . . . ’ And he started into his role about the history of Haiti and how important the
FRAPH
is. I let him get about ten seconds into that, and I cut him off and told him very curtly that I was not interested in hearing any of that right now.”

The next day, Constant gave the speech accepting Aristide’s return and casting himself as the new leader of the democratic opposition. According to a highly placed U. S. official, the speech was outlined by Constant’s old C.I.A. contact, Kambourian, and handed over to the U.S. Embassy, which in turn dictated it to Constant, who apparently accepted it without his usual bravado. “He could have been imprisoned,” the official told me, “but the judgment was made that as long as we could get out of him what we wanted it would be O.K. for him to walk around.”

General Shelton may have wanted little to do with Constant, but other elements of the U. S. government seem to have done more than just keep an eye on him. Immigration authorities told me it was “impossible to believe,” as one put it, and “totally bogus,” as another said, that Constant could have entered the United States at that time on a valid visa without help from either someone in the U.S. government or forged documents. “Everyone knew he was a killer,” a former I.N.S. official says. “His picture was everywhere.” Constant told me that he did alert certain U.S. officials before he left, and “it’s possible they did something.” A high-ranking intelligence-community source, although not commenting directly on Constant’s case, said, “On the high end of the spectrum, the director of the C.I.A. can bring in fifty to a hundred people in the top spy category. These are people to whom we owe a lot, because they have risked their lives doing things of great value to our nation, so it is [if] you want to get out, we will get you out; you want to get in, we will get you in, get you a house, whatever. . . . Lower down, you can do everything from a little help around the edges to supplying visas.”

H
OW
T
OTO
G
OT
S
PRUNG

Sitting in Wicomico County Detention Center, on the verge of being deported with the full support of the State Department and the I.N.S., Constant leveraged the potential exposure of his old connections to save himself. Threatening to divulge the details of his relationship with the C.I.A., he filed a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit against Warren Christopher and Janet Reno for wrongful imprisonment. “C.I.A. operatives collaborated with the Plaintiff,” his lawyer maintained in the suit. To underscore his warning, Constant appeared on “60 Minutes” in December of 1995 in his prison jumpsuit. “I feel like that beautiful woman that everybody wants to go to bed with at night, but not during the daytime,” he told Ed Bradley. “I want everybody to know that we are dating.”

It was at this point that Benedict Ferro, who was the district director of the I.N.S. in Baltimore at the time of Constant’s incarceration, began to see things that he had never seen before—things that were, as he puts it now, “off the scale.” Ferro had worked for the I.N.S. for more than thirty years, and he was used to working on cases that involved sensitive government issues. After Constant made his threats, Ferro says, highly placed officials throughout the government began to get involved, even though the Administration had already publicly and privately indicated that Constant would be returned.

A cover page from a May 24, 1996, Justice Department memorandum titled “Emmanuel Constant Options” indicates that those consulted in the process included Samuel Berger, the Deputy National-Security Adviser; Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State; Jamie Gorelick, the Deputy Attorney General; and David Cohen, the Deputy Director of Operations for the C.I.A. “Look, they came out of the woodwork when [Constant] started singing,” says Ferro, who is now the president of INSGreencard.com.

It was then—“at the eleventh hour,” as Ferro recalls—that government officials received information regarding a plot to assassinate Constant when he was returned to Haiti. Many at the I.N.S. maintained that, even if true, the report merely meant that Constant should remain in a U.S. prison until a later date. “We have Cubans from the Mariel boatlift who remain in jail,” Ferro says. “We have people from the Middle East who are in jail who can’t be sent back. This is not a new process.” But, according to several officials involved in the deliberations, the information swayed the senior decision-makers. “I didn’t want to send someone, even a killer like Constant, to his summary execution,” one person involved in the case told me. When I asked a senior official who it was that had uncovered the plot on Constant’s life and prepared the classified report, he answered simply, “Reliable U.S. intelligence sources.”

Ferro and several of his colleagues at the I.N.S. made one last attempt to press their views, insisting that they could not in good conscience send a suspected terrorist into a community where he might harm U. S. citizens or where, just as likely, U.S. citizens might harm him. But it didn’t matter. The final decision was hammered out over several days, and senior officials from the Justice Department, the State Department, and the National Security Council participated. “To this day, I can’t understand why he’s not rotting in a U.S. jail,” Ferro says. “We were not reinventing the process. He was just treated differently than any other murderer or terrorist.”

Ferro himself gave Constant the good news.

“They called me at the prison and said I could get my things and go,” Constant says today, still surprised.

“I basically just read from the script,” Ferro says. “This guy was believed to have murdered and assassinated all these people, and we released him into our society. It was outrageous.”

A copy of the legal settlement that set the terms for Constant’s release, which I obtained from Constant, reveals certain conditions: Constant must live in his mother’s home in Queens and must remain within the confines of the borough except for visits to the I.N.S. office in Manhattan; he must check in with the Immigration and Naturalization Service every Tuesday; and he must not talk about, among other things, Haitian politics or the details of the legal agreement. “I like exposure,” he says, “so this is the worst thing they can do to me, this gag order.” (As may by now be apparent, Constant takes an expansive view of the restrictions.) Constant’s formal legal status is this: he is under an outstanding order of deportation whose execution has been withheld on the advice of the State Department.

When I asked Warren Christopher about the deal with Constant, he said he could not recollect the details of what had happened and would try to call me back. Later, his assistant called and said that he still didn’t have “sufficient recollection of the matter that you discussed to comment.” Constant’s lawyer, J. D. Larosiliere, who has continued to cite the threat to his client’s life, says, “I knew that he wasn’t going to be deported, but I needed a hook in the legal system to allow them to have a way out. Plausible deniability. That’s all this game is about. Plausible deniability.”

A “T
ELL-ALL
A
UTOBIOGRAPHY”

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: