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!”
AU REVOIR?
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.