seemed to emerge only periodically. He was spotted, someone said, at a disco, clad in black, dancing on the day of Baron Samedi, the voodoo lord of death who guards cemetery gates in his top hat and tails. He was seen at a butcher shop and at a Blockbuster. Haitian-community radio and local newspapers reported the sightings-“HAITI’S GRIM REAPER PARTYING IN U.S.,” one headline announced-but he always managed to vanish before anyone could locate him. Finally, in 1997, the rumors led to a quiet street in Laurelton, near the heart of the Haitian community, where for years exiles had hoped to shed the weight of their history-a history of never-ending coups and countercoups-and where Constant could be seen sitting on the porch of the white-stucco house he shared with his aunt and his mother. “The whole idea of Toto Constant living free in New York, the bastion of the Haitian diaspora, is an insult to all the Haitian people,” Ricot Dupuy, the manager of Radio Soleil d’Haiti, in Flatbush, told his listeners.
It was not long before residents draped the street’s trees and lampposts with pictures of Constant’s alleged victims, their hands and feet bound with white cord or their limbs severed by machetes. Neighbors shoved one of the most horrifying pictures-a photo of a young boy lying in a pool of blood-under Constant’s door. Yet a few days later Constant was back on his porch. Locals came by and spat at his bushes; they stoned his door. Then, after Constant’s appearance at the Maceus house, an angry crowd surrounded his home, yelling “Murderer!” and “Assassin!” Someone spotted a figure down the road-a well-known ally of Constant’s, “a spy,” as a protester cried out-and the crowd chased after him. When he disappeared and there was still no sign of Constant, the crowd marched to the real-estate office, four miles away, where it threatened to drive the Haitian owner out of business unless he fired his new employee.
By November of 2000, Haitians had created permanent Toto Watches-networks that tracked Constant’s every whereabouts. At about this time, Ray Laforest, one of the Toto Watchers, agreed to show me where “the devil” could be found. He told me to meet him near the real-estate office, in front of which Constant had been seen smoking on his lunch break. Laforest was a large man, with a beard and sunglasses. He carried with him several posters, and when I asked him what they were he unfurled one, revealing an old black-and-white photograph of Constant. A mustache curled down around the corners of the reputed death squad leader’s mouth, and several crooked teeth showed between his lips. In bold letters, the poster said, “WANTED: EMMANUEL ‘TOTO’ CONSTANT FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE HAITIAN PEOPLE.”
Laforest told me that Constant had disappeared since the protest. “He’s gone into hiding again,” he said. After Laforest taped one of the “WANTED” posters to a lamppost, we got into his car and drove through the neighborhood, past a series of elegant Tudor houses, until we arrived at the house where Constant had last been seen. “Why are you stopping?” I asked.
“I’m numb,” he said. “If I saw him right now, I’d tie him up myself.” He told me that Constant’s men and other paramilitaries had dragged one of his friends from a church and shot him in broad daylight, and that earlier his own brother had been tortured by the Haitian military. We waited for several minutes, parked behind a bush. “Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje,” Laforest said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s an old Creole proverb,” he said. “Those who give the blows forget, those who bear the scars remember.”
LETTING TOTO SPEAK FOR TOTO
I had been looking for Constant ever since I heard that a man facing charges in Haiti for crimes against humanity was living among the very people against whom the crimes were said to have been committed. Unlike Cain, who was cast out of his community, Constant had become an exile in a community of exiles, banished among those whom he had banished. Though he had fled justice, he could not escape his past. He had to face it nearly every day-in a glance from a neighbor, or a poster on the street.
More important, he was, for the first time, confronted with the prospect of real justice. In the fall of 2000, the Haitian government put him on trial in absentia for the 1994 murders of at least six people in the town of Raboteau. Dozens of others were also on trial. It was a historic case-the first major attempt by the Haitian government to prosecute anyone for the brutal crimes committed by the military regime and to test its judicial system, which had been corrupt for so long that it was essentially nonexistent. And there was mounting pressure on the U.S. government, at home and abroad, to extradite Constant.
When I reached his lawyer, J. D. Larosiliere, he told me that things were at their most critical juncture. A barrel-chested Haitian-American who speaks a combination of formal English and street slang and has a penchant for finely tailored suits, Larosiliere told me that he was often referred to as “the Haitian version of Johnnie Cochran.” Denying that there had even been a massacre at Raboteau, he said that if Constant was sent back to Haiti he would likely be assassinated. Because of the desperateness of the situation, Larosiliere agreed to let Constant, whom many thought had disappeared, meet with me.
So, one afternoon several days later, I headed to Larosiliere’s office, in Newark, New Jersey. When I arrived, Larosiliere was in a closed-door meeting, and as I waited outside in the foyer I could hear the sound of Creole punctured by occasional bursts of English. Suddenly, the office door swung open and a tall man in a double- breasted suit hurried out. It took me a moment to recognize Constant-he looked at least thirty pounds heavier than in the pictures I’d seen of him taken during the military regime. He still had the same mustache, but on his heavier face it no longer appeared so menacing. He wore a turtleneck under his jacket and a gold earring in his left ear. “Hey, how you doing?” he said, speaking with only a slight accent.
To my surprise, he looked like an average American. We sat down in a small conference room lined with books. He paused, rocking back in his chair. Finally, he said, “It’s time for Toto to speak for Toto.”
It was the first of more than a dozen interviews. As he told me his story over the next several months, he often spoke for hours on end. He turned over his voluminous notes and private papers, his correspondence and journals. During that time, I also interviewed his alleged victims, along with human-rights workers, United Nations observers, Haitian authorities, and former and current U.S. officials within the White House, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the intelligence community, many of whom had never before spoken publicly about Constant. I also gained access to intelligence reports, some of which had previously been classified, and State Department cables. With these and other sources, I was able to piece together not only the story of Emmanuel “Toto” Constant but also much of the story of how the U. S. government secretly aided him and later shielded him from justice.
VOODOO PARAMILITARY
In October of 1993, the U.S.S. Harlan County, loaded with military personnel, was sent steaming toward Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. President Bill Clinton had dispatched the ship and its crew as the first major contingent of an international peacekeeping mission to restore to power Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide was a political priest, a wiry, passionate, bug-eyed orator who had risen to power in late 1990 on a mixture of socialism and liberation theology. The downtrodden of Haiti, which is nearly everyone, called him Titid and revered him; the military and the economic elite reviled him as an unstable radical. He was deposed in a coup less than a year after taking office and ultimately fled to the United States. Since then the military, along with roaming bands of paramilitaries, had murdered scores of people. The bloodshed had galvanized the international community, and the ship’s arrival was hailed as a turning point in the effort to reestablish some semblance of public safety and the island’s democracy.
On October 11th, as the Harlan County neared port, a group of U.N. and U. S. officials, headed by the charge d’affaires, Vicki Huddleston, and accompanied by a large press corps, came to formally welcome the ship and its troops. The assembly waited at the entrance to the port for a guard to open the gate, but nothing happened. Documentary footage shows Huddleston sitting in the back of her car with the C.I.A. station chief. Speaking to another embassy official, she says into her walkie-talkie, “Tell the captain [of the port] I am here to speak with him.”
