worked on this case full time for four and a half years.”)
After Larosiliere left, I sat for a while and stared at the dozens of alleged victims sitting on the back benches. Many of them had bought suits for the trial. The young women, some of whom had been shot, wore white dresses that somehow stayed pristine in the dusty heat; they sat with their backs perfectly straight. On several occasions, these people had walked miles to the capital to pressure their government for justice. They had written songs about what had happened. And they sat there now, as rain began to fall, and as a clerk collected the bones strewn on the table, and as rumors filled the country that another coup attempt had been thwarted in the capital.
As I finally rose to go, a young man who had seen me arrive with Constant’s lawyer stopped me. Before I could say anything, he spat at my shoe and walked away.
THE VERDICT
“They tried to get me to come out to beat me up,” Constant told me shortly after I returned. He was eating a piece of chocolate cake in a Queens diner. Tensions in the community had intensified since the beginning of the trial. Larosiliere had instructed him to leave the house during such demonstrations, to avoid confrontations. But Constant always remained nearby. “I have to protect my mother and aunt in case one of them go crazy,” he told me.
Ricot Dupuy, of Radio Soleil d’Haiti, told me candidly, “There are Haitian groups who have toyed with the idea of taking the law into their own hands and killing him.”
Constant claims that he has a small coterie of supporters who keep an eye out for him. “I can tell you, when they come in front of my place, fifty per cent of the people out there are my people,” he said. “They pass by in case there is any trouble.”
Though it is hard to know the precise numbers, Constant maintains some hold over a small following of former FRAPH members, Tonton Macoutes, soldiers, and Duvalierists who also live in exile. Demonstrators say that in at least one instance a car showed up outside his house to monitor them. “They came by taking pictures of us, and we took pictures of them,” Ray Laforest told me.
“I don’t want to play a deadly game,” Constant said of Laforest, “but I have stuff on him, and… ” He let his thought trail off.
One day, I was sitting with Constant in his house, reading a chapter of his book, when his phone rang. After he took the call and hung up, he said, “You’re here for a part of history. The verdict came out. I’ve been sentenced to life imprisonment and to hard labor, and they’re taking over all my property in Haiti.”
He dropped into his rocking chair, lighting a cigarette and looking around the room. The jury had deliberated for four hours and had found sixteen of the twenty-two defendants in custody guilty, twelve of them for premeditated murder or for being accomplices to murder. Those who had been tried in absentia were convicted of murder and ordered to pay the victims millions of dollars in damages. “I hate to lose my things back home,” Constant said, “because eventually my mother has to go back there.”
He lit another cigarette and drew on it deeply. “I better call J.D.,” he said, referring to Larosiliere. He picked up his cell phone, trying to concentrate. “They have a verdict against me,” he said into the phone, leaving a message for his lawyer. “I need to speak to him. O.K.? They have sentenced me to life and hard labor!”
A few minutes later, the phone rang, and Constant picked it up in a hurry. But it was a reporter asking him for a comment. He managed a few words and hung up. The phone rang again. It was Larosiliere. “What do you think’s going to happen here?” Constant asked nervously. “O.K… yes… O.K.”
He handed me the phone. I could hear Larosiliere’s voice crackling through the receiver before I put it to my ear. “I have one word to say about all this: bullshit.” Larosiliere said that the Haitian government would now try to extradite Constant, claiming that a legitimate tribunal had convicted him with the blessing of international observers. But, he said, they still had to show that the verdict was fair and prove in a U.S. court that Constant deserved to be sent back.
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 Haiti Progres, 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
