I had come to see the villain in charge.
On a bright Tuesday morning, October 4, 1994, I walked into a mustard-yellow building in the center of Port-au-Prince, headquarters of the famously violent and corrupt national police. These thugs with badges had been terrorizing the Haitian people for the past three years, as their predecessors had on and off for centuries. I was there to meet Lieutenant Colonel Michel-Joseph Francois, the department’s dreaded chief and, it was widely believed, a valuable friend to drug traffickers across the Caribbean. I was eager to look Francois in the eye and explain to him with perfect clarity that a new day had dawned at last.
Haiti was occupied by twenty thousand American troops, some on ships off the island but most already on land. Operation Uphold Democracy, the effort was called. After three years of slow diplomacy following a 1991 military coup, the U.S. forces had come to remove the murderous military regime of Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras, who’d grabbed power from the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Two weeks before I helicoptered in from Camp Santiago in Puerto Rico, the American forces had been on the verge of invading. Planes were literally in the air when former president Jimmy Carter, who’d been dispatched by President Bill Clinton, persuaded General Cédras to step aside. Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was involved as well. Now the Haitian people nervously awaited the October 15 return of Aristide, a forty-one-year-old Catholic priest turned politician.
I was in the country as director of the International Police Monitors, part of the U.S.-led Multinational Interim Force in Haiti: eight hundred police officers from twenty countries around the world with a couple of hundred interpreters and a company from the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division. We were a truly international monitoring force, with police officers on loan from Poland, Israel, Jordan, Belgium, Argentina, the Philippines, and the CARICOM nations of the Caribbean. There was an American component, though not a large one, since the United States has no national police force. In addition to the Tenth Mountain Division, we had a handful of Marine Corps reservists and some former U.S. police officers who were recruited, somewhat haphazardly, by DynCorp International, a private military contractor. We all carried weapons, but we made clear to everyone that we were not in Haiti to perform actual police duties.
Instead, we had the daunting responsibility of reforming and reconstituting what was left of the Haitian police, turning these bitter and dispirited ofisye polis into a democratic force. In a place so out of control, though, it was often impossible to avoid some policing—of the citizens and of the police. Truly, there was no one else to do it.
As I walked into the police headquarters that morning, I had Mario LaPaix, a major in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves and a New York City employee, as my guide and translator. He was born in Haiti and spoke some French and Creole. I knew him from the marine reserves. Mario was the one who’d first called me about coming to Haiti.
After I’d left the police department at the end of the Dinkins administration, I’d had a brief stint at New York University teaching leadership—thanks to Jay Oliva, the university’s president and a fellow Manhattan College alum—before taking a position as president of the corporate intelligence firm IGI, Investigative Group International. The firm was chaired by Terry Lenzner, a former federal prosecutor and Senate Watergate counsel. I enjoyed the private sector. The firm was staffed by smart, sophisticated people. But when Mario reached me at IGI in late September of 1994, nine months after I’d left the police department, I was definitely open to the idea of a new adventure. The State Department, he said, was looking for someone to be in charge of an entity they were putting together called the International Police Monitors. No one in Washington wanted the U.S. military to be the police for an all-black population in Haiti. “It wouldn’t look good,” Mario said. The notion instead was to bring in a cadre of professional police officers from around the world and have them monitor the Haitian police.
That sounded like a fascinating challenge to me. It sounded so fascinating, in fact, that I barely even considered what it might mean to spend six months in Haiti, away from my family, away from my other work, away from anything approaching normalcy. When the State Department agreed to hire me through IGI, I said yes immediately, and things moved quickly from there.
I wanted the multitalented Paul Browne to come as my right-hand man. A former news reporter in Albany and aide to New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Paul had gone to the NYPD, where he wrote speeches for Commissioner Lee Brown and then became my spokesman and close aide when I became commissioner. Paul had left the NYPD when I did at the end of the Dinkins administration and was working at the Daily News. I couldn’t imagine going to Haiti without him. I called Mort Zuckerman, the paper’s owner, to see if Paul could take a leave of absence. Mort said no. Paul resigned the next day. I reached Port-au-Prince just ten days after I had gotten Mario’s call, and Paul quickly followed.
When Mario and I got upstairs, the feared Lieutenant Colonel Francois was nowhere to be found. At that very moment, he was fleeing the country, crossing the border into the neighboring Dominican Republic. The Haitian people were so angry with him, a huge mob had descended on his ridgetop home and torn it apart with their bare hands, one floorboard and roof tile at a time. Dépeçage, that ritual destruction is called in Haiti. It’s made easier by the country’s lax building codes. Things are often halfway falling down to start with.
The colonel’s replacement, a Haitian police major, did not seem thrilled by our arrival. The words “international” and “monitors” sounded like nothing but trouble to him. He immediately rejected the joint patrols I was proposing. He fumed that the U.S. military had just detained seven of his men. Did I understand, he wanted to know, that angry mobs with machetes were gathering outside right now, intent on revenge against the police?
Our meeting lasted more than three hours. As I listened to the major’s numerous complaints, grumbling officers wandered in and out of the room, seething with a variety of American-directed insults. Outside, I could hear people chanting in Creole.
I did what I could to lower the temperature. I told the major that the handcuffing of his men had been a mistake. It had happened during a chaotic American military raid at the headquarters of a violent Haitian paramilitary group. But I refused to back down from the joint patrols. Small steps, steady steps, all in the same direction. It’s always impressive how much can be accomplished simply by refusing to stop. In the face of opposition, I have often found that effective. “We must do this,” I told him.
Finally, the major relented, on the condition that I would join the first patrol with one of his lieutenants. The lieutenant and I, dressed in bulletproof vests, walked a twelve-block loop along some of Port-au-Prince’s rougher streets. We did not know what to expect, but I was convinced this was the best approach. If police are going to have an impact, they have to be present and visible and reliably there. Otherwise it’s too easy for crime and disorder—even anarchy, in a place like Haiti—to take hold.
We got plenty of glares on the sidewalks but also some cheers and handshakes—and, thankfully, no flying bullets or machete blades. The international monitoring of the Haitian police had officially begun.
* * *
The six months I spent in Haiti were some of the most demanding and exhilarating of my life. Just being on the island was a constant challenge. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, it had suffered from every imaginable social ill—severe overpopulation in the cities, a chaotic economy, terrible housing, constant power outages, dirty water, frequent earthquakes and landslides, and a sour aroma that constantly hung in the air. Raw sewage? Garbage in the street? Mold and mildew? Dead bodies left for the pigs? Any and all of the above, depending on the day of the week and the corner you chose.
I loved the place, despite all its problems, and I especially loved the people, who were open and warm and decent, even as they sometimes did inexplicable things. I had never been in any place—not Vietnam, certainly not New York—quite so anarchic and raw. In New York, we’d spoken often of the importance of social order. This was disorder to the tenth power. The electricity was on maybe half the time. There were no sewers. There didn’t appear to be traffic laws. Breathing was a constant struggle because of the low-hanging clouds of dust and who knows what else. You didn’t want to drink even the bottled water in Haiti. One day, there were twenty-one murders in Port-au-Prince. The next day, there were zero. No one could seem to explain either number. The poverty was so grinding, the oppression was so thick, even the most fundamental principles of modern policing seemed like foreign concepts here. Without a doubt, the Haitian police needed a top-to-bottom culture change. There would be no torturing prisoners, no taking bribes, no behaving like the street-level auxiliary of the Haitian Army, doing the daily dirty work of the brutal military regime. One of our first orders of business: disbanding the armed civilian attachés, quasi-official vigilantes who seemed to operate with no rules at all.
Before we could get started, we had to pick out a location for our headquarters. We needed somewhere that could serve as both a command center and a place to sleep. We drove out to an old Club Med. The trip was like a sightseeing tour of everything that was wrong with Haiti. Tires were burning on the side of the road. Bandits were stopping cars and shaking people down. The potholes were just as unforgiving. The Club Med, when we finally got there, was too isolated and too far from the city. We settled into the abandoned and dilapidated Hotel Villa St. Louis on Avenida John Brown in the heart of the capital instead.
I began meeting with William Swing, the smart and supportive U.S. ambassador to Haiti. In his career in the diplomatic corps, he’d been in the People’s Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and some other challenging corners of sub-Saharan Africa. He knew what we were up against. Haiti, he said, was as tough as anywhere he’d been. The local police were terribly equipped. They had no working radios. Their wrecked patrol cars were often sitting up on concrete blocks, the perfect mechanical embodiment of the cops’ own work ethic. To be fair, the issue wasn’t only laziness. Many of the officers had nowhere to live. In the past, they’d gotten by on whatever they could collect in bribes, but those had dried up. Now many were too scared to go out on patrol. I’d never seen that before, cops too frightened to go outside. The whole broken department needed to be rebuilt and rebranded, right down to the mustard-yellow color scheme. That was the color of army facilities, a connection we had to break any way we could. We ordered the police buildings painted light blue.
As the foreign police contingents gradually reported for duty on the island, we kept the national groups together, sending each one to a different part of Haiti to patrol with local police. Having contact with these outside professionals would gradually acclimate the Haitians to modern law enforcement techniques. That was my strategy, anyway. The head of each foreign contingent stayed back at the St. Louis, so I had immediate access to each group in the field. I kept moving around the country by helicopter and truck to the various local outposts.
Trouble could pop up anywhere. One morning, I got word that two hundred people had surrounded a police station in Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince’s most violent slum, frequently described by the United Nations as the most dangerous place in the world. I rushed to the scene. I couldn’t say their grievances weren’t legitimate, but they quieted as soon as we walked up. “We are here and things are changing,” I announced through an interpreter. That was a message at least some of the people were willing to hear. The crowd backed away from the building and some of them began to cheer. Someone was going to police the capital’s neighborhoods, and they would need a building to do it from.
Days later, I returned to the Cité Soleil police station. When I got there, another mob had gathered outside. Again I wasn’t quite sure why they were angry, and no one could explain it to me with clarity. Again I assumed their grievance was probably legitimate. They were armed with machetes and crowbars, and they were about to take the building apart, another example of Haitian dépeçage. As I approached the crowd, they lowered their tools and weapons. Quietly, respectfully, they nodded, smiled, and dispersed. No one put up any kind of a fight. They didn’t have to. They knew I’d be gone and they’d still be there. And when I came back the next day, the Cité Soleil police station was little more than a giant pile of powdered cement.
Another day, beside a row of tumbledown shacks, we passed a procession of people leading a young boy whose hands were tied behind his back. Someone was carrying a bike. We stopped our truck and got out.
“What’s going on?” I asked through an interpreter as unthreateningly as I could.
“He stole the bicycle,” said one of the men in the crowd. “We have to hang him.”
It was said so matter-of-factly, at first I wasn’t sure if the man was being serious. But he was. The kid had stolen a bicycle, so he would be killed. “We have to,” the man said when I raised an eyebrow.
“You’re not going to kill anyone,” I said calmly but firmly. “Not today.”
And they didn’t. We put the boy in our truck and drove him out of there.
Despite their occasional violent outbursts, Haitians could be extraordinarily warm and friendly. I often played the conga drum with Haitian workers at the St. Louis Hotel. They immediately respected authority. When I said “Don’t,” they didn’t. But there was such a deep tradition of curbstone justice, I don’t think they believed they were doing anything wrong. Quite possibly, there’d be another bicycle thief—and a successful hanging—tomorrow.
As we made our way through tense urban ghettos and along muddy country roads, we kept running across scenes like these. On one busy block, there was a large truck piled high with charcoal. A suspected attaché was cowering in fear at the top. A crowd had surrounded the truck, and they were yelling “Kill, kill,” as people tried to scamper up and pull the man down.
We stopped the Jeep. Paul Browne and I got out. We climbed to the top of the pile and rescued the suspected attaché, putting him in the Jeep with us and driving him to at least temporary safety.
Was he a good guy, a bad guy, or something in between? We had no idea. Did the crowd have every right to be angry with him? Perhaps. But I wasn’t going to stand by idly while a mob killed someone, even if in their eyes there was understandable cause. Sometimes, it seemed, we were training the Haitian people as much as their police.
The prisons were a special challenge. In general, the conditions were deplorable, especially at the municipal lockup in Port-au-Prince. The jail was more like Attica in 1971. One day during my time in Haiti, five hundred prisoners rioted there. Seven inmates were killed. The others banged tins in their cells and started fires with anything they could burn. They were looking for retribution against the guards. The guards had obviously been very heavy-handed, and now that dynamic had begun to change. It was a very scary place.
I arrived at the prison with an Argentine police officer. We made our way inside and then out onto a catwalk in the cell block. The inmates started going crazy. Was it me or the Argentine? Were they happy to see us, or did our presence make them angrier? The whole scene was just so chaotic, it was impossible to decipher the mood. On balance, I believe they were just desperately grateful that outsiders, foreigners, anyone who might have some authority was finally paying attention.
Intermingled with all parts of life in Haiti were the ancient potions, blessings, and curses of voodoo. African slaves, who were brought to Haiti by the French to work the sugarcane fields, carried many of those rituals with them. Though many Haitians were forced to convert to Catholicism in the 1700s and 1800s, the old ways never really disappeared. “Ninety percent of Haitians are Catholic,” someone explained to me. “One hundred percent believe in voodoo.”
In mid-November, a Haitian soldier named College Francois, who worked as a bodyguard at the American embassy, robbed an embassy payroll car. He shot all three men in the car—his own embassy coworkers—before escaping with $59,000 in cash and checks. Two of the embassy workers died immediately. We got to the hospital in time to interview the third man through an interpreter before he, too, died. “It was College Francois,” he told us in the emergency room.
We launched a manhunt—interviewing witnesses, putting flyers on cars, doing everything we could think of to find Francois. My son Jim, who had come down to see how I was getting on, even joined the search.
Several weeks later, Francois went to see a houngan, a male voodoo priest, near Jacmel in southern Haiti. He told the houngan that he wanted a disappearing potion. The houngan offered to be helpful.
“Come back tomorrow,” he told College Francois. “Come in your underwear. Bring a dead goat. Bring the money, and we’ll do business. No guns.”
The next day, Francois returned. Underwear. Dead goat. Twenty-nine thousand dollars. No gun.
The houngan grabbed College Francois, tied him up, took the money, and turned him over to us.
Where else but Haiti could something like this occur? Francois was twenty-five years old. He’d used computers and flown in helicopters. He’d been in the army and worked at the U.S. embassy. And his escape plan still involved a houngan, a dead goat, and disappearing potion.
The only disappearing he did was off to prison.
Once, outside Port-au-Prince, Paul Browne encountered a woman who had narrowly escaped being stoned to death by angry neighbors who accused her of being a witch. They claimed she was responsible for a rash of infant deaths. They believed she would fly at night from house to house, sucking the life out of babies.
As we kept encountering these otherworldly dramas, officials kept coming down from Washington. The visitors included top State Department people like Richard Clarke, Michael Sheehan, Strobe Talbott, and Bob Gelbard, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement. Drugs and thugs, we called Gelbard’s unit. Many visitors—not these four—would go to see Ambassador Swing at the U.S. embassy or at his elegant ambassador’s residence and not see the real Haiti. When I received people, I preferred taking them to Cité Soleil, where they would get a far grittier eyeful of Haitian poverty and despair. That was Haiti, people walking miles to get water, sharing the roads with the skinniest pigs in the world. We might see a live dépeçage or maybe a bloodsucking woman flying from rooftop to rooftop. Anything was possible in Haiti.
* * *
The national groups represented in the monitoring force were as different from each other as you could imagine, as was the expertise they brought. Different cultures, different attitudes, different levels of training. Our multinational force spoke six different languages. The Belgians were highly efficient. The Jordanians were constantly on edge. We had a contingent of special-forces soldiers from Poland—large, fair-haired fighters in excellent physical shape. Unlike most of the others, they carried assault rifles. At a couple of locations where the local police commanders were being uncooperative, I sent the Polish soldiers in with instructions to just stand there. Say nothing. Do nothing. Just stand there beside the commander and watch. It was highly unnerving. Their mere presence was enough to fundamentally alter the dynamic. Those Poles knew how to make a point. One day, just to show they could, the Polish contingent decided to skip the door and climb up the front wall of their four-story hotel. They did it in near-perfect unison.
Twice a day we tried to have meetings with all the contingent heads. Veronica couldn’t believe what those meetings were like when she came down for a weekend visit. Everyone gathered in a room next to my bedroom. The meeting room was its own multicultural experiment. Everything you said had to be translated into five other languages. Every sentence was followed by a strange buzzing echo as the translators repeated what you’d just said. We had no headsets, no microphones, no modern technology. Just everybody whispering in different languages, trying to be heard.
Truly, I’d never been anywhere like Haiti. If you’re bored, wait five minutes. Something bizarre will occur. On December 26, some Haitian soldiers had gone to the Port-au-Prince army depot demanding back pay they were owed. A Haitian general heard them shouting to a clerk and panicked. He locked himself in his office and began shooting through the door with a machine gun. He hit several soldiers, including some of his own security guards.
The soldiers who’d come for their money ripped open a gun locker and grabbed a pile of rifles. That’s when they ran into a contingent of American troops.
The U.S. soldiers responded with a firefight, shooting several Haitian soldiers and wounding some other people, too. When I got there, it was still an active shooting scene. People were bleeding. I was carrying bodies out. This was far more like what I remembered from Vietnam than anything resembling normal police work.
When the shooting finally ended, the U.S. troops grabbed the soldiers they believed were responsible, tied their hands behind their backs, put blindfolds over their eyes, and transported them to a warehouse. This made a bad situation considerably worse.
When I finally arrived at the warehouse, the Haitian soldiers were still tied and blindfolded, several hours after they had first been grabbed.
“What is this?” I asked the commander from the Tenth Mountain Division.
He had no idea that this wasn’t standard police practice. He was used to dealing with prisoners of war. I knew that he and his troops had been in Somalia, and I think they were still traumatized. I emphasized to the soldier that it wasn’t a good idea to keep unpaid Haitian soldiers tied up for hours like rodeo calves. “You build a lot of unnecessary resentment that way,” I explained.
Then there was Mardi Gras. The pre-Lenten celebration fell that year at the very end of February. We knew Mardi Gras could be an especially wild time in Haiti. Those three nights of dancing, drinking, voodoo, and assorted other dusk-to-dawn debauchery usually left many dead bodies behind. Mardi Gras in Haiti was the perfect time for seeking retribution and settling scores. I was committed to making this year different. I summoned most of our monitoring crew.
Altogether, we had 240 beat-up U.S. Army trucks called CUCVs. They were pieces of junk, but they ran. We took those vehicles and lined them up along the main parade route a block or so apart. We had two or three monitors standing on the back of every truck, in sight of each other, their yellow hats that we all wore plainly visible above the teeming crowds. I wanted the message to be clear: someone was watching. None of our officers had any real problems. No killings were reported at that year’s celebration.
* * *
Our mission was set to end on March 31, 1995.
All peacekeeping responsibilities were being transferred from the Multinational Interim Force to the United Nations Mission in Haiti. Going forward, they’d have the job of overseeing the Haitian police and making transition changes permanent. We had made a lot of progress. Everyone had seen it. In those six months, Haitian police officers were learning to be police officers in the modern sense of the term. They had been out on patrol with law enforcement professionals from around the world. Their supervisors had been taught what it means to have standards and live up to them. Many of the officers were eager students and seemed proud of the progress they had made. Others considered the approach too hard, too dangerous, or just not something they wanted to do, and they melted away quickly.
While we were there, we did so much more than monitor the police. We saved lives. We cleared out prisons. We interrupted countless acts of vigilante violence. I don’t kid myself; we certainly didn’t end those outbursts for good. But we delivered new equipment. We improved local facilities. We spread a lot of light-blue paint. We taught some basic human rights principles to police officers—veterans and recruits—who had never heard of those concepts before. We created Haiti’s first police test, establishing an orderly system for finding capable recruits.
All of that was hugely gratifying. We also achieved it with lightning speed. But we didn’t stay, and neither did the U.S. troops. Once we were gone, it would be natural for some of the old forces to assert themselves. Six months is a blip in Haitian history, and Haiti is prone to backsliding. No improvements last forever there. Even as we were making some, I was aware that ours might not last either.
President Clinton flew down for the official transfer of power, a day of celebration that felt almost like the Fourth of July. The National Palace was whitewashed for the nine-hour visit. The shabby Port-au-Prince airport was hosed down with a brand-new American fire engine. It was the first time an American president had visited Haiti since 1934, when Franklin Roosevelt came. There was genuine hope in the air. This being Haiti, of course, there were worrisome signs as well. Just as the president was arriving, the local papers said a team of FBI agents suspected Aristide’s interior minister, Mondesir Beaubrun, of being involved in the assassination of a political rival. I went to the scene of the killing. But it would take more than that to dampen the mood in Haiti.
I made some real friends there. We had a great team of people from around the world working together on a shared mission under conditions that were often absurd. That was a bonding experience for all of us. I also remained in contact with some of the Haitians I got to know. One was René Préval, a local agronomist who became president after Aristide and visited with me in New York. President Aristide sent me a beautiful Haitian painting and an eloquent letter of thanks. Another friend was a popular singer and keyboardist whose stage name was Sweet Micky. His genre was compas, a style of Haitian dance music that relies on synthesizers and is sung in Creole. Using his real name, Michel Martelly, he was elected president in 2011, after Préval’s second term. Though it is a nation of nine million people, Haiti can feel like a small town.
At the palace, President Clinton met with Aristide, United Nations secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. With white doves and balloons in the air and Aristide at his side, Clinton declared the mission “a remarkable success” as thousands of students waved tiny U.S. and Haitian flags.
“We celebrate the restoration of democracy to your country,” he said. “Never, never again must it be stolen away.” For his part, Aristide thanked the Americans “who helped restore democracy to our country” and moved the country “from death to life.”
The president asked Paul and me to fly back to the United States with him. We could travel on Air Force One as far as Little Rock, where he was planning to cheer on his Arkansas Razorbacks, whose men’s basketball team had made it to the NCAA Final Four. The first game, against North Carolina, was the next day at the King Dome in Seattle.
We were supposed to take off at 2:00 p.m. After telling everyone good-bye, Paul and I got to the Port-au-Prince airport in time. What we didn’t know was that the president had finished his meetings early and we’d kept him waiting for almost an hour.
He didn’t seem to mind. Once we got on board, he talked about Haiti with his aides Bruce Lindsey and Harold Ickes. He took me to the back of the plane to speak with the reporters about Haiti and banter about basketball. He could recall every player, every coach, all the records and scouting reports, as if he were reciting precinct-by-precinct voting returns on election night. I’d never seen someone who seemed to know so much about so many things.
“How do you know all that?” one of the reporters asked him.
“Every once in a while,” he said with a smile, “you gotta do something to keep your mind off government.” Bill Clinton had a steel-trap mind—for politics, foreign affairs, and basketball.
Since this was our first time on Air Force One, he gave Paul and me a tour. He took us into the galley, the dining area, even the plane’s high-flying presidential bathroom.
“I just took a shower in here, Ray, right here,” he said, talking with all the exuberance of a regular Arkansan showing off his new Winnebago. “Pretty neat, huh?”
When we got to the aircraft’s conference room, the president put in a videotape. It was a clip from the movie Forrest Gump, which had opened in theaters the previous summer. This was the part of the movie where Forrest, wearing number 44, scores a phenomenal ninety-nine-yard touchdown for the University of Alabama. “He might be the stupidest son of a bitch alive, but he sure is fast,” a grinning coach Bear Bryant declares.
Only it wasn’t Tom Hanks anymore playing the lovable simpleton who was everywhere. Someone had altered the video. Now peeking from beneath that crimson helmet was the grinning face of Bill Clinton.
“Can you believe that?” the president said, shaking his head.