At 5:00 P.M. on Friday, May 13, 2011, Dominque Strauss-Khan, better known in France by his initials, “DSK,” boarded U.S. Airways Flight 2180 at Reagan National Airport. The 62-year-old French-born economist had a busy schedule. He planned to be in New York only overnight to see his daughter. He would fly back to Paris on Sunday, and then go that day to Berlin, where he had scheduled a meeting with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Since September 2007, DSK had been head of one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund, an organization of sovereign states with the job of providing loans to any nation in financial trouble. For the past six months, he had had to deal with a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Greece, one of the weakest economies in the European Union, was running out of money. It now had to refinance its massive debt but lacked the credit to borrow money at rates it could afford. If Greece did not get the money in the next few months, it would have to default on its bonds. Such a bankruptcy would threaten the largest banks in France and Germany and set off a cascade of falling dominoes that could not only destroy the euro but plunge Europe and America into financial chaos. Since the IMF was the largest holder of Greek debt and could draw upon the resources of the 187 nation-states that constituted its membership, DSK expected to play a major role in preventing this impending disaster. He had qualification in this regard. After obtaining a law degree and PhD in economics at the Université Paris at Nanterre in 1977, he was appointed to head the finance department of the Plan Commission in 1982. He served as Minister of Industry and Foreign Trade from 1991 to 1993 and as Minister of Economy, Finance and Industry from 1997 to 1999. He also played a major role in the French Socialist Party, having first been elected to the National Assembly in 1986, and was now in line to be its presidential candidate. Even though French president Nicolas Sarkozy had backed DSK’s appointment at the IMF four years earlier, he was now emerging as Sarkozy’s leading rival for the presidency, and now he was well ahead of him in all the national polls. If elected, DSK would be France’s first Jewish president.
DSK had come to Washington, D.C. from Paris just three days earlier for a meeting of the IMF board. But IMF business, as crucial as it was, had occupied only part of his time that week. The night before, he also had gone to a libertine event at a suite in the W Hotel. The other guests, including four young women, had all flown to Washington, D.C. from Paris to attend the party. As it turned out, this party on May 12 was the last in a series of parties, many of which had the same guests. The first party had taken place in late 2009 in Paris. Then the group met in other cities, including Lille in the north of France, Brussels, and once before in Washington, D.C., when DSK had taken one of the female guests for a visit to his IMF office. One participant was the politically connected police commissioner for the Lille region, Jean-Christophe Lagarde. He was in an unusually good position to find attractive women for these parties because he was also providing protection for a prostitution ring that operated out of the Carlton Hotel in Lille and imported women from Belgium, where prostitution was legal, to France. Lagarde, like many other Socialist politicians, had become a supporter of DSK for his planned challenge to Sarkozy. The expenses for these small gatherings were mainly paid by two wealthy guests: David Roquet, an executive of the French construction group Eiffage, and Fabrice Paszkowski, a longtime friend of DSK who owned a medical supply company. For the party on May 12, Lagarde brought two women, called “Florence” and “Hélène,” from France. They were introduced to DSK, according to Lagarde’s subsequent testimony, as secretaries at Eiffage, but they were in fact prostitutes. The other two women (who were not paid) were friends of Paszkowski and DSK. The party had gone onto the wee hours of May 13.
Before DSK left the W Hotel, he had a private conversation with Lagarde in his room. Lagarde warned that now that DSK had decided to run for president, these sex parties could be a serious political risk. His main concern was that DSK’s risqué activities could be exposed in the intense scrutiny that would come with a political campaign.
Lagarde’s warning in Washington may have been more prophetic than he realized. In December 2011, a French journalist learned from authorities investigating the Carlton prostitution ring that there existed a word-for-word transcript of the conversation between DSK and Lagarde in the W Hotel in Washington on May 12. If this was true, it would suggest that DSK’s activities had been monitored before he arrived in New York. According to what this journalist was told, this interception had resulted from a freak coincidence in which DSK’s speaker phone was accidentally left on while the line was somehow connected to a French phone number that was under legal surveillance. As the journalist was unable to obtain the putative recording or match it to DSK and Lagarde’s voices, it remains unconfirmed.
Other than booking his room at the Sofitel for the afternoon of May 13, DSK did not advise the hotel as to his time of arrival. As it turned out, he caught a later flight in Washington than he expected, and it arrived at JFK in New York at 6:21 P.M. that Friday. He had only carry-on baggage and caught a yellow taxi from the queue. At 7:08 P.M., the taxi arrived at the 44th Street entrance of the Sofitel. The doorman unloaded DSK’s bag and briefcase while he paid. He then carried his own baggage to the hotel, pulling a small wheeled bag behind him. In the entranceway, he was met by a female clerk who accompanied him through the lobby to the reception area, which is on the 45th Street side of the building. After he had signed in, he went directly to the presidential suite on the 28th floor.
What he did not see when the taxi pulled up was that his arrival may have been anticipated. Ninety seconds before DSK’s taxi pulled up at the 44th Street entrance, a tall, well-dressed man came out of the hotel, a cell phone pressed to his ear. He walked out into the street and handed the phone to the doorman. They both looked down 44th Street. The well-dressed man then returned to the sidewalk and continued speaking and gesturing to the doorman, who then walked down 44th Street (out of the range of the CCTV camera) and then ran back with DSK’s cab. Perhaps this was a coincidence, but just four seconds after DSK entered the hotel at 7:10:23 P.M., the well-dressed man appeared from the entranceway, where he had been standing, and followed in DSK’s path to the lobby lounge, where he stopped at a doorway looking toward the reception desk. On the video, at 7:11 P.M., while DSK provides his passport for the reception clerk, the well-dressed man can be seen framed in the lounge doorway looking toward him. Then, at 7:12:16 P.M., DSK, accompanied by the reception clerk, walks to the elevator lobby. Three seconds later, the well-dressed man comes out of the doorway, walks past the reception desk, again following DSK’s route, and, as he passes the elevator lobby, turns his head to the right towards where DSK would be waiting for the elevator. (See CCTV video A, via the link in Appendix A.)
The well-dressed man is Brian Yearwood, the head of engineering at the Sofitel. (According to LinkedIn, he is the hotel’s “Director of Engineering Design.”) He is a large, muscular former prison guard who had been employed by the Sofitel since 2005. Before that, he had worked as a corrections officer at the Mid-Orange Correction Center in Warwick, New York, for 17 years. According to Sofitel records, he was supposed to be off work that weekend, but his schedule had apparently been changed, since his car can be seen on 45th Street all night on the CCTV camera. On the film, shortly before DSK goes anywhere, Yearwood seems to appear, and as soon as DSK leaves, he seems to follow the same route. These near-encounters with DSK, which would continue the next day, may have been pure coincidence, or Yearwood may have been assigned by the hotel the task of making sure that DSK’s arrival—and his departure the next day—went smoothly. Such a task could be a perfectly proper precaution, since DSK, a possible future president of France, was one of the hotel’s most important clients. But if Yearwood was assigned that role, how did he, or the person on the telephone, know when DSK’s cab was arriving? (I requested an interview with Yearwood, but he, like all other Sofitel employees I approached, declined to speak to me.) DSK does not recall ever noticing Yearwood.
Later that evening, DSK went out for dinner. He did not return to the hotel until 1:53 A.M., according to the key records. He had a guest with him, a blond female. She is shown exiting the elevator on the ground floor at 3:56 A.M, ending a long day for the 62-year-old managing director of the IMF.