David Grann - The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

After a while, Kroner offered to show me around the valley. As the sun was setting, we drove in his car past the old steel mills, past the Greek Coffee House and the Doll House and other gambling dens, past the place where Bernie the Jew met with his team of hit men and where Strollo had Ernie Biondillo killed. “We’re a part of this community like everyone else,” Kroner said. “We suffer the same problems if we live in a corrupt town.” He paused for a moment, perhaps because he couldn’t think of anything to add or perhaps because he realized that, after a lifetime of fighting the Mafia, there was little more that he could do. Finally, he said, “As long as they choose to put people in office who are corrupt, nothing will ever change.”

– July, 2000

In November, 2000, Traficant was elected to a ninth term in Congress. Six months later, he was indicted on ten counts of bribery, racketeering, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice. Among the charges were that he did political favors for the Buccis in exchange for fee construction services on his farm, and assisted others in return for thousands of dollars in kickbacks. Traficant was also accused of asking an aide to lie to a federal grand jury and to destroy incriminating evidence. (The aide told authorities that Traficant watched while he took a blowtorch to envelopes that had once contained cash payoffs to the Congressman.)

The trial began in a federal district court in Cleveland in February of 2002, and, as Traficant had done nearly two decades earlier, he decided to represent himself. He accused the prosecution of having “the testicles of an ant,” and at one point stormed out of the courtroom. Yet this time a jury found him guilty on every count.

Saying he was “full of deceit and corruption and greed,” the judge sentenced Traficant to eight years in prison. In addition, the judge ordered that he pay more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in fines and nearly twenty thousand dollars in unpaid taxes, and return ninety-six thousand dollars in illegal proceeds.

As Kroner looked on, Traficant was led away in handcuffs. Kroner soon retired from the F.B.I. On July 24, 2002, the House of Representatives voted 420 to 1 to expel Traficant-making him only the second congressman since the Civil War to be expelled from the institution. While he was in prison, Traficant was put in solitary confinement for trying to foment a riot. In September of 2009, after serving seven years, he was released on probation. He was greeted in Youngstown by more than a thousand cheering supporters, many of them wearing T-shirts that said “Welcome Home Jimbo.” Traficant announced that it was “fifty-fifty” that he would run for Congress again.

No one remembers who first saw him in the neighborhood, but Emile Maceus was nearly certain that Emmanuel “Toto” Constant-the man everyone called “the devil”-was now standing on his front stoop. The man was six foot three, maybe more; he wore a coat and tie, and his tightly curled Afro was neatly combed. He had come, he said, to show a client Maceus’s house, a three-bedroom in Queens Village, New York. He was a real-estate agent, he said, and had seen the pink “For Sale” sign on the front lawn.

Maceus stared at him. The man’s face was pudgier than Maceus remembered from Haiti, during the military regime of the early nineteen-nineties. Back then he had been bone-thin and ghostlike, sometimes appearing with an Uzi or with a.357 Magnum tucked under his shirt. To help keep the junta in control, he had terrorized the population with his paramilitary squad-a legendary outfit of armed civilians who, together with the Haitian military, allegedly tortured, raped, and murdered thousands of people. “Can we look around?” the man asked.

Maceus wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe it wasn’t Constant. He was bigger than Maceus recalled, more genial, and before Maceus knew it the man was walking through his house, poking his head into each room, looking at the floorboards and the toilets, taking note of the overhead space in the kitchen, and commenting in Creole. In the living room, the man passed a poster on the wall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide-the once and future Haitian President, and the paramilitaries’ archenemy-but didn’t give it a second look. Maybe he was just a real-estate agent after all, just another Haitian immigrant trying to survive in New York.

But, as the real-estate agent was leaving, Maceus kept thinking, What if he is Toto Constant? Maceus knew that in 1994, after the United States overthrew the military regime, Constant, a fugitive from Haitian justice, had been allowed, inexplicably, to slip into the country. Maceus had heard that, after Constant had finally been arrested and ordered deported, he had in 1996 mysteriously been released under a secret agreement with the U.S. government-even though the Haitian government had requested his extradition and U. S. authorities had found photos of his group’s victims, their bodies mutilated, pasted to the walls of his Port-au-Prince headquarters like trophies. As the man was opening the front door, Maceus’s curiosity overcame him. He asked in Creole, “What’s your family name?”

The man hesitated. “Constant.”

It was Toto Constant. For an instant, the two Haitians stood there, staring at each other. Then Constant and his client sped off in a car. Maceus went inside and found his wife. She was trembling. “How could you bring that devil in my house?” she shouted. “How could you?”

News of the encounter, in the summer of 2000, spread through the city’s sprawling Haitian community, from Flatbush to Laurelton to Cambria Heights to Brooklyn, as it would have in Haiti-by teledjòl, word of mouth. Constant had ventured out into the community several times since the U.S. government had set him free, but never with such audacity-selling houses to the same people he had driven into exile. When he first arrived in Queens, he 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.