David Grann - The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

General Shelton may have wanted little to do with Constant, but other elements of the U. S. government seem to have done more than just keep an eye on him. Immigration authorities told me it was “impossible to believe,” as one put it, and “totally bogus,” as another said, that Constant could have entered the United States at that time on a valid visa without help from either someone in the U.S. government or forged documents. “Everyone knew he was a killer,” a former I.N.S. official says. “His picture was everywhere.” Constant told me that he did alert certain U.S. officials before he left, and “it’s possible they did something.” A high-ranking intelligence-community source, although not commenting directly on Constant’s case, said, “On the high end of the spectrum, the director of the C.I.A. can bring in fifty to a hundred people in the top spy category. These are people to whom we owe a lot, because they have risked their lives doing things of great value to our nation, so it is [if] you want to get out, we will get you out; you want to get in, we will get you in, get you a house, whatever… Lower down, you can do everything from a little help around the edges to supplying visas.”

Sitting in Wicomico County Detention Center, on the verge of being deported with the full support of the State Department and the I.N.S., Constant leveraged the potential exposure of his old connections to save himself. Threatening to divulge the details of his relationship with the C.I.A., he filed a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit against Warren Christopher and Janet Reno for wrongful imprisonment. “C.I.A. operatives collaborated with the Plaintiff,” his lawyer maintained in the suit. To underscore his warning, Constant appeared on “60 Minutes” in December of 1995 in his prison jumpsuit. “I feel like that beautiful woman that everybody wants to go to bed with at night, but not during the daytime,” he told Ed Bradley. “I want everybody to know that we are dating.”

It was at this point that Benedict Ferro, who was the district director of the I.N.S. in Baltimore at the time of Constant’s incarceration, began to see things that he had never seen before-things that were, as he puts it now, “off the scale.” Ferro had worked for the I.N.S. for more than thirty years, and he was used to working on cases that involved sensitive government issues. After Constant made his threats, Ferro says, highly placed officials throughout the government began to get involved, even though the Administration had already publicly and privately indicated that Constant would be returned.

A cover page from a May 24, 1996, Justice Department memorandum titled “Emmanuel Constant Options” indicates that those consulted in the process included Samuel Berger, the Deputy National-Security Adviser; Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State; Jamie Gorelick, the Deputy Attorney General; and David Cohen, the Deputy Director of Operations for the C.I.A. “Look, they came out of the woodwork when [Constant] started singing,” says Ferro, who is now the president of INSGreencard.com.

It was then-“at the eleventh hour,” as Ferro recalls-that government officials received information regarding a plot to assassinate Constant when he was returned to Haiti. Many at the I.N.S. maintained that, even if true, the report merely meant that Constant should remain in a U.S. prison until a later date. “We have Cubans from the Mariel boatlift who remain in jail,” Ferro says. “We have people from the Middle East who are in jail who can’t be sent back. This is not a new process.” But, according to several officials involved in the deliberations, the information swayed the senior decision-makers. “I didn’t want to send someone, even a killer like Constant, to his summary execution,” one person involved in the case told me. When I asked a senior official who it was that had uncovered the plot on Constant’s life and prepared the classified report, he answered simply, “Reliable U.S. intelligence sources.”

Ferro and several of his colleagues at the I.N.S. made one last attempt to press their views, insisting that they could not in good conscience send a suspected terrorist into a community where he might harm U. S. citizens or where, just as likely, U.S. citizens might harm him. But it didn’t matter. The final decision was hammered out over several days, and senior officials from the Justice Department, the State Department, and the National Security Council participated. “To this day, I can’t understand why he’s not rotting in a U.S. jail,” Ferro says. “We were not reinventing the process. He was just treated differently than any other murderer or terrorist.”

Ferro himself gave Constant the good news.

“They called me at the prison and said I could get my things and go,” Constant says today, still surprised.

“I basically just read from the script,” Ferro says. “This guy was believed to have murdered and assassinated all these people, and we released him into our society. It was outrageous.”

A copy of the legal settlement that set the terms for Constant’s release, which I obtained from Constant, reveals certain conditions: Constant must live in his mother’s home in Queens and must remain within the confines of the borough except for visits to the I.N.S. office in Manhattan; he must check in with the Immigration and Naturalization Service every Tuesday; and he must not talk about, among other things, Haitian politics or the details of the legal agreement. “I like exposure,” he says, “so this is the worst thing they can do to me, this gag order.” (As may by now be apparent, Constant takes an expansive view of the restrictions.) Constant’s formal legal status is this: he is under an outstanding order of deportation whose execution has been withheld on the advice of the State Department.

When I asked Warren Christopher about the deal with Constant, he said he could not recollect the details of what had happened and would try to call me back. Later, his assistant called and said that he still didn’t have “sufficient recollection of the matter that you discussed to comment.” Constant’s lawyer, J. D. Larosiliere, who has continued to cite the threat to his client’s life, says, “I knew that he wasn’t going to be deported, but I needed a hook in the legal system to allow them to have a way out. Plausible deniability. That’s all this game is about. Plausible deniability.”

One day, after our initial meeting in Larosiliere’s office, Constant invited me to his house in Laurelton, where he was living, as he put it, “like a hostage.” Part of a long row of nearly identical English Tudors, the house had fallen into disrepair: the façade, once white, was weather-stained, the front steps needed paint, and the storm window overlooking the porch was shattered. Haitians had told me, among other things, that Constant kept the bones of his victims in his room, practiced late-night voodoo rituals, stored C.I.A. arms in the basement, and shot trespassers.

As I hesitated on the stoop, the front door suddenly opened and Constant appeared, holding a cigarette. “Come on in,” he said. I followed him into the living room, which was musty and dimly lit; the walls were covered with Haitian art, and the couches and chairs were draped in plastic. Constant sat across from me in a rocker, swaying back and forth as he smoked. During our initial encounter, I had pressed him about FRAPH murders and rapes. He said that there was no evidence implicating him and that he could not be held accountable for every member of such a sprawling operation. “If somebody the day of the vote killed another individual in the street of New York, and they found he just voted Democrat, they’re not going to make Clinton responsible,” he said. He insisted, “My conscience is clear.”