The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

The Brand
THE RISE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS PRISON GANG IN AMERICA

On a cold, damp December morning in 2002, after weeks of secret planning, the United States Marshals launched one of the most unusual dragnets in the organization’s two-hundred-and-fifteen-year history. As the fog lifted on a small stretch of land in the northwesternmost corner of California-a sparsely populated area known primarily for its towering redwoods-nearly a dozen agents, draped in black fatigues and bulletproof vests, and armed with assault rifles and walkie-talkies, gathered in a fleet of cars. The agents sped past a town with a single post office and a mom-and-pop store, and headed deep into the forest until they arrived at a colossal compound, a maze of buildings surrounded by swirling razor wire and an electrified fence that was lethal to the touch. A gate opened and, as guards looked down with rifles from beneath watchtowers, the convoy rolled inside. The agents jumped out.

After entering one of the buildings and walking down a long corridor lined with surveillance cameras, the officers reached their destination: a fortified cellblock in the heart of Pelican Bay, California’s most notorious prison. They could hear inmates moving in their ten-by-twelve, window-less cement cells. Pelican Bay housed more than three thousand inmates, men who were considered too violent for any other state prison and had, in the parlance of correctional officers, “earned their way in.” But the men on the cellblock, which was known as the Hole, were considered so dangerous that they had been segregated from this already segregated population.

Four prisoners were ordered to remove their gold jumpsuits and slide them through a tray slot. While some officers searched their belongings, others, using flashlights, peered through holes in the steel doors to examine the inmates’ ears, nostrils, and anal cavities. To make sure that the prisoners had no weapons “keistered” inside them, the guards instructed them to bend down three times; if they refused, the guards would know that they were afraid to puncture their intestines with a shank. Once the search was complete, the inmates were shackled and escorted to a nearby landing strip, where they were loaded onto an unmarked airplane.

All across the country, agents were fanning out to prisons. They seized a fifth inmate from a maximum-security prison in Concord, New Hampshire. They took another from a jail in Sacramento, California. Then they approached the Administrative Maximum Prison, in Florence, Colorado, a “supermax” encircled by snow-covered ravines and renowned as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” There, in the most secure federal penitentiary in the country-a place that housed Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993-agents apprehended four inmates who were allegedly responsible for more than a dozen prison murders.

Before long, the marshals had rounded up twenty-nine inmates-all of whom were among the most feared men in the American prison system. One had strangled an inmate with his bare hands; another had poisoned a fellow-prisoner. A man nicknamed the Beast was thought to have ordered an attack on an inmate who had shoved him during a basketball game; the inmate was subsequently stabbed seventy-one times and his eye was gouged out.

Then there was Barry Mills, who was known as the Baron. Soft-spoken and intense, with a gleaming bald head, he was described by one of his former prosecutors as a “cunning, calculating killer.” He liked to crochet in his cell and, according to authorities, compose lists of enemies to kill. In a previous court case, he testified that “we live… in a different society than you do. There is justified violence in our society. I’m here to tell you that. I’m here to tell all you that.” He was not, he conceded, “a peaceful man,” and “if you disrespect me or one of my friends, I will readily and to the very best of my ability engage you in a full combat mode. That’s what I’m about.” Once, at a maximum-security prison in Georgia, Mills was found guilty of luring an inmate into a bathroom stall and nearly decapitating him with a knife.

Along with the Baron and the other prisoners, five women on the outside were also seized, as well as three ex-cons and a former prison guard. Most of those apprehended-there were forty in total-were transported on a Boeing 727, with their legs and arms shackled to their seats, while guards patrolled the aisles, their rifles sealed in compartments out of arm’s reach. Days later, the prisoners ended up in a Los Angeles courtroom, where they were accused of being members of an elaborate criminal conspiracy directed by the Aryan Brotherhood, or the Brand. Authorities had once dismissed the Aryan Brotherhood as a fringe white-supremacist gang; now, however, they concluded that what prisoners had claimed for decades was true-namely, that the gang’s hundred or so members, all convicted felons, had gradually taken control of large parts of the nation’s maximum-security prisons, ruling over thousands of inmates and transforming themselves into a powerful criminal organization.

The Brand, authorities say, established drug-trafficking, prostitution, and extortion rackets in prisons across the country. Its leaders, often working out of barren cells in solitary confinement, allegedly ordered scores of stabbings and murders. They killed rival gang members; they killed blacks and homosexuals and child molesters; they killed snitches; they killed people who stole their drugs, or owed them a few hundred dollars; they killed prison guards; they killed for hire and for free; they killed, most of all, in order to impose a culture of terror that would solidify their power. And, because the Brotherhood is far more cloistered than other gangs, it was able to operate largely with impunity for decades-and remain all but invisible to the outside world. “It is a true secret society,” Mark Hamm, a prison sociologist, told me.

For the first time, on August 28, 2002, that world cracked open. After more than a decade of trying to infiltrate the Brand’s operations, a relatively unknown Assistant United States Attorney from California named Gregory Jessner indicted virtually the entire suspected leadership of the gang. He had investigated hundreds of crimes linked to the gang; some were cold cases that reached back nearly forty years. In the indictment, which ran to a hundred and ten pages, Jessner charged Brand leaders with carrying out stabbings, strangulations, poisonings, contract hits, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, robbery, and narcotics trafficking. The case, which was expected to go to trial in 2005, could lead to as many as twenty-three death-penalty convictions-more than any in American history.

One morning in 2003, I visited the United States Attorney’s office in downtown Los Angeles, where the prosecution was preparing to arraign the last of the forty defendants. As I waited in the lobby, a slender young man appeared in a gray suit. He had short brown hair, and he carried a folder under his arm as if he were a paralegal. Unlike the attorneys around him, he spoke in a soft, almost reticent voice. He introduced himself as Gregory Jessner.

“I’m forty-two,” he told me, as if he were often greeted with similar astonishment. “Believe it or not, I used to look much younger.” He reached into his pocket and revealed an old office I.D. He looked seventeen.

He led me back into his office, which had almost nothing on the walls and appeared to be decorated solely with boxes from the case, one stacked upon the other. On his desk were several black-and-white photographs, including one of an inmate who had been strangled by the gang.

“An Aryan brother went in his cell and tied a garrote around his neck,” Jessner said. He held out his hands, demonstrating, with tapered fingers, how an Aryan Brotherhood member had braided strips of a bedsheet into a noose. “This is a homicidal organization,” he said. “That’s what they do. They kill people.”

He was accustomed, he explained, to murder cases, but he had been shocked by the gang’s brutality. “I suspect they kill more than the Mafia,” he said. “They kill more than any single drug trafficker. There are a lot of gang-related deaths on the streets, but they are usually more disorganized and random.” He paused, as if calculating various numbers in his head. “I think they may be the most murderous criminal organization in the United States.”

There are hundreds of gangs in this country: the Crips, the Bloods, the Latin Dragons, the Dark Side Nation, the Lynch Mob. But the Aryan Brotherhood is one of the few gangs that were born in prison. In 1964, as the nation’s racial unrest spread into the penitentiaries, a clique of white inmates at San Quentin prison, in Marin County, California, began gathering in the yard. The men were mostly motorcycle bikers with long hair and handlebar mustaches; a few were neo-Nazis with tattoos of swastikas. Together, they decided to strike against the blacks, who were forming their own militant group, called the Black Guerrilla Family, under the influence of the celebrated prison leader George Jackson. Initially, the whites called themselves the Diamond Tooth Gang, and as they roamed the yard they were unmistakable: pieces of glass embedded in their teeth glinted in the sunlight.

Before long, they had merged with other whites at San Quentin to form a single band: the Aryan Brotherhood. While there had always been cliques in prison, known as “tips,” these men were now aligned by race and resorted to a kind of violence that had never been seen at San Quentin, a place that prisoners likened to “gladiator school.” All sides, including the Latino gangs La Nuestra Familia and the Mexican Mafia, attacked each other with homemade knives that were honed from light fixtures and radio parts, and hidden in mattresses, air vents, and drainpipes. “Everything was seen through the delusional lens of race-everything,” Edward Bunker, an inmate at the time, told me. (He went on to become a novelist, and appeared as Mr. Blue in “Reservoir Dogs.”)

Most prison gangs tried to recruit “fish,” the new and most vulnerable inmates. But according to interviews with former gang members-as well as thousands of pages of once classified F.B.I. reports, internal prison records, and court documents-the Aryan Brotherhood chose a radically different approach, soliciting only the most capable and violent. They were given a pledge:

An Aryan brother is without a care,

He walks where the weak and heartless won’t dare,

And if by chance he should stumble and lose control,

His brothers will be there, to help reach his goal,

For a worthy brother, no need is too great,

He need not but ask, fulfillment’s his fate.

For an Aryan brother, death holds no fear,

Vengeance will be his, through his brothers still here.

By 1975, the gang had expanded into most of California’s state prisons and was engaged in what authorities describe as a full-fledged race war. Dozens had already been slain when, that same year, a fish named Michael Thompson entered the system. A twenty-three-year-old white former high-school football star, he had been sentenced for helping to murder two drug dealers and burying their bodies in a lime-filled pit in a back yard. Six feet four and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he was strong enough to break ordinary shackles. He had brown hair, which was parted in the middle, and hypnotic blue eyes. Despite the violent nature of his crime, he had no other convictions and, with a chance for parole in less than a decade, he initially kept to himself, barely aware of the different forces moving around him. “I was a fish with gills out to fucking here,” he later said.

Unaligned with any of the emerging gangs, he was conspicuous prey for roaming Hispanic and black groups, and several of them soon assaulted him in the yard at a prison in Tracy, California; later, he was sent to Folsom, which, along with San Quentin, was exploding with gang wars. On his first day there, he says, no one spoke to him until a leader of the Black Guerrilla Family, a trim, angular man in shorts and a T-shirt, began to taunt him, telling him to come to the yard “ready” the next day. That night in his cell, Thompson recalled, he looked frantically for a weapon; he broke a piece of steel off his cell door and began to file its edges. It was at least ten inches long, and he sharpened both sides. Before the cell doors opened and the guards searched him, he said, he knew he needed to hide the weapon. He took off his clothes and tried to insert it in his rectum. “I couldn’t,” he recalled. “I was too ashamed.” He tried again and again, until finally he succeeded.

The next morning in the yard, he could see the guards, the tips of their rifles glistening in the sun. The leader of the Black Guerrilla Family circled toward him, flashing a steel blade, and Thompson lay down, trying to extricate his weapon. Eventually, he got it and began to lunge violently at his foe; another gang member came at him and Thompson stabbed him, too. By the time the guards interceded, Thompson was covered in blood, and one of the members of the Black Guerrilla Family lay on the ground, near death.

Not long after this incident, several white convicts approached him in the yard. “They wanted me to join the Brand,” Thompson said. Initially, he hesitated, in part because of the gang’s racism, but he knew that the group offered more than protection. “It was like being let into a sanctuary,” he said. “You were instantly the man-the shot caller.”

To be accepted, according to Thompson and other gang members, each recruit had to “make his bones,” which often meant killing another inmate. (One recruit told authorities in a sworn statement that the rite was intended to “create a lasting bond to the A.B. and also prove that he had what it takes.”) Thompson also recited a “blood in, blood out” oath, in which he vowed not only that he would spill another’s blood to get in but also that he would never leave the gang unless his own blood was fatally spilled. While many new members had a probationary period, which often lasted as long as a year, Thompson, because of his physical strength and his ability with a knife, was voted into the gang almost immediately. He was “branded” with a homemade tattoo gun (which inmates made out of a beard trimmer sold at the commissary, a guitar string, a pen, and a needle stolen from the infirmary). Sometimes members were tattooed with the letters “A.B.” or the numerals 666, symbolizing the beast, a manifestation of evil in the Revelation of St. John. On Thompson’s left hand, just above one of his knuckles, he received the most recognizable symbol: a green shamrock. “All I had to do was show that ’rock and I was in charge,” he said.

He was moved from one state prison to the next, often for disciplinary reasons, but these transfers only helped him garner more influence, and he gradually rose through the Brotherhood’s rarefied ranks. He met Barry Mills, a.k.a. the Baron, who had initially been incarcerated for stealing a car and became the gang’s vanguard member, seemingly concentrating all his energies not on returning to the outside world but on remaining in the inside world, where he was, in the words of Thompson, “the hog with the biggest balls.” And he met T. D. Bingham, a charismatic bank robber who was nearly as wide as he was tall and who could bench-press five hundred pounds. Nicknamed the Hulk and Super Honkey, he spoke in a folksy manner that concealed a burning intelligence, friends say. In photographs from the time, he has a black walrus mustache and a ski hat pulled down over his eyebrows. Part Jewish, he wore a Star of David tattooed on one arm and, without any apparent irony, a swastika on the other. Once, when he testified on behalf of another reputed Aryan Brotherhood inmate, he told the jury, “There’s a code in every segment of society… Well, we have a different kind of moral and ethical code.” He later added, “It’s a lot more primordial.” One of his friends, referring to his propensity for violence, told me, “Sometimes he got the urge, you know what I mean? He got the urge.”

Thompson soon became acquainted with the Brotherhood’s inner sanctum. There was Thomas Silverstein, a talented artist with long flowing hair who, a counsellor noted in his prison file, “seems to be easily influenced by these men and is eager to please them.” After shedding an enemy’s blood with a handcrafted knife, he would often retire to his cell and draw elaborate portraits. One ink sketch showed a man in a cell with a claw reaching down toward him. Thompson also met Dallas Scott, a drug addict who once told the reporter Pete Earley, in the 1992 book “The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison,” “In your society I may not be anybody, but in here I am;” and Clifford Smith, who lost an eye after a black-widow spider bit him at San Quentin and who, when asked to carry out his first hit, said, “Yeah, bro, I’ll do the bastard.”

Thompson, who had only a high-school education, was being tailored for leadership. He was given many books, a curriculum that formed a kind of world view. He read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” and Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” He read Nietzsche, memorizing his aphorisms. (“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”) And he read Louis L’Amour, whose pulp novels about romantic gunslingers who ride for “the brand” inspired the gang’s nickname. “It was like you went to school,” Thompson said. “You already hate the system, hate the establishment, because you’re in jail, you’re buried, and you start to think of yourself as this noble warrior-and that’s what we called each other, warriors. It was like I was a soldier going out to battle.”

Thompson said that, like other new members, he was trained to kill without blinking, without reservation. One A.B. instruction manual, which was seized by authorities, stated, “The smell of fresh human blood can be overpowering but killing is like having sex. The first time is not so rewarding, but it gets better and better with practice, especially when one remembers that it’s a holy cause.” During a confidential debriefing with prison officials, one Aryan brother described how members studied anatomy texts, so “that when they stab somebody it was a killshot.”

In 1981, according to prison records, Thompson approached one of the gang’s enemies “from behind and began stabbing him,” and “continued” striking his victim “as he lay on the floor.” Thompson once wrote in a letter, “Knife fighting, at its best, is like a dance. Under ideal conditions, the objective is to bleed your opponent-cutting hands, wrist, and arms and as the opponent weakens from blood loss, inflicting further damage to the face (eyes) and torso.”

Inmates were frequently killing each other not because of any actual slight but because of the color of their skin. In one incident, Silverstein and an A.B. associate, Clayton Fountain, who, according to a friend, was eager to “make his bones,” stabbed a leader of the rival gang D.C. Blacks sixty-seven times in the shower, then dragged his bloody corpse through the tiers while other white inmates chanted racial slurs. After Silverstein was charged with murdering another inmate, he boasted in court, “I have walked over dead bodies. I’ve had guts splattered all over my chest from race wars.”

To try to rein the Brand in, prison officials, in desperation, had begun to place its members throughout the correctional system. (No inmate would publicly admit being in the gang, and, when asked under oath, would typically say, “Sir, I will not answer a question like that.”) The dispersal measures, however, only spread the Brand’s reach to penitentiaries in Texas and Illinois and Kansas, and still farther east, to Pennsylvania and Georgia. A once classified 1982 F.B.I. report warned that leaders were “recruiting for the A.B., only now they had the entire country to pick from.” One letter from a gang member, which was obtained by Texas prison sociologists, said, “All members shipped from here last week have written back and it looks like the family is in the process of growing.” Another stated, “We are growing like a cancer.”

Upon entering a new prison, Brand members would often carry out a “demonstration” killing or stabbing, in order to terrorize the inmate population. The Baron reportedly ordered that one foe be “taken out in front of everyone, to let these motherfuckers know we mean business.” Indeed, rather than conceal its murders, the gang flaunted them even in front of the guards, as if to show it had no fear of repercussions, of being shot or sentenced to life without parole. “We wanted people to think we were a little crazy,” Thompson said. “It was a way, like Nietzsche said, of bending space and reality to our will.”

On a Saturday morning in the fall of 1983, at Marion federal prison, in southern Illinois, Thomas Silverstein waited for guards to take him for a routine shower. Marion, which is about a hundred miles southeast of St. Louis, was opened in 1963, the year that Alcatraz closed, and was designed to cope with the profusion of violent gang members-in particular, men like Silverstein, who by then had been convicted of murdering three inmates and had earned the nickname Terrible Tom (as he often signed his letters, with looping strokes).

Before taking Silverstein to the bathroom, the guards frisked him, to make sure he hadn’t fashioned any weapons. (He often had pens and other sketching tools for his artwork.) They also shackled his wrists. Three guards surrounded him, one of whom was a hard-nosed, nineteen-year veteran with military-style gray hair named Merle Clutts. Clutts, who was to retire in a few months, was perhaps the only guard in the unit who didn’t fear Silverstein; he once reportedly told him, “Hey, I’m running this shit. You ain’t running it.”

As the guards escorted Silverstein through the prison, he paused outside the cell of another gang member-who, as planned, suddenly reached between the bars and, with a handcuff key, unlocked Silverstein’s shackles. Silverstein pulled a nearly foot-long knife from his conspirator’s waistband. “This is between me and Clutts,” Silverstein hollered as he rushed toward him.

One of the other guards screamed, “He’s got a shank!” But Clutts was already cornered, without a weapon. He raised his hands while Silverstein stabbed him in the stomach. “He was just sticking Officer Clutts with that knife,” another guard later recalled. “He was just sticking and sticking and sticking.” By the time Silverstein relinquished the knife-“The man disrespected me,” he told the guards. “I had to get him”-Clutts had been stabbed forty times. He died shortly afterward.

A few hours later, Clayton Fountain, Silverstein’s close friend, was being led through the prison when he paused by another inmate’s cell. In an instant, he, too, was free. “You motherfuckers want a piece of this?” he yelled, waving a blade. He stabbed three more guards. One died in the arms of his son, who also worked in the prison. Fountain reportedly said that he didn’t want Silverstein to have a higher body count.

It was the first time in the history of American federal prisons that two guards had been killed on the same day. “You got to understand,” Thompson said. “Here were guys in restraints, locked in the Hole in the most secure prison, and they were still able to get to the guards. It sent a simple message: We can get to you anywhere, anytime.”

As the gang’s reputation for brutality was growing, so, too, were its ranks. Although the Brand continued to permit only a select few to become “made” members, it had thousands of followers, known as “pecker-woods,” who sought out the perks of being associated with it: permanent protection, free contraband, better prison jobs (which were often dictated by trusty inmates who did whatever the gang demanded). As Thompson put it, “The guards controlled the perimeter of the prison and we controlled what happened inside it.” But as the number of gang members, associates, and hangers-on swelled, managing the organization grew increasingly difficult.

When the Brotherhood was in its infancy, every member had an equal vote on critical matters; by the early eighties, this policy was creating chaos. In a previously undisclosed briefing, Clifford Smith told authorities, “We used to be one man one vote, included damn near everything. I mean, damn near everything. Somebody getting in, whacking somebody… You damn near had to have the whole state’s okay… You had to send some kites”-notes-“and runners and lawyers and this and that. It always got tipped off by the time we got back to you and said, ‘Yeah, dump the guy.’… You can’t have someone in the yard that you want to bump and let them be out there for two or three weeks.” Smith said the gang members were becoming “like twelve horses teamed to one wagon, with each of them going in a different direction.” An internal report at the time by the California Department of Corrections went so far as to predict that “the A.B. will probably not propose a serious threat to law enforcement agencies in the future unless it gains a clear and well enforced chain of command.”

Thompson started to push for just that. “I wanted to eliminate the irrationality and make it into a true organized-crime family,” he said. “I wasn’t interested in killing blacks. I was interested in only one thing: power.”

He and other leaders hatched a plan with gang members who were incarcerated at a prison in Chino, in Southern California. These men, who were awaiting trials for the assaults or murders of fellow-inmates, were encouraged to represent themselves as attorneys, thereby allowing them to subpoena their colleagues around the country as witnesses. Each time a Brand member sent out a “writ,” another member would have to be relocated to Chino. For several days, using what one member called “subpoena power unlimited” and exploiting the very legal system that was trying to stop them, most of the Brand was able to meet for hours in the yard, in what amounted to a private convention.

As Smith recalled, “We all get over in the corner one day and say, ‘Damn, man, check this out, we got all the power right here. Let’s take this one step further.’” The Brand’s California leaders decided to establish a chain of command modelled loosely on the structure of the Italian Mafia. A council of about a dozen members would manage gang operations throughout the state prison system. Each council member would be elected by majority vote. He would be responsible for enforcing all of the gang’s policies, which would now be codified; he also could authorize a hit at any moment, as long as it wasn’t on a fellow A.B. member. The council’s actions would be overseen by a three-man commission. Authorities say that Thompson and Smith served on the California council. In the federal prison system, where the gang set up a similar hierarchy in roughly a dozen maximum-security prisons, the Baron and T. D. Bingham allegedly became high commissioners.

The A.B.’s new structure strengthened its grip, but there remained one outstanding obstacle: snitches. Though other crime families had to worry about members “rolling over,” in prison everyone had an incentive to “flip,” and all an inmate had to do was whisper in a guard’s ear. In the early nineteen-eighties, a former gang member, Steven Barnes, had testified in a murder rap against one of the new commissioners and was housed in protective custody, where no one could get to him. In response, the Aryan Brotherhood settled upon a new policy: If it couldn’t get to you, it would get to your family. “What we wanted to do was hit… Barnes’s wife,” Smith explained. “If we couldn’t get to her, we’d move then to his brother… or sister and from there we’d work our way down the list… That was policy that we’d established that we’d do from then on.”

To carry out its new policy, Brand leaders needed to find a hit man, someone who could, in the words of the gang, “step up.” And so they allegedly turned to Curtis Price, a forty-one-year-old made A.B. member who was about to be paroled from Chino prison, and who would, according to a former gang member, “kill as to directions received from the A.B. council.” Described by his parole officer as “one of the most dangerous state prisoners I’ve dealt with in my twenty-two years” of service, Price was six feet tall, with short brown hair and vacant blue eyes. In photographs, the bones around his pallid face protrude and give him a slightly ghostly air. Price, who had once expressed hope of going into law enforcement, had in more recent years stabbed another inmate and taken two guards hostage, telling one, “I’ll blow your partner’s head off.”

Court and prison records reveal that upon his release, on September 14, 1982, Price met a twenty-two-year-old mother of two children named Elizabeth Hickey and stole several weapons from her stepfather’s house, including a twelve-gauge shotgun and a Mauser automatic. Price then drove to the home of Steven Barnes’s father, Richard, in Temple City, California, and shot him three times in the head, execution style. Barnes’s neighbors found him lying on his bed, face down, his cowboy hat resting nearby.

Afterward, Price returned to Elizabeth Hickey’s home and beat her to death, crushing her skull in five places, in an apparent attempt to eliminate her as a potential witness. He then bought a ticket to see the movie “Gandhi.” The gang soon received a postcard in prison. It said, “Business has been taken care of.”

At one point, I tried to find Michael Thompson. I had been told that he had mysteriously dropped out of the Aryan Brotherhood shortly after the Barnes killing, and had testified against Price, who, in 1986, was convicted of the two murders. Thompson became the highest-ranking defector in the gang’s history. (“He’s big, he’s tough, he’s mean, he’s killed, and then all of a sudden he’s gone, just rolled over,” one A.B. associate said in disbelief.) Thompson was thought to have as many death threats made against him as anyone in prison; his family had been relocated, and he was being held in the correctional system’s version of the witness-protection program. He was moved from prison to prison anonymously, and was often kept in a protective-custody unit, walled off from most inmates.

After weeks of searching, I called the prison where I had heard Thompson was incarcerated. The authorities insisted that there was no one there by that name. Moments later, I received a call from a law-enforcement official who knew I was trying to find Thompson. “They think you’re trying to kill him,” she said. “They’re moving him out of the prison right now.”

After explaining to officials why I wanted to speak with Thompson, I was able to get a letter to him, and, with his agreement, I headed to the maximum-security prison where he was being held under the name of “Occupant.” To get inside the prison, I had to submit my car to a search, and I was given a checkered shirt to replace my blue oxford, which happened to match the color of some inmate uniforms and was therefore forbidden. There were several children with their mothers filing in alongside me; they wore white dresses or neatly pleated pants, as if they were attending church.

We passed through several steel gates, each door clanking loudly behind us, before reaching a brightly lit room filled with wooden chairs and tables. While the other visitors were allowed to sit freely with inmates, I was led to the back of the room, where a three-foot-by-three-foot bulletproof window was cut into the wall. A chair was placed in front of it, and I sat down and peered through the scuffed plastic. I could see a small cement cell, with a telephone and a chair. The room was sealed on all sides except for a steel door at the opposite end. A moment later, the door clicked open and Thompson, a giant of a man, appeared in a white prison jumpsuit with his hands shackled behind his back. As a guard removed his chains, Thompson bent forward and I could see his face. It was covered with a hermit-like beard. His hair reached to his shoulders and was parted down the middle, in the style that was fashionable in the seventies, when he was first convicted of murder. As he came closer to the glass, I could see, amid the thickets of graying hair, his bright-blue eyes. He sat down and reached for the phone, and I picked up mine.

“How was your trip?” he asked.

He spoke in a soft, courteous voice. I asked him why he had dropped out of the Brand, and he said he made his decision after the debate over whether to kill Steven Barnes’s father and other family members. “I argued with them for days,” he said. “I kept saying, ‘We’re warriors, aren’t we? We don’t kill children. We don’t kill mothers and fathers.’ But I lost. And they killed him, execution style, and then they killed Hickey, an innocent woman, just because she knew where Price had gotten the gun. And that’s when I walked away. That’s when I said, ‘This thing is out of control.’” He leaned toward the window, his breath steaming the glass. “I am still willing to fight someone in here, head up, if I have to. That’s the culture of where I live. But I was not for killing people on the outside, people in your world.”

When I asked him what he initially found compelling about the gang, he paused for a long moment. “That’s a very good question,” he said. There was the protection, he suggested, ticking off the reasons. There was the sense of belonging. But that wasn’t really it. For him, at least, he said, it was the rush of power. “I was naïve, because I saw us as these noble warriors,” he said. In the eighties, he added, he had tried to change the nature of the gang. “I thought that by organizing we could make the gang less bloody. I thought we could strip away the irrational killings. But I was foolish, because at some level you could never remove that. And the structure only allowed the gang to be more deadly.”

During our conversation, Thompson cited various philosophers, including Nietzsche, whose “true genius,” he later wrote me in a letter, “the gang often misinterprets.” It was hard to reconcile this cerebral figure with a man who said he had once helped to stab sixteen men in a single day. But, when I asked him about his training, he reached out with his hand and began, in almost clinical fashion, to show how to assassinate someone. “You can do it here on the right side of the heart, in the aorta, or here in the neck, or back here in the spine, which will paralyze someone,” he said, moving his hand back and forth, as if slicing something. “I’ve been in jail thirty years now, and I know I am probably never going to get out. I am a dangerous person. I don’t like violence, but I am good at it.”

He had tried, he said, to isolate himself from other prisoners. “I don’t go in the yard much,” he said. “It’s not safe.” He said the only people he could really interact with were the guards, for fear of being recognized. “In here, I am lower than child killers and child molesters. Because I defected from the A.B., I am the lowest there is.”

The gang had tried several times to get to him; after he was placed in the protective-custody unit, he said, the Brand sent in a “sleeper”-a secret collaborator-who had tried to stab him. “You need to understand one thing,” Thompson said. “The Aryan Brotherhood is not about white supremacy. It is about supremacy. And it will do anything to get it. Anything.”

A guard banged on the door. “I have to go now,” he said.

As he stood, he pressed his hand against the glass, and I could see something green on his left hand. I looked closer: it was the faint outline of a shamrock. Armed with that tattoo, Thompson had told me, a man could take over an entire United States penitentiary.

In the fall of 1994, a bus filled with prisoners arrived at Leavenworth, Kansas, a maximum-security federal prison built almost a century ago. Out stepped a tall muscular man with a black mustache. His arms were covered with tattoos, and he soon appeared in the yard without a shirt, revealing a large shamrock in the middle of his chest. He was immediately surrounded by a group of white inmates. Many went to the commissary and paid to have their photograph taken with him, which they carried around like passports. “If you… were able to show that picture, it was just like standing next to your favorite pop star,” one prisoner said.

The man’s name was Michael McElhiney, but everyone called him Mac. A reputed A.B. member, he had just come from Marion, where he had been housed with Barry Mills, the notorious Baron. Mills, who later testified in court on McElhiney’s behalf, said, “I look at him like a son.”

McElhiney, a convicted methamphetamine dealer who had conspired to kill a witness, was so charismatic that, according to authorities, a juror once fell in love with him. However, in private letters, which were later confiscated by prison officials, Mac spoke openly of “the beast” inside him and referred to himself proudly as “an angry motherfucker.” An F.B.I. agent at Leavenworth described him as probably “a psychopath,” while a close friend put it this way: “He likes to have everybody know that he’s God.”

An Aryan Brotherhood presence had long existed at Leavenworth, which was known as “the hothouse,” because of its sweltering, catacomb-like cells. But McElhiney was determined to extend the gang’s reach.

Although the Brand maintained remnants of its racist ideology, it had increasingly sought, according to a declassified F.B.I. report, “to launch a cooperative effort of death and fear against staff and other inmates… in order to take over the system.” The Brand aimed, the F.B.I. warned, to control everything from drug trafficking to the sale of “punks”-inmates forced into prostitution-to extortion rackets to murder contracts behind bars. It sought, in short, to become a racketeering enterprise. The council member Clifford Smith had told authorities that the gang was no longer primarily “bent on destroying blacks and the Jews and the minorities of the world, white supremacy and all that shit. It’s a criminal organization, first and foremost.”

Using an array of white associates, who either coveted membership in the gang or needed protection, McElhiney set out to dominate Leavenworth’s underground economy. His men went from tier to tier, demanding a tax from the sale of “pruno”-prison wine that could be brewed out of almost any cafeteria fruit (apples, strawberries, even ketchup). At the time, a man named Keith Segien was running a friendly poker game in the prison’s B unit. One night on his way to his cell, Segien later testified in court, Mac was waiting for him. He told Segien to sit down.

Segien hesitated. “What’s this about?” he asked.

“If I wanted you killed,” Segien recalls him saying, “you’d have been dead by now.” Then Mac added, “Someone told me you don’t want me… to run the poker game, and I’m here to make money. I’m going to run the poker game.” He asked if Segien had a problem with that.

“I said no,” Segien testified. “That was the last day I ran the poker game.”

Mac soon had gambling rackets operating in nearly every unit, on nearly every tier. As with the sale of pruno, inmates say, the guards often turned a blind eye, perhaps to mollify a seething population. Some guards, it seemed, had come to consider the Aryan Brotherhood presence as inevitable, and even used its leaders as surrogate power brokers. In one instance, a guard at Leavenworth went to McElhiney to get the O.K. before he released another prisoner in the yard. One longtime A.B. member compared the illicit operations in maximum-security prisons to bootlegging during Prohibition and to the high-roller tables in Las Vegas.

Currency is not allowed in prison, and inmates typically paid their smaller debts to the Brotherhood by offering free contraband or items from the commissary: cigarettes, candy, stamps, books. At the high-roller tables at Leavenworth, where imprisoned drug lords could place bets in the thousands of dollars, participants were allowed to play for a month on credit. The man in charge of the table kept a tally of wins and losses. At the end of the month, inmates say, Mac’s men would collect the losses; usually, gamblers would pay up by having a relative or a friend send an untraceable money order to a designated A.B. person on the outside. If an indebted inmate didn’t have the money mailed on time, internal prison records show, he was typically “piped”-beaten with a metal rod. McElhiney later acknowledged that he was funnelling the proceeds to his mentor Mills and to other reputed leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood, with whom he had “a pact” to take over the “gambling business.”

McElhiney, who presided over the yard wearing sunglasses, his nails often stained yellow from chewing tobacco, then decided to focus on drug smuggling. In the past, the Brand had sought out almost anyone who could bring in its merchandise. In one instance, several inmates involved in a scheme told me, the gang offered to protect Charles Manson, and even conspired in a failed bid to help him escape; in return, Manson’s cult of women on the outside helped to smuggle dope into prison for them.

According to authorities and court records, Mac now started to canvass the population for the most vulnerable inmates-those who were drug addicts or in debt to the gang or simply scared, and could therefore be forced to serve as “mules.” One such person was Walter Moles, a drug user who was terrified of the gang. His father, who was terminally ill with emphysema, was planning to travel to Leavenworth to celebrate his son’s birthday. According to Moles’s later testimony, Mac instructed him to have his drug contact on the outside send Moles’s father six balloons filled with heroin. Using coded language on the prison’s tape-recorded pay phones, Moles then persuaded his father to transport the package.

Weeks later, when his father arrived, he sat beside Moles in the visiting room, under the guards’ scrutiny. He carried the package in his underwear. Moles instructed his father to go into the bathroom, place two of the balloons in his mouth, then return and spit them into Moles’s cup of coffee. His father said he couldn’t do it. The heroin wasn’t in six balloons. “It’s in one big one,” he said.

“How big?” Moles asked.

“A Ping-Pong ball.”

Eventually, Moles’s father managed to drop the balloon into his son’s coffee cup. Moles tried to swallow it, but it got stuck in his throat.

His father started to panic. “Son, just give it back to me,” he begged. “I’ll send it back to where it came from.”

“No, Dad, I can’t,” he said. He explained that the heroin wasn’t for himself. “These guys I’m bringing it in for want their stuff.”

His father didn’t seem to understand: Who were these people?

Moles saw a guard’s attention wander, and said that he had to say goodbye.

“Is it the end of the visit?” his father asked.

“If I’m going to do it, this is my only chance,” Moles said. While his father distracted the guard, Moles untucked his shirt and forced the drugs into his rectum. After he got past the guards, he said, he gave “the stuff” to one of Mac’s henchmen.

The next morning, Moles waited behind the bleachers in the yard for his cut. Suddenly, he felt something hard against the back of his head, and he collapsed to the ground. “I tried to get up,” Moles later testified, “but I kept getting kicked.”

Mac’s men told Moles to stay down.

“What did I do wrong?” Moles asked. “What did I do wrong?”

Afterward, when an A.B. associate asked Mac why he had assaulted Moles and taken his share of the dope, Mac reportedly replied, “Fuck the little punk.”

Heroin was now flooding into Leavenworth. According to authorities, inmates received more than twelve hundred positive tests for heroin during 1995. One prisoner estimated that forty per cent of the population was shooting up. “Heroin deadens everything,” an inmate at Leavenworth said. “Speed, man, you’re bebopping around and you’re doing more time than you would normally because you ain’t sleeping at night… But the heroin, yeah… you’re feeling no pain.”

Because of the scarcity of supply and the unusually high demand in prison, authorities say, a gram of heroin that was bought on the street for sixty-five dollars was selling inside Leavenworth for as much as a thousand dollars. A former council member told me that the gang was bringing in anywhere from half a million to a million dollars a year from a single prison. As one F.B.I. agent put it, “You just do the math.”

With his empire expanding by the day, Mac seemed more and more “out of control,” as one former ally said. Although A.B. leaders were forbidden, under gang rules, to use heroin themselves, associates say that Mac would hole up in his cell with “a rig”-a homemade syringe typically constructed out of a needle stolen from the infirmary and a hollowed-out ballpoint pen. There, in what inmates describe as a heroin-induced haze, he would allegedly sit with A.B. henchmen and mete out his own form of justice, including murder.

McElhiney eventually became convinced that a snitch was trolling for evidence against him. Then one day, associates say, Mac sent word to his men that he had found the rat: Bubba Leger, a trusted associate who did most of the A.B.’s tattoo work and who only a few months earlier had posed proudly next to Mac for a photograph. In the rec cage one day, according to witnesses, one of Mac’s associates nicknamed Ziggy, who was purportedly eager to make his bones, pulled out a knife and started stabbing Bubba. “Why you doing this?” Bubba pleaded. With blood flowing from his chest, Bubba stumbled over to the steel door of the cage and pounded on it, trying to get the guards’ attention. In full view of the guards, Ziggy stabbed Bubba at least five more times. Bubba died moments later.

It was then, witnesses say, that they saw one of Mac’s men take another weapon, a sharpened toothbrush, and plant it near Bubba to make it look as though he had used it first. Afterward, McElhiney was said to have enforced a long-standing Aryan Brotherhood policy, which required all witnesses to perjure themselves. “‘I’m going to give you a choice,’” an associate said that McElhiney told him. “‘You can either lie or die on this one.’” In a note, McElhiney, who shaved his head after the murder, instructed Ziggy what to do: “The defense you’re going to have is self-defense.” He went on, “Hang tough, Stud. As soon as you get a lawyer direct him to me without further ado… Got it? Stress to him that it’s a must he come see me ’fore you trust him-Our code word will be Mary Mary Quite Contrary.”

Ziggy received a twenty-seven-year sentence and later appeared with a tattoo of a shamrock on his leg, but authorities were never able to prove that McElhiney had ordered the killing (though they did later convict him for smuggling drugs). During the investigation, one unexpected fact emerged: Bubba had not been a snitch after all.

“This isn’t in the job description,” Gregory Jessner said. The Assistant United States Attorney was standing on a loading dock outside the Los Angeles federal courthouse, stacking onto an old wooden dolly boxes of transcripts for his case against the Aryan Brotherhood. There were thirteen in all, and as he worked a small circle of sweat appeared on his starched white shirt. The son of a mathematician, he had a slightly cerebral air. “I don’t really have a bulldog persona,” he said. “I’m not like Marcia Clark.” He had never read a John Grisham novel, and was known to pick up books by Cervantes and David Foster Wallace between trials.

After he had wheeled the boxes upstairs, occasionally bumping into walls and doors, he arranged them on a long wooden conference table, and caught his breath. Then he said, “These deal with just one murder in the indictment. It’s nothing.”

Jessner had started investigating the gang in 1992. A convicted murderer was found strangled in his cell at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, and Jessner was assigned the case. Law-enforcement officials often dismiss such crimes as N.H.I.s-“No humans involved”-because the victims are considered to be as unsympathetic as the perps. Trying to break through a web of perjury, Jessner located several witnesses who claimed that the A.B. had murdered a fellow gang member for, among other things, falling in love with a gay prisoner. Although the Brotherhood had a long history of trafficking in “punks,” and although some of its members were known to receive sexual favors in return for protection, the gang considered open homosexuality a sign of weakness, a violation of the A.B. code. “The member made the mistake of kissing on the stairs,” Jessner said.

Jessner was able to prove that an A.B. recruit had gone into his associate’s cell, tied a bedsheet around his neck, and strangled him while an accomplice held his legs. Yet Jessner realized that he had done little to impede the gang; as with previous isolated prosecutions, he may have only strengthened it. The recruit was later said to have hung a photograph of his target on his cell wall, like an honorary plaque, and held a celebration with pruno on the anniversary of the murder.

As Jessner dug deeper into this violent subculture, he learned that there were no definitive statistics on A.B. crimes, because so few of them were prosecuted-and because so many associates from other gangs, including the Dirty White Boys and the Mexican Mafia, did its bidding. More general statistics on inmate violence provided a glimpse of what one sociologist once described as “the upsurge of rapacious and murderous groups” inside American prisons. According to the most recent Justice Department census, fifty-one inmates were murdered in prisons in 2000. Moreover, there were more than thirty-four thousand reported assaults by inmates on other inmates, and nearly eighteen thousand on staff. Rape is common; one study of prisons in four states estimated that at least one in five inmates has been sexually assaulted.

Jessner eventually started to dig into hundreds of violent crimes linked to the Aryan Brotherhood. Working with an officer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms named Mike Halualani-a half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian agent who was as brash as Jessner was genteel-Jessner attempted to devise a strategy to break the gang’s stranglehold. But the more he investigated the more it seemed that the gang defied any conventional notion of a prosecution. Jessner told me that he kept asking himself, “How do you stop people who see a murder rap as a badge of honor? How do you stop people who have already been stopped by the law and sentenced to life imprisonment?”

By the nineteen-nineties, authorities, hoping to create at least some deterrent, and to protect other inmates, had relocated nearly all the Aryan Brotherhood’s top leaders, including the Baron, to what were then a new breed of prisons, called “supermaxes.” These prisoners were held in single cells, locked down nearly the entire day, without, as one gang member put it, “seeing fresh earth, plant life, or unfiltered sunlight;” they exercised alone in an indoor cage, were fed meals through a tray slot, and had little, if any, human contact.

In the case of Silverstein, who was already serving multiple life sentences when he killed the guard Clutts, in 1983, the Bureau of Prisons had established a separate unit for him at Leavenworth, where he was held in a Hannibal Lecter-style cage. Though Silverstein continued to sketch, he was for years not permitted to have a comb or a hairbrush, and when the reporter Pete Earley visited him, in the late eighties, he had long wild hair and a beard. “They want me to go crazy,” he told Earley. “They want to point their fingers at me and say, ‘See, see, we told you he is a lunatic.’… I didn’t come in here a killer, but in here you learn hate. The insanity in here is cultivated by the guards. They feed the beast that lingers within all of us… I find myself smiling at the thought of me killing Clutts each time they deny me a phone call, a visit, or keep the lights on. I find it harder and harder to repent and ask for forgiveness, because deep inside I can feel that hatred and anger growing.”

Jessner told me, “Within the gang’s lore, Silverstein has become its Christ figure.”

Even under these conditions, which some civil-rights groups considered a violation of human rights, the Aryan Brotherhood continued to flourish. Its members developed elaborate ways to communicate. They dropped notes through pipes that were connected to nearby cells; they tapped Morse code on prison bars; they forced orderlies to pass kites; they whispered through vents in “carnie,” a convoluted, rhyming code language. (“Bottle stoppers” meant “coppers.”) In addition, the leaders had developed a devoted coterie of women on the outside who had fallen in love with them through visits and correspondence and could serve as couriers, relaying messages back and forth between members. One woman who cooperated in the gang’s illegal businesses later claimed she had Stockholm syndrome.

With the help of prison authorities, Jessner began to intercept a series of covert messages. Portions of the letters appeared to be blank, as if someone had been interrupted. After analysts applied heat with an iron and placed the paper under ultraviolet light, letters would appear, revealing “a secret message,” as the F.B.I. wrote in an internal report. Cryptographers analyzed the “ink” of one such note, and discovered that the message was written with urine. The message itself was baffling; it had been scrambled into a code. “They have certain words that mean a certain thing,” one former member said. “If they tell you that ‘somebody’s going to build a house in the country,’ the prevalent word… is ‘country,’ because… that means ‘murder.’”

Jessner and his team spent hours breaking sentences apart and reconstructing them. He started to see patterns in the messages: “baby boy” meant yes, and “baby girl” meant no. One day, prison authorities intercepted a note sent by T. D. Bingham, the A.B. commissioner, to the Baron. It said, “Well I am a grandfather, at last my boy’s wife gave birth to a strapping eight pound seven ounce baby boy.” Jessner feared that the reference to the baby’s weight was code for 187, the California legal statute pertaining to murder; the fact that the baby was a boy suggested that a hit had been approved. Then analysts noticed that several of the letters had squiggly marks, almost like tails, on them. The words “eight pound,” for instance, had curlicues on the letters “e,” “g,” “n,” and “d.” It appeared to be a code within a code.

After scrutinizing the letters, authorities determined that the note was in fact written in a biliteral cipher, a method invented by Sir Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century philosopher. It involved using two distinct alphabets, depending on how the letters were drawn. An unadorned “c” referred to alphabet A, whereas a curlicued “c” represented alphabet B. Investigators went through the note, categorizing each letter by alphabet until they had a cluster of letters that all seemed to be a play on the initials of the Aryan Brotherhood:

bbbaaaaabbabaaabababbabaaababaaabaaabbbababbaabbaaabbaabbabb-baabb…

It still made no sense. But after analysts broke the letters into clusters of five, Jessner says, they started to realize that each cluster represented an individual letter. Thus “ababb” was an “A,” “abbab” was a “B,” and so on.

They had finally cracked the code; now they went through the letter again. It said:

Confirm message from Chris to move on DC.

Officials knew that “DC” meant the D.C. Blacks, a prison gang against whom the Aryan Brotherhood had recently declared war. But, by the time authorities decoded the letter, two black inmates had been found dead in their cells in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: one was stabbed thirty-four times, the other thirty-five.

The Brotherhood began developing murder schemes that could succeed even in maximum-security environments. They started to befriend their foes, so they could one day “rock them to sleep.” At Pelican Bay, where friends could apply to be cellmates, they sought to room with the very men they wanted to kill. “Deception was key,” one member who strangled his cellmate acknowledged. Between 1996 and 1998, A.B. members at Pelican Bay murdered three inmates, and were suspected in at least three additional slayings.

In many cases, officials in the correctional system seemed powerless to stop the gang. At Folsom prison, after A.B. leaders were sequestered from the general population, the gang’s associates protested by indiscriminately stabbing rapists and child molesters until the leaders were released. A few prison officials actually facilitated the Brotherhood’s activities. At the supermax prison in Colorado, a guard was accused of becoming an Aryan Brotherhood disciple; at Pelican Bay, two guards were discovered encouraging the beatings of child molesters and sex offenders by gang members. A local prosecutor warned that officials at Pelican Bay were unable to stop a “reign of terror.”

By the mid-nineties, Jessner says, the gang had evolved to the point that it had to appoint members to lead different branches of its operations-such as the “department of security” and the “department of narcotics.” Though the Aryan Brotherhood’s profits never rivalled those of the Italian Mafia or outside drug lords, its reputation for violence did. The gang had some of the most highly trained and ruthless hit men in the country. And inside the prison system the Baron had so grown in stature that he overshadowed the imprisoned head of the Italian Mafia, John Gotti. According to authorities, in July, 1996, after a black inmate attacked Gotti at Marion prison, bloodying his face, the Mafia leader, who seemed ill prepared for the explosion of prison violence, sought the Baron’s help in murdering his assailant. The Brotherhood seemed receptive to the idea-the Baron allegedly used sign language to communicate the price of the hit to an associate-but Gotti died before the hit could be executed.

It was around then that Jessner decided that the only way to take down the gang was the way authorities had taken down the Italian Mafia-by using the RICO STATUTES, which allowed the government to attack the entire hierarchy of a criminal organization rather than just one or two members. The goal, as Halualani put it, was to “cut off the head, not just the body.”

In an audacious move, Jessner decided to pursue the death penalty for nearly all the gang’s top leaders. “It’s the only arrow left in our quiver,” he told me. “I think even a lot of people who are against the death penalty in general would recognize that in this particular instance, where people are committing murder repeatedly from behind bars, there is little other option.”

While Jessner was slowly trying to build a case, methodically flipping witnesses, decoding messages, and gathering forensic evidence, he had to be careful of “sleepers”-gang members pretending to cooperate with authorities in order to infiltrate the investigation. During a previous F.B.I. probe, agents reported that they were concerned that one snitch may “have in fact been a ploy by the A.B. to infiltrate the WITSECprogram”-the witness-protection program-“and determine where all the government witnesses were housed.”

As the Brotherhood grew stronger, it developed ambitions that extended beyond prison walls. Though many leaders were serving life sentences without parole, some members were being paroled-an outcome that authorities had long feared. “Most of the A.B. will be paroled or discharged at some future date and, in view of members’ lifelong commitments, it would be naïve to think he would not remain in contact with his brothers,” a declassified F.B.I. report stated. “The rule of thumb is that once on the streets, one must take care of his brothers that are still inside. The penalty for failure to do so is death upon the member’s return to the prison system.” Given the gang’s ability to operate behind bars, the F.B.I. report warned of “what these gang members can do with little or no supervision.” Silverstein himself has said, “Someday most of us finally get out of this hell and even a rational dog after getting kicked around year after year after year attacks when his cage door is finally opened.”

On March 24, 1995, the door at Pelican Bay finally opened for Robert Scully, a reputed A.B. member and armed robber who had spent, with the exception of a few months, the previous thirteen years behind bars-many of them inside the Hole. For an Aryan brother, he was small: barely five feet four, and a hundred and forty-five pounds. But the thirty-six-year-old was known to work out obsessively in his cell, doing an endless routine of what the gang called “burpees”-standing one moment, then dropping to the floor to do a pushup, then hopping to one’s feet again.

Brenda Moore, a lonely thirty-eight-year-old single mother who had long corresponded with inmates at Pelican Bay-and, in the process, had become one of the gang’s female followers-picked Scully up at the prison gate in her truck. Scully wore powder-blue sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and a watch cap. He had two hundred dollars in his pocket. Scully had previously sent Moore a series of seductive letters. In one, written on pink paper, he said, “All extraneous subversion manifests itself when we connect.” In another, he wrote, “I will always be with you as you are one of me now. Our synergy is infinite.”

After leaving the prison, the couple drove to the beach, where Scully walked along the shore, collecting seashells. The following day, though, he found a sawed-off shotgun, and he and Moore set out for Santa Rosa, driving south along Highway 101. Six days after Scully’s release, they stopped near a saloon in the middle of the night. A police car pulled up behind their pickup truck. As a fifty-eight-year-old deputy sheriff approached with his flashlight, Scully leaped out with his shotgun. The deputy raised his hands over his head, but Scully shot him between the eyes.

The Aryan Brotherhood was now killing on the outside with as little hesitation as it had on the inside. Similarly, the gang was expanding its racketeering operation onto the streets. In letters written in 1999 to one recent parolee, the Baron said, “We especially need for some to step-up,” and, referring to the gang’s shamrock symbol, he urged, “START POLISHING THE ROCKout there!!!” The gang allegedly enlisted paroled A.B. members and associates to become drug dealers, gunrunners, stickup men, and hit men. Some Pelican Bay inmates were discovered mapping out establishments to rob.

That same year, a reputed Brand member on the streets walked into the Palm Springs home of a drug dealer who wasn’t sharing enough of his profits with the gang. Witnesses told police that the A.B. member pulled out a.38 and unloaded five bullets into the man’s chest and head, telling everyone in the room that this was for “the fellows”-the Aryan Brotherhood-up north at Pelican Bay, and warning that new brothers were being released every day.

A year later, in a letter disguised as privileged legal mail, the gang spoke of plans to “buy a warehouse with offices on some large acreage.” The letter’s author, a member who was about to be released, added, “I’ll outfit it with a well-stocked law library, computer research desk, copy machine, iron pile, pool table, big screen TV, car and bike garage with tools, handball courts, etc. This will be the Brand Ranch… This will be home base for us out there.”

Around the same time, a longtime reputed A.B. member confided to authorities that he had been approached at the supermax in Colorado by the gang and asked for technical help in making bombs. The gang, he was informed, was planning terrorist attacks on federal facilities across the United States. “It’s become irrational,” he told authorities after declining to help. “They’re talking about car bombs, truck bombs, and mail bombs.”

Just when the Brotherhood seemed poised to take a particularly violent turn, Jessner unleashed the United States Marshals. Nearly four decades after the gang was born, it found itself under siege.

The courthouse where one of the first trials against the Brand would take place was in the middle of a verdant forest in Benton, Illinois, about thirty miles from Marion prison. It had been built on the edges of a circular clearing, and stood not far from a dozen or so dilapidated brick storefronts. Some of the stores had been shut down; others had signs offering discounts, as if they would soon join them.

A single alleged A.B. murder, which was included in Jessner’s sprawling indictment, also fell under the jurisdiction of the United States Attorney in the Southern District of Illinois. The trial, which began in September, 2003, centered on David Sahakian, McElhiney’s most feared cohort, the man who had once reputedly had an inmate stabbed for bumping him during a basketball game. He was charged with ordering two alleged associates to murder a thirty-seven-year-old bank robber named Terry Walker during a 1999 race war at Marion. Sahakian, along with his two associates, faced the death penalty. The trial offered a glimpse of what would happen in Los Angeles, where Jessner planned to prosecute forty people, including McElhiney and the Baron.

Even though the Benton trial involved only one A.B. member and two associates, the United States Marshals walled off the entire building. For the first time in the court’s history, cement barricades had been placed around the exterior. To get inside, I had to pass through two metal detectors.

Nearly a dozen marshals, dressed in black suits and black shoes, led the defendants, whose wrists and ankles were shackled, into the courtroom. Sahakian wore gray slacks and a gray short-sleeved shirt. Everything about him was big: his hands; his stomach; his long, sloping forehead. Whereas in old photographs he had an unruly beard-it apparently had inspired his nickname, the Beast-now he had only a goatee, which made his face look even larger.

His wife was in the gallery, and he winked at her as he sat down. She told me that they had met twenty-five years ago, and that for twenty-three of those years he had been behind bars. Petite, with blond hair and a blue miniskirt that exposed well-toned legs, she gave off a strong scent of perfume. She sat right behind him, taking notes throughout the trial. At one point, she told me, “They keep saying he’s a boss of the Aryan Brotherhood and that he ordered everyone around. But I don’t believe it. He can’t even order me around.”

When a pathologist took the stand, the prosecution projected on a large screen a photograph of Walker’s body. It was stretched out on a metal table. There were bloodstains on his chest, his eyes were open, and his mouth appeared to be frozen midspeech. The pathologist described each stab wound. Then he pointed to a hole in the heart-it was the one that killed him, he said.

None of the defendants looked up at the screen, and, apart from the marshals and Sahakian’s wife, the gallery was empty. Nobody from the victim’s family was there. Jessner had told me that most of these victims had already been cast out by society, and, when they were killed, few people, if any, cared. “I feel a certain obligation to defend those who have no one to defend them,” he had said.

After a break in the trial, the defendant who had purportedly held the victim down during the attack refused to come out of a holding room. The judge ordered the marshals to forcibly carry him out. Sahakian leaped to his feet and said that that wasn’t necessary. “If I go back there,” he said in a commanding voice, “he’ll come out.” At last, a marshal went out to the holding room and escorted the defendant into the courtroom. He walked with pointed slowness and stared at the prosecutor. “What the fuck you looking at!” he yelled.

Six marshals quickly hovered around him. As he sat down, he slammed his chair into the groin of one of the agents. Eventually, order was restored, and, when an inmate who had helped stab several black inmates took the stand as a government witness, Sahakian rubbed his fingers along the arm of his chair. Each time the witness made allegations against Sahakian, he seemed to grip the chair more tightly. His knuckles turned white. Finally, he glanced toward me in the gallery and said, “Don’t believe a word he’s saying. He’s nothin’ better than a shit-house rat.”

“Don’t use that language, honey,” his wife said.

“Metaphorically speaking,” he said.

Several inmates who had told authorities that they were prepared to come forward had also said that they were frightened to do so. One said that since he had turned on the A.B. his family had been threatened. Another, who had provided evidence, was staying in his cell, clutching his rosary beads. He said, “I’ll say my prayers that I don’t get about seventy-five holes in me.”

Jessner was sitting at his desk at his headquarters in Los Angeles, preparing pretrial motions. While he was awaiting a verdict in the Benton trial, he needed to get ready not just for one trial but for potentially five or six-since not all forty defendants could be held safely in one courtroom. Security was already a challenge; most of the inmates, including the Baron and McElhiney, were being held in single cells at the West Valley Detention Center, outside Los Angeles. Some defendants had been found with drugs and concealed razor blades.

Fearing that the gang might turn on its own, Jessner had placed a few A.B. members in other prisons. In a letter, the Baron had told another gang member, “It’s likely necessary for us to step-up and conduct a thorough evaluation of every brother’s personal character and level of commitment, as we currently possess some serious rot that is in fact potentially a cancer!” He added that it should be “a top priority to wipe them off the face of this earth!”

Jessner said he knew that the gang was trying to hold on to its operations, but he was optimistic about the upcoming trials. “I can’t say for sure if another gang will take the Brotherhood’s place, or if new leaders will replace the old ones,” he said. “But I know that if we succeed it will send a message that the Aryan Brotherhood can no longer kill with impunity.”

Jessner got up and started heading toward the courtroom, to attend a pretrial hearing. He was wearing a charcoal suit that seemed too loose for his small frame. I asked him if, as some feared, he had been “put in the hat”-marked for assassination.

He blanched. “I don’t know,” he said. He later added, “It’s a pretty big hat.”

The United States Attorney had arranged extra security for him, including a secure parking space nearby. One of his colleagues had declined to work on the case after his wife objected. “I worry,” Jessner admitted. “You can’t help but worry.”

He paused and looked at me. He wouldn’t feel right if he stopped, he said. “I don’t believe that because you rob a convenience store you should receive a death sentence. I don’t believe that our prisons should be divided into predators and prey.” As he headed into the courtroom, he added, “I don’t believe that that is what our system intended by justice.”

– February, 2004

The case against the Aryan Brotherhood produced nearly thirty convictions. The gang’s two most feared and powerful leaders, Barry Mills and T. D. Bingham, were found guilty of murder, conspiracy, and racketeering. The jury, however, deadlocked on whether they should receive the death penalty, and they were sentenced to life without parole. David Sahakian, whose initial trial in Benton led to a hung jury on the count of ordering the murder of Terry Walker, was later retried and found guilty. He was sentenced to twenty years. After failing to obtain the death penalty against other leaders of the gang, the prosecution dropped charges against Michael McElhiney; he is not expected to be released from prison until 2035, when he will be seventy-eight years old.

Crimetown, U.S.A.
THE CITY THAT FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MOB

There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown, Ohio. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Everyone suspected who the killers were-they lived in the neighborhood, often just down the street-but no one could ever prove anything. Sometimes their methods were simple: a bullet to the back of the head or a bomb strapped under the hood of a car. Or sometimes, as when they got John Magda, they went for something more dramatic, tranquillizing their victim with a stun gun and wrapping his head in tape until he could no longer breathe.

Then there were those who just disappeared. Police found their cars on the side of the road, empty, or food still warm on dinner tables where they had been eating. The victims had, in the most classic sense, been “rubbed out.” The only sign of the killers was an artistic flourish: a dozen long-stemmed white roses that the victims typically received before they vanished.

So, when Lenny Strollo ordered the hit that summer night in 1996, there was no reason to believe it would go down any differently. Strollo was the Mafia don in Mahoning County-a stretch of land in a valley in northeastern Ohio that encompasses Youngstown and smaller cities like Canfield and Campbell, and that is home to more than two hundred and fifty thousand people. From his farm in Canfield, where he tended his gardens, Strollo ran a criminal network that comprised extortion rackets, illegal gambling, and money laundering. He also oversaw many of the killings in the region. Only weeks earlier, Strollo had had his main Mob rival gunned down in broad daylight. This time, Strollo’s choice of target was more brazen: the newly elected county prosecutor, Paul Gains.

The Mafia didn’t ordinarily “take out” public officials, but the prosecutor, who was forty-five years old, had resisted the customary bribes and campaign contributions. What’s more, Strollo had heard that Gains intended to hire as his chief investigator the man the don most loathed, an F.B.I. agent named Bob Kroner, who had spent two decades pursuing organized crime in the region.

As usual, Strollo employed layers of authority, so that nothing could be traced back to him. First, he gave the order to Bernie the Jew, on whom he relied for muscle. Bernie, in turn, hired Jeffrey Riddle, a black drug dealer turned assassin who boasted that he would become “the first nigger ever inducted into the family.” Riddle then brought in his own two-man team: Mark Batcho, a fastidious criminal who ran one of the most sophisticated burglary crews in the country, and Antwan “Mo Man” Harris, a crack dealer and murderer who still lived with his mother.

That Christmas Eve, as Batcho and Harris later recounted, the three men packed up everything they needed: walkie-talkies, ski masks, gloves, a police scanner, a.38 revolver, and a bag of cocaine to plant at the scene in order to make it look like a drug-related killing. After sundown, the men drove out to the prosecutor’s house, in a Youngstown suburb. Gains was not yet home-his house was dark inside-and Batcho got out of the car and waited behind a lamppost near the garage. He attached a speed loader to the revolver to enable him to shoot faster. Then he tested the voice-activated walkie-talkie, but there was no response. He tried again-nothing. Incredulous, he ran back to the car and said he couldn’t kill anyone without “communication.”

The three men drove to a nearby parking lot, where they programmed their cell phones so that they could dial one another at the touch of a button. When they returned to Gains’s home, they noticed that a car was in the driveway, and the lights in the house were on. “O.K.,” Riddle said. “Get out and go do this.”

Batcho exited the car, carrying the gun and the bag of cocaine. He crept up to the house, his heart racing. The garage door was open, and he said, “Hey, mister,” but no one answered, and he kept walking. A door leading into the house was also ajar, and he decided to go in. As he made his way down a corridor, he could hear Gains talking on the phone in the kitchen, only a few feet away. Batcho hesitated, as if contemplating what he was about to do. Then he rushed forward, bursting into the kitchen, pointing the gun at the prosecutor’s midsection. He pulled the trigger, then fired again. Gains collapsed to the floor, blood seeping from his forearm and side. Batcho stepped closer, and Gains put up his hands to ward him off. Batcho aimed near Gains’s heart and pulled the trigger, but the gun kicked back, jamming.

Batcho ran out of the house, stumbling into the darkness. He fell and, getting back up, hit the button on the cell phone, screaming, It’s done! Come pick me up. He saw the car approaching from down the street and darted toward it. As the car slowed, he jumped into the back seat, crouching down.

“Did you kill him?” Riddle asked.

“I think so,” Batcho said uncertainly.

“You don’t know?” Riddle said.

“The gun jammed.”

Harris looked at him coolly. “Why didn’t you go in the drawer and get a steak knife and stab him to death?” he asked.

Riddle said that they had to go back and finish the job, but just then the police scanner crackled with news of the shooting. Riddle hit the gas and sped along the back roads. Fearing that the police might pull them over, Harris tossed the gun out the window. The men realized that the speed loader was missing, and started screaming at each other. Then from the scanner came the news that Gains was still alive.

It was a remarkably inept professional hit. Police found the speed loader outside Gains’s house, along with a clean footprint. Within days, a sketch of the shooter appeared in the local newspaper, the Vindicator. Yet the crime scene was so messy that investigators concluded that Strollo’s men could not have been behind it. Gains told friends that if the Mob had done it he’d be dead. Batcho, who had taken to wearing disguises, gradually emerged from hiding. Once more, it looked as if the murderers would escape punishment.

Then several months later, in the spring of 1997, the prosecutor received a telephone call at his home. “Are you Paul Gains?” a woman asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Who’s this?”

“I know who shot you,” she said.

When the woman disclosed details about the crime that few could have known, Gains summoned Kroner and other F.B.I. agents, who were in the midst of a three-year sting operation against organized crime in the Mahoning Valley. The next day, Kroner and his men visited the woman, who was an ex-girlfriend of an associate of the hit men. “I know everything,” she said. “I know other people they shot.”

Her information would lead authorities to the three assassins and help solve a Mob hit for the first time in the county’s history. Meanwhile, Kroner and the F.B.I. had begun to break apart what was believed to be the most crooked county in America-a place where the Mafia had ruled with impunity for nearly a hundred years and where it still controlled virtually every element of society. The don’s influence extended to a chief of police, the outgoing prosecutor, the sheriff, the county engineer, policemen, a city law director, defense attorneys, politicians, judges, and a former assistant U.S. attorney. By July of 2000, the F.B.I. probe had produced more than seventy convictions. Now Kroner and his colleagues were closing in on the most powerful politician in the region, a man whom they’d caught on tape scheming with the Mob nearly twenty years earlier but who had eluded them ever since: United States Congressman James Traficant.

The Mahoning Valley is today one of the most depressed areas of America, but it was an economic boom that first gave rise to the local Mob. During the first half of the twentieth century, the valley was at the center of the burgeoning steel industry. Mills churned around the clock, blackening the sky. Thousands of immigrants-Poles and Greeks and Italians and Slovaks-descended on the area, believing they had found the Ruhr Valley of America; meanwhile, racketeers thought they had discovered their own Little Chicago. The streets were lined with after-hours joints, where steel-workers drank and played barbut, a Turkish dice game, and where capos, dressed in white-brimmed hats and armed with stilettos, ran the numbers, or “bug,” as the locals called it. Like Chicago, Buffalo, and Detroit, Youngstown had all the elements the Mob needed to flourish: a teeming immigrant population accustomed to arbitrary and violent authority, a prosperous economy, and pliable local politicians and police.

Yet Youngstown was too small to have a Mob family of its own, and by 1950, as the rackets grew into a multimillion-dollar industry, the Pittsburgh and Cleveland Mafia families began fighting for control of the region. Cars and stores were bombed-warnings to anyone who allied himself with the wrong side. A local radio station ran public-service ads featuring an earsplitting bang and the slogan “Stop the bomb!” In 1963, the Saturday Evening Post reported that local “officials hobnob openly with criminals. Arrests of racketeers are rare, convictions rarer still, and tough sentences almost unheard of.” The newspaper dubbed the area Crime-town, U.S.A.

By 1977, the Mob war had become even more violent. On one side was Joey Naples and Lenny Strollo’s faction, which was controlled by the Pittsburgh Mafia; on the other were the Carabbia brothers-known as Charlie the Crab and Orlie the Crab-who were aligned with Cleveland. “It seemed like you’d get up every morning and get in your car and hear someone else had been murdered,” the F.B.I. agent Bob Kroner told me.

First, there were Spider and Peeps-two petty cons hit within a few weeks of each other. Then came one of Naples’s drivers, shot as he changed a tire in his driveway, and a crony of Peeps’s, who was gunned down outside his apartment. Then John Magda, who was discovered, his head wrapped in tape, at the dump in Struthers, and, next, a small-time bookie who refused to go easily-he was first bombed and later shot through his living-room window as he watched television with his wife. Then Joey DeRose, Sr., killed by accident when he was mistaken for his son, Joey DeRose, Jr., a Carabbia assassin; and, finally, a few months later, the son, too. “Oh my God, they got Joey,” his girlfriend screamed when police told her they had found the car he was driving burning on a country road between Cleveland and Akron.

In 1976, Kroner arrived in Youngstown and descended into this violent underworld. He was a former high-school math teacher who turned in his books for a badge in 1971, and who could be seen around town, in his neatly pressed suit and tie, trailing reputed hit men and banging on the doors of the All-American Club and other Mafia hangouts. Though he came from a family of cops, which included his father, Kroner didn’t look like one: he was too tall and slender, almost delicate, and he lacked the easy manner of the police who played craps in the shadow of the courthouse. He wore penny loafers in a city where most people wore boots, and spoke with a certain formality.

His F.B.I. predecessor, according to the agency’s own affidavit and informants, had allegedly consorted with gangsters, and was later appointed Youngstown’s chief of police at the Mafia’s behest. But Kroner was hostile to the local dons. Prickly and shy, he spent hours alone in his small office, smoking cigarettes and listening to intercepted conversations between the different factions. Like a cartographer filling in the blanks on a map, he made little diagrams of each family, to which he added further details whenever he received a tip from an informant. He did everything he could to bring down the Mafia’s enterprise: tapping its members’ phones, tailing their spotless Cadillacs, subpoenaing their friends. Before long, Strollo and his cronies gave him the ultimate epithet: “motherfucker.”

In December of 1980, Charlie the Crab, the head of the Cleveland faction, disappeared without a trace, and, soon after, Kroner searched the apartment of one of the city’s most notorious assassins. The apartment was cluttered with knickknacks, and Kroner and his partner went through each room carefully. In a cabinet, Kroner noticed a breadbox and opened it. Inside, tucked amid the stale bread, was an audiotape. When he played it, he heard male voices, saying, “He’s a scared motherfucker” and “You either play our fucking game or you[’re] going to be put in a fucking box.” Two of the voices, Kroner was sure, belonged to Charlie and his brother, Orlie the Crab. There was also another voice, one Kroner thought he recognized from television and radio. Then it dawned on him: it was James Traficant, a former college football star, who had recently been elected sheriff of Youngstown.

Later, Kroner and his partner, acting on a tip, drilled open the Carabbias’ sister’s safe-deposit box, where they found a similar tape with a handwritten note. It said, “If I die these tapes go to the F.B.I. in Washington. I feel I have more people after me because of these tapes and… I pray and ask God to guide and protect my family.”

Back at headquarters, Kroner and his colleagues listened to a jumble of voices on the tape arguing about which public officials they thought were allegedly being paid off by the rival Pittsburgh Mob.

“You believe they got all them fuckin’ people?” Orlie said.

“I know they got” him, Traficant said, referring to one prominent politician.

“Oh, they definitely got” him, Charlie said.

Traficant paused, as if running through other names in his mind. “I don’t know all of them,” he finally said. “But I know it’s a fuckin’ fistful.”

With its Pittsburgh rival controlling many of the valley’s politicians, the Cleveland faction knew it needed some powerful representatives of its own. And the tapes, apparently made by Charlie the Crab at two meetings during the 1980 sheriff’s campaign, appeared to show them buying Traficant. “I am a loyal fucker,” Traficant informed the Carabbia brothers, “and my loyalty is here, and now we’ve gotta set up the business that they’ve run for all these fuckin’ years and swing that business over to you, and that’s what your concern is. That’s why you financed me, and I understand that.”

The arrangement appeared to be an old-fashioned one: Traficant acknowledged receiving more than a hundred thousand dollars from the Cleveland faction for his campaign; in exchange, he indicated that he would use the sheriff’s office to protect the Carabbias’ rackets while shutting down their rivals.

Charlie told Traficant, “Your uncle Tony was my goombah… and we feel that you’re like a brother to us. We don’t want you to make any fuckin’ mistakes.” Traficant assured his benefactors that he was solid, and that if any of his deputies betrayed them “they’ll fuckin’ come up swimming in [the] Mahoning River.”

But, according to the tapes, Traficant was not worried primarily about his deputies; he was worried about the Pittsburgh Mob. As Charlie knew, Traficant had accepted money from Pittsburgh, too-some sixty thousand dollars. (The first installment had come with the message “I want you to be my friend.”) The young candidate for sheriff was now double-crossing the Pittsburgh family: he had just given over at least some of its money to Charlie the Crab in order to prove his loyalty, and he knew that when the Pittsburgh family found out it would retaliate. “Look, I don’t wanna fuckin’ die in six months, Charlie,” Traficant said.

Kroner and his colleagues could hear Traficant hatching a plan to protect himself from the Pittsburgh Mafia and the officials they controlled. “Let’s look at it this way, O.K.?” he said. “They can get to the judges and get what they need done… What they don’t have is the sheriff, and… I’m one step ahead.” On the day he was sworn into office, Traficant said he’d take some of the money the Pittsburgh family had given him and use it as evidence to arrest them for bribery. What’s more, Traficant rehearsed what he and the Crabs would say if their secret dealings were ever uncovered by the authorities: “I was so fucking pissed off at this crooked government, I came to you and asked you guys if you would assist me to break it up, and you said, ‘Fuck it… we’ll do it.’ O.K.? That’s gonna be what you’re gonna say in court.”

“Orlie, too?” Charlie asked. “He’s got a bad heart-”

“Look… I’m not talking fucking daydreams,” Traficant said. “If they’re gonna fuck with me, I’m gonna nail them.” Traficant was taken with the audacity of his plan. “If you think about it,” he mused, “if I fuckin’ did that-”

“You can run for governor,” Charlie said.

They all broke into laughter.

After Kroner and his superiors reviewed the tapes, they called Traficant down to headquarters. Kroner had never met the sheriff before, and he watched as he settled into the chair across from him. Traficant, who was forty-one years old and had once worked in the mills, was an imposing figure, with wide shoulders and a flamboyant, brown toupee that stuck up on top. Kroner told Traficant that he had watched him play quarterback at the University of Pittsburgh. (An N.F.L. scout once said that Traficant, “at the most critical point in a game,” would “keep the ball himself and run with it,” bowling over anyone in his path.)

What happened next at the F.B.I. meeting with Traficant is in dispute. According to sworn court testimony from Kroner and other agents present, Kroner asked the sheriff if he was conducting an investigation into organized crime in the valley. Traficant said he wasn’t. Kroner then asked him if he knew Charlie the Crab or Orlie the Crab. Traficant said he’d only heard of them.

You never met them? Kroner asked.

No, Traficant said.

You never received money from them?

No, he said again.

Then Kroner popped in the tape:

TRAFICANT: “They have given sixty thousand dollars.”

ORLIE THE CRAB: “They gave sixty. What’d we give?”

TRAFICANT: “O.K., a hundred and three.”

After a few seconds, Traficant slumped in his seat. “I don’t want to hear any more,” he said, according to Kroner. “I’ve heard enough.”

In the F.B.I.’s version of events, Traficant acknowledged that he’d taken the money, and he agreed to cooperate in exchange for immunity. In front of two witnesses, he signed a confession that read: “During the period of time that I campaigned for sheriff of Mahoning County, Ohio, I accepted money… with the understanding that certain illegal activities would be allowed to take place in Mahoning County after my election and that as sheriff I would not interfere with those activities.” But several weeks later, the F.B.I. says, when Traficant realized that he would have to resign as sheriff and that the reason for his resignation would become public, he recanted his confession. “Do what you have to do,” he told Kroner, “and I’ll do what I have to do.” Or, as Traficant later told a local television reporter, “All those people trying to put me in jail should go fuck themselves.”

Kroner and the F.B.I. arrested Traficant for allegedly taking a hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars in bribes from the Mob. The indictment charged that he “did knowingly and willfully combine, conspire, confederate, and agree” with racketeers to commit crimes against the United States. He faced up to twenty-three years in jail. To everyone’s astonishment, Traficant decided to represent himself in court, even though he wasn’t a lawyer and even though the judge warned him that “almost no one in his right mind” would do so.

On the day of the trial, in the spring of 1983, Traficant paced the courtroom, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks. He told the jury what he vowed on the Carabbia tapes he would say: that he was conducting “the most unorthodox sting in the history of Ohio politics.” In a role that he said deserved an “Academy Award,” Traficant told the rapt jury and gallery that he had been acting all along as an undercover agent, trying to convince the Carabbia brothers he was on their side so that he could then use them to shut down the more powerful Pittsburgh faction. “What I did, and what I set out to do very carefully,” he said, “was to design a plan whereby I would destroy and disrupt the political influence and the Mob control over in Mahoning County.”

He admitted taking money from the Mob, but said he did so only because he wanted to prevent his opponent in the campaign from getting it. Though he agreed that he had signed “a statement” in front of the F.B.I., he said it was different from the “confession” introduced into evidence. He insisted that he lied to the F.B.I. about the sting because he couldn’t trust its agents, and that if Kroner and the F.B.I. hadn’t intervened he would have cleansed the most corrupt county in the country. “The point of the matter I want to make is this,” he said. “I got inside of the Mob.” He added, “I fucked the Mob.”

When Kroner took the stand, testifying that he had seen Traficant sign the confession, the sheriff leaped to his feet and yelled, “That’s a Goddamned lie!” During cross-examination, he taunted his F.B.I. adversary, saying, “Oh, I see” and “No, Bob.” Traficant referred to himself as “my client” and asked reporters, “How am I doin’?” In a region embedded with corruption and wary of federal authorities, he became, by the end of his defense, an emblem of the valley, a folk hero. There were parties held in his honor, and residents wore T-shirts championing his legal struggle. It didn’t matter that the I.R.S. would later find Traficant liable for taking bribes and evading taxes, in a civil trial in which he invoked the Fifth Amendment. Or that the money he had allegedly taken as evidence for the sting was never turned over. Or that one of his deputies claimed on the stand that Traficant had repeatedly asked him to shoot Traficant in order to make it look like an attempted Mob hit and delay the trial. (“He wanted me to wound him, but not to maim him,” the deputy said.)

Traficant understood his community better than anyone else. It took a jury four days to decide to acquit him of all charges. Charlie the Crab was wrong about one thing: Traficant wouldn’t become governor-he would become a United States congressman.

By the time Traficant went to Washington, D.C., in 1985, the economy in the Mahoning Valley was already disintegrating. The worldwide demand for steel had plummeted, leaving the area in a near-permanent recession. Mills were shuttered; department stores were boarded up. By the end of the decade, the population in Youngstown had fallen by more than twenty-eight thousand, while the sky, leaden for half a century, turned almost blue.

Traficant, who would be repeatedly reelected to Congress by overwhelming margins, railed against the closings. When one of the last steel mills in the region filed for bankruptcy, in the late nineteen-eighties, Traficant sounded like Charlie the Crab. “I think this is beyond all this talking phase,” he warned, adding that if the owner ripped off a local industrial facility then someone should “grab him by the throat and stretch him a couple of inches.”

Though prosperity had once brought the Mob to the valley, depression now cemented its rule. The professional classes that did so much to break the culture of the Mafia in Chicago and Buffalo and New York in the nineteen-seventies and eighties practically ceased to exist in Youngstown. Much of the valley’s middle class either left or stopped being middle class. And so Youngstown experienced a version of what sociologists have described in the inner city. The city lost its civic backbone-its doctors and lawyers and accountants. The few upstanding civic leaders who remained were marginalized or cowed. Hierarchies of status and success and moral value became inverted. The result was a generation of Batchos, who worshipped the dons the way other children worshipped Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio. (Batcho had a tattoo of a Mob boss on his left arm, and told people proudly that he’d “take a bullet for him.”)

Meanwhile, Lenny Strollo and his partners, in need of players for their cash-strapped casinos, began catering to the local drug dealers and criminals, who were the only people left with money to spend. The Mob, which had once competed with the valley’s civil society, now all but displaced it. As late as 1997, in the small city of Campbell, Strollo controlled at least ninety per cent of the appointments to the police department. He fixed the civil-service exam so that he could pick the chief of police and nearly all the patrolmen. The city law director brought the list of candidates for promotion to Strollo’s house, and the don would pore over it, making his choices. An attorney familiar with the city told me that Strollo could “determine which murderers went to jail and which ones went free.”

In 1996, three Mob hit men, including Mo Man Harris, were on their way to kill their latest target when the Campbell police pulled them over for speeding, according to people in the car. In the vehicle, the cops found an AK-47 rifle, a.357 Magnum revolver, and a 9-mm. pistol. One of the assassins used his cell phone to call Jeff Riddle, who rushed to the scene and told the police that the men were running an errand for Bernie the Jew. The cops let them go.

In the rare instances when the police arrested a reputed mobster, Strollo and his associates paid off the judges. Once, a judge refused to fix an assault case, and so Strollo dispatched Batcho with a walkie-talkie and a silencer to wound the defense attorney, Gary Van Brocklin, in order to force a mistrial. As Batcho later recalled, “I said, ‘Are you attorney Gary Van Brocklin?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I am.’… And I shot him right in the knee.” Andy Arena, who was Kroner’s boss at the F.B.I., told me, “I don’t know how an honest defense attorney could make a living in this town.”

Strollo’s influence extended to the valley’s representative in Congress as well. Traficant’s top aide in the district, Charles O’Nesti, served as the “bagman” between Strollo and the city’s corrupt public officials, as O’Nesti himself later admitted. (Traficant had hired O’Nesti in 1984, despite his claims on the infamous tapes that O’Nesti was a Mob crony whom he would arrest as part of his so-called sting to clean up the valley.) While working for Traficant, O’Nesti would meet Strollo at the don’s farm or scheme with him on the phone. The two even conspired to steal a stretch of city pavement as it was being laid down.

The F.B.I. sting that would start unravelling this web of corruption began in 1994. By then, Kroner was married and had two daughters; and he had given up smoking through hypnotism and put several pounds on his slender frame. One morning, as he met with other agents in their cramped local office, he was despairing. He had recently witnessed the disintegration of one of his few triumphs: fourteen months after he had secured a conviction against Strollo for gambling, his nemesis had reemerged from prison and reasserted his power. Even when we bust them, Kroner thought, they just come back.

So Kroner and his colleagues opted for a new approach. Rather than attack the Mob from the top, as they had in the past, they’d start at the bottom, with the numbers runners and the stick handlers at the barbut games. The investigation was based on the theory of carpenter ants-if you don’t eliminate all of them, they simply multiply again. Kroner says, “We set forth right in the beginning that we were not going to stop until we got to the nest, and if it meant having to work deals with people we had lots of evidence against, that’s what we were going to do.”

One of the first people they persuaded to cooperate was a local bookie named Michael Sabella, whose clothes always smelled of fish. After being questioned by the feds on a separate matter, he agreed to wear a wire around to the county’s gambling dens. Eventually, he provided enough evidence that investigators were able to wiretap several low-level members of Strollo’s sprawling enterprise, who, in turn, gave them enough evidence to tap more phones, and so on. As the number of intercepted conversations grew into the thousands, Kroner and his partners, John Stoll and Gordon Klau, spent days and nights sifting through transcripts. “We really put a strain on our families,” Kroner once told a reporter. “It was a difficult period.”

Still, after more than a year they hadn’t penetrated Strollo’s inner circle. Hoping to “shake the tree,” as Kroner put it, the agents raided several gambling joints. Afterward, they had established enough links to Strollo that a judge granted them the authority to install listening devices in the don’s kitchen and to tap his telephones. Kroner and his colleagues soon began picking up snippets of incriminating conversations. They heard what sounded like a plot to shake down a priest and what some “asshole did before… he got whacked.”

At one point, Kroner received a tip from an informant that Strollo was planning to kill one of his rivals, Ernie Biondillo. Feeling a moral obligation to warn Biondillo, Kroner picked up the phone and called him. “This is Bob Kroner,” he said. “You know who I am?”

“Yeah, I know who you are.”

“Well, I need to sit down and talk to you alone.”

They met that night in a dark parking lot. Biondillo was in his Cadillac, and pulled alongside Kroner’s car. The men spoke through their open windows. Kroner hoped the warning would encourage Biondillo to cooperate with the investigation. But Biondillo just kept saying, Who the fuck wants to kill me?

Kroner looked at him warily. “I can’t tell you that. I’m not out here to start a war.”

Unable to get an answer, Biondillo drove off in his Cadillac. Several months later, he was riding in his car and turned down a deserted street, when two vehicles boxed him in. A pair of men wearing rubber masks and holding guns opened fire, killing him.

Though Kroner was sure that the hit was ordered by Strollo, the F.B.I. still didn’t have the evidence to arrest him. But, by the summer of 1996, the authorities were closing in, and Strollo, sensing it, became increasingly paranoid. On the phone, he spoke almost exclusively in code. Once, Strollo had a premonition that a longtime confidant was wearing a wire, even though he wasn’t. Another time, Strollo became convinced that an airplane flying overhead was tailing one of his bookies. When someone tried to calm him down, he snapped, “This is my life you’re talking about… I got to fight for survival.”

Strollo was consumed with his nemesis, Kroner. On the telephone, he would say, “Bob, can you hear me? Can you hear me?” Strollo sent one of his men to find out if Kroner’s father could be paid off to control his renegade son, but word came back that the father was honest, too. Knowing his phones were tapped, Strollo tried to plant evidence to suggest that Kroner was somehow on the take. He told associates that Kroner had received bribes from Little Joey and was running drugs through the valley.

One day, Strollo sounded threatening toward Kroner and other F.B.I. agents. “I don’t know what I’m going to have to do about these guys,” he said. Not long afterward, unbeknownst to the F.B.I., Strollo ordered the assassination of Gains. The bungled hit-and the phone call from the “scorned woman,” as Kroner referred to the Mob associate’s former girlfriend who contacted Gains-broke open the F.B.I.’s investigation. In 1997, Bernie the Jew, Riddle, and Harris were all charged with attempted murder. As Batcho was walking near his house, an unmarked car pulled up behind him and two men jumped out. “Are you Mark Batcho?” one of them said.

“No, I’m not Mark Batcho. I don’t know him.”

Despite his denials, Batcho was taken into custody, where he became what he called “the lowest form of life”-a Mob rat. Kroner and his men had finally infiltrated the Mafia’s “nest.” On a cold morning shortly before Christmas in 1997, F.B.I. agents fanned out through the valley, arresting more than twenty-eight Mob associates. Kroner showed up at Strollo’s door with an arrest warrant. As Strollo was being handcuffed, he said to Kroner, “Are you happy now, Bob?”

In the end, nearly all of Strollo’s underlings pleaded guilty and turned evidence against one another, except for Bernie the Jew and Riddle, the two men who had adopted the old Sicilian code, even though they could never be officially inducted into the Mafia. “The only ones who had any balls were a schwartze and a sheeny,” said one of the lawyers involved in the case.

Just before Bernie was about to go on trial, he insisted that Strollo would never turn on them and break his oath of silence. But even as Bernie was speaking Strollo was cutting a deal with the prosecution. Strollo told Kroner, “You win.”

“I will probably be under indictment” in the next few months, Traficant said on C-SPAN, staring into the camera. It was March, 2000, almost two decades since he was first arrested by Kroner and the F.B.I. The Congressman, who was now running for his ninth term in the House of Representatives, wore a sombre black coat and tie; his pompadour was sticking up more than usual, and his long sideburns gave him the look of an aging biker. In his sixteen years in Congress, Traficant had earned a reputation as an eccentric populist. He often appeared on the House floor, in polyester suits, speaking about the plight of the working class and railing against the I.R.S.; he closed his speeches with the signature line “Beam me up, Mr. Speaker.” In a political city seemingly without memory, he had become known as simply “the honorable gentleman from Ohio.”

Now he looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. “Hawks are circling, buzzards circling, sharks circling… trying to kill the Traficant election,” he stammered. He paused, his cheeks reddening. “Let me tell you what: Twenty years ago-not quite-I was the only American in the history of the United States to defeat the Justice Department… They have targeted me ever since.” Pointing his finger into the camera, he continued, “I’m targeting them. They better not make a damn mistake… I am mad and… I’m going to fight like a junkyard dog in the face of a hurricane, and… if I beat them you’re now watching one of the richest men in America, because I’m going to sue their assets all apart.”

Even stranger than his warnings to the Justice Department and the F.B.I.-and his admonition that he would shoot any unexpected late-night visitors to his house-were Traficant’s threats to his own party. He warned that if Democratic leaders didn’t stand by him he would switch parties. And, as further compensation for his loyalty, Traficant demanded a list of favors for his district: “I want an empowerment zone from the President of the United States-and I expect it this year-and I want additional appropriations.” On national television, he seemed to be extorting not only members of Congress but also the United States President.

His threats came after authorities had already convicted several people connected to him. Among them were O’Nesti, his top aide and Strollo’s bagman; a disbarred attorney who had once advised Traficant, and who was implicated in the scheme to murder the prosecutor Paul Gains; and two former deputy sheriffs who had served in Traficant’s sheriff’s office, and who were convicted of taking bribes from the Mob. According to accounts first detailed in the Vindicator and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, investigators were looking into, among other things, whether the Congressman received illegal contributions-including the use of a Corvette-from associates in the valley. Authorities had homed in on two brothers, Robert T. and Anthony R. Bucci, who owned a paving company in Traficant’s district and allegedly delivered materials and did construction work on the Congressman’s seventy-six-acre farm. Both brothers appeared to be enmeshed in the city’s network of corruption. On one of the F.B.I.’s wiretaps, O’Nesti could be heard conspiring with Strollo to steer a million-dollar contract to the Buccis’ company. Robert Bucci had since fled the country after allegedly transferring millions of dollars to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.

Throughout the investigation, Traficant had steadfastly maintained his innocence, and the valley was bracing for a second epic trial. “Here’s what I’m saying now,” he insisted on C-SPAN, “and I’m saying this to the Justice Department… If you are to indict me, indict me in June so I can be tried over the August recess. I don’t want to miss any votes.”

Not long after, I travelled to Youngstown, hoping to learn more about the case against the Congressman and the Mafia’s hold on the region. Though it was the middle of the day, the downtown area was eerily empty. Rows of stores were boarded up, and the ornate façades of buildings were crumbling. Finally, I saw a light in a clothing store, where an old man was folding Italian suits. When I went in and asked him about the Congressman, he said, “Ain’t no one gonna get rid of Traficant. Traficant’s too sharp.” He recalled fondly the “henchmen,” including Strollo, who bought hand-tailored clothes from him. “They didn’t wear red or pink suits like they’re coming out with now,” he said. When I pressed him about the local corruption, he shrugged. “Who cares? If you’re working and making a living and nobody is bothering you, why are you going to butt in?”

That night at the restaurant in my hotel, several Youngstown natives who were in their seventies and eighties were sitting around a table arguing about the Congressman. “Traficant produces,” one of the men said. “That’s what counts.”

“Damn right!” another said.

A frail man with white hair said, “When I was eight years old I delivered newspapers downtown, and I would always go by this speakeasy on Sunday afternoon. Well, one day the owner says, ‘I want you to meet someone.’ So I went over and it was Al Capone.” He paused, then repeated, “Al Capone.”

Another man at the table, who had remained silent, suddenly said, “You see this? This is typical Youngstown. Here’s an educated man, an attorney, and Traficant is a god of his, and he’s still raving about meeting Al Capone.”

Later, Mark Shutes, an anthropologist at Youngstown State University who had studied the region, told me, “We have socialized ourselves and our offspring that this is the way the world is… There is no sense in this community in which gangsters are people who have imposed their will on our community. Their values are our values.”

During the latest Democratic primary for Congress, Traficant faced two opponents who railed against his alleged Mob ties and noted that he would soon be indicted. Still, Traficant won the primary with more votes than his two main competitors combined. Traficant seemed invulnerable; some congressional Republicans had even begun to defend him, apparently hoping he’d follow through on his threat to switch parties. “Jimmy Traficant is not being done right by,” Representative Steve LaTourette, Republican of Ohio, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “There isn’t a finer man, there isn’t a finer member of Congress, there isn’t a finer human being.”

Emboldened by his popular support, Traficant attempted to do what he always did: rally the valley against the outsiders he claimed were trying to besmirch its name. Over the last year, he has defiantly called his convicted former top aide, O’Nesti, a “good friend” and championed a local sheriff convicted of racketeering, arguing that he should be moved to a prison closer to Youngstown to be near his ill mother. Traficant said of members of the F.B.I., “These sons of bachelors will not intimidate me, and they won’t jack me around.”

Though he refused to talk to me or to other reporters (“I’ll only make an official statement when I’m actually killed,” he said), he and his staff released a torrent of press releases attacking those pursuing him. “TRAFICANT BILL WOULD CREATE NEW AGENCY TO INVESTIGATE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT,” one release said. Another said, “TRAFICANT WANTS PRESIDENT TO INVESTIGATE FEDERAL AGENTS IN YOUNGSTOWN.” On the House floor, where his speech was protected against suits for libel, he was even bolder. “Mr. Speaker, I have evidence that certain F.B.I. agents in Youngstown, Ohio, have violated the RICO STATUTE and… stole large sums of cash,” he claimed. “What is even worse, they ‘suggested’ to one of their field operative informants that he should commit murder. Mr. Speaker, murder.”

Before I left Youngstown, I stopped by the F.B.I. office in Boardman, Ohio, where Kroner and his boss, Andy Arena, were trying to fend off Traficant’s allegations. They were careful not to say anything about the pending investigation of the Congressman, but it was clear they were under siege. On talk radio, Traficant supporters denounced Kroner as a thief, a con man, a crook, a creep, a liar, and a dope dealer. “The thing that most depressed me,” Kroner told me, “was when I became the subject on talk radio one day and they were discussing my integrity.” He folded his arms. “I just have to block out [those] things.” Rather than a hero, he had become almost a pariah. “Everything is turned upside down here,” Arena said.

As Kroner sat in his neatly pressed jacket and loafers, with his twenty-year-anniversary F.B.I. medallion mounted prominently on a thick gold ring, he seemed slightly defensive. “Every time we charge another public official, the [media] presents it as another black eye for the community,” he said. “I’d prefer if they’d portray it to the community as another step in cleansing ourselves. We’ve got to take a look at what’s being done here as a positive thing.”

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.

Giving “The Devil” His Due
THE DEATH SQUAD REAL-ESTATE AGENT

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.

By November of 2000, Haitians had created permanent Toto Watches-networks that tracked Constant’s every whereabouts. At about this time, Ray Laforest, one of the Toto Watchers, agreed to show me where “the devil” could be found. He told me to meet him near the real-estate office, in front of which Constant had been seen smoking on his lunch break. Laforest was a large man, with a beard and sunglasses. He carried with him several posters, and when I asked him what they were he unfurled one, revealing an old black-and-white photograph of Constant. A mustache curled down around the corners of the reputed death squad leader’s mouth, and several crooked teeth showed between his lips. In bold letters, the poster said, “WANTED: EMMANUEL ‘TOTO’ CONSTANT FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE HAITIAN PEOPLE.”

Laforest told me that Constant had disappeared since the protest. “He’s gone into hiding again,” he said. After Laforest taped one of the “WANTED” posters to a lamppost, we got into his car and drove through the neighborhood, past a series of elegant Tudor houses, until we arrived at the house where Constant had last been seen. “Why are you stopping?” I asked.

“I’m numb,” he said. “If I saw him right now, I’d tie him up myself.” He told me that Constant’s men and other paramilitaries had dragged one of his friends from a church and shot him in broad daylight, and that earlier his own brother had been tortured by the Haitian military. We waited for several minutes, parked behind a bush. “Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje,” Laforest said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s an old Creole proverb,” he said. “Those who give the blows forget, those who bear the scars remember.”

LETTING TOTO SPEAK FOR TOTO

I had been looking for Constant ever since I heard that a man facing charges in Haiti for crimes against humanity was living among the very people against whom the crimes were said to have been committed. Unlike Cain, who was cast out of his community, Constant had become an exile in a community of exiles, banished among those whom he had banished. Though he had fled justice, he could not escape his past. He had to face it nearly every day-in a glance from a neighbor, or a poster on the street.

More important, he was, for the first time, confronted with the prospect of real justice. In the fall of 2000, the Haitian government put him on trial in absentia for the 1994 murders of at least six people in the town of Raboteau. Dozens of others were also on trial. It was a historic case-the first major attempt by the Haitian government to prosecute anyone for the brutal crimes committed by the military regime and to test its judicial system, which had been corrupt for so long that it was essentially nonexistent. And there was mounting pressure on the U.S. government, at home and abroad, to extradite Constant.

When I reached his lawyer, J. D. Larosiliere, he told me that things were at their most critical juncture. A barrel-chested Haitian-American who speaks a combination of formal English and street slang and has a penchant for finely tailored suits, Larosiliere told me that he was often referred to as “the Haitian version of Johnnie Cochran.” Denying that there had even been a massacre at Raboteau, he said that if Constant was sent back to Haiti he would likely be assassinated. Because of the desperateness of the situation, Larosiliere agreed to let Constant, whom many thought had disappeared, meet with me.

So, one afternoon several days later, I headed to Larosiliere’s office, in Newark, New Jersey. When I arrived, Larosiliere was in a closed-door meeting, and as I waited outside in the foyer I could hear the sound of Creole punctured by occasional bursts of English. Suddenly, the office door swung open and a tall man in a double-breasted suit hurried out. It took me a moment to recognize Constant-he looked at least thirty pounds heavier than in the pictures I’d seen of him taken during the military regime. He still had the same mustache, but on his heavier face it no longer appeared so menacing. He wore a turtleneck under his jacket and a gold earring in his left ear. “Hey, how you doing?” he said, speaking with only a slight accent.

To my surprise, he looked like an average American. We sat down in a small conference room lined with books. He paused, rocking back in his chair. Finally, he said, “It’s time for Toto to speak for Toto.”

It was the first of more than a dozen interviews. As he told me his story over the next several months, he often spoke for hours on end. He turned over his voluminous notes and private papers, his correspondence and journals. During that time, I also interviewed his alleged victims, along with human-rights workers, United Nations observers, Haitian authorities, and former and current U.S. officials within the White House, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the intelligence community, many of whom had never before spoken publicly about Constant. I also gained access to intelligence reports, some of which had previously been classified, and State Department cables. With these and other sources, I was able to piece together not only the story of Emmanuel “Toto” Constant but also much of the story of how the U. S. government secretly aided him and later shielded him from justice.

VOODOO PARAMILITARY

In October of 1993, the U.S.S. Harlan County, loaded with military personnel, was sent steaming toward Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. President Bill Clinton had dispatched the ship and its crew as the first major contingent of an international peacekeeping mission to restore to power Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide was a political priest, a wiry, passionate, bug-eyed orator who had risen to power in late 1990 on a mixture of socialism and liberation theology. The downtrodden of Haiti, which is nearly everyone, called him Titid and revered him; the military and the economic élite reviled him as an unstable radical. He was deposed in a coup less than a year after taking office and ultimately fled to the United States. Since then the military, along with roaming bands of paramilitaries, had murdered scores of people. The bloodshed had galvanized the international community, and the ship’s arrival was hailed as a turning point in the effort to reestablish some semblance of public safety and the island’s democracy.

On October 11th, as the Harlan County neared port, a group of U.N. and U. S. officials, headed by the chargé d’affaires, Vicki Huddleston, and accompanied by a large press corps, came to formally welcome the ship and its troops. The assembly waited at the entrance to the port for a guard to open the gate, but nothing happened. Documentary footage shows Huddleston sitting in the back of her car with the C.I.A. station chief. Speaking to another embassy official, she says into her walkie-talkie, “Tell the captain [of the port] I am here to speak with him.”

“Roger, ma’am. We have passed that repeatedly to him, and we are getting nowhere.”

“Well, tell him I’m here at the gate and I’m waiting for the authorities to open it.”

“He doesn’t want to talk right now… He ran away.”

“Open the gate.”

“We’re having some problem with hostile staff. We may have a situation.”

At that moment, a band of armed men, under the direction of the then little-known thirty-six-year-old paramilitary leader Toto Constant, stormed the area. The men, who had already blocked the dock where the Harlan County was supposed to tie up, surrounded Huddleston’s car, banging on the hood and yelling in English, “Kill whites! Kill whites!”

There were only about a hundred in all, many of them potbellied and armed with little more than pitchforks. But the show of force, only a few days after U. S. soldiers had been killed in Somalia, proved terrifying. Constant put on a savvy performance for the press cameras: his ragtag troops banged on sheepskin drums and shouted “Somalia” as if it were a battle cry. They drank and caroused through the night, turning their vehicles’ lights toward the open sea where the Harlan County was still waiting. Finally, President Clinton ordered the ship to leave. It was one of the most humiliating retreats in U. S. naval history, and a surprising one even to those who forced it. “My people kept wanting to run away,” Constant told reporters afterward. “But I took the gamble and urged them to stay. Then the Americans pulled out! We were astonished.”

That day was the coming-out for Constant and his Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, better known as FRAPH, which in Creole evokes the word “frapper,” meaning “to hit.” (Constant said the name had come to him in a dream.) Organized by Constant several months earlier, FRAPH was described by its leader as a grass-roots political organization-“a mysterious event”-that would rise from the masses and replace the remnants of Aristide’s populist movement. The party literature, which Constant composed on an old manual typewriter and handed out to the press, explained that “FRAPH is a popular movement of unity, where all the social sectors are firmly intertwined to bring perfect harmony.”

But FRAPH was a peculiar sort of political party: although it offered free food and liquor to lure supporters, most of its thousands of followers were drawn from the armed bands that operated at the military’s behest and from former members of the now defunct Tonton Macoutes, the infamous paramilitary organization named for a child-snatching bogeyman in Haitian fairy tales. At rallies, FRAPH members would slam their right fist into their left palm in mass salutes. And although FRAPH’S literature spoke of unity, Constant declared publicly, “If Aristide were to return, he would die. Aristide and his supporters are the enemies of this country.”

Despite such warnings, Constant tried to cultivate an image as the only gentleman in a band of thugs. At the official launching of FRAPH, as his men flanked him with guns, he released a handful of doves. Rather than don a soft hat and sunglasses, or camouflage pants, like other paramilitaries, he often appeared in a sharp blue suit and tie and carried a bamboo cane, which he leaned on as he walked. He had been raised within Haiti’s tiny aristocracy, and had studied at Canadian universities and worked briefly in New York as a Haitian diplomat. He spoke English with only a slight accent, and translated for the press in Spanish and French. “Never forget that I am from the establishment,” he liked to say. “I am not just any Joe out there. I’m Constant.”

Still, there was something frightening about him. His eyes, set deep in his head, were glassy and jittery. U.S. officials and reporters said that he was wired on cocaine (Constant has always denied this), and he was known to stay up all night, driving wildly through the streets, his bodyguards hanging out the back of the car with their machine guns. In public, he usually appeared with a man named Jojo, a fierce former Macoute who claimed that his pregnant wife had been murdered by Aristide’s supporters and who was regarded as a merciless killer. “He is not afraid of anything,” Constant still says of Jojo respectfully.

With Jojo as his partner, Constant began to set up FRAPH offices in every town and village. Members received special I.D. cards and machine guns. Like the old Macoutes, they operated as part local bosses, part spies, part extortionists, part militia, and part political cadre. But at their core they were an extension of the military’s might, a brutal “force multiplier,” as one U.S. intelligence report put it, which would allow the regime the deniability that a prudent government always looks for in the use of murder. “FRAPH’S will is an order,” Constant declared shortly after the storming of the port. “When we ask for something, the entire country has to accept it.”

“FACIAL SCALPING”

More and more packs of armed men began to roam at night, looking for Aristide supporters. They were believed to be FRAPH, the police, or the military, or a combination of the three, but they were usually careful to disguise themselves with hoods or women’s clothing (a trademark of the old Macoutes). They carried tire irons, M16s, Uzis, pistols, machetes, axes, and “voodoo powders,” which were widely believed to be lethal. They broke into homes and seized their political enemies. “I realized that I was among animals,” an Aristide supporter who was taken prisoner by one of these armed packs told human-rights monitors. “At first they played with me, taking out their guns and saying I would die. Then they took me to a little torture chamber where there was a small bed… They started beating me about the buttocks with their truncheons, one after the other. At that moment, I thought I would die. I passed out. When I came to, I was in a cell with another man. There were rivers of blood on the floor. Some of it was mine.”

In 1994, after an extensive investigation, the O.A.S./U.N. International Civilian Mission reported, “The scenario is always substantially the same. Armed men, often military or FRAPH members, burst into the house of a political activist they [sought] to capture.” If he wasn’t there, the intruders attacked his wife or sister or daughter. “One guy took me by the hands and led me to the front porch,” a woman told Human Rights Watch. “He said lie down. He said, ‘If you don’t, I’ll split your head open.’… He pulled his pants down to his knees, lifted up my nightgown, pulled down my underpants, and raped me.”

Faceless bodies began to appear in the streets. The assailants had developed a kind of art known as “facial scalping,” a bloody ritual in which a person’s face was peeled from ear to ear with a machete. It was a way to torture people even in the afterlife, because, many believed, such mutilation would prevent a proper burial-trapping the spirit eternally in purgatory.

As the bodies piled up, Constant held forth. He would often sit in a rattan chair in the courtyard of the house that had been his father’s, a sprawling Art Deco mansion with a swimming pool and fountains, and speak to the press. Unlike other paramilitary leaders, who purposely remained in the shadows, Constant craved attention. He let reporters sleep in his garden. He cut back the hedges to make more space for them and handed out T-shirts emblazoned with FRAPH’S name. “At one point, I was the most interviewed person in the world,” he recalls. “It was incredible.” Constant enjoyed playing the role of statesman. He warned the United States not to intervene and threatened to shut down the country in protest of the world embargo put into place after the coup. He called for the dissolution of Haiti’s parliament, echoing Jojo, who had earlier warned that, if it didn’t disband, FRAPH would call on the people to “tie up the deputies.” As Constant put it, “A leader has to know how to play with the army, the power, and the people.”

As he cultivated the press, Constant also courted Haiti’s houngans, or voodoo priests, a potent psychological force. He portrayed himself as an embodiment of the most ferocious spirits. He held public ceremonies in front of the markets or at temples, where his men laid out small skulls. At a typical ceremony, he would lie on the ground, surrounded by skulls and fire. Then, as he rose from the flames, the crowd would chant in Creole, “Toto for President! Without Toto, Haiti can’t have a life.” Though he still carried a.357 Magnum, he insisted that he no longer needed it. “I have the power of voodoo with me,” he said.

GENERAL CONSTANT’S BOY

In Haiti, nearly every leader has a hidden history, a family closet usually filled with the bones of enemies. Constant inherited the secrets, and to some degree the power, of his father. Gerard Emmanuel Constant had been the Army chief of staff under Haiti’s dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier during the nineteen-sixties. A loyal soldier, he once famously rose from his bed in the middle of the night to execute, along with other officers, more than a dozen of his friends at the dictator’s command. He remained a symbol of the old ruling order after it had collapsed.

But shortly after the military coup, in September of 1991, as his disciples emerged from the barracks to restore the Duvalier system, the seventy-two-year-old general slipped into a coma and died. All the military leaders and former Duvalier supporters turned out for his funeral. “It was a real phenomenon,” Constant says. “I was inheriting all my father’s protection and power and people. It was a symbolic transference.” In his private papers, Constant went further: “My prominence, some might argue, is destiny… To be the first son of General Gerard Emmanuel Constant is the call to arms for Emmanuel Gerard Constant, myself.”

It was not long before people feared the younger Constant even more than they had feared his father. By the middle of 1994, thousands of Haitians had been slaughtered or had disappeared, and although no one knew for sure how many had been killed by FRAPH itself (most human-rights observers had by then been driven out of the country), the group was universally considered the most brutal of all the right-wing paramilitary outfits. Witnesses, many of them found floating on rafts as they tried to escape to the United States, told international authorities that Constant’s men, in an effort to wipe out opposition, were annihilating the population. Even FRAPH members started to flee in disgust. “When they kill and rape people, we [new members] are forced to sit and watch,” a former recruit told U. S. authorities, according to a declassified document obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights for use in a lawsuit against FRAPH. Later, as part of their initiation, this same man said, the recruits were made to join the assaults.

Though Constant continued to deny the allegations, by 1994 the U.N. had concluded that Constant’s organization was “the only political movement [in Haiti] whose members have been linked to assassinations and rapes.” In the spring of 1994, a secret cable from the office of the American military attaché in Port-au-Prince warned, “All over the country, FRAPH is evolving into a sort of Mafia.” Its members were “gun-carrying crazies,” one cable stated, eager to “use violence against all who oppose it.”

According to witnesses, when a FRAPH member turned up dead in Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, in December of 1993, Constant’s men descended within hours. Carrying machine guns and machetes, they torched a thousand houses in revenge, killing more than a dozen people. The Human Rights Watch/Americas-N.C.H.R. described how “they entered the neighborhood, looked for specific persons and shot them on sight, doused the precarious one-room shacks with gasoline, set them alight… Firefighters were turned back by armed men… [who] nailed doors shut, imprisoning people in their homes.”

Constant, who some witnesses claimed was at the scene, denied FRAPH’S involvement. “If I was going to really react, there would be no more Cité,” he later said. But by the autumn of 1994 he was no longer merely the head of FRAPH; he had become, in the eyes of most Haitians, the embodiment of the regime: the voodoo lord of death, Baron Samedi, himself.

A MYSTERIOUS ESCAPE

In July of 1992, Brian Latell, the leading C.I.A. analyst for Latin America, visited Haiti to gather intelligence as policymakers in Washington tried to assess military rule in Haiti. Afterward, in a report later obtained by the press, he wrote, “I do not wish to minimize the role the military plays in intimidating and occasionally terrorizing real and suspected opponents, but my experiences confirm the [intelligence] community’s view that there is no systematic or frequent lethal violence aimed at civilians.”

Playing down the bloodshed (Latell called the head of the junta, Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, “a conscientious military leader”), the report conflicted with those coming from human-rights organizations, the press, and even the State Department. But, along with subsequent C.I.A. reports, it had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy and on the decision of whether to launch a military invasion to restore the exiled Aristide to power. Whereas President Bill Clinton was pushing for such a move, many in the C.I.A., along with elements in the Pentagon, feared that Aristide was a dangerous populist. In fact, Aristide was a problematic figure. (He had once suggested necklacing his enemies with burning tires.) But a crucial C.I.A. report, which was circulated on Capitol Hill just after the Harlan County incident, seemed to exaggerate his instability, claiming that he was so unbalanced psychologically that he had once had to be hospitalized. The charge later proved to be false, but at the time it fuelled American opposition to an invasion and contributed to the ongoing vacillation in Washington. “There were factions in the process who didn’t want to get involved in Haiti and could use these intelligence reports to strengthen their position,” a former Clinton Administration official says.

The evidence of “systemic” and “frequent lethal violence aimed at civilians,” however, was overwhelming. And in September of 1994, three years after the coup and almost a year after the Harlan County’s retreat, President Clinton finally ordered a full-scale invasion to end what he called the “reign of terror.” “We now know that there have been… over three thousand political murders,” he said. In preparation for battle, Constant changed FRAPH’S name to the Armed Revolutionary Front of the Haitian People and, according to news accounts, stockpiled weapons and “secret” powders that, he declared, would be able to “contaminate water so that the GIs will die.” He claimed that one of these powders had been ground from the bones of AIDSvictims. Appearing in camouflage pants and a black T-shirt, a machine gun at his side, he no longer gave any hint of the diplomat. “Each FRAPH man,” Constant said, “must put down one American soldier.”

But before war broke out the junta, faced with the might of the United States, agreed to relinquish power. Thousands of U.S. soldiers easily seized the island. Surprisingly, FRAPH was allowed to remain an active force. When asked why, U.S. soldiers said they had been told by their superior officers that FRAPH was a legitimate opposition party, like Republicans and Democrats. U.S. soldiers even stood by, insisting they were not a local police force, while FRAPH members beat back civilians who had spilled onto the streets expecting liberation. It was only after random bands of FRAPH members mowed down a crowd of Haitians and shot and wounded an American photographer, and a radio conversation was intercepted in which Constant and his men threatened to “break out weapons” and “begin an all-out war against the foreigners,” that U.S. forces reversed their stance. On October 3rd, they stormed FRAPH headquarters. A jubilant crowd gathered outside, cheering them on. Inside, amid piles of nail-embedded sticks, Molotov cocktails, and trophy photos of mutilated corpses, soldiers surrounded more than two dozen FRAPH members. They bound their hands and gagged them, while the crowd shouted, “Let them die! Let them die!” As the soldiers departed with their FRAPH prisoners, the crowd rushed inside, smashing the headquarters.

Back at his father’s mansion, Constant listened to a police scanner, waiting for the soldiers to seize him. His wife and four children had already fled. At one point, he yelled at a journalist, “Everybody who is reporting the situation bad… by the grace of God, they will wind up in the ground!” But though other FRAPH members were taken into custody Constant remained free. The U.S. Embassy spokesman, Stanley Schrager, whose assassination Constant had called for only two days before, even arranged a press conference for him outside the Presidential Palace. News footage shows Constant standing under the glaring sun, sweating in a jacket and tie. “The only solution for Haiti now is the reality of the return of Aristide,” he said. “Put down your stones, put down your tires, no more violence.” As he spoke, hundreds of angry Haitians pushed against a barricade of U.S. soldiers, shouting, “Assassin!” “Dog!” “Murderer!”

“If I find myself in disagreement with President Aristide,” Constant pressed on, his voice now cracking, “I pledge to work as a member of loyal opposition within the framework of a legal democracy.”

“Handcuff him!” people yelled from the crowd. “Tie him up! Cut his balls off!”

As the barricade of troops gave way, U.S. soldiers rushed Constant into a car, while hundreds of jeering Haitians chased after it, spitting and beating on the windows. At the time, U. S. authorities insisted to reporters that the speech was meant to foster “reconciliation,” but a senior official told me later that it had been a disaster: “Here we were protecting him from the Haitians when we were supposed to be protecting the Haitians from him.”

Throughout the occupation, ensconced in his house, where, he says, U.S. soldiers routinely came by to check on his safety, Constant tried to reinvent his past. “We’re the ones who kept this country secure for a year,” he told reporters, adding, “Aristide needs an opposition, and… I am the only organization right now that… can allow us to say there is a democracy.” But the incoming government took a different view-and within a few months Constant was ordered to appear before a magistrate investigating charges of torture and attempted murder against him. On the day of the hearing, people saying they were victims waited for Constant outside the courtroom. He never appeared. Later, he told me that on Christmas Eve of 1994, with a small suitcase and what money he could stuff into his pockets, he had crossed the border on foot into the Dominican Republic, made his way to the airport, and then, using a valid visitor’s visa that he had obtained before the coup, caught a plane to Puerto Rico. From there, he flew to the mainland United States without incident, ending up days later on the streets of New York City.

He managed to transmit a radio broadcast to his followers back home. “As for you FRAPH members,” he said, “close ranks, remain mobilized.” He went on, “FRAPH people, where are you? FRAPH is you. FRAPH is me.” The Haitian government demanded that the United States do something. Finally, in March, 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, saying, “Nothing short of Mr. Constant’s removal from the United States can protect our foreign policy interests in Haiti.”

Two months later, saying that Constant had been allowed to enter the country owing to a “bureaucratic error,” I.N.S. officials surrounded him in Queens as he went to buy a pack of cigarettes. They forced him to the ground and frisked him. He was taken to Wicomico County Detention Center, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; in September, a judge ordered his deportation to Haiti. As he waited for the outcome of his appeal, he wrote letters to world leaders, including Nelson Mandela. (“I could not hope to fill one of your footprints, yet here am I writing to one of the few men in all the world that could understand my situation, being in a white man’s jail.”) He grew a beard, and read Malcolm X and Che Guevara. “I am… a political prisoner,” he wrote in a letter to Warren Christopher. At one point, he was placed on a suicide watch.

Then, in December of 1995, as the I.N.S. inched closer to deporting him, Constant decided to play the only card he had left. He threatened to divulge details of U.S. covert operations in Haiti, which he said he had learned about while secretly working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

THE PERFECT RECRUIT

The story Constant tells begins around Christmastime, 1991. It was shortly after the coup, and he was working at Haiti’s military headquarters when Colonel Pat Collins, the U.S. military attaché at the Embassy, phoned and asked him to lunch. “Let’s meet at the Holiday Inn,” Collins said.

Collins, who, a government spokesman confirmed, was working for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, could not be reached for comment. But an associate says he was known to show up often at Haitian military headquarters. Constant says Collins was there on the night of the coup. And Lynn Garrison, a Canadian who served as a strategist and an adviser to the junta, told me that Collins was present in the days that followed, conferring with the new regime.

At the Holiday Inn, Constant says, he and Collins sat by a window overlooking the pool. Many people, Collins said, were impressed by Constant’s background and suggested that Constant might play an important role in the power vacuum left by Aristide’s ouster.

Constant was a tempting choice for recruitment by U.S. intelligence. He spoke impeccable English, knew his way around the military, and, as one of the new regime’s top advisers, occupied an office right next to that of the junta’s head, Raoul Cedras. Since the coup, Constant had taught a course on the dangers of Aristide’s liberation theology at the training site for the National Intelligence Service (S.I.N.). The service, according to the New York Times, had been created, funded, trained, and equipped by the C.I.A., starting in 1986, to combat drug trafficking, but it had quickly become an instrument of terror (and even, according to some U.S. officials, a source of drugs).

Constant says that Collins told him, in this first meeting, that he wanted him to meet someone else at Collins’s home. “I’m not going alone,” Constant remembers saying, only half joking. “I’m going to come with a witness.” He says that he and an associate drove to Collins’s residence that night. Although the streets were pitch-black, owing to a fuel shortage, Collins’s house was completely lit up. Constant says they went upstairs, into a small antechamber next to the master bedroom, where a man with dark hair was waiting. He had on a short-sleeved shirt, and Constant noted his muscles. “I’m Donald Terry,” the man said.

Constant says that, as they sat drinking cocktails, Terry began to pepper him with questions about the stability of the current military regime, and pulled out a booklet-“a roster”-containing the names and backgrounds of officers in the Haitian armed forces. He and Collins asked Constant who were the most effective.

A few days later, Constant says, Terry asked to meet again, this time alone at the Kinam Hotel. “Why don’t you join the team?” Terry asked.

“What’s the team?”

“A group of people working for the benefit of Haiti.”

It was then, Constant says, that Terry divulged that he was an agent of the C.I.A.

The U. S. government will not comment on any questions regarding Donald Terry, and Terry himself could not be reached. But the C.I.A. had been deeply involved with the Haitian military and the country’s politics for decades. Constant remembers that, in the nineteen-sixties, his father served as an informal adviser to an agent who used to stop by for conferences on their porch. According to press reports, the agency, after starting S.I.N., had planned to finance various political candidates in the 1987 Presidential elections, until the Senate Intelligence Committee vetoed the plan.

Constant says that eventually he agreed to serve as a conduit between the Haitian military regime and U.S. intelligence. He says he was then given the code name Gamal, after Egypt’s former nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he admired, and a two-way radio, with which he checked in regularly.

It is impossible to confirm all the details in Constant’s account. A C.I.A. spokesman stated that it was “not our policy” to confirm or deny relationships with any individuals. But there is little doubt that Constant was a paid informant. After Allan Nairn first reported Constant’s connection to the intelligence community, in The Nation in October of 1994, several officials acknowledged it to reporters, and many have confirmed it to me. What has been a mystery is the nature of the relationship: just how big an asset was Constant? U.S. authorities have maintained that he was nothing more than a two-bit snitch. But interviews with several people connected to the intelligence community, coupled with Constant’s own version of events, suggest that from the beginning he was a generous font of information, and later, according to at least some, a full-fledged operative. After the coup, he helped run a little-known operation called the Bureau of Information and Coordination (BIC), which collected various kinds of data: the number of deaths and arrests in Haiti, the number of adherents of liberation theology, and so forth. Constant says the data collection was for the purposes of economic development, but it clearly had another purpose: military intelligence.

According to Constant, and to a non-Haitian connected to the intelligence community, Constant and another BIC member were the first to enter one of Aristide’s private quarters, where they found a hoard of secret documents. Some of these ended up in the hands of U.S. intelligence officers, who in turn provided the documentation for controversial reports claiming that Aristide was mentally unbalanced, contributing to the voices against him in the United States.

A former senior C.I.A. official justified using an informant who was as potentially problematic as Constant thus: “You can’t help these bad guys accomplish stuff, but you got to give ’em money to find out what’s happening in groups like that. And if you’re going to recruit in a terrorist group like FRAPH, you’re not going to get any functional equivalent… [of] a Western democrat… To find out what’s going on, you rather rapidly end up in the same position as the F.B.I. with the Mafia-recruiting and paying money and even granting freedom to lower-level folks, even some high-level folks.”

Another former high-ranking government intelligence official put it more bluntly: “Look, we could have gone to the nuns [in Haiti] and asked them [to give us information]. But I’m sorry-the nuns are nice people, but what they know about terrorism is nothing.” This same official observed that Constant was “one of a whole range of people we had relationships with, all with the knowledge of the Administration.” He said he believed that Constant stood somewhere “on the spectrum of the relationship, from someone who talked to you occasionally to tell you things he wanted you to know to someone who was a wholly owned, salaried subsidiary, who provided information even to the detriment of his cause.”

Constant says that by the time he officially created FRAPH, in 1993, he had been assigned another handler, John Kambourian, who would drive with him through the mountains of Petionville, exchanging information. When I reached Kambourian by telephone and asked him about Constant, he told me to speak to Public Affairs at the State Department and hung up. It remains unclear how involved U.S. intelligence officers were, if at all, in the actual formation and evolution of FRAPH. A C.I.A. spokesman stated for the record that the “CIA. had no role in creating, funding, or guiding the FRAPH organization.”

But Lynn Garrison recalls that when Constant was trying to start a secret police force, even before FRAPH, Collins told Garrison directly, “Let’s let it play out and see where it takes us.” A U.S. government official involved with Haiti during the military regime goes even further, saying it was common knowledge in intelligence circles that Collins was involved with FRAPH long before it became an official organization (by which time Collins had left the country). “If he didn’t found FRAPH, he was at least very, very close to it,” this official told me. Trying to explain why the C.I.A. or the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) might form such an alliance, this official added, “People are always looking for counterbalance, and at that point Aristide was not in power. I’m not excusing it, but they didn’t quite know what FRAPH was going to become.”

Despite the existence, at the time, of internal State Department documents portraying the organization’s members as thugs and assassins, Constant says that his handlers never asked him about FRAPH’S alleged rapes and murders. What’s more, he says, the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. encouraged him to help derail Aristide’s return and even knew beforehand about his demonstrations against the Harlan County, which helped to delay the invasion for nearly a year. A C.I.A. spokesman denied to me that the agency pushed its own foreign-policy goals in Haiti, but Lawrence Pezzullo, the U.S. envoy to Haiti at the time, along with other U.S. officials, publicly accused the C.I.A. of exaggerating the threat of the Harlan County, thereby derailing Aristide’s return and, in essence, pursuing its own agenda. Constant told me, “If I’m guilty of all these things they say, then they are guilty of them, too.”

THE BREAKUP

Toto Constant’s relationship with U.S. intelligence, according to both Constant and several C.I.A. officials, continued undisturbed until the spring of 1994. It was then, Constant says, that Kambourian called and said they had to meet. He told Constant to bring the radio. “I’m sorry,” Constant remembers Kambourian saying, “but we can’t see you anymore.”

“Why?” Constant asked.

Kambourian said that, in the wake of the Harlan County incident and Constant’s rhetoric against the President, Washington wanted to sever its ties.

U. S. officials say that intelligence contacts with Constant were more or less cut at this point. Cooperation between FRAPH and the U.S. military was eventually curbed as well, and in October of 1994 American forces stormed FRAPH headquarters. Afraid for his life, Constant went to meet Lieutenant General Henry Shelton, who was in charge of the occupation. Constant recalls, “I told Shelton straight out, ‘I’m a son of a general, and I inherited his honor and dignity, and that’s why I’m here to ask what the rules of engagement are, because I don’t understand them.’”

According to a transcript of an oral history that General Shelton recorded during the invasion, Shelton had no desire to meet with Constant. But Shelton and Major General David Meade decided to see if they could get from him what they wanted: first, that he provide a complete list of FRAPH members and the location of their weapons caches; second, that he call each one of his key thugs and tell them to surrender their arms; and, third, that he publicly accept Aristide’s return and transform FRAPH into a peaceful political party.

“We were using a little bit of psychological warfare on Constant,” Shelton, in his oral history, disclosed. “I sent Meade in first. Meade was to go in and tell [Constant] that he was getting ready to meet the big guy… I gave Meade about twenty or thirty minutes to set the conditions, and then I arrived and my security guy, the SEAL,entered the room… rattling the doors and kicking on doors to make sure the place was secure before I came in, as they always did. But Constant saw all this, and it was kind of like seeing a meeting with the Godfather being set up… and so he got very nervous at that time, and his eyes got very big.” It was then, Shelton said, that Meade walked out and he walked in. “[Constant] immediately stood up and smiled and stuck out his hand, at which time I just said to myself, ‘Remember two things-force and death they understand.’ So I looked at him and I said, ‘Sit down!’ and he immediately sat down, and the smile left his face… and I said to him, ‘I understand that you have agreed to all the conditions that we have set for you to keep us from hunting you down and members of your organization.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, I have no problem with any of that.’ And then he started, ‘But Haiti is… ’ And he started into his role about the history of Haiti and how important the FRAPH is. I let him get about ten seconds into that, and I cut him off and told him very curtly that I was not interested in hearing any of that right now.”

The next day, Constant gave the speech accepting Aristide’s return and casting himself as the new leader of the democratic opposition. According to a highly placed U. S. official, the speech was outlined by Constant’s old C.I.A. contact, Kambourian, and handed over to the U.S. Embassy, which in turn dictated it to Constant, who apparently accepted it without his usual bravado. “He could have been imprisoned,” the official told me, “but the judgment was made that as long as we could get out of him what we wanted it would be O.K. for him to walk around.”

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.”

HOW TOTO GOT SPRUNG

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.”

A “TELL-ALL AUTOBIOGRAPHY”

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.”

Now, as I started to ask him more questions, he took a tape recorder from his pocket and said that he was working on a book about his life. “I went to take a class about self-publishing your book, and one of the things the guy told me was if you’re talking about your past, then record yourself,” he said. I thought he wanted to make sure I quoted him correctly, but a moment later he handed me a book proposal: “This proposal offers a ‘hot’ new ‘tell all’ exposé on Emmanuel ‘TOTO’ Constant code name ‘GAMAL,’ and FRAPH… The market analysis suggests that with at least 2 million Haitians in the U.S. and at least 50,000 others in the U.S. who have interest in Haiti… this book could easily sell over 1 million copies.” The book was tentatively titled “Echoes of Silence.” He had drawn up a dummy book jacket that said:

Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, notorious leader of FRAPH… and alleged murderer, rapist, and terrorist thug, breaks the yoke of silence. Speaking from his heart, he exposes the real man behind the villainous images. Interesting, provocative, informative and sensitive, “Echoes of Silence” candidly portrays the complexities of life in Haiti, where nothing is simple. It might lead one to conclude: The political frenzy in Haiti, as addictive and dangerous as any narcotic, keeps the masses alive mentally and emotionally even while it kills.

This was Constant’s latest attempt to earn a living. Since his release from prison, he had tried all sorts of ways to set himself up. He had taken computer classes. He had sold used cars. But, each time he had found employment, the other Haitian immigrants in the community had risen up and driven him from his job. “The worst time is when they came in front of the real-estate office… because I really had a good situation,” he said.

Since that day, he had become what he called an “investment consultant,” which seemed to mean selling and renting properties as covertly as possible. Whenever I was with him, his cell phone would ring with a prospective client. Once, I listened to him raise and lower his voice like an auctioneer: “Hello. Oui. Oui… I saw the apartment… They were asking one thousand one hundred dollars, and I’ll bring it down to a thousand… Everything is included… O.K.?… It’s Cambria Heights, very nice neighborhood, very quiet, very, very safe… I’m working very hard for you.”

His wife had moved to Canada with their four children out of fear for their safety. “My wife is leaving me,” he told me at one point. “We’re having discussions about the kids. I wanted them to come the way they used to, and she doesn’t want them to. So we’re having an argument, but everything will be O.K.”

After a while, his phone rang, and I asked if I could look around the place. “No problem,” he said.

I headed upstairs, past several cracked walls and closed doors. Constant’s room was on the third floor. It was small and cluttered with videos and men’s fashion magazines. By his bed was a framed picture of him from his appearance on “60 Minutes.” In one corner was a small shrine. Candles and figurines of Catholic saints, which often play a role in voodoo, were arranged in a neat circle.

As I bent down to inspect them, Constant called out my name. One of the statues was the patron saint of justice; on its base was inscribed, “Be ever mindful of this great favor and I will never cease to honor thee as my special and powerful patron.”

Constant called my name again, and I hurried downstairs. “Let’s go out,” he said, putting on a leather jacket.

As we walked through Laurelton, the sound of compas, Haitian dance music, blared from grocery stores. We passed several men smoking in the cold, chatting in Creole. “I need some meat,” Constant said, heading toward a butcher shop.

The store was packed, and we could barely fit inside. A small circle of Haitians were playing cards in the back. As Constant pressed up against the counter, I realized that everyone was staring at him. “I need some goat,” he said, breaking the sudden silence. He pointed at some enormous hind legs hanging from a meat hook. He glanced at the back, where several people seemed to be saying something about him, but he appeared unfazed. The butcher began to cut through the bone and gristle of a goat leg. His thick arm pushed down, slicing in clean strokes. “Everybody here knows who I am,” Constant said on the way out. “Everybody. They’ve all read about me or seen my picture.”

He darted across the street to a barbershop. A “Closed” sign hung on the door, but we could see the barber inside, and Constant banged on the window, pleading with him to take one more customer. “There’s another barbershop down the street,” he told me, “but if I went there they’d slit my… ” His voice trailed off as he drew his fingers across his throat and let out a strange laugh.

A COURTHOUSE IN HAITI

The trial was more than a thousand miles away from New York. On September 29, 2000, a Haitian court began trying Constant on charges of murder, attempted murder, and being an accomplice to murder and torture-charging him, in effect, with the Raboteau massacre. I went there with J. D. Larosiliere a few weeks later, as the trial was reaching its climax. Twenty-two people-mostly soldiers and FRAPH paramilitaries-were being prosecuted in person. Constant and the leaders of the junta were being tried in absentia.

Although the U. S. invasion had stemmed the bloodshed, the country remained in shambles. Eighty per cent of the people were unemployed, and two-thirds were malnourished. Gangs roamed the streets. Drug-running planes took off and landed with impunity. Even the heralded new democratic system was believed to be rife with fraud. Aristide, after having put a protégé in power, was running for the Presidency again amid allegations that he was trying to pack the parliament with his supporters. Political thuggery and assassination, this time from both the right and the left, were beginning to occur again. “Now everyone knows I was right,” Constant told me later. “Everyone has seen what has happened under Aristide.”

The trial itself was a potential flash point for violence. The U.S. Embassy warned Americans to stay away from the area for fear of “large scale demonstrations, tire burnings, rock throwing and worse.” As our plane landed, Larosiliere told me that he had been warned about potential assassination attempts. “If they attack me, it will only help me prove my case,” he said. “If I’m not safe, then how can my client be safe?”

At the airport, we met a muscular man with mirrored sunglasses and a military bearing, who would serve as Larosiliere’s “attaché.” “You cannot depend on the police to have security,” the attaché told me. “So you need to be armed to protect yourself.” The attaché pushed our way through a crowd of taxi-drivers, bag handlers, beggars, and pickpockets. I smelled flesh and sweat and food, and as we rushed to the car I tried to deflect the arms outstretched to help me with my things. “Welcome to Haiti,” Larosiliere said.

The city of Gonaïves, where the courthouse was situated, is only seventy miles from Port-au-Prince, but, because nearly all the roads in Haiti are unpaved, it took us half a day to get there. The courthouse was in the center of the city, surrounded by tractor-trailers-a makeshift barricade to prevent mobs from rushing in. We entered a small, squat building, where armed guards searched us for weapons; the attaché told me he had left his gun behind, but he stayed close to Larosiliere’s side. We passed through one room and then another; finally, to my surprise, we headed into an open courtyard, where the trial was being held under a billowing white canopy. The judge sat at a table, wearing a black robe and a tall hat with a white band. He had a bell in place of a gavel. The twenty-two accused sat nearby, behind a cordon of armed guards. Larosiliere joined the other defense lawyers, and the attaché and I found a place in the back with the scores of observers and alleged victims.

I had barely sat down when a lawyer for the prosecution began to scream at Larosiliere, jabbing his hand in the air and demanding that Larosiliere tell the court who he was and why he was there. The attaché, who had been at my side, was on his feet before Larosiliere answered. The crowd filled with murmurs: “Toto Constant! Toto Constant!” People looked around as if Constant might be under the canopy. The lawyer began to bark again at Larosiliere; the attaché now stood by Larosiliere’s side, his arms crossed on his chest.

Most of the alleged victims had already testified that on April 22, 1994, soldiers and FRAPH members had descended on the village of Raboteau, known for its staunch support of Aristide. They described being driven from their homes, forced into open sewers, robbed, and tortured. In past attacks, the villagers had fled to the sea, where their fishing boats were tied up. But when they did so this time, they said, the attackers were waiting for them in boats and opened fire. “I climbed aboard my boat,” one of the villagers, Henri-Claude Elisme, said in a sworn deposition. “I saw Claude Jean… fall under the soldiers’ bullets.” Abdel Saint Louis, a thirty-two-year-old sailor, said, “I fled… into a boat… I then saw Youfou, a FRAPH member, piloting a group of soldiers. They fired in my direction. I called for help. They arrested me, beat me, and forced me to guide the boat. Seeing other people in a boat, the soldiers fired in their direction and hit two girls: Rosiane and Deborah.”

By the end of the assault, according to the prosecution witnesses, dozens of people were wounded and at least six were dead; the prosecution estimated that the actual toll was much higher. Most of the bodies had allegedly been buried in shallow graves along the sea and washed away. “When I went down to the shore, I saw [my brother’s] boat covered in blood,” Celony Seraphin testified. “I only found him on April 28… tied up with Charité Cadet; both had been murdered. I was not authorized to remove the body… I demand justice for my brother.”

The testimony occasionally elicited angry shouts from the spectators, and the judge would ring his bell, trying to quiet the courtyard. That afternoon, Karen Burns, a forensic anthropologist from the United States, was sworn in. A Canadian expert on DNA was scheduled to follow her. It would be the first time that forensic evidence and genetic evidence were introduced in a Haitian court, and the courtyard fell silent. Burns stood in the center of the gathering, surrounded by the skeletal remains of three people, excavated from the edge of the sea in Raboteau in 1995. As she spoke, spectators and jurors craned their necks to look at the bones. Burns held up one and said, “This is the pelvis right here.” She put it down and picked up another bone. “This individual was found with a rope tied around his neck, and this is the rope that was retrieved.” As she held up the rope, there were several gasps.

Larosiliere-who, like his client, maintains that the massacre was fabricated as propaganda to discredit FRAPH and the military regime-remained unimpressed. “I live for testimony like this,” he told me that night, drinking a glass of rum, as we sat with the attaché at the hotel restaurant. “She did a scientific study on a site with no integrity. Everyone and everybody walked around it. Come on. You know I can go to graveyards and pick up skeletons from anybody and put them down.”

Refilling his glass, Larosiliere said that if there had been any organized military involvement at all no evidence would have been left on the beach. “Those bodies would be put on a truck, and they’d be taken out on the Rue Nationale-”

“You got it,” the attaché agreed.

“-or the highway-”

“At night,” the attaché added.

“-and dumped into-”

“The Source Puante,” the attaché said.

“Sulfur ditches,” Larosiliere explained. “The best place, because the sulfur eats the body.”

As he spoke, several international human-rights observers sat down next to us, and soon one of them began to argue with Larosiliere about Constant. Larosiliere said, “If for one instant, sir, I believed that Haiti could sustain a true trial for my client, I’d be the first one to throw him on the plane.”

Later, Brian Concannon, an American human-rights lawyer who had spent most of the previous five years in Haiti spearheading the trial, told me that the trial was extraordinarily fair by any standard. Indeed, he said, it had become a kind of prototype for the judicial system in Haiti. Perhaps most important, despite Constant’s fears that he would be killed, not a single defendant so far had been harmed in prison or in a courtroom. “The defendants were given the benefit of all their rights under Haitian law and under international treaties to which Haiti is a party,” Concannon said. “They were allowed to present witnesses, alibis, and exculpatory evidence.”

As for Constant, Concannon said, the case was based on the same legal precedent used to prosecute Nazi leaders after the Second World War and, more recently, war criminals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. “Constant started an organization that was specifically designed to [carry out]-and in fact carried out-massive violations of human rights,” he said. “He was in charge of a criminal organization and is responsible for the crimes of that organization.”

On the second day of our visit, Larosiliere decided to stage a protest.

In the middle of the proceedings, he rose from his chair and stood stiffly in the courtroom. The trial came to a halt, and everyone stared at him. Then he marched out the door, the attaché a few feet behind him. There was an angry chorus of murmurs. A prosecution lawyer denounced the move as merely a ruse, a sign that Constant’s lawyer had intended from the outset not to use the tribunal for justice but only to discredit it. (“My understanding of an adequate murder defense is that you spend more than a few hours at the trial,” Concannon told me. “We’ve 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 Haïti Progrès, 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 would be a hostage in Queens for the rest of his life. “If I stand up and make a press conference, and even if I don’t say anything but I just attack Aristide, that’s going to give strength to the opposition down there, that’s going to give strength to the former military, that’s going to give strength to the former FRAPH members, that’s going to give strength to everyone who didn’t have the guts because they didn’t see who would take the lead.”

He had recently received a new spate of death threats, he said. Someone had gotten hold of his cell-phone number and had warned, “I’m going to get you no matter what you do.”

I asked if he was afraid of what might happen if he so brazenly broke his gag order and called a press conference. He said that he wasn’t sure what would happen, but it was his destiny. “I’ve been prepared since young for a mission, and that’s why I’ve stayed alive,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder again, and then he leaned toward me. “I’m either going to be President of Haiti,” he said, “or I’m going to be killed.”

– June, 2001

In July, 2006, Constant met a more mundane and unexpected fate: he was arrested in New York for defrauding lenders of more than a million dollars in an elaborate real-estate scam. This time, none of Constant’s connections could protect him from the law. Tried in New York, he was found guilty and sentenced to up to thirty-seven years in prison. The state’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, said, “Constant will no longer be a menace to our society.”