Once-Feared Haiti Chief Has a Turn Behind Bars

Once considered the most powerful man in Haiti, Michel-Joseph Francois now sits in a prison here, powerless and reliant on his jailers.

“My life depends on them,” said the man who acknowledges that he helped to plot the 1991 coup that ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and then commanded 1,000 police and an unknown number of attaches, or secret police, through three years of military rule.

In those days, when the secret police in Haiti could snuff out a life with no questions asked and an estimated 4,000 people were killed, Lt. Col. Francois was considered even more powerful than Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the leader of the Haitian coup.

Francois had enough power to build a private airstrip and ship 33 tons of Colombian cocaine and heroin to the United States--at least that is what U.S. prosecutors in Miami claim in an indictment that led to his arrest last month.

But Francois maintains his innocence. He also insists that he did not receive millions of dollars in bribes from Colombian drug lords. As proof, he cites what he considers his modest lifestyle in exile, where he runs a carwash in the Dominican Republic and a furniture and appliance store in Honduras to support his family.

“I am a victim of political persecution,” said Francois, whom human rights groups accuse of persecuting thousands of his countrymen. Political persecution, he claimed, also is behind attempts to extradite him to the United States to face cocaine trafficking charges.

Meanwhile, Francois lives in a cell with other foreign prisoners and supplements his prison diet with food he buys. As for prison conditions, he said, shrugging, “It is a jail in a poor country.”

Still, he added, “I regret nothing, because all that I did, I did according to the norms of my country, not according to the norms of the United States.”

Wearing jeans and a pastel plaid sports shirt, Francois, 38, sat in the sunny prison courtyard under the watchful eyes of his lawyer and calmly talked for an hour about the 1991 coup, his conduct as police chief of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, and his three years of exile.

Francois claims that he engineered Aristide’s overthrow because his life was endangered by the priest-turned-president. Soldiers under Francois’ command told him the president had ordered him killed because Aristide wanted to fill the top army jobs with his own loyalists, he said.

“If I had not acted as I did six years ago, I would have died,” he said.

U.S. prosecutors in Miami say that even before the coup, Francois was deeply involved in drug trafficking. In September and October 1987, Francois--then a major--was part of a conspiracy that shipped seven tons of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s cocaine through Haiti to the United States, according to the U.S. indictment. Francois received up to $4 million in protection money for the transshipments “as a representative of the Haitian military,” the indictment states.

By early 1991, then-U.S. Ambassador Alvin Adams warned Aristide that Francois was sending drugs through the Caribbean in ships carrying cement. Aristide around that time told Cedras, his military commander, to fire Francois. That contributed to the conflict that resulted in the coup.

After the coup, Francois became part of the triumvirate that ran Haiti. Besides the police, he also controlled cement and gasoline supplies--commodities that became increasingly scarce and expensive as the international embargo of Haiti tightened.

Because he had access to the scarce cement supplies, Francois was able to use his $500 monthly salary to build his family a chateau in the fashionable Delmas neighborhood, on a hill overlooking the teeming port capital.

“We could live well because we worked hard,” his wife, Bernadette, said. “I worked in the Planning Ministry 11 years, and my husband has always been a hard worker. Besides working, we sold clothing.”

But the Miami indictment says Francois had an additional source of income: He controlled the ports and airports and filled positions there with members of his drug-smuggling ring. In return, he received more than $1 million in payoffs and a Toyota Land Cruiser, prosecutors allege.

During the day, Francois played soccer with his troops. After dark, he toured the city’s nightclubs, often going to hear his favorite singer, Michel Mathely, who shared a nickname with Francois: “Sweet Mickey.”

Francois’ other nickname--the one he used as he gave orders late into the night over a police radio--was “Mapuoou,” the name of a thick tree that is sacred in voodoo. Human rights groups claim that many of those orders were to carry out atrocities, such as the 1993 murder of Antoine Izmery, a businessman who supported Aristide.

In 1995, Francois was convicted in absentia of Izmery’s assassination and was sentenced to 30 years hard labor. But Haiti has not requested his extradition because it has no maximum-security prison and breakouts are common.

Francois says that conviction also is politically motivated. “When Aristide returned to Haiti, he found his people there to support him,” said Francois, referring to the U.S.-backed restoration of democracy in Haiti on Oct. 15, 1994.

Francois was the first member of Haiti’s military triumvirate to bow to U.S. demands that he leave the country in preparation for Aristide’s return. On Sept. 19, 1994, he packed his Land Cruiser and two other cars and headed for the border of the Dominican Republic, the nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

By that time, he had already been named in a 1993 U.S. Senate report and a 1994 U.S. Justice Department memorandum as a target in a cocaine-smuggling case and accused in a 1994 Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing of protecting drug smugglers.

In Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, Francois, his wife and four children went to live with his brother, who gave them a 50% interest in a carwash to settle an old debt. That business provides an income of $500 a month, Francois and his wife said in separate interviews. “From that, I have to pay my children’s schooling and the electricity--everything,” said Bernadette. “I have to think twice about sending them to the doctor.”

To cover the family’s expenses, she sold her car. The Land Cruiser was turned over to a Dominican company to settle a $10,000 debt, she said, showing a copy of the loan papers.

But Dominican sources noted that the Francois children attend the exclusive Lycee Francais and estimate that the family’s house in the upscale Los Rios suburb cost at least $400,000.

Francois said he lived under virtual house arrest in Santo Domingo. Then, last year, authorities accused him of plotting another coup to overthrow the Haitian government and told him to leave. He was offered exile in Honduras a year ago. “I did not choose Honduras, the Dominican government chose Honduras for me,” he said.

Francois then asked for help from a longtime friend in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second-largest city and the commercial center of the north. He made a down payment on a tiny store selling furniture and appliances in downtown San Pedro Sula and rented a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood near the local college.

His wife, who arrived in Honduras for a visit days before his arrest, now minds the shop. It is crowded with stereo equipment, fans and cheap living room sets. Chairs are stacked to the ceiling, and mattresses and pillows nearly fill the loft.

“I am here from 7 in the morning to 6 at night,” she said. Pointing out how her husband labored as proprietor of the business, she said: “A man who is mixed up in drugs does not have to do such hard work.”

As for the future, she said: “I don’t know, I don’t know. We will always have to work.”