CHAPTER 6
BEND THEIR REALITY
One Monday morning in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a call came in to the FBI office from the nephew of a prominent Haitian political figure. He spoke so fast he had to repeat his story three times before I understood. But finally I got the basics: kidnappers had snatched his aunt from her car, and their ransom demand was $150,000.
“Give us the money,” the kidnappers told him, “or your aunt is going to die.”
In the lawless, chaotic wake of the 2004 rebellion that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti surpassed Colombia as the kidnap capital of the Americas. In fact, with between eight and ten people abducted every day in the Caribbean nation of eight million, Haiti earned the dubious honor of having the highest kidnapping rate in the world.
During this onslaught of abductions and death threats, I was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. And I had never seen anything like it. Reports of abductions—increasingly bold, daylight attacks right in Port-au-Prince—seemed to roll into the office hourly: fourteen students abducted on their school bus; American missionary Phillip Snyder shot in an ambush and seized along with a Haitian boy he was taking to Michigan for eye surgery; prominent Haitian politicians and businessmen bundled from their homes in broad daylight. No one was spared.
Most of the abductions went down the same way: ski-mask-clad kidnappers surrounded a house or a car, forced entry with a gun, and snatched a vulnerable victim—usually a woman, child, or elderly person.
Early on, there was the possibility that the kidnappings were driven by politically aligned gangs seeking to destabilize Haiti’s new