The Annals of Unsolved Crime (32 page)

Finally, there is the issue of the time lapse. There was a gap of well over one hour between the time when Diallo had her encounter with DSK and the time that it was reported to the police. She had run out of the presidential suite when, or before, DSK called his daughter at 12:13 p.m. The 911 call by the Sofitel security chief was received at 1:32 p.m., according to the 911 report. This is a seventy-nine minute delay. Part of the gap was due to Diallo not immediately reporting the incident to anyone. First, at 12:26 p.m., as the keycard records show, she briefly went back into the presidential suite but did not stay to clean it. Then, approximately four minutes later, she asked a hypothetical question to another maid, and only when that maid asked whether the hypothetical situation had just happened to Diallo did Diallo state that she had been attacked by the guest in the presidential suite. This allegation was made at 12:30 p.m. But even after her outcry, there was a one-hour delay before the hotel staff reported it to police or attempted to get Diallo any medical attention. As a result, Diallo did not arrive at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital until 3:57 p.m., nearly four hours after the alleged attack.

We know from CCTV videos, phone records, and police reports that members of the hotel staff, including the hotel’s head engineer, a security guard, and the head of housekeeping, were heading up to the 28th floor within ten minutes of her outcry. By 12:37 p.m., according to key records, the head housekeeper and Diallo had reentered the presidential suite. They were joined at 12:45 p.m. by Yearwood and the security guard, and they remained there for approximately five minutes. If Diallo told them the same story she later told police, they knew only that she had been violently attacked by a naked man who came out of the bedroom of the presidential suite at about noon. Since Diallo had not previously seen DSK—she had not been on duty when DSK arrived the previous evening—she could not have known that he, and not an intruder, was the attacker. The
hotel staff, according to prosecutors’ documents, did not show her a photograph of DSK until 2:30 p.m., so, when they first heard her story, they could not rule out the possibility that an intruder had gotten into the suite after DSK had left it and attacked her. If that was true, it was possible that a criminal was still lurking in the hotel and could be a danger to others. That was reason enough to call the police immediately. In addition, they had to consider the well-being of their fellow employee. Diallo said she was dragged across a room and molested. Even if there were no visible injuries, she might require immediate medical attention or trauma counseling. The suite had a phone. Yet, instead of calling for police and medical help, they took Diallo downstairs, through the main lobby, and to a bench in the employees’ entranceway across from the security office. Here, without any privacy or comfort, she waited for fifty minutes before the call was finally made.

During this wait, there was no interruption of communications. The CCTV videos show that both the head engineer and the security guard frequently used their cell phones. Yet no one from the hotel’s human resources department, which deals with employee welfare, was brought down to talk to Diallo. If the hotel staff was waiting for some development, what was it?

One possibility is that Diallo was initially unwilling to file a complaint. Such a theory was suggested by Lanny Davis, the Washington lawyer retained by the Sofitel’s owner, the Accor Group, in an interview on NBC’s
Today Show
in December 2011. Presumably, as the crisis manager for the Sofitel, he had access to its employees. In attempting to explain the weird dance between the security guard and head engineer following the call to the police, Davis said it was possible that the two men were celebrating Diallo’s finally agreeing at 1:30 p.m. “to allow the hotel to call 911.” The implication is that for an hour she had not agreed to such a call. While such a scenario is possible, the prosecutors specifically cited the promptness
of her outcry for help as a factor that made them believe her story. If she had been unwilling to make a complaint for over an hour, it raised the question of what or who changed her mind at 1:30 p.m.

Another possibility is that the hotel staff was awaiting authorization from a higher level before calling 911. After all, DSK was a possible future president of France, and making the 911 call would likely involve the French-owned hotel in a major scandal. The CCTV videos depict the head engineer and security guard almost constantly on their cell phones in the three minutes prior to the 911 call. The cell-phone records also show that Accor’s chief of security in New York called Yearwood at 1:28 p.m. and also sent a text to the hotel manager, who then sped to the hotel on a motor scooter (arriving only seven minutes before the police). A flurry of cell-phone communications preceded the 911 call, and the employees at the hotel could have been influenced by these calls.

Ordinarily, a scandal is not good news for a first-class hotel. It is particularly onerous if it involves the arrival of uniformed police in the lobby, authorities subpoenaing CCTV videos, and the sealing off of VIP rooms with yellow tape as crime scenes. For the security staff, it can also mean many hours of work preparing incident reports and being questioned by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and management. Given such consequences, it is not clear why two hotel employees would engage in the sort of victory dance that would be appropriate after a touchdown in a football game. Yet the security guard and the head engineer at the Sofitel did such a dance following the call to the police. They did not do this dance in the view of others; instead, they went into a loading-dock area, where no one in the security area could see them.

Neither man has offered an explanation for the dance. According to an Accor Group spokesman, they both said their minds were blank on the subject and they could not recall the
dance. So we do not know what made both men suddenly go to a private area and dance at 1:34 p.m. We do know that these two men had been working together throughout that day, as can be seen on the CCTV videos, and that they had many earlier opportunities to high-five each other but didn’t. No significant sports event ended at 1:34 p.m. What did happen at that time was that the 911 dispatcher said she was sending a squad car to the hotel.

The unresolved mystery of what brought about the downfall of the man who seemed likely to become the next president of France has given rise to three main theories. First, there is the theory that DSK himself was the sole author of his disgrace in New York. According to this view, DSK forcibly attempted to rape Diallo and did everything else attributed to him in the dismissed indictment. Whatever delayed her outcry to the police and led her to give false testimony to the grand jury were innocent mistakes. The other anomalies, such as the unidentified semen and saliva stains in the presidential suite, were irrelevant coincidences, as was DSK’s missing phone, the multiple entries in his suite, and the near encounters he had with the head engineer when he arrived and departed from the hotel. Second, there is the theory that DSK was set-up by parties acting on behalf of Sarkozy to derail his presidential bid. According to this view, Diallo was sent into the room because of his known attraction towards woman, and when he took the bait, the trap was sprung. He was thus the victim, albeit a willing one, of a well-orchestrated conspiracy. The third theory was that there was an after-the-fact conspiracy, set in motion only after his sexual encounter with the maid, to shape the incident so that it would lead to his arrest and imprisonment. In this view, DSK had been under surveillance by French intelligence since March to find information that could be used to discredit him. To this end, freelancers, including individuals possibly working at the hotel, were used to track his activities
and to take his phone once he realized it was compromised and arranged to have examined. Then, when the maid voiced a complaint against DSK after he checked out, the operatives helped her articulate an incriminating story and convinced her to go to the police. Once that had been accomplished, the after-the-fact conspirators provided information about DSK that led prosecutors to argue against bail, which irreparably destroyed his candidacy.

After reviewing the evidence and speaking to DSK and some of the prosecutors, my assessment is that the court acted correctly in dismissing all the charges against DSK. While DSK might have acted crudely and reprehensively, I do not believe that there is any credible evidence that he committed a crime at the Sofitel Hotel. On the other hand, there was another crime committed that day: an after-the-fact conspiracy to shape and alter the event so as to destroy DSK’s career. As the prosecutors themselves established, DSK’s humiliating imprisonment proceeded from an indictment based on false testimony given under oath to the grand jury by its principal witness, Diallo. That witness concealed important information from the police about her activities. But why? It is clear to me from viewing the CCTV videos that she met with a number of people in the hotel, including potential witnesses, both in the presidential suite and the security area, during the one hour and fifty minutes that elapsed between her leaving DSK’s suite and the arrival of the police. We also know both from her statements and CCTV videos that she engaged in several reenactments of the incidents. While we don’t know what was said, she had an opportunity to modify, if not change, elements of her story to fit in with other considerations during this critical period. The otherwise-inexplicable omissions and untrue parts of her testimony about her movements may have been the result of these considerations. We now know that she initially was reluctant to go to the police. It was only after an hour that she
agreed to making the report that would bring DSK down. The prosecutors could have pursued the issue of when and why she changed her story, since falsely testifying to a grand jury could constitute a felony, but they chose not to go into that potential minefield. Consequently, what influenced her remains part of the mystery.

From my discussions with former CIA and NSA officials, I also have no doubt that French intelligence had the capability to intercept DSK’s communications and monitor his movements in both Washington, D.C., and New York. Further, it is now clear from the work done by French journalists that DSK had been a target of French surveillance at the time. I therefore believe it to be likely that French intelligence learned through its contacts at the hotel before the police were called that DSK had a potential problem. If so, French intelligence could take full advantage of the situation by making sure that it proved an acute embarrassment to DSK and badly damaged his ambitions. And, in my view, French operatives did intervene on both May 14 and May 15.

The riposte to this is that Sarkozy did not need to use the New York incident to derail DSK because he could use a prostitution scandal in France to achieve the same objective. The problem here, however, is the chronology. As early as March 2011, French authorities were tracking DSK’s participation in a series of sex parties with French prostitutes operating out of the Carlton Hotel in Lille. The organizers included three associates of DSK: Jean-Christophe Lagarde, the police commissioner for the Lille region; David Roquet, an executive of the French construction group Eiffage; and Fabrice Paszkowski, the owner of a medical supply company. The fact that DSK, a possible presidential candidate, had attended ten or more of these sex parties with prostitutes, made it a high-profile case when DSK attended the last such party at the W Hotel in Washington, D.C., on May 12. There is no doubt that French
operatives were aware of these liaisons, since bugs had been placed on the phones that DSK and his associates were using. In light of the relations between French intelligence and the Élysées Palace, it seems inconceivable that Sarkozy’s staff did not know about DSK’s attendance at these parties. But attendance in itself did not constitute a crime in France, where it is legal to use the services of prostitutes and to attend sex parties. Moreover, if Sarkozy’s forces revealed the salacious details of these parties in the midst of the run-up to the election, the revelation could backfire by exposing the fact that French intelligence was spying on the head of the IMF. So, up until May 14, 2011, Sarkozy’s forces had potentially compromising spying that they could not safely use. Indeed, they did not get the evidence they sought until September 2011, five months after the Sofitel incident, when the three organizers of the Lille sex parties suggested DSK may have been complicit in procuring women for the parties, a possible criminal offense. As DSK had been rising in the polls that May, and Sarkozy forces could not be certain in which direction the sex-party case would go, the accusation of DSK at the Sofitel of a crime that would be pursued by American authorities presented a way of derailing him before he gained the nomination. And it succeeded. In my view, the true crime in the DSK case was the manipulation of the American justice system.

CHAPTER 33
THE MACDONALD MASSACRE

When military police arrived at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald at 3:50 a.m. on February 17, 1970, they found a bloody massacre. Captain MacDonald, a twenty-seven-year old military doctor, had multiple wounds, including stab wounds in his stomach and chest, and a collapsed lung. His pregnant wife, Colette, twenty-seven, was lying dead in a pool of blood. Their two daughters, Kimberley, six, and Kristen, three, had been beaten and stabbed to death. The word “pig” was scrawled in blood on a wall. There were apparent signs of a struggle, including a table standing on end, magazines strewn around the room, and torn clothing. They also found three possible weapons—a paring knife, an ice pick, and a club. When Macdonald was revived by the military police through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he gave a descriptions of three men and a blond woman who he said broke in and attacked him. He said that the woman wore boots and a floppy wide-brimmed hat, and held a candle.

The gory murder scene itself lent itself to two theories. The first one, based on MacDonald’s story, was that home invaders had broken in and attacked him while he slept on the couch. Such home invasions happened in that era. Just about six months earlier in Los Angeles, the Charles Manson “family” had broken into two homes and murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. They had also written the word “pig” in blood. Since Fort Bragg was an open base, anyone, including
drug-crazed murderers, could have broken into the MacDonald home that night.