The Rise and Fall of Haitian Drug Lord Jacques Ketant
It was supposed to be easy. Edouard Rene Joseph was a combat vet, Desert Storm, so he had trimmed the situation down to simple mission objectives: Get into the country, pick up the kids, leave the country. One day, tops. No big deal. "It's not," he would muse years later, "like you're trying to take prisoners out of Saigon."
Joseph's mother, Claudie Adam, had asked him to go to Haiti to help his sister Sibylle retrieve her children from their estranged father, who was refusing to send them back to Miami after a visit. Joseph couldn't say no. Buried under his burly frame — tall with wide shoulders ending in fists that didn't mind a fight and topped with a friendly face that could deflate quickly into a hard stare — was a devoted son. The 26-year-old tossed aside the law-school exam books he'd been studying and hopped on a plane.
In country on February 10, 1997, Joseph and his sister easily found the 6-year-old boy and 3-year-old girl at school. They grabbed the kids, then headed to the airport for an afternoon flight back to Miami. But before they arrived, Joseph and Sibylle learned from family friends that Haitian police officers were at the gates, ready to seize the children. They considered driving 60 miles, crossing into the Dominican Republic, and flying out from there. But they got word that border police were waiting there too.
Haiti is a small country," Joseph says. "Everyone knows who to call to find out things. And that's what the word was we were getting: There are pictures [of the children] everywhere; there are police officers who had been paid off."
Desperate, Joseph and his sister went to the U.S. embassy. But officials there offered no help, he says. A custody spat had blown up into a national incident, and they were stuck.
This is what happens when an estranged husband is a cocaine trafficker with his hands on the country's levers of power.
Sibylle's husband was Beaudoin "Jacques" Ketant, then 33 years old and responsible for smuggling tens of thousands of kilos of cocaine annually into the United States. A year earlier, Ketant had evaded arrest in New York by slipping onto a Haiti-bound flight disguised as a woman. Now, U.S. authorities were preparing to hit him with an indictment for cocaine trafficking and money laundering. But on his home turf — a country infected like a bad molar with narcotics — Ketant was untouchable, as Joseph was finding out.
Joseph, believing he had done all he could, decided he would return to New York the next day. But that night, before his flight, his phone buzzed with a call that jerked his whole world out of place. His mother had been gunned down in Miami. Joseph's mind darted to his bullying, power-mad brother-in-law.
For nearly 20 years now, the question of who killed Claudie Adam has taken a back seat to Ketant's rise and fall. The trafficker ascended the drug game like a rocket in the 1990s, when Haiti was sandbagged by one corrupt government after another. According to court documents, affidavits, witness testimony, and published reports, the smuggler cut deals with cartels, partnered with military juntas, and got so close to politicians that he was feted at the National Palace. At the height of his power, Ketant was making $13 million a year in illegal drug runs and amassing "Midas-like quantities of material assets," in the words of prosecutors. Although his name won't make it into the country's official history books, Ketant arguably shaped contemporary Haiti as much as any other public figure.
The influence continued after Ketant was taken into U.S. custody in 2004 and sentenced to 27 years in federal prison. The trafficker's second act was as a star witness, tossing dozens of former co-conspirators, including corrupt politicians and policemen, into the open jaws of U.S. prosecutors. Because he cooperated, this April, a federal judge cut Ketant's sentence in half. By the expedient logic of the drug war, Ketant had earned enough points to cancel out his bad acts. He was released from federal prison and is currently in the custody of U.S. Immigration. He is asking to stay in the United States, claiming he will likely be killed if he returns to his home country.
This infuriates Edouard Joseph, whose ears are still ringing with gunshots that tore through his family. He still has questions that need answers — and so do Miami-Dade cold-case investigators, who hint that they are making headway in the investigation into Claudie Adam's murder.
"It doesn't take a genius," Joseph says, "to realize somebody who is responsible for the murder of your mother, them getting out of jail — and not having their head put on a stick — is not something you're happy about."
It was thanks to Pablo Escobar that Haiti secured its place on the underground conveyor belt feeding Colombian cocaine to the United States. As federal court documents describe, in the late 1980s, the infamous, pot-bellied head of Colombia's MedellÃn cartel was casting his eye around the Caribbean looking for a route through which he could pass some product. Escobar then controlled 80 percent of the world cocaine market, and his business was making $60 million a day. He needed a way station with the right mix of political instability, biblical poverty, and bribe-hungry officials.
Haiti then was the hottest geopolitical mess in the hemisphere. François "Papa Doc" DuvalÂier, a doctor and self-described voodoo priest, had served as "President for Life" from 1957 to 1971, during which time 30,000 Haitians were killed and more exiled as the dictator clung to power. His son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, took over at age 19 and lived lavishly while his country spiraled downward; he was ousted in a popular uprising in 1986.
Escobar sent minions into the power vacuum. By 1987, bribed Haitian officials had built and monitored an airstrip outside Port-au-Prince for kilo-loaded planes. The cartel was working directly with Lt. Col. Joseph-Michel François, a career soldier nicknamed "Sweet Micky." In 1987 alone, François safeguarded 70,000 pounds of Escobar's nose candy through Haiti to America. For this, he earned a reported $4 million.
In December 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a charismatic Selesian Catholic priest, rode 67 percent of the vote to the presidency. The new president was seen as a well-intentioned reformist and a possible threat to drug profits. But political stability is the suicide cocktail for a boom-market narco business. Before Aristide could celebrate his one-year anniversary in office, a group of military officials — including François — ousted him from office and put him on a plane to Venezuela in October 1991.
Postcoup, François appointed himself head of the Port-au-Prince police department and installed trusted associates in the top positions at Haiti's ports and the capital's airport, shouldering out any obstacles to the cocaine trade.
François also got a lucrative side game going. Corrupt officials at the Port-au-Prince airport hunted for other traffickers who hadn't paid the junta's toll, then seized the competition's product. To offload these drugs, François tapped a small-time crew of drug smugglers run by Jacques Ketant.
It was a family affair. There are few details in the public record about Ketant's upbringing, but later court files and police reports show the Haitian-raised Ketant stocked his criminal enterprise with brothers, cousins, and brothers-in-law. He also relied heavily on ties forged in the Miami neighborhood called Little Haiti, where many Haitian expats had resettled. These connections gave the drug smuggler a stateside foothold that was likely attractive to François.
According to court testimony, in the late 1980s, two Haiti-born, Miami-raised best friends — nicknamed "Chief" and "New Chief" — had a brainstorm while working security at Miami International Airport. "I noticed how easy it would be to allow couriers with suitcases filled with cocaine to go through," one — "Chief" Evens Gourgue — later explained in a federal courtroom. "It was a very, very simple task. You could imagine it, with a flip of a key, within two or three seconds, you are making $30,000 or $60,000."
The bad-apple civil servants slipped word of their availability into the Little Haiti gossip mill. Pretty soon, they were working with numerous dealers — including Ketant — who moved product from the island into the airport. For $2,000 per kilo, traffickers would be assured that their drug courier could walk off a plane arriving from Port-au-Prince without the hassle of nosy customs agents.
"[The courier] would bring his carry-on bag back to the information counter with the notion that he needed assistance with his forms," Gourgue testified. "As soon as I felt it was clear behind the counter, there were no other Dade County employees, I would simply make a bag switch with him, and that bag would stay within that counter until my shift was over, and I walked out... with the cocaine in the bag, uncontested.
The corrupt officials also began letting drug smugglers pass through "sterile," or off-limits, parts of the airport. "I saw no problem whatsoever in meeting them while they are in transition from the aircraft to immigration and rerouting them through a door which would eventually lead them to the free side of the terminal," Gourgue explained.
With Ketant taking care of shipments in the United States, François made sure the smugglers had a free pass in Haiti. The military strongman's personal bodyguards drove Ketant's drugs to the airport. Ketant and his brother were arrested by Haitian officials in summer 1994, but within 24 hours, he was released by members of the Haitian narcotics squad. The smugglers even used a military radio frequency to communicate. "There would be communications, such as 'the package left,'?" a crew member told a federal court in 1998. They would state "that the package left, the bird left the nest, or the bird arrived, or the package just arrived, depending on whether money was coming in or cocaine was leaving Haiti."
Ketant was a fixture on both ends of the pipeline. He would frequently ride on the same flights as his drug couriers. Between 1992 and March 1995, Ketant entered the United States at least 40 times. In South Florida, he was a regular at hangouts favored by traffickers, including an illegal Little Haiti gambling joint called Neptune's and a club called the Eight Ball. Ketant and his associates leveraged connections to put their drugs in markets from Miami to New York to Chicago. Prosecutors would later determine that Ketant was responsible for bringing 30,000 kilograms of cocaine into the country.
Big speed bumps didn't slow business. Pablo Escobar's 1993 death at the hands of Colombian antidrug forces, Aristide's 1994 return to power, even François' eventual exile to Honduras — Ketant continued through it all. Even in the mid-1990s, when the two chiefs' schemes at the Miami airport came under the scrutiny of officials, Ketant simply retooled, found a bribe-hungry baggage handler at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and began moving couriers through New York City.
But U.S. officials began to eye the Haiti-Miami connection. In January 1992, two suitcases were abandoned on a Haiti Trans-Air flight into Miami. Inside were three kilos of cocaine. The flight itinerary listed a Jacques Ketant on the same flight. In September 1993, customs agents discovered 63 pounds of cocaine at the same airport, again loaded on a flight from Haiti. Inside the luggage was a phone number for the husband of Ketant's sister. In 1995, customs nabbed a Haitian national carrying almost three pounds of cocaine — and Ketant's business card.
