The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  There is also the mystery of DSK’s missing IMF BlackBerry. Twenty-three minutes after DSK departed the hotel, his phone was still there. But the police did not find it there when they searched the presidential suite. Nor was it found in the corridor, elevator, check-out desk, or lobby. The room was locked at 12:51 p.m. and not reopened until the police arrived later that afternoon. It is reasonable to conclude that some unknown party took the phone between 12:14 and 12:51 p.m.

  Assuming the police search was thorough, and they were specifically looking for the phone, its disappearance presents a locked-room mystery. One possibility is that DSK left it behind in the rush to meet his daughter. That would account for the continued signals from the Sofitel. But if that was the case, the phone would have been found in the room after he departed at 12:26 p.m. We know that the door was locked, because Diallo swiped her key to reopen the suite at 12:26 p.m. Aside from Diallo, the only employees to use their electronic keys to enter the room were the head housekeeper, who entered the suite at 12:38 p.m. along with Diallo, according to her statement, and the head engineer, who entered the suite at 12:45 p.m. and a second time at 12:51 p.m. But none of these employees reported seeing the phone. Nor did the police who then entered the suite.

  The other possibility is that the phone was taken before DSK had left the presidential suite. Since it is a large four-room suite—pantry, dining room, living room, and bedroom—it cannot be ruled out that someone else was in the suite, possibly even before Diallo had entered at 12:06 p.m. That person could have taken the phone from DSK’s briefcase or elsewhere while he was getting dressed, and had it taken somewhere else in the Sofitel. In that case, the phone would continue to send out GPS signals from the hotel—as it did—until it was disabled at 12:51 p.m. The phone has never been found. We don’t know who took it from the room, when it was taken, or why it stopped sending GPS signals at 12:51 p.m.

  Another mystery proceeds from the key records. When analyzed together, the records produce three intriguing possible interventions.

  First, there is a possible intruder in DSK’s suite. DSK arrived at the Sofitel on the evening of May 13. At 7:13 p.m., after checking in, he used his newly issued electronic key to enter the presidential suite on the 28th floor. The suite had been prepared for him earlier in the afternoon, and the maid on duty, O.Y. Fong, had turned down the bed at 5:47 p.m. Then, at 6:13 p.m., just as DSK’s plane was landing at the airport, a person entered the suite using the electronic key belonging to a Sofitel employee named A.C. Chowdhury. The hotel’s personnel records, however, show that Chowdhury was not working that evening. If so, an unknown person used an employee’s ID to gain entry. At 6:54 p.m., there was another unidentified entry by a person using the generic “HK1” key, kept in the housekeeping department. This key does not identify the individual.

  Second, there is the issue of the double entry. A maid cannot clean a hotel room without the cleaning equipment on his or her cart. For that reason, a maid normally takes a cart to the room he or she is about to clean and leaves it parked outside the door of the room while cleaning it. On May 14, however, Diallo did not have her cart when she went to the presidential suite after noon. It will be recalled that she had left it in the room on the other side of the elevator bank, room 2820, where it remained until 12:26 p.m. Yet the key records show that Diallo entered the presidential suite not once but twice within one minute at 12:06 p.m. She entered the first time, according to her account, because a room-service waiter told her that the room was empty. Since the electronic key records do not record seconds, we do not know how much time she spent on her first visit or how much time she spent in the hall afterward.

  The room-service waiter, Syed Haque, who had entered the room only one minute or less before Diallo’s first entry, may possibly have still been in the suite. He told prosecutors that he had entered the suite to remove the breakfast dishes. These dishes were in the dining room at the far end of the suite. Wherever Haque was at 12:06 p.m., Diallo did not remain long after that first entry. It is also possible that she met someone else outside the suite between her first and second visits.

  If she still intended to clean the room, she needed her cart of cleaning equipment. But she did not get that equipment. Instead, she returned to the presidential suite without it again. Whatever reason she had for returning to the room, she did so without the means to clean it.

  Third, there is the issue of the room across the hall, 2820. If the prosecutors had been given the key records on May 14, room 2820 might have been less of a mystery. It was not until late June that the prosecutors learned that Diallo had gone into room 2820, and, by that time, the room had been rented out many times, and it was too late to find evidence. Prosecutors found her concealment of her presence “inexplicable.” In doing so, she prevented the police from searching room 2820. It was not only Diallo who did not provide the authorities with this information about room 2820. The hotel would not identify the registered guest other than to say he was a “French businessman.” There was no key entry between 11:37 a.m. and 12:26 p.m., so, if Diallo was telling the truth to the prosecutors in June that she ran directly to room 2820 after leaving the presidential suite, an unknown person in room 2820 may have opened the door for her at 12:13 p.m. But given Diallo’s conflicting accounts, all that we really know for certain is what the electronic key records disclose: Diallo entered room 2820 three times before the registered guest left and once afterward at 12:26 p.m. We don’t know if anyone else was in the room when she was there, why she left her equipment there before the guest had checked out, or, if her June version is true, how the door was opened at 12:13 a.m. without leaving a swipe record.

  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 key-card 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 fe
llow 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.