Before signing on with the Times, I’d spent twelve years writing travel articles and sports stories. My main source of income, for much of my career, was Skiing magazine. The reception I now received for my Times pieces was overwhelming. The CIA invited me to its headquarters to speak about the situation in Haiti; hundreds of people, including a congressman, wrote letters in response to the Gaza story; I was given a $10,000 Livingston Award for being a “superior” young journalist. I was thirty-two years old, single and energetic and intoxicated by the attention. I agreed to write the slave story, and in June of 2001 I flew to Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast.
Slave practices on the plantations had apparently been ongoing for decades, but the story, as is often the case with news cycles, had just become a hot one. Packs of journalists had descended upon the fertile valleys of the Ivory Coast; I met reporters from France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Mali. The Chicago Sun-Times had already run a long story, as had National Public Radio and Newsweek. A writer for Knight Ridder Newspapers, the second-largest newspaper chain in the United States, had just spent several weeks in the area.
As regularly happens when a number of journalists are chasing the same story, a well-worn path had formed, complete with guides and drivers and translators. You stepped off the plane, made a phone call to a so-called fixer whose number had been passed to you by a colleague, and everything fell into place. The arrangement was symbiotic. Our work was made easier in a challenging part of the world, and for those on the media path we provided an excellent source of income. In the Ivory Coast the path led directly to the town of Daloa, in the heart of the cocoa-growing region, and once there, to a group representing the child slaves—most of whom had come from Mali—called the Malian Association of Daloa.
The association was staffed by Malians who had emigrated to the Ivory Coast, and its chief mission was to investigate and expose the abuses that befell young Malian-born laborers. I found the group’s members extremely helpful. They arranged interviews for me with several teenagers who’d escaped from the cocoa plantations, and these boys told me stories of miserable working conditions, of constant hunger, of brutal beatings.
The young laborers explained how they had been tricked into coming to the Ivory Coast by traffickers promising easy, high-paying jobs. They described how they’d been held captive by the plantation owners and forced to dig holes, plant seeds, and machete weeds under a broiling sun for twelve or more hours a day, six or seven days a week. They related chilling stories about being beaten for no apparent reasons—struck with whips or sticks or bicycle chains. They told me of their harrowing escapes, running through the jungle by night, hiding by day, until they were fortunate enough to find safe harbor with the Malian Association of Daloa.
Officials with the association talked about the prevalence of slavery and called for new child-labor laws in the region and tougher enforcement of existing laws. They told me that the slaves had to either run away from the plantations or work for years before being allowed to leave. Their association, they said, was arranging buses to transport the boys who’d escaped or been released back to their families. They asked for donations to help cover the cost of these bus trips.
It was a tailor-made feature story, an easy winner. A few days after I arrived in Africa, a series of articles with titles like “The Taste of Slavery” began to appear in many Knight Ridder papers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, and the San Jose Mercury News. I read several of them on the internet from my hotel in Abidjan.
The Knight Ridder stories, while not as dramatic as those presented in the British documentary, reported that there were perhaps tens of thousands of child slaves toiling on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast, and that most chocolate bars were therefore tainted with slave labor. According to the articles, some of the slaves were as young as nine years old, and many were routinely and savagely beaten. A boy named Aly Diabate was featured in one of the stories. Diabate said that he was not yet twelve years old when he was tricked into working on a plantation. He said that he had labored for a year and a half and was whipped nearly every day.
The stories were superbly written, peppered with illuminating details and heart-wrenching quotes. They had such a profound impact on a U.S. congressman named Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York, that he read much of the Aly Diabate story on the House floor. (“Aly was barely four feet tall when he was sold into slavery, and he had a hard time carrying the heavy bags of cocoa beans. ‘Some of the bags were taller than me,’ he said. ‘It took two people to put the bag on my head. And when you didn’t hurry, you were beaten…. The beatings were a part of my life.’”) Engel eventually sponsored an amendment to a bill that included $250,000 to develop standards for labeling chocolate as slave-free. It was passed easily by the House. The authors of the Knight Ridder series later won the $10,000 Livingston Award—the same prize I had won the previous year—and also the Polk Award for international reporting, a journalism honor probably second in prestige only to a Pulitzer.
My plan was to write a piece very much like the Knight Ridder ones. But after about a week in the Ivory Coast, I began to sense that the story was not quite what it seemed. There was something unsettling, I felt, about a few of the members of the Malian Association of Daloa. For one thing, I didn’t like the way that some association officials aggressively solicited money. One vice president, Cisse Samba, proudly showed me a two-inch-thick stack of journalists’ business cards and insisted that every one had “contributed” to the association.
In journalism, there’s a hard-and-fast rule about paying people who are quoted or who provide key information: You can’t do it. But the ethics governing the treatment of ancillary helpers such as interview facilitators, cultural liaisons, or city guides are not at all clear. In order to uncover a good story, I’d learned over the years that it was often necessary to present a timely gift, or grease a few palms, or pick up a hefty bar tab. In Haiti, I’d once paid for the rental of an electric generator, a professional DJ, and several cases of beer so that I could entertain some people whose help I needed in researching my article. In Gaza, I made sure to buy all my provisions from a certain shop because I wanted permission to interview the owner’s teenage son.
Soon after I arrived in Daloa, a Malian Association vice president named Diarra Drissa spent several hours introducing me to various interview subjects, then listening in and occasionally aiding my translator as I conducted interviews. When I said good-bye to Drissa at the end of the day, he refused to shake my hand, instead telling me, “Our business is not done.” I was uncomfortable with the situation because I considered Drissa himself a source for my story, but I wanted more introductions, so I gave him a generous tip for that part of the world—$30 in cash, as well as my raincoat, which he’d been eyeing all day.
Later that evening Drissa showed up at my hotel, furious, saying that I had not paid him nearly enough. Other journalists, he insisted, were far more generous. I wasn’t sure whether he was telling the truth, and when I refused to give him further payment, he announced that he would never work with me again, and marched off.
Lying in bed that night, I thought about the incident and replayed, in my mind, the interviews Drissa had organized. Something was off. Even with allowances for language barriers—most of the laborers spoke only Bambara, a main tribal language in Mali—many of the stories the child slaves told me sounded remarkably similar. A level of detail seemed missing. The narrations felt overly rote and unemotional for such disturbing experiences. No matter how I’d phrased the questions, the answers I heard had a faint whiff of falseness about them.
The next day, I worked with a different Malian Association official. He arranged for me to speak with a former cocoa-plantation worker named Adama Malé. The interview took place in the association’s cramped cinder-block office. At one point, Malé began describing a failed escape attempt that had occurred several months before he was finally released by the plantation’s owner.
This is what Malé said to me, as related by my translator: “I tried to escape and I was caught and beaten. When they catch you they take your clothes off and tie your hands.” At this point, Malé stood up from the wooden bench he’d been sitting on and demonstrated, pressing his wrists together in front of him and leaning slightly forward, as though looking for something on the ground. I’d seen the same reenactment from several other boys. “I was hit with a fan belt from a motor. On my back.” I asked him if he bled and he said, “Yes, there was much blood.”
As he said this, I thought about the mosquito bite on my right hand. I’d been bitten days earlier, in the fleshy spot between my thumb and forefinger, and had picked at it until it bled. Though I’d rubbed antibiotic lotion on the spot, it had become infected and was now a yellowish purple mass, inflamed with pus. Such things happen in a tropical environment.
If my insignificant bite, carefully tended, appeared so bad, I could only imagine what a person would look like if his back had been ripped open by a fan belt and he had no access to medical supplies. In the Slavery documentary, one child described what became of such lesions. “After you were beaten,” he said, “your body had cuts and wounds everywhere. Then the flies would infect the wounds, so they’d fill with pus. You had to recover while you worked.”
I asked Malé, politely, if he would mind taking off his shirt. He was wearing a threadbare oxford that had likely been donated by an aid agency. He looked at me with partly hooded eyes—we were both embarrassed—and then, still standing and facing me, he began to unbutton his shirt. He was tall and painfully thin, with beautiful, delicate fingers. When he reached the last button, he pulled his arms through the sleeves and held the shirt balled up in his hands.
I asked him to please turn around. My translator translated, and Malé turned slowly around. I really wasn’t surprised. His back was as smooth as marble. There was not a nick, not a scratch, not so much as the slightest shadow of a scar.
FOUR
THE LONGO FAMILY murders, according to investigators, all probably occurred shortly before dawn on Monday, December 17,2001. There was one possible witness. A man named Dick Hoch had seen someone at the spot where the two older children were dumped. That Monday morning, at about 4:30 A.M., Hoch had been heading to the coast, on his way to work—he removes beach sand that has blown onto people’s driveways—when he saw a reddish minivan stopped on the State Highway 34 bridge just outside the town of Waldport, Oregon. The van was facing east, away from the Pacific Ocean.
Hoch, who contacted the sheriff’s office after he learned of the dead children, said he was concerned that the vehicle was disabled, so he pulled his pickup truck over to assist. There appeared to be a lone white male in the van, Hoch said, though he could not see clearly because the van’s interior lights and headlights were both off. It was a cold morning, a few degrees above freezing, the streets glazed with rain. Hoch asked the man if he needed help, and the man said that he did not—his engine light had flashed on, he explained, and he was just checking it. Hoch drove off, and he watched through his rearview mirror as the van headed across the bridge and down the road.
Christian Longo’s vehicle happened to be a maroon Pontiac Montana van. That Monday afternoon, Longo drove the van to the Fred Meyer department store and worked, according to the store’s records, from 2 P.M. until 11 at night. Tuesday was his day off, and by midmorning he had driven about a hundred miles north, to the Portland outskirts.
In the months before the murders, the Longo family had lived a rather chaotic existence—they’d moved from a rental house to a hotel room to another hotel room to a condo in just the past few weeks. Before that, for a fortnight, they’d lived in a tent, and before that, in an old warehouse. The van was one of the family’s few constants, and its interior was a jumbled collage of their lives. Later, when officers enumerated every item in the vehicle on search-warrant forms, the list required twelve pages. There was a scooter, a miniature car, a stuffed animal, a sippy cup. There were videotapes—Toy Story 2; Time for Counting; Cartoon Crack-Ups—and, installed over the van’s rear seats, a pull-down video monitor. There was camping gear, sunscreen, diet pills, lipstick. There was a children’s book, Zoo Book, and an adult book, a Lisa Scottoline legal thriller entitled, curiously, Running from the Law.
Longo drove his van to the Town & Country Dodge dealership, in the Portland suburb of Wilsonville. He parked in the dealership’s outdoor lot and pulled the license plate out of the metal frame at the rear of his van. The plate, from Michigan, where Longo and his family had lived for several years, read KIDVAN. Longo also grabbed his tool kit, his cell phone, and a folder of personal documents, then entered one of Town & Country’s large indoor showrooms.
Some of the vehicles in the showroom had keys inside them. Many also had legal plates. A salesman approached, but Longo waved him away, saying that he didn’t need any help. The salesman wandered into another showroom. Earlier in his life, Longo had owned a green Dodge Durango, and here in the Town & Country showroom was another green Durango, nearly new. Longo climbed inside. The keys were already in the ignition. It was unbelievably simple. He started the car and drove it over the weight-sensitive trigger on the showroom floor, which activated the automatic garage door. The door opened, and Longo drove out. Nobody saw him.
When employees of Town & Country noticed that the Durango was missing, they figured a customer was merely taking it for a test drive. Not until the following morning—Wednesday, December 19, the same day Zachery Longo’s body was pulled from Lint Slough—did they contact the police.
After stealing the car, Longo drove back down to the waterfront condominium he was renting in Newport. That evening he went to a Christmas party. The gathering was held at an Italian restaurant across Highway 101 from the Fred Meyer department store. It was hosted by the staff of Fred Meyer’s in-store Starbucks, where Longo had worked until his promotion to the home-furnishings section three weeks before. For the party’s gift exchange, Longo brought along an unopened bottle of his wife’s perfume.
The next day, Wednesday, Longo arrived at work on time for the 5 A.M. shift. He informed the home-furnishings manager, Scott Tyler, that his wife and kids had moved away, and that he could now work whatever hours Tyler needed. This was also the day he had lunch with Denise Thompson and told her that MaryJane and the children had gone to Michigan.
Longo worked the same shift, 5 A.M. to 2 P.M., on Thursday. On Friday, he was scheduled for a late shift that started at three in the afternoon. Longo was usually punctual, so when three o’clock passed and he hadn’t come in, his manager tried to call him at home. Nobody answered, and Longo did not show up at all.
The desire to escape Newport, Longo later recounted, had come upon him after work on Thursday, while he was at the gym. He’d just arrived there when the radio station on the gym’s sound system announced that a young boy had been found dead in the water. The station gave the boy’s description and said that he had not been identified. As soon as Longo heard this, he felt nauseous and hurried to the bathroom. He splashed water on his face until he settled down. Then he played volleyball for two hours with a few friends from work.
He didn’t sleep much that night—he stayed in the condominium and drank a couple of beers and eventually dozed on the couch. Early the next morning, Longo packed the stolen Durango with most of his belongings, as well as the television and microwave that came with the condo, and drove out of town. He wasn’t sure where he was going, he later explained, except that it had to be where no one would recognize him. He drove east, toward Interstate 5, and about fifty miles from Newport he realized it was a Friday—payday at the Fred Meyer. He turned around, drove back to Newport, picked up his $230 check, cashed it at the store, and left again.
Longo returned to the interstate. He didn’t know whether to go north, toward Seattle, or south, toward San Francisco. He took the first on-ramp he came to. It was south. The farther he got from Newport, he later said, the better he
felt, so he kept driving, past the Cascade Mountains and the Klamath National Forest and the Sacramento Valley. He drove six hundred miles, then exited the highway in Sacramento. He parked in a residential area and slept in the Durango.
Longo reached San Francisco around noon on Saturday, just about the time that divers found his daughter Sadie at the bottom of Lint Slough. He stopped by a bookstore and bought a guidebook to inexpensive San Francisco hotels and another on local campgrounds. He decided to take a room for two nights, at $22 a night, at the Fort Mason Youth Hostel, adjacent to the Marina District. He hadn’t eaten a full meal in two days, so he walked to a Safeway and purchased bagels, ramen noodles, cheddar cheese, and Triscuits, then ate them in the hostel’s kitchen.
He’d spent nearly half his paycheck on gasoline during the drive down, and he had nothing in the bank. In a matter of days, he’d be out of money. The next morning—Sunday, December 23—he filled out a job application at the Starbucks on Union Street. By this time, Denise Thompson had spoken with sheriff’s officers in Newport and had identified the bodies, and Longo was a murder suspect, pursued by federal authorities.
The Starbucks application he completed in San Francisco was later recovered by the FBI. On it, Longo wrote his name, accurately, as Chris M. Longo and said that his social security number was 315-02-4297, which is correct except for the last digit. He listed as a reference his manager at the Fred Meyer Starbucks. For callbacks, he left his cell-phone number. The manager of the Union Street Starbucks said he’d likely have a job for Longo in a few days.
True Story Page 2
