Back at the hostel, Longo checked the news online. He pulled up the web site of the Oregonian and saw a headline about the two bodies found in Lint Slough. Longo clicked on the story, and up came a retouched photo of his son.
Longo fled the hostel, climbed into the Durango, and drove away. He parked the car and, he later said, cried as hard as he’d ever cried in his life. He decided that he couldn’t return to the hostel—he didn’t want to be around people. Instead, he drove to a beach by the Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. He sat in his car, gathering his nerve. His intention was to walk to the center of the bridge and jump off. He sat in the car for hours, envisioning stepping onto the bridge. But he couldn’t do it. He never even got out of the car.
That night, he parked the Durango on a San Francisco side street. He hung towels and shirts over the windows, crawled into the backseat, covered himself with his leather jacket, and tried to sleep. In the morning, he used the bathroom at Golden Gate Park, then drove to the San Francisco Zoo and sat for most of the day in a secluded spot in the Africa section. That evening, Christmas Eve, he parked for the night on a steeply sloped street. He could hear, he later said, the sounds of a Christmas party emanating from an apartment above him—people playing the piano, people singing carols.
On Christmas Day, a Tuesday, Longo left the Durango and began walking. Nearly every place was closed, except a movie theater. He bought a ticket and watched Ali. When it was over, he didn’t want to leave, so he stayed and watched it again. Then he walked some more. A Walgreens drugstore was open, so he went in and wandered aimlessly through the aisles. Then he walked again. At a Chinese restaurant, he ordered a noodle dish to go and walked back to his car and ate it there.
He drove around the city on Wednesday and eventually found himself at a park called Lands End. He followed a trail for a few miles until he reached a set of cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He sat with his feet dangling from the edge and again wanted to end his life. He stood up, backed away a few feet, and then ran to the lip of the cliff, but he couldn’t fling himself off.
The next day—Thursday, December 27—FBI agents got the break they were hoping for. That morning, the manager of the Union Street Starbucks decided to check the reference on Longo’s employment application. The manager called the Newport Fred Meyer, and an employee there, upon hearing Longo’s name, contacted the police. The police notified the FBI. The FBI, with the assistance of Starbucks officials, swiftly devised a sting operation.
In the meantime, Longo had determined that he needed to leave the United States. Wednesday afternoon, the day before the FBI learned of his Starbucks application, he drove to a Kinko’s and used their internet service to book a flight to Cancún, Mexico, leaving late that night and returning a month later. He made the reservation under his own name and paid using a credit-card number from a receipt he’d pocketed several weeks earlier while working the cash register at Fred Meyer.
The FBI’s plan was to apprehend Longo at the Union Street Starbucks. A Starbucks manager left a message on Longo’s voice mail, requesting that he come in for a job interview on Friday, December 28. Though Longo didn’t return the call, that morning, several FBI agents were sprinkled anonymously among the usual crowd. The interview time came, then passed. There was no sign of Longo.
The FBI was too late: Longo had already left the country. After booking the flight, he’d driven to the San Francisco airport. On the way there, he pawned the microwave and TV he’d stolen from the condo in Newport, for which he received $90. At the airport he checked in, without incident, for American Airlines Flight 1048, San Francisco to Dallas. He waited in Dallas, then transferred to the early-morning nonstop to Cancún. He’d traveled to Mexico four times before, all of them with MaryJane and twice with his children. Usually, Longo later said, he was a talkative passenger. This time, he didn’t speak with anyone on either flight.
When Longo failed to show up for his Starbucks interview, the FBI switched tactics. They decided to make the hunt for Longo both a nationwide affair and a public one. Charles Mathews, the chief FBI agent in Oregon, appeared on NBC’s Today show and on CNN’s Live Today to explain the charges against Longo and ask for any information the public could provide. He said that Longo might be driving a green Dodge Durango with a KIDVAN license plate.
Hundreds of tips were phoned in, some from as far afield as Florida and Iowa, with many callers saying that they’d spotted the plate. Nothing, however, was helpful—KIDVAN plates had been registered in at least twenty-five states. Longo’s parents, Joe and Joy Longo, who live in Indiana, issued a statement to the press, pleading for Christian to turn himself in. Longo never heard his parents’ appeal.
On January 6, nine days after the futile Starbucks sting, the Dodge Durango was found. Two San Francisco police officers spotted it in a short-term parking garage at the airport. Inside the vehicle was a laptop computer, a cell phone, a box of Triscuit crackers, some cheddar cheese, two empty bottles of wine, and a KIDVAN
license plate, which he’d never attached to the car.
Over the next few days, Longo was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and profiled on the television show America’s Most Wanted. Longo, who had never previously been accused of a violent crime, was now on the same list as Osama bin Laden. His wanted poster called him “armed and extremely dangerous” and also mentioned that he “has been known to frequent coffee houses.” John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, said this of Longo: “He’s very, very charming. He’s very, very smart. He’s very calculating. He’s really, really good at disappearing.”
A $50,000 reward was offered by the FBI for information leading to Longo’s arrest, but the bureau also announced that Longo had evidently caught a flight to Mexico, to the resort area of Cancún. Spanish-language wanted posters, said the FBI, were currently being circulated across eastern Mexico, but in truth, the agency admitted, nobody really knew where Longo was.
FIVE
AS ADAMA MALÉ stood in the tiny room in the Ivory Coast town of Daloa, his scarless back turned in my direction, a shock of understanding came over me. I am not a natural skeptic. I tend to believe what people tell me, especially if it confirms my expectations. But there was clearly something wrong here. At that moment, I changed my tack—rather than searching for slaves, I was now looking for liars. And then, as if a code had been cracked, everything suddenly made sense.
“Where are your scars?” I asked Malé.
The young man twisted around and faced me. His eyes were still half-lidded and shy. “The scars have disappeared,” he said. He put his shirt back on.
There were a half-dozen other boys hanging around the Malian Association’s compound, sitting in the shade, swatting at flies. Most of these boys had told me that they, too, had been beaten. Some had escaped from plantations only days before. I walked over to them. “Can any of you,” I asked, “show me scars from being beaten?”
No one said they could. “It doesn’t need to be a big scar,” I said. “Just a little one.”
The boys shook their heads. “All the marks have healed,” one explained to me.
Then Adama Malé perked up. “My friend was beaten,” he said. “He has marks.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He’s still on the plantation.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s visit him.”
“When?” said Malé.
“Right now,” I said. I had a rental car and driver at my disposal.
“No,” said Malé. “We can’t. He has left the plantation and gone home.”
Later that day, I had a discussion with a fellow journalist, a Paris-based filmmaker who was gathering footage for a French version of the British documentary. His name was Nils Tavernier. He told me that he’d filmed dozens of interviews and had listened to many anguished tales. I asked Tavernier if the stories had begun to sound repetitive, and he admitted that, in some ways, they had. I told him about Adama Malé, and how his b
ack had no scars. I asked him if he’d filmed anyone who had shown him physical confirmation of being whipped.
The question seemed troubling to Tavernier. He was quiet for a while, perhaps attempting to recall all the scenes he’d shot. I’d been in Africa only a few weeks; he’d been back and forth from France for the past year. His answer was unambiguous. “I have never seen evidence of one person being beaten,” he said.
In the documentary Slavery, there is one boy who has horrible scars across his neck and torso and arms. According to the video, several months had passed since he’d been rescued from a cocoa plantation. This one boy’s scars are pictured, repeatedly, in the film—often accompanied by a sound track of a cracking whip—but no one else’s wounds are shown.
I thought a great deal about this one beaten child. His scars seemed to prove that the injuries to a boy who had been whipped, even months earlier, were horrendous and unmistakable. They did not simply disappear. This strongly implied that the boys from the Malian Association of Daloa were lying to me. Perhaps, I thought, they were being coached to tell such stories. It was possible that this was being done so that journalists would have powerful material. This would entice more journalists to visit. Everyone would be asked for donations, and the stories would generate further contributions. It was an efficient way for the Malian Association to raise money. If this scenario were true, I realized, then the type of abuse the British documentary says is commonplace might in fact be quite rare. It might hardly exist.
I needed to investigate the plantations myself. As a writer for the Times, I was fortunate enough to have a generous expense account and several weeks’ time to secure my story. Most journalists were not so lucky. They worked on tight budgets and tighter deadlines. The cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast are located in the midst of dense jungles that are difficult and expensive to access. It made more sense, time-wise and money-wise, to allow the Malian Association of Daloa to handle logistics.
But I had rented a four-wheel-drive, high-clearance vehicle and had hired an experienced driver. My translator was an expert; his English was perfect. So we drove beyond the broken pavement of Daloa’s city streets and onto the packed-dirt secondary roads, past clusters of mud huts and banana trees and young men who’d killed bushrats with their slingshots and were holding the rodents out, hoping we’d want to buy some meat.
Then we entered the jungle. Here, the route was little more than a wide footpath; the only previous tire tracks had been left by bicycles. The grass grew taller than the car and arched over the path on both sides, nearly forming a natural tunnel. We drove for more than an hour, flattening the grass beneath our wheels. The soil seemed to have been dyed bright red, like a bolt of fabric; termite mounds rose sharply skyward.
Cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast are mostly small and independently owned. There are an estimated six hundred thousand of them, many of which are extremely remote little islands in a vast green sea. We drove the paths until they became too crude to drive upon. Then, to reach the plantations, we started to walk. The plantations are often a mile or two apart, with wilderness in between. My translator and I walked for hours, conducting interviews at each stop. We drove back to Daloa in the evening and returned, via a different route, the next morning. We went back and forth for the better part of a week.
In the British documentary, the president of the Malian Association of Daloa, a middle-aged man named Diabe Dembele, said this: “You’ll find slavery on at least ninety percent of the plantations.” During my walks, I visited more than twenty-five plantations. I tried to arrive unannounced, so that no one would have time to hide anything. I spoke with more than sixty workers who’d been brought to the plantations from neighboring countries. One of them admitted that he was fourteen years old, another said he was sixteen, and all the other workers, except for the children of plantation owners, told me they were at least eighteen.
Not one of the sixty or more workers I spoke with on my walks said that he had been beaten. None appeared ailing or badly injured, though one worker had cut his own foot while swinging a machete and was wearing a dirty bandanna wrapped around the wound. A few workers admitted they were homesick or wished the food tasted better or the labor were not so difficult, but none mentioned that they felt afraid or were planning to run away. Some said they’d heard rumors of beatings, but no one told me that they’d actually seen a worker of any age being whipped. An article printed in the Chicago Sun-Times several weeks before I arrived quoted a Malian diplomat: “It was rare,” he claimed, “to meet a child who had not been beaten.”
This isn’t to say that the living conditions on the plantations could even remotely be described as adequate. The workers slept several to a room on the bare floors of leaky mud-brick buildings. When I first saw a plantation’s living quarters, I thought the structures were chicken coops. None had electricity. The food, mostly made from cornmeal, could in no way fulfill the laborers’ nutritional requirements. Their clothing was tattered, their footwear insufficient. They had no chance to leave the plantations and visit the city. They had no opportunity for schooling.
On the majority of the plantations I visited, though, the food and the living conditions of the owner’s family were similar to those of the laborers. The plantation owner’s children usually didn’t go to school, either. The owner and his wife and their children also slept on the floor, also ate cornmeal, also worked from sunup to dark. Men and boys in the owner’s family toiled in the fields; women and girls chopped firewood and pounded corn and cooked meals. Life was short and hard for everyone.
Several plantation owners spoke with me at length. They told me about people called “locateurs”—men who bring farmhands from poor villages in Mali and other countries to plantations in the Ivory Coast. Yes, the plantation owners told me, they did pay the locateurs for the workers, and yes, this purchase price was taken out of each worker’s salary. They were very open about these transactions; two owners even showed me their accounting books.
Most workers, I learned, were paid a monthly salary of ten thousand Central African francs, the equivalent of about fourteen dollars. To pay back their purchase price usually required three months’ labor. So the first year’s salary was $14 times nine months: $126. This is more money than most people in Mali earn. The workers were paid once a year, in the fall, when the cocoa beans were sold—the only time most owners were paid. If a laborer quit or ran off before completing a full year, he was not paid at all. At the end of the year the worker could take his money and leave, or elect to stay for another annual cycle.
It was true, the owners admitted, that if the cocoa crop failed due to blight or drought, then the plantation would make no money that year, and likely, the laborers would not be paid. On my walks I did meet two workers from a single plantation who said that they’d labored one year and nine months and had not yet been paid. Their names were Siaka Traore and Ibrahim Malé. They told me that the crops had failed the first year, and they were working a second because they hoped this season would be better, and they did not want to return home empty-handed.
I met the owner of this plantation. He confirmed, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, that his crops had died. Most of his teeth were missing. The roof of his home was half collapsed. His own infant son had a distended belly. During our brief talk, the infant sat beside us on the muddy ground, naked and wailing.
Another plantation owner, a man named Touré Fakourou, listened attentively to my translator as I spoke about the slavery accusations and the British video and the possibility of an international boycott of Ivorian cocoa. “We are not talking about slavery,” he said, when I was finished. “We are talking about poverty.”
Back in the city of Daloa, I tracked down a person who had worked as a translator for the Slavery documentary. His name was Michel Oulai, though he was better known by his pen name, Vincent Deh. He had written for a local newspaper called Notre Voie—Our Way—for nine years. He was thirty-six years old and spoke excelle
nt English. I’d brought my copy of the documentary with me; Deh said he hadn’t seen it. A friend of Deh’s owned an old VCR and television, so we drove to the friend’s house and watched the documentary together.
Deh, who appears in one of the scenes, seemed captivated by the movie, but when I told him that it was supposed to be accepted as truth, he considered this for a moment and said, “It’s exaggerated.” He did not seem particularly troubled by this notion. He assumed, he said, that this was how documentaries were made—for people to pay attention to your work, sometimes you had to exaggerate.
I told Deh that I was having trouble finding a single person who appeared to have been beaten. I asked him if, while working on the documentary, he’d seen the type of abuses that the film says are prevalent. “No,” he said. “I never saw proof of even one slave.” His comment about exaggerations, he told me, was just a polite way of saying the movie was false.
I asked him about one of the film’s most powerful lines, in which a young laborer looks into the camera and says that people who eat chocolate are “eating my flesh.” We rewound the tape, and Deh watched the scene again. He told me that the boy’s statement couldn’t have been genuine. Deh vividly recalled working with the laborer and said that the boy—like almost all the laborers—did not understand the relationship between picking cocoa and eating chocolate. Most kids, Deh said, didn’t know what chocolate was. Deh felt that someone must have put the words into the boy’s mouth, instructing him on what to say.
After speaking with Deh, I took my driver and translator and headed north, across the border and into Mali. The transformation was startling. Here, at the periphery of the Sahara, the soil seemed sapped and colorless; the corn was not even ankle-high by the Fourth of July, which I happened to spend in Mali. Beggars were everywhere. When I opened a tin of sardines, a crowd of children grabbed at me, pleading to drink the oil. I gave the tin to one boy, who was promptly pummeled by the others, the oil spilling onto the ground.
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