The first big city on the Malian side of the border is called Sikasso. The relief agency Save the Children Canada had recently opened a rehabilitation center in Sikasso to help treat the child slaves of West Africa for psychological problems. The facility was named Horon So—Freedom Center. It was located in a whitewashed stucco building, one of the nicest structures in town. Many of the younger boys who’d finished their time on the cocoa plantations were bused to Horon So from the Ivory Coast; some of these bus trips were paid for by the Malian Association of Daloa. The boys usually stayed for five days. They slept at the center, and ate there, and spoke with counselors. When I visited, Horon So’s director was a thirty-five-year-old psychologist named Ibrahim Haidara. A few months later, he left Save the Children.
Haidara met with me one evening in the courtyard of my hotel. We ordered grilled chicken, drank a few Cokes, and embarked on a lengthy discussion. Haidara was born in France but was of Malian descent—his father was from Timbuktu, in central Mali. He spoke eloquently and openly and without any apparent agenda. He never asked me for money.
“I don’t accept the word ‘slave’ to describe these kids,” he said to me. “I have not seen any evidence of abuse from those coming back. Maybe a few machete marks, but nothing more. Almost all of these children want to go. They hang around bus stations, waiting for locateurs to take them across the border. For them, the Ivory Coast is a paradise.”
Most boys, he explained, are accustomed to farm labor. They’ve worked on family farms, but for this work they are not paid. There are very few paying jobs available in Mali, Haidara said, but in the Ivory Coast there are jobs, so the boys cross the border. This has been the case, he said, ever since there was a border.
“Generally,” Haidara said, “the children leave their home villages to get something they’ve wanted. They want what they don’t have. The boys want bicycles, a radio, good clothes. They want basketball shoes. They know all the brand names. They want Nike basketball shoes. That is their dream.” His job, Haidara explained, was to teach the workers the advantages of staying in Mali, with their families, and helping to improve the fortunes of their own country.
The next day, Haidara took me to meet Aly Diabate, the boy who’d been featured in the Knight Ridder series, the one whose story had been read aloud on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Diabate had spent a year and a half on a plantation and a week at Horon So and was now back at his village, a scattering of huts along a brown river in the Malian hill country.
According to the Knight Ridder article, there were only “rare days” when Diabate wasn’t flogged “with a bicycle chain or branches from a cacao tree.” When I spoke with Diabate in person, the story was different. Perhaps because he was no longer beholden to the Malian Association, as he may have been when the Knight Ridder reporter spoke with him, he felt better able to speak freely. Whatever the reason, Diabate’s tale had changed. He said that he did experience some physical abuse—he was slapped or hit with a fist by the brother of the plantation owner. This happened once or twice. But as for daily lashings, Diabate said this: “No, we were never whipped.”
The Knight Ridder article reported that Diabate was fourteen years old. His extreme youth was a big part of the story. I visited Diabate less than a month after the article was published. I asked him his age. “I don’t know how old I am,” he said. My translator asked him to guess, and he said, “I guess nineteen.” By this estimate, he would have been seventeen, not twelve, when he was hired to work on the plantation. It was difficult to tell Diabate’s age by looking at him—he had the type of baby face that could allow an observer to believe he was far younger than he was, though his arms and shoulders had sprouted an adult musculature.
A day after speaking with Diabate, I returned to the Ivory Coast, back to the capital city of Abidjan. There, in a boxy high-rise, I visited a branch office of the United Nations Children’s Fund, and met with an official named Lavender Degre. UNICEF had closely studied child labor in the region, and had issued numerous reports on the topic. Degre concurred, readily, that the slave story had been blown out of proportion. “We have never once used the word ‘slave’ in any of our reports,” she said.
I asked her if the boys at the Malian Association of Daloa would really lie to me, and she laughed. She wondered if I’d read any newspaper accounts about the so-called Street of Slaves. I had; the articles described a market in Abidjan where slaves could be bought and sold.
“If you give me a thousand francs”—about $1.40—“I’ll give you a slave,” said Degre. “It’s all about economics. If you offer someone money for a slave, he will show you a slave. The street boys are smart. They’ll go get their cousin and say, ‘Look, here’s a slave.’ They’ll get you all the slaves you want.”
After three weeks in Africa, I realized I had my story. If you listened to certain members of the Malian Association and took notes and tilted your head just so—well, yes, there was slavery. West Africa is a very poor part of the world; if journalists were willing to pay good money to see slaves, it seemed as though some officials with the Malian Association were more than happy to provide them.
But I wanted to write about the real problem: I wanted to write about the crushing cycle of poverty, and about the suffering that young people were willing to endure in order to eke out a living. At the same time, I wanted to explain how the media can generate misunderstandings, and how aid agencies can perpetuate these errors. I wanted to demonstrate how we can sometimes see what we’re looking for instead of what really exists. This wasn’t the story I came to find, and it wasn’t a particularly explosive one, but it felt important in its own quiet way. So I packed my belongings and flew home.
I described the idea to Ilena Silverman, my editor at the New York Times Magazine. I was excited about its prospects; it had the potential, I thought, to be an intelligent, insightful, unorthodox article. Silverman, though, said she wasn’t particularly interested in yet another story accusing the media of getting everything wrong. She didn’t want a piece that might unfairly harm humanitarian agencies. Instead, she suggested that I present all of these issues more palatably, perhaps by telling a detailed story of one boy. Weave an intimate portrait of a single laborer, she said, and through this one worker artfully clarify the fine line between slavery and poverty. “Could you do that?” she asked me.
I had spent almost all my time in Africa attempting to prove that the story I’d been sent to cover did not exist. But proving that there’s no story, my editor had implied, is not itself much of a story. I realized that she was right. Her idea, the tale of one boy, seemed less complicated than mine, and possibly more profound.
Except that I’d just flown seven time zones from West Africa prepared to write one story, and now I was being asked to work on a very different one, using the same material. There was some part of me that knew, right then, that I could not fulfill my editor’s request. I should have said so immediately. But I sensed that my success as a writer was almost solely in Silverman’s hands, and I felt a powerful need to please her.
I couldn’t even suggest a compromise, partway between her idea and mine—maybe a profile of three or four separate workers. That seemed to me like admitting I’d failed in West Africa. Also, I feared that any such compromise might result in a second-rate article, and one mediocre piece, I was convinced, was all it would take to damage my standing at the magazine and derail my ambitions.
So I began to rationalize. With all the interviews I’d done, many of them two and three hours long, I figured there had to be one boy who would work. Or, failing that, I could follow what Lavender Degre at UNICEF had said: If someone wants to see a slave, show her a slave.
Could I write a story about one boy? I told my editor I could.
SIX
WHAT I DID was take a handful of interviews and meld them together. One worker I’d spoken with told me about leaving his farm in Mali and traveling with a locateur to the Ivory Coast. Another described
how he was sold to a plantation owner. A third detailed the type of labor he did on his plantation. And yet another spoke of his time with the Malian Association of Daloa and Save the Children, and of his return home. I lifted details and quotes from all these stories, and a few others, and invented a single character who narrated the entire journey as if it were his own.
I thought I’d get away with it. I was writing about impoverished, illiterate teenagers in the jungles of West Africa. Who would be able to determine that my main character didn’t exist? For several months after the article was printed, it seemed as if my instincts were right. I had gotten away with it.
Then I was caught. My career, twelve years of intensely focused labor, promptly imploded. I was about to be pilloried on page A-3 of the New York Times. The rest of the journalism world would soon weigh in. I’d be shown, publicly, to be a liar—a stink you can never fully wash off. I planned to go into hibernation. And then my phone rang.
On the other end of the line was Matt Sabo of the Oregonian, asking to speak with Michael Finkel of the New York Times. When he said that, I winced. I had spent all of my adult life trying to become Michael Finkel of the New York Times. Now, after scarcely a year, I was finished.
At first, our conversation was confusing. The Oregonian reporter said that he was calling because he was writing a story about Christian Longo. Until that instant, I had never heard of Christian Longo. The reporter told me that he was working on a lengthy piece about the crimes Longo had been accused of, about his run from the law, about the details of his capture.
“But why are you calling me?” I asked.
The reporter explained. After Longo escaped to Mexico, he changed his identity, which is not a surprising action for a most-wanted fugitive. But rather than creating a fictitious alias, he took on a real one. And apparently he had done an excellent job convincing others of his new persona.
While Christian Longo was in Mexico, wanted for the murder of his wife and three young children, he pretended to be a journalist. He chatted with other tourists about the stories he had written; he said he was in the Cancún area on assignment. He took notes. He teamed up with a photographer. And his name and newspaper, he told many of the people he met, was Michael Finkel of the New York Times.
PART TWO
MEXICO
SEVEN
BY THE TIME the Oregonian reporter called, I had already exiled myself to the upper floor of my home, a few miles outside the town of Bozeman, Montana. My hibernation had not officially begun—I was still awaiting publication of the Editors’ Note—but there seemed no place else to go. I had squandered my career due to stupidity and hubris; I had caused my own downfall. I did not want to see my friends or speak with my parents. I felt remorseful and ashamed and confused. I don’t know what I wanted, except to blame someone else for my deceit.
Hours at a stretch, I lay prone on the upstairs sofa, burrowed beneath my laundry pile. Or else I paced back and forth in my bedroom. When my head began to pound—when I was so furious at myself that my vision went fuzzy—I’d clamp my palms over my ears and yell at the ceiling until my breath gave out. All day, I wore sweatpants and bedroom slippers. I didn’t watch TV or listen to music. I ate whatever canned foods were left in the house. More than once, I crawled into the cramped, dusty space underneath my writing desk and tore at the carpet, rubbing my fingers raw.
It was at this point that the reporter phoned. The story he told me was so absurd and unexpected, and delivered with such impeccable timing, that it slapped me from my brooding. All at once, I was curious and repulsed and perplexed. And then my immediate feelings coalesced into one distinct, uncontainable reaction: I laughed. I really did. Out loud, over the phone, to the reporter from the Oregonian.
The Editors’ Note was printed the next morning. I remained in hiding for a spell, but I felt as though I could breathe again. I’d been released from my loop of self-centered moping. I ventured to the supermarket for supplies; I rented a few movies; I peeked on the internet to learn about Longo and read of my disgrace. As the other media outlets weighed in—one journalist compared my ethics to those of a “glazy-eyed person” who kills abortion doctors—I remained passive and distant, saddened in a stunned sort of way, as if watching my belongings consumed by a fire. I took my beatings, and then, once the story had played itself out, I picked up the phone and called the Oregonian reporter.
I had only one question: How could I get in touch with Christian Longo? That was impossible, the reporter said. Longo’s lawyers—he was represented by two public defenders—had forbidden their client from speaking with the press. Nearly every West Coast news outlet from Seattle to San Francisco had requested an interview, and not one, the reporter told me, had been accommodated. Even so, on March 6, 2002, two weeks after the Editors’ Note had appeared, I wrote Longo a letter. I filled the front and back of one sheet of yellow lined paper.
Here, in its entirety, is what I wrote:
Dear Mr. Longo:
Yes, it is actually me—Michael Finkel of The New York Times. Or, rather, formerly of The New York Times. To tell you the truth, I was just recently fired. I invented a character in one of my recent stories, and I was caught, and was very publicly fired. So now I am out of a job. This is why I am writing this by hand rather than computer—I’m actually no longer an official journalist, though I still love to write.
I understand that while you were in Mexico you used my name. I do not mind this at all—in fact, I find it both interesting and, in a way, it makes me feel somewhat honored. I understand that you are facing an upcoming trial, and that there is probably much that you are unable to talk about, but I was hoping that you would agree to meet with me in person.
I live here in Montana, which is not much of a long drive away. I’d like to ask you why you chose to be “me,” and what it felt like, and maybe talk with you a bit about this. We can even talk about writing, if you want.
I’d like to do this because at the same time that you were using my name, I lost my own—my firing, as I mentioned, was very public. During my firing, I was robbed of the two things that a freelance writer needs to survive—his name and his reputation. Both are now gone.
Now that I’m out of a job, I am sort of seeking to find out who I really am, and I would be grateful and honored if you would consider speaking with me. Please write me back—my address is on the front of this note—or call me collect. Please let me know when you are willing to meet, and I will be there.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours,
Mike Finkel
I photocopied the letter, then mailed the original to Christian Longo, care of the Lincoln County Jail.
EIGHT
A MONTH PASSED. There was no reply. Except for his lawyers, it seemed that Longo was not speaking with anyone. In the Lincoln County Jail, he was being held under administrative-segregation status, which meant that he was alone in his eight-foot-by-eleven-foot cell, alone for all of his meals, alone during his time in the recreation yard, and forbidden from communicating with all other inmates. The window in his cell was frosted over, denying him an outside view. He was completely sealed off. I didn’t know if he’d even received my letter.
As for me, that month was particularly uncomfortable. Within days of publishing the Editors’ Note, the Times announced that a thorough investigation would be made into all the stories I’d written for the paper. Reporters were mobilized in Haiti and Israel and Afghanistan to reinterview people who’d appeared in my articles. I didn’t blame the Times for looking into my pieces. In other cases of journalistic fraud—most notably in the late 1990s, with Stephen Glass, who wrote primarily for the New Republic, but also fifteen months after my incident, with the Times reporter Jayson Blair, and even more recently with USA Today writer Jack Kelley—where one deceitful story turned up, soon there were many.
I knew in my case there was indeed only one. And if that were shown to be so, I hoped to be able to return to journali
sm. But I couldn’t be sure what the investigation would find. I didn’t know if I had been tricked on an assignment by a manipulative source, or if a person I’d spoken with would significantly change his or her story upon a follow-up interview. If the Times had even a hint of suspicion, I sensed I’d have no recourse. I had been caught lying once, and therefore was unlikely to be further believed. I had no idea what I’d do if my journalism career was over.
The silence from Longo, the ongoing investigation into my articles, and the meaningless, meandering days I wasted cooped inside my home started to wear on me. Over the previous decade, I’d spent at least six months of each year on the road, accumulating the raw materials for magazine articles. My time at home was devoted to writing, to researching, and to skiing or hiking in the mountains. I wasn’t accustomed to stasis. Before long, I was again pacing my bedroom. The excitement that the Oregonian call had stirred in me faded away, and my brooding resurfaced. I felt an acute need to escape. So I climbed in my pickup truck and left town.
I drove through southern Montana and into Wyoming. Spring was approaching; it was warm enough to roll down my windows. I drove through Colorado and Kansas. I slept in cheap motels, or I drank coffee and drove all night. For five hundred miles, I tortured myself by thinking of ways I could have written the West Africa story without cheating. For another five hundred, I berated myself for not simply having told my editor the truth.
I drove through Oklahoma and across Texas. I began calling people on my cell phone. I spoke with my parents, my sister, and my friends. Some of the things they said about the Times disaster were surprising. My mom told me that, in many ways, she was relieved I’d been fired. She said I’d gotten myself into a crazy cycle with the Times. Every story I wrote, it seemed, had to be bigger, and better, and more daring. My friend Doug called it “a giant game of ‘Top This.’” Another friend candidly informed me that I’d become an asshole; that writing for the Times had made me frenzied and rude and cocky.
True Story Page 4
