CHAPTER 6

BEND THEIR REALITY

One Monday morning in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a

call came in to the FBI office from the nephew of a
prominent Haitian political figure. He spoke so fast he had
to repeat his story three times before I understood. But
finally I got the basics: kidnappers had snatched his aunt
from her car, and their ransom demand was $150,000.
“Give us the money,” the kidnappers told him, “or your
aunt is going to die.”
In the lawless, chaotic wake of the 2004 rebellion that
toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti surpassed
Colombia as the kidnap capital of the Americas. In fact, with
between eight and ten people abducted every day in the
Caribbean nation of eight million, Haiti earned the dubious
honor of having the highest kidnapping rate in the world.
During this onslaught of abductions and death threats, I
was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. And
I had never seen anything like it. Reports of abductions—
increasingly bold, daylight attacks right in Port-au-Prince—
seemed to roll into the office hourly: fourteen students
abducted on their school bus; American missionary Phillip
Snyder shot in an ambush and seized along with a Haitian