Days 9-11 - Ransom Attempt?

AI generated podcast transcript:

Welcome to The STIMPACK Podcast.

STIMPACK is a Haiti-focused think tank and interventional NGO.

Okay, welcome back to the 43 Days to Freedom Podcast.

This is your host, Jeff Frazier.

Welcome back, good to have you guys.

Thanks for sticking it out.

This will be days nine, 10, and 11, kind of all bundled up.

Sorry, we've gotten a little bit behind, but life has gotten busy, but we're gonna do our best to catch up here in this episode.

Maybe it'll be a little bit longer.

I want to hit a few things.

I've had some questions from listeners about some of the details around what life is like in the cell, so to speak.

So I want to walk through a little bit of that, and then we'll see where that leads us.

One thing that I think is interesting is just kind of understanding the nature of the relationship between the captives.

So at this point by day nine, 10, 11, it's just the three of us in our cell.

So you remember Stephanie and Sarah.

Sarah is the 30-something with a couple of children, I believe, and then Stephanie, who I knew the best.

She ended up being with me for 35 of my 43 days and became like a sister to me.

And she has two older children.

And so we, at this point, by day 11-ish, will have been absolutely depending on each other for processing our experience, certainly bonding on the stresses of the day.

We certainly will talk a lot with one another.

But at the same time, there's still a strange kind of distrust simply around this idea that everyone's trying to be to appear more humble than they are, right?

No one wants to be a big target.

And so counter to what people are used to on the outside where everyone's puffing their chest and flashing their status symbols, the opposite is true when you're in a cell as a kidnapped captive.

And so everyone was kind of slow to drip out the truths about themselves.

So that was a strange thing, kind of a cloud that hung over each of us.

Even by the time we were all out, Stephanie came to visit me in South Florida and the family and showed up and surprised me at church of all places, which was awesome.

Just like she promised that she would someday, which was, it was amazing experience.

But once we started learning about each other's reality, she would say things like, Jeff, you didn't tell me such and such a thing about you.

Right?

And I would say, Steph, neither did you.

So that distrust was continued in that one category.

But certainly you're clinging to each other for emotional support while you're in there, and however that you can with total strangers, of course.

So one thing I wanted to mention is when you're sitting around thinking during the day, one of the things that you can't help but think of is what's happening back at home.

One of the many things that I would think about was my son, I was his baseball coach, and he's eight years old, and we were in the middle of the season when I was supposed to be gone and miss one game, but obviously missed many.

And that was rough, because I imagined him going to these games and somehow having to explain why his dad isn't there, or maybe not go to the games at all.

I would later learn that he did go to the games, and Mary just fed him a line that he could say, my dad has to stay in Haiti for a while for work.

But just imagining my eight-year-old having to straight face that every time, having to continue to explain why his dad wasn't there, is just ugh.

But it was, so on the brighter side, it was fun in 2024, just a couple days ago.

This is Monday, April 22nd, but on Saturday, we had a baseball game.

It was really hot in Florida, and a lot of people were complaining, but I was just enjoying every minute of it, because I'm gonna be there for the whole season this year.

Life in the cell is pretty slow, as you can imagine, right?

Not much is going on, other than inside your head.

So, remember, everyone has, well, at this point, their own mattress.

And so, you lay down a lot, and stare at the ceiling a lot.

At this point, by day 11, we're getting pretty bold with the windows.

And so, we've already slid the red thick curtain on the west window all the way open, and are doing our best throughout the day to peek out that window.

Remember, it also has bars, and then outside of the bars.

So, well, let me say that again.

There's the louvered glass, and then the bars, and then a white sheet that's tied to those bars to further obscure the view outside that window.

But you can, if you look, if you stick your head close to the window and look to the left, you can see out that direction through the sheet.

And there's a few holes in the sheet also, so you can see other directions a little bit as well.

You just don't want to get caught looking out that window.

And so we do look out that window quite a bit.

And then at this point, we probably opened the louvers in the north-facing window completely.

And so we'll look out the window as much as we can just to kind of stay sane.

And that's how you pass the day, thinking through your situation, thinking through your negotiation, hoping that Chef Jeff will show up and somehow there will be movement on your case.

Everyone's super frustrated with Chef Jeff all the time because he's so rarely around, and he's the only one who can move your case forward.

Kidnapping is not a glamorous job in a gang.

You kind of think that it's a big deal, but in these gangs, Chef Jeff was a low-level dude.

These gangs are pretty sophisticated.

These are internationally funded insurgencies.

For those of you who are not familiar with an insurgency, that's a rebel group of some sort within your borders trying to overthrow your government.

And that's certainly the case with these gangs at this point in time.

But Chef Jeff is an idiot, right?

This is, I would, my team always thought when I was on the phone that I was under duress, right?

That there was some sort of gang member standing next to me, forcing me to say something.

And so they never trusted anything that I said to them.

Although I was always trying to convince them, I'm speaking freely, you can speak freely, I'm not under duress.

And they never really believed me, although I've heard them say that they started to believe me several, probably on day 20-something or 30-something, when I referred to Chef Jeff as the world's laziest kidnapper.

Because this guy was always not doing his job as a kidnapper.

So think of what it actually takes to be a kidnapper, especially with all these people that are held captive at the same time.

So at the peak, there's probably like 13 people in there.

And so that's 13 negotiations that you've got to keep organized.

And like he should have a spreadsheet going or something to that effect.

But of course, it doesn't.

And so he's just like muddling through it.

He's got these stack of phones that he's using to have 13 different conversations with 13 different negotiators, right?

Like it's a lot of work, and he doesn't like it.

And while he probably has some sort of financial incentives, certainly the bulk of the money is not going to go to him.

It's going to go to his boss's boss, right?

And so these guys are doing their low-level job and they don't want to do it.

So Chef Jeff is always somewhere else, right?

We see him leave, usually on a motorcycle, sometimes in an SUV.

He goes down the hill and disappears most of the day and then comes back to clean up before going out during the evening.

And it would appear as though he's got some sort of moonlighting gig, a side hustle as a DJ and a rapper.

Like, we would hear him in his room rehearsing his rapping.

And I don't think he was just rehearsing.

I think he was actually trying to show off for us.

And of course, if he ever poked his head in, we would tell him how awesome he was at rapping.

Do it some more.

Anyway, just idiots.

Further along the idiot line, you'll be entertained to know that I was always super worried that Chef Jeff was going to walk in with my phone and make me log in to my banking app on the phone and then demand all the money in my bank.

And wisely, my wife had already been advised to move all our money, so that wouldn't have been an issue at that point.

But I thought at some point, they would even at least ask me and try to make that happen.

And they never did.

They never even opened my banking app.

They never found it.

Because when they would hand me my phone, I could partially swipe up and see what apps were open or recently used.

And all they ever did is look at my photos and text and WhatsApp.

And they never looked at banking stuff.

Why?

Because they don't understand it.

They don't understand banks.

They wouldn't even know the brands of the American banks at this level.

Certainly, the senior level gangsters would know those kinds of things.

But the junior level guys don't get it at all.

So why do I bring that up?

I just want you to understand how frustrating it is during the day to sit around this cell and want your case to move forward.

And Chef Jeff doesn't even show up most days, or I should say many days, right?

Sometimes we would go multiple days without even seeing him and just hoping that you'd get two minutes with your phone or that he would give you an update on your case, that he talked to your negotiator and you've come to an accord or whatever, just some sort of progress you're hoping is gonna happen.

So a lot of your day is spent looking out the window, hoping Chef Jeff is gonna show up.

And while you're afraid of that, because that can mean bad things, but at least it might mean some progress.

Another sign of a good day is when, during the evening, they run the generator.

So if the gangs have money, then there will be fuel in the generator because that increases their standard of living as well because they run the lights inside their portion of the house.

They play their music incredibly loud, probably till like four in the morning.

It's crazy how night owl these dudes are.

So if they run that generator all night, it's charging our fan on the wall because our fan, like I mentioned earlier, has a battery, an internal battery, and it charges during the evening.

And also you can run the LED light that's attached to the fan.

So it's a fan, a battery, and a light all in one, right?

And it's plugged into the wall.

So if they're running the generator, it's powering the whole house and we're getting a good charge.

And that means the next day, as soon as the generator kicks off, probably around 5 a.m.

we'll also turn the fan off because it will have been on a full charge and then wait till the heat of the day starts to increase.

And you're probably somewhere around 10 or 11 a.m.

We kick the fan on and then it'll run until the early evening when the day starts to cool off and then you're okay.

And you've kept the mosquitoes blown off of you during the day and try to keep cool during the day.

That's a good day.

If they've got money, they've got fuel, that means we've got air conditioning and a little bit of light, and we're always grateful for that.

And then of course, if they've got money, typically that means we're getting fed and getting water.

So water came in two forms.

They call it de l'eau pour bein and de l'eau pour boire, which means water for bathing and water for drinking.

That's two separate things.

So water for drinking comes in these little sacks.

They're, I don't know, probably eight ounces, something like that.

And you bite the corner off of it and then just squirt the water into your mouth.

That's a very standard, low cost drinking water solution in Haiti.

And then water for bathing comes in a bucket and they get it delivered about once a week.

A truck comes and pumps water into a big 55-gallon drum that's sitting out in the kitchen slash common area.

And they use a bucket to pour it into more buckets.

And then we get a fresh bucket of bathing water that we also use to flush the toilet.

So if the gang has money, that means we get water for bathing and water for drinking and likely are fed, unless for some other reason the gang is trying to put pressure on us as captives so that they can put us on the phone and talk about how they're not feeding us and how our families need to send money.

Otherwise, they're not going to feed us.

Anyway, they just use it to apply greater pressure in some situations.

And if you're really lucky, you can get the guards to bring you what's called a plakatox, which I don't know what the English word would be.

It's like some sort of a centronella spiral candle thing.

It lasts maybe four or so hours, but it keeps the mosquitoes away during the evening.

So it's a good night if you've got one of those.

A quick rundown of the guards.

So we have some regulars, about five regulars, and then some that we don't really recognize because they really just come during the night.

They rarely peek their head in during the evening, but if they do, it's just quick, and then they're usually just there to steal your water.

So we started hiding our water from those guys.

So guards.

You've got good guards and bad guards and then horrible guards.

One of the good ones, his name is Spider.

We call them not because we're creative, but because he always wore a Spider-Man mask.

Most of the guards wear a mask.

100% of the time, this Spider is one of those.

This other guy, Rasta, we call him that because he wore a hat with a big weed leaf on the front of his hat.

And it's highly likely he was running a side hustle of selling weed as well.

And he was high like half the times that he walked in.

That was Rasta.

He was usually in a pretty good mood.

Rarely aggressive towards us.

And then as a kid, we called T-Access.

He never wore a mask for some reason.

I'd say he was in the middle in terms of his cruelty.

And then one of my least favorite, we called Haiti Hat.

Also not a very creative nickname.

He wore a hat that was like a round brimmed hat, tourist hat that said Haiti across the front.

But this guy, all of these dudes were probably in their mid-20s.

This guy was just disgusting, just an evil human.

You know, I can't imagine he's ever seen the movie Silence of the Lambs, but he often reminded me of Hannibal Lecter.

He would come in with his knife and just harass me to no end with it, you know, just to get me to flinch and curl up.

He was a rough dude.

I was happy to say goodbye to him on day 43.

And then you've got Chef 2, who we also call Bad Cop.

The Bad Cop nickname will make sense later in the story, but at this point, we would have called him Chef 2 because he was underneath Chef Jeff, right?

So he's kind of the number two guy and certainly the most violent of all the bunch.

But most days, we don't see the bad guys.

We see Spider and Rasta most of the time, and we're happy to see them.

They're usually helping us.

Maybe they're getting us water for bathing or asking us what we need to get by.

They'll bring us crackers or something like that.

Anyway, that's kind of the guards.

Okay, so as a reminder, I spoke to Diego a few days prior, and he's committed to getting me the 100k within four or so days.

So during those days, I'm feeling pretty good about the world, and I am confident that at some point in the next week or less, I can get free somehow.

Now, I'm aware that there's risks in paying big and fast, and that this whole thing can go sideways, and then I can pay, and they won't let me out.

But I'm confident, hopeful to confident, that my team can find a way to make sure that we pay once, and they get me out in some form of a live exchange or something.

We'll leave that up to them to figure out.

But in the meantime, I'm seeing and hearing about all of this lost money.

And I can't remember if it happens to Stephanie during this period.

I don't remember which day.

I'll have to go back into my notes.

But at some point, it happens to her, and it definitely happened to the Toussaint's, and it definitely happened to Curvin's, but others it didn't happen to.

And as a reminder, that story is always this ridiculous ruse that Digicel, the Digicel Tower, is right outside our house, right, our cell.

And Digicel is the largest cell phone carrier in Haiti.

And then second is Natcom.

And their story is that somebody that works at Digicel is hacking their calls and is intercepting their plans to meet with the money, and they show up and they take the money instead of the gang, right, and then it's lost.

And of course, I don't believe a word of that, but the reality is the money is getting stolen somehow by someone, and then the captives have to pay twice or more times.

And I don't want that to happen to me.

And so my countermeasure to guard against that scenario that we keep hearing about with the Digicel Intercept is for my courier to talk to me on the phone before they agree to a meeting, so to make sure that I am present, to make sure that they're actually talking to Chef Jeff or similar, and then before you actually hand the money to anyone, make sure that you get me on the phone again, right?

Have them prove that they have me on the other line, right?

So if you can't do a live exchange, at least do that method as a countermeasure to make sure our money doesn't get lost.

And I'm also afraid of putting all our eggs in one basket, and so the idea that I come up with is, hey, let's do a test run.

Let's try a $10,000 payment just to make sure we can make the payment without it getting lost, right?

We can get the logistics down, right?

It won't be a live exchange, but at least we can not lose the money.

It cranks down the intensity a little bit, both from the intensity on the moment of that exchange and also takes some of the heat off of me in captivity, because I'm the one caught in this vice grip, right?

And so making a bit of a payment might get us some better treatment and some food and water on a more consistent basis, or something to that effect, right?

But at least we won't receive so much pressure in there.

So that's my thinking when I get on the phone with Gunny.

So I called Gunny and said, hey, how's the money coming?

And he hymns and haws and says, hey, dude, all we can get is the 10K.

I said, well, is the rest coming?

And he's like, well, I can't give you what I don't have.

And that throws me off, and I'm frustrated by that.

But regardless, I kind of let it go and say, well, can you come up with 10K?

He's like, yeah, I have that in country.

Okay, great.

Let's do that as a test payment.

And here's the methodology that you need to use.

Here's my countermeasure.

Say that back to me.

He says it back to me.

And I leave the phone call confident that my money, my test payment is not going to get stolen.

And I'm hoping that whatever dodgyness that I was feeling from Gunny in the phone call was not related to the fact that my 100K was coming, or in this case, another 90K was on its way in country, because that's my plan at that time, and that's what I wanted to have happen.

But I'm at least confident or pleased that I've communicated to Gunny this countermeasure.

And so at least I've staved off a possible disaster that was kind of circulating in my head the previous three or so days of, hey, I just told Diego to get 100K, and then it's going to get lost through this ridiculous intercept method.

So I leave that phone call pleased, and I hand the phone back to Chef Jeff, and they finish making those arrangements.

“Days 9 through 11 for my side.We’re still learning how to, when I say we, I mean me and Erin, Erin and I, we’re learning the value of holding our ground.We’re being taught the importance of going slow and that we’re going to be playing the long game, the importance of a unified message to the gangs.You can’t confuse them, you can’t be caught in a lie.The message has to be consistent and it can’t change.And we’ve really locked in on this 13,000 number.I can’t remember the exact number, 13, four, something, whatever.But it’s an odd number and we’ve locked in on that number.And we have a unified approach with Erin, Diego and Gunny all sending the exact same text messages that have been crafted by our team.Our team lead, Austin, I’m pretty sure he wrote the text and all three of them are sending it.And I think they’re sending it multiple times.So we are also actively continuing to shut down any other options we think Jeff will use or has used.He’s continuing to reach out to other people when he can.And we are shutting those down and getting them on board with the unified message and explaining to them the situation and how it works.And obviously, none of us understood the way these things worked in real life.So once somebody educated with the gangs and hostage negotiations and all of that explains it to you, it makes sense.Yes, you don’t want multiple streams of income possible because that just keeps Jeff there longer.And so once you’re on board with that, you very quickly fall in line because you realize it’s actually the best thing for Jeff and getting him home sooner.It’s just tricky to reach out to everybody and also keep it quiet.It’s been stressed to us many times by many people, the importance of keeping it quiet and not letting other people know, especially the media and anybody that would talk.And so we’re trying our best to do that.And that’s been hard with the other advice I was given early on from our lead at the FBI, who I really liked.It was a woman, and she told me when I asked her, I think on day four or five what I was supposed to do with my children, how it was just really hard.She’s like, well, they should be going to school.And that really surprised me.And also was eye opening because she obviously knew that this was going to be a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.And that was really good advice.And luckily, I hadn’t and never really did bring my kids into the details or the roller coaster of the six weeks.We were able to keep them pretty removed from anything after the initial day of finding out that Jeff was taken.After that, they never rode the roller coaster with us.And so in a lot of ways, it was easier for them to just get back to their normal life because it distracted them and it made the time go a lot faster.And because we had awesome family in town helping us kind of run their lives and their schedules and activities and sports and so forth, it made the time go by a lot faster for them.So because of that, they had different things that they would say.We would just use the line that Jeff was in Haiti.He goes there a lot for projects, and this one wasn’t going well, and he was having a hard time getting back.But hopefully, he’d be back soon.It was kind of what we told people.And that was getting trickier and trickier as time went on.He’s the bishop of our LDS ward.For those of you that understand what that means, he helps people pretty frequently on the daily basis.And so keeping all of those people not curious got trickier and trickier, especially on Sundays.And we weren’t going to church either, which was pretty easy for the first two Sundays.We pretended we were sick, but it got more and more difficult as time went on.Although I was comfortable telling people that Jeff was gone on a long project, I was not comfortable going to church because I did not want any of my children to be in a position where they had to ask or answer any questions from people.That pressure would be too much for them, and I didn’t want that on them.They were able to get away with it in their normal lives because people don’t ask where your dad is when you go to school and sporting events.So anyway, okay, I think also on day nine is when we get the call from Gunny that we are going to try to make the first payment.And we, at the same time, in the last 48 hours, we had been getting a lot of news through different security channels that the gangs were facing quite a lot of civilian uprisings in their communities.And this was awesome news that people were finally rising up against the gangs, and this was really good news, but it also made it so the gangs were busy.They were battling, and we weren’t able to get a hold of them as easily.And we were hopeful that this would make them want to get rid of Jeff.We were being told that they were usually afraid of kidnapping Americans, and afraid of the FBI, and afraid of just what having an American might bring on.And we were hopeful that maybe they were looking for a way to save face, and maybe this first payment, even though we knew it was naive to think it could be the one that got him out, we were hopeful that they were scared enough, and wanting to get rid of him enough that by some miracle, they would actually just let him go.So we attempted that first payment.There was a lot of logistics that I wasn’t a part of.I was just nervously waiting for updates on the other end.I believe Gunny found us a courier, and I think I’ve spoken previously about the shady characters of the couriers.So Gunny was able to secure the courier that was going to take our first installment of $10,000.I believe, my memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe we were sticking to that $13,000 number, and then we used the excuse that you can only bring $10,000 into the country at a time as our reason for bringing $10,000 the first time to the game.And long story short, they did the payment.It worked.They got there.The courier made it to the gang meeting point, and the gang denied the payment and basically said, no way.We’re waiting for the $100,000.Get out here.And when that news got back to our team, we were all dumbfounded.Members of our team that had worked in situations like this numerous times said that they had never heard of anything like this happening before.Yes, to say that they’re keeping Jeff, that would be normal, but to not take the money at all was very strange and kind of left our heads spinning.And we would soon find out through other means and different assets we had on the ground that their rumors in the neighborhoods surrounding these gangs was that they had, they knew they had a big fish, and that would present quite a lot of problems moving forward.And so we ended day 10 pretty defeated, and just the continuation of Jeff and us being on totally different pages.I don’t even think he ever knew.Well, I know he didn’t ever know that we even attempted that payment.So we were just in this era completely on different pages, which was so frustrating on so many levels and heartbreaking as well.”

— Mary