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Michel Franois MICHEL FRANCOIS The notoriously slippery Col. Michel-Joseph Francois helped topple Haiti's elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, then terrorized his country as chief of the police and secret police under dictator Gen. Raoul Cedras; some 4,000 Haitians were killed. Francois fled in 1994 to the Dominican Republic, where he lived off a half interest in his brother's car-wash, yet somehow bought a $400,000 house and sent his kids to an exclusive private school. Though convicted in Haiti of assassinating an Aristide supporter, he was never extradited. When the Dominican Republic deported him last year for plotting another coup in Haiti, the wily Francois landed in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where he runs a modest furniture store and rents a home in another ritzy neighborhood. That's where U.S. prosecutors nabbed him last March and charged him with smuggling 33 tons of cocaine and heroin into the U.S. from his private airstrip in Haiti, while taking millions in bribes from Colombian drug lords. Francois denied it all and stewed in a Honduran prison until July, when the Honduran Supreme Court nixed U.S. extradition efforts for lack of evidence and sent the killer back to his shop to sell tacky living room sets. If "Sweet Mickey" ever did take the stand, the CIA might blush -- he was associated with two CIA-created and -funded groups, Haiti's national intelligence service (SIN) and the death-squad Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). He also received U.S. military training at the Army's notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., and is widely reputed to have been on the U.S. intelligence payroll. "All that I did," said Francois of the drug charges, "I did according to the norms of my country, not according to the norms of the United States." Don't give us too much credit, Mickey.
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