Friday, October 30, 2015

The Haitian Railroad Story


                                                  The Haitian Railroad Story
1967
                             This is What Happened to the Railroad in Haiti?
                                  Written 2010 and Re-written 05/18/2016
                                                       Howard Yasgar

    I was surfing the internet one day, and I came across someone wondering what had happened to the railroad in Haiti.
    Well, I can tell you what happened, it’s quite a story that all started with my friend Lou “Red” Gladstein.
    I knew Lou pretty good as we had been friends and business associates in Stamford Connecticut for a couple of years.
    We were such good friends that  Lou was the best man at my wedding in 1963, and his wife was our witness.
    Lou and his wife Gladys were the reason that my wife and I left Connecticut and moved to Florida in the first place.
    It was in November of 1963, when they asked me to help them find out what was going on with a business Lou had invested in, he suspected the manager was stealing.
    They said, that my going to Florida would be just like a honeymoon.
    To sweeten the deal, Lou even said he would give me a nice 1959 Plymouth sedan to make the trip in and use, so, I did it.
    After about a year Lou ended up closing the Miami business down.
    My wife and I opted to stay in Florida and to make a living, I got involved with buying and selling automotive parts.
    Then, one day Lou brought a 40 foot work boat to Florida, he said he wanted to build a freezer in it to enable him to buy lobster tails a country called Haiti, wherever that was.
    So then, after work, I started coming to the boat slip every evening and I helped Lou install a special freezer system in the boat.
    While we were refrigerating the boat, Lou was flying back and forth to Connecticut, to keep his used car business running.
    While all that was going on, one day the Miami police stopped me because I still had a Connecticut Junk Dealer license plate on Lou’s car.
    They confiscated the 1959 Plymouth saying Lou had given me a stolen car to drive.
    I called Lou, and he instructed me to go and remove the Connecticut junk dealer license plate from the Plymouth, which I did.
    Then he gave me a 1958 Ford station wagon to use, he had the Ford station wagon parked at the boat slip.
    I did what Lou said, but I suspected the ford wagon was another stolen car.
    Then one day Lou came to Miami and just took off with the boat.
    He did it, without saying a word to me. So I assumed he must have been in some kind of big trouble up in Stamford.
    So when that happened I quickly got rid of the Ford wagon, I traded it in for a 1961 Falcon station wagon, and for the next 4 years I never heard a single word from Lou.  
    It was in the fall of 1967, and I was busy at work, when my secretary received a phone call. She said it was from someone named Lou, and he was calling me from Haiti.
    Now I had not spoken to Lou for over 4 years, so when she told me who was calling, I was pretty excited.
    But all Lou said to me was, “I need your help, and I need you to catch the next plane to Port Au Prince Haiti”.
    Lou gave me his phone number, and told me to call him when I had the flight number, he said he would meet me at the airport in Port Au Prince.  
    I think that was possibly the most exciting phone call that I ever received in my life, Port Au Prince Haiti, wow.  
    I had heard the name Port Au Prince many times from customers that came to Miami to buy parts from me, but I had never looked to see where the place actually was.
    So I sat there for a few minutes, and after my excitement died down, I got to thinking about it, and I started having mixed feelings regarding Lou’s call.
    First of all there was the excitement of receiving the call, then there was the fact that I was going to some really exotic place, that was OK, but, knowing my friend Lou, I felt for sure that there had to be some kind of monkey business going on.
    Lou was what everyone called a wheeler dealer, that meant that you never knew exactly what he was into. The truth is, that’s what always made knowing Lou so exciting.
    I informed my partner and then my wife, that I was off to help my friend Lou in Port Au Prince Haiti.
    Neither of them were happy about it, but it was too late, as I had already bought my round trip ticket with an open return flight.
    The next day, I was on the plane, it was about a 2 hour flight to Haiti, and I looked out my window, as we were approaching what looked to be a large island.
    The second thing I noticed was that the island had a big brown mud stain that was flowing out from it into a beautiful dark blue ocean, the mud looked like it was coming right from the city where we were going to land, and it was.                                                                                                   
    I arrived at the Francois Duvalier International Airport on a hot and steamy Sunday afternoon.
    It was so hot that I could see the heat waves rising from the tarmac.
    As we were landing, from my window I saw both  Lou and Gladys both standing on the observation deck, on top of the airport building.
    As I stood in line, everyone around me looked and sounded  pretty strange, I didn’t understand even one word of what anyone was saying.
    But I knew Lou and Gladys couldn’t miss finding me, because I was the only white guy on the entire flight.
    As I reached the Haitian Customs desk, I saw Lou coming, he had Gladys following right behind him.
    They were gently pushing their way through the airport crowd towards me.
    When the Haitian Customs official saw them both waving to me, he immediately recognized them and stamped my papers, with no questions asked. I didn’t quite know what to make of it all.
    It had been almost four years, and there was Lou, good old jovial Lou.
    He hadn’t changed even a little bit, Lou was around sixty years old, five foot eight, and overweight.
    As usual, the shirt button on his belly was popped open, and there was that ear to ear grin he always had.
    We shook hands and he hugged me, and after that it was Gladys turn.
    Gladys was about five foot six and somewhat overweight just like Lou, she had a round happy face with short dark black hair, she hugged me, and I could feel her dress was soaked with sweat.
    “Well, Lou said, “What do you think of Haiti”, I didn’t answer him.
    We picked up my suitcase off a wooden pallet and then Lou pushed our way through the crowd, he was expertly fending off the vendors, and cab drivers, who were all trying to get my attention.
    I noticed there were several muscular looking guys standing around the airport. They were all were similarly dressed wearing jeans, loud polyester shirts and sunglasses.
    Once I looked at them, I saw what appeared to be chrome plated 45 caliber pistols tucked in their belt.
    Lou said, “Don’t stare at them, they are the Tonton Macoute, the president’s private army, its best to try to avoid them”.
    We then walked out of the airport terminal building and across the road to the parking lot.
    Lou pointed to a Toyota station wagon, and when we got there, the door handles were so hot I could hardly touch them.
    Lou and Gladys both started talking to me at the same time, they both wanted to tell me how wonderful the country of Haiti was.
    But as they talked, I was looking out my open window, at what appeared to be a hoard of  impoverished people.
    The streets were all crowded, there were quite a few women walking with large bundles balanced on their heads.
    Among the people, the cars, the trucks, and the jitneys were several raggedy dressed men pushing wooden carts with wobbly tires.
    There were car horns blowing, and people yelling, so I could hardly hear a thing Lou and Gladys were saying.
     I was just too busy looking and listening, because to me, the streets of Haiti were just like a page right out of a National Geographic Magazine.  
    Gladys said, “We are heading up into the mountains to an area called Fermathe, it’s much cooler up there”. We are renting a house  there from Doctor Fritz Cineas a Haitian Ambassador.
    As I listened, to them, I couldn’t help but think what a great adventure this was going to be.
    When we arrived at their  house in the mountains, a young boy ran out of the woods and opened the large wrought iron metal gate, as we drove up a concrete driveway.
    “That’s our gate boy, we call him Cappy, Lou said, he sort of came with the house and he costs us only $2.00 a week.”
    I looked as Gladys pointed across the road, she was pointing towards a beautiful villa with two armed soldiers standing in front of it.
    “That’s the home of Papa Doc’s daughters,” she said.
    Who is Papa Doc I asked.
    “He’s our president, Lou replied, he hesitated, and then he said, Papa Doc’s the president for life here, he is sort of like a dictator”.
    We drove up the driveway, and Lou parked next to a roll up door, there were two smaller doors next to it.
    Lou explained, “This is the garage, and those smaller doors  are the servant’s quarters”.
    Lou pointed towards an enclosed staircase and said, we live on the second floor, lets go”.
    Lou took my suitcase, but I stopped, I wanted  to take in the beauty of the view.
    Lou, pointed to a distant mountain range and said, “That’s Port Au Prince where we just came from”.
    Then he pointed to a small dot in the sky, he said that “It was a plane coming in for a landing at the airport”.
    Their rented  house was a modern split level, dug right into the mountain side, and the builder had used all beautiful natural stone from the local area to construct it.
    Once we were on the second floor Gladys showed me to the guest rooms, they were way down a long hallway.
    Gladys said, “Unpack your bag and wash up, then just lay out any laundry, the maids will pick it up and wash it for you.”
    I finished my unpacking and made my way back to their living room.
    As I walked down the hall, I looked out the open windows, I could see the concrete drive way below, and I could see the house across the road with the two guards standing in front.
    In the living room there was a television set in a wood cabinet and three big over-stuffed chairs,
And that was where Lou and Gladys were sitting waiting for me.
    When they saw me coming, both Lou and Gladys got up and motioned for me to follow them to the end of the house where there was a large step down sitting room.
    In the sitting room there was a built in sofa, a big coffee table and chairs.
    As we all sat down, one of the maids brought a tray with iced tea.
    Lou said, “I suppose you want to know why we asked you to come here.” I didn’t say anything, of course I wanted to know.
    Lou started telling me quite a story.
    Lou said that before he met me in 1963, he had been sentenced to two years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury Connecticut.
    I didn’t know anything about that.
    Lou went on and said that in 1960, he was running his used car lot in Bridgeport Connecticut, His  wife was very ill and he had hired around the clock nurses for her, nurses that he paid in cash.
    Then by chance one of the nurses had an IRS audit. One thing led to another and Lou was found guilty of income tax evasion.
    Lou told me that it was in the Danbury prison where he met the Haitian that told him about all the cheap lobsters available in Haiti.
    Then Lou said, when he was released from prison after serving about a year, he was so mad at the United States government, that  he decided to go to Israel and start a new life.
    It was while he was in Israel that he met Gladys whose husband had died several years before.
    Lou said that while he was in Israel he tried doing several kinds of business, but he soon fell in with the wrong crowd of people.
    He said that they were “Shmeck” dealers, and Lou was pointing to his nose, so I assumed that  Shmeck meant Cocaine.
    That’s when he and Gladys decided to return to Bridgeport Connecticut where Lou still owned a family home.
    Lou said that when he arrived in Bridgeport, he had the opportunity of leasing a used car lot on West Main Street in Stamford Connecticut, that was in 1963.
    He said that the rest of the story I knew, because it was 1963 when he met me.
    Lou said, that it always was in the back of his mind that he was planning on finding some way to do that lobster business in Haiti.
    So when we closed up the auto wrecking yard in Miami, he had free time to think more about it, and that’s when he found the forty foot work boat, it was at an auction, on the Connecticut River, and he bought it.
    Then, Lou said that something bad happened at the Stamford used car lot, but he didn’t say what had happened.
    He said that he flew into Miami, hired a cab, and loaded the boat up with supplies and took off for Haiti.
    Lou apologized for not contacting me but he said he thought my phone might have been tapped. I didn’t want to ask Lou what had  happened in Stamford but it must have been pretty bad.
    So it was in late 1963 that Lou finally got to Haiti.
    He said he contacted a real estate agent, who advised them of the available house, and he sent for Gladys.
    Lou started buying lobsters, he was paying $1.00 for every 13 lobsters the Haitians brought him.
    Then his men wrung off the tails and packed 12 tails to a box and quick froze them right on the boat.
    I asked Lou, what happened to the lobster business, if it was so good?
    Lou said, “I sold it”.
    He said, working the lobster boat was just too much for him.
    He said that he had to work and sleep on the boat with three Haitian helpers 24 hours a day, and he said those guys ate some of the worst food in the world.
    They just ate boiled fish and some coconuts, plantains and cassava,” Lou said, that after a few weeks he was just dying for the taste of a hamburger, and he was done with the lobster business.
    Lou said he sold it to an American professor who was in the hydroponic vegetable business in Haiti, for $35,000.00.
    While living in Haiti, Lou had noticed that there were old railroad tracks buried all along the side of the Highway.
    So one day he followed the track for more than ninety kilometers to a town called Saint-Marc.
    Lou said that some of the rail was still in perfect condition above ground, but a lot of it was buried under landslides.
    So Lou did a little research, and he was told that the railroad had been built in 1905 and it ran from the city of Port Au Prince to Saint-Marc.
    Everyone told him, that the railroad, like everything else in Haiti went bankrupt in 1920.
    Lou said that he knew that the steel railroad track was worth over $20.00 a ton in Miami for scrap.
    He thought that if he could buy all the old railroad track from the government cheap enough, he could probably sell it for scrap.
    That’s when Lou contacted a local lawyer with his idea. He wanted to try and buy all the rail as scrap from the Haitian Government.
    With the money he had gotten from the lobster business, Lou and Gladys had enough cash to live  in Haiti while they were waiting to buy the rail.
    Their lawyer told Lou that the railroad fell under the jurisdiction of the Minister of the Interior in Haiti, and Lou needed the Ministers permission to buy the rail.
    Lou’s lawyer also said that he would send a letter to the Minister, however Lou was advised that all official business in Haiti had to be done in French, a language that he did not speak.
    Weeks went by without a word from the Minister of the interior, so Lou quickly started to suspect that the Haitian attorney he had hired was now taking advantage of him.
     Lou was a business man and he felt he knew how to quickly resolve the problem.
     He instructed the attorney to offer the Minister a $2.00 a ton under the table as a bribe.
     He waited for weeks, and the weeks then turned into months and still nothing happened.
     It became obvious to Lou that the attorney and the Minister of the Interior were dragging everything out waiting for him to offer a bigger bribe.
     Lou was now running out of patience as well as money, and he decided to call on the Minister of the interior himself, without the attorney.
     When he went to the palace the Minister’s secretary said he was always too busy to see Lou, so for a week Lou sat in a chair in the hallway of the palace, always hoping the Minister of the interior would see him.
    Every day that passed, Lou and Gladys became more disgusted with the whole corrupt system in Haiti.
    So when they were down to their last $5,000.00, they decided to make one last attempt.
    Both Lou and Gladys sat outside the Ministers office for three hours.
    Finally, Lou felt enough was enough, and he called his attorney and told him to tell the Minister of the Interior to go screw himself. Then he and Gladys packed up, they bought one way tickets to Miami, and boarded the plane, they were both determined to leave Haiti forever.
    The Air Haiti plane taxied down the runway to take off, but suddenly it came to a halt on the runway.
    Thinking the plane was broken, Lou, Gladys and the rest of the passengers just sat there in the sweltering heat waiting to hear some word from the pilot.
    Then the people looking out the planes side windows, saw a boarding ladder being pushed to the plane by a group of airport workers, even though the plane was now more than a half mile from the terminal.
    As the boarding ladder was rolled up, a stewardess opened the planes door as a big black Cadillac limousine pulled up.
    Two official looking Haitian guys wearing sunglasses boarded the plane, and walked right up to Lou and Gladys.
    They politely said, “Mr. Gladstein, the Minister of the Interior wishes to see you.”
    Within a few hours, that same day a proclamation was made, that Lou Gladstein officially owned the Haitian Railroad.
    The very next day official posters were printed in French, and plastered all over town, the poster declared that the railroad was to be transferred by Presidential Decree to Mr. Louis Gladstein.
    As we sat there, Lou showed me a copy of it.
    Lou said, it ended up the Minister of the Interior was taking the two dollars per ton bribe.
    Now Lou and Gladys, with only $5000.00 left in savings, desperately needed to find a customer to buy the rail, and they needed to do it in a hurry.
    That was when Lou called me in Miami.
    So, now with a verbal promise of two dollars per ton, I was to assist Lou, first by finding a buyer for the rail, and second, to help him remove and ship it.
    Thus began my adventure of traveling back and forth from Miami to Haiti, and staying with Lou and Gladys at their house up in Fermathe whenever I was there.
    Lou, told me that he had already calculated the costs of setting up to dig out the track.
    He also calculated how many laborers we would need to dig it out and disconnect the track.
    But Lou said that was just the beginning, because the track now had to be lifted up, transported, and stored somewhere prior to shipment, and all of these things cost a lot of money to do, and would take a lot of time.
    Once Lou had carefully calculated all the costs, he determined that selling the rail for scrap in Miami was a lost cause, there would be no profit.
    Lou told me, that to cover all the expenses, and make a profit, we needed a better type of customer than a scrap yard, we needed someone that would pay more, and we also needed a company that would open up a letter of credit.
    The opening up of a letter of credit was important because the Minister of the Interior would not let the rail leave Haiti until he was assured he had his payment in hand.   
    So here I was, all of a sudden I needed to learn all about selling railroad track.
    I returned to Miami, and went to the library, making a list of companies that reused railroad track.
    Then I sat home every night typing out letters to all of them.
    What I learned was, that bed frames were made from re-rolled railroad track, so once I knew that, I again went to the library and found companies that made bed frames.
    I was working as fast as I could and Lou was calling me regularly to remind me of the urgency.  
    Soon I started receiving replies, but as soon as they heard that the rail was in Haiti, they all quickly lost interest.
    Then one day, Lou called and jokingly said, “What we need is someone who is building a railroad,”
    That was a very novel idea that I had never thought of, it was a good idea, but I didn’t know anyone that needed a railroad.
    On my next trip to Haiti, Lou brought up an interesting point.
    He had solicited the Haitian government for the railroad track to scrap it.
    However it appeared that he was awarded the entire railroad, and Lou really had no idea of what that consisted of.
    There was a rumor that there was an old abandoned railroad maintenance facility somewhere near the city of Saint-Marc. Lou said that some old timers he spoke to had remembered hearing stories about a facility years ago.
    Lou thought we should drive to Saint-Marc and look around. He thought we could follow the rail road tracks into the jungle, “They have to lead somewhere”, he said.
    The following day we drove to Saint-Marc, and we followed the railroad tracks all the way to the old abandoned Saint-Marc train station.
    At the station, there was a roundabout behind it. It was a place where the railroad cars were switched around.
   By the time we got there it was middle of the afternoon and it was hot as hell.
   We found a railroad spur that led into the jungle, it hadn’t been used for so long that trees and bushes were growing up in the middle of it.
    At a small roadside store where we stopped for cold drinks, Lou hired two young Haitian boys with machetes, he hired them to follow the train tracks and cut through the jungle brush.
    The two kids were about 10 or 12 years old and they wanted 10 cents each to do it.
    It was hot and sweaty work for the kids, but they worked hard, I could hear them hacking away in the jungle. It took a few hours, but then we heard them yelling for us.
    We assumed that they had found the maintenance facility building.
    We followed the tracks into the jungle, doing it on the path the kids had cut for us.
    What we found was an incredible sight before us.
    It was the monstrous maintenance building completely covered in jungle vines.
    We couldn’t believe our eyes, there it was a building that had been hidden for 50 years.
    The boys hacked away at the vines until a pair of huge corrugated metal doors appeared.
    The doors  were about twelve feet high and ten or fifteen feet wide, and chained shut with an ancient padlock.
    I had my SX70 camera and I took a picture of Lou standing in front of the doors, next to the two kids.
    It really was an exciting discovery for us, it was just like finding an Egyptian tomb.
    Lou broke the padlock using a piece of iron he picked up off the ground, and we pushed open a door just enough for us to squeeze in.
    The two kids were scared to death, so Lou gave each one of them their dime and one of them ran back to town, but the other stayed.
    As we squeezed into the building and as our eyes became accustomed to the dim lighting I realized it was a  really huge place.
    It was about 200 feet long, and 75 feet wide and about 40 feet high. There was some sun light coming in from the vine covered windows just below the roof. The building was so long that we couldn’t see to its far end.
    There were two rows of railroad track that ran the length of the building.
    There were huge iron working machines that were lined up one after the other all the way down the center of the building. Some of the machines appeared to be huge punch presses, they were bigger than any I had ever seen before.
    There were track shearing machines and hole punching machines, this facility had every kind of machine you needed to keep a railroad running.
    I could see along the far side of the building was a row of giant metal working lathes, they were lined up the full length of the building, each of them had leather belts hanging from their steam driven drive shafting overhead.
    I looked at the well oiled dirt floor of the building, it was spotlessly clean. It was as if workers had just swept it a few minutes ago and went home for the evening.
    As my eyes adjusted I saw that there were two enormous diesel engines that were apart and being rebuilt, mechanics tools, were neatly laid out like they would be coming right back.
    I was certain we were the first people to see the inside of this enormous building in fifty years.
    Lou and I walked up to the first giant metal turning lathe, we studied it carefully, it looked like it was brand new, covered in a black protective grease, it was just as if time had stood still.
    There were two complete diesel locomotives in the building, obviously in the process of being repaired.
    We walked to the far end of the building and then out a small door into what was the railroad storage yard.
    Under the thick vegetation were neatly piled up, steel bridges and trestles, there were box cars and car pullers, piles of new axle shafts, and piles and piles of new iron wheels.
    We were in awe, I took some more SX70 pictures, and then we walked back to our car, and we drove home.
    It appears Lou owned a lot more of the Haitian railroad than he had anticipated.  
    In the morning, we drove down the mountain to the company Lou had found called Cement Haiti.
    It was a French owned company that made cement, and they had their own concrete pier that was big enough to have a self-loading cargo ship dock there.
    Lou spoke with the managers and they said they would let him store and load the railroad track there.
    After the meeting, I was ready to return to Miami, when Lou received a telegram.
    The telegram  was from someone in Atlanta Georgia, they wanted to know who the agent was regarding the sale of the railroad in Haiti.
    Lou and I went to the Western Union office and he sent an immediate reply, then Lou gave me the telegram so I could follow up when I got back to Miami.
    The next evening I was in Miami sleeping when my home phone rang, it was 2:AM in the morning.
    I quickly got out of bed and tried to answer it before it woke everyone up in my house.
    The call was from the fellow who had sent the telegram.
    He said he was a former purchasing agent for United Fruit Co, now retired.
    He said that United Fruit intended to buy all our used Haitian railroad track to place in their banana plantations located in Puerto Lemon, Costa Rica.
    I couldn’t believe this guy had called me at 2:AM in the morning, and I told him so.
    He said “Yes I know, since I can’t sleep at night, I work in my home office from 1 AM to 4 AM in the morning”.
    I think that under any other circumstances, I would have hung up the phone on this crazy guy, but as he was my only customer, I listened to him.
    I told him that if he would fly into Miami, we could both fly to Haiti together, and when he was there, he could discuss the price of the rail directly with Lou.
    He said that was fine, but he didn’t fly, he would only travel to Haiti by boat.
    I tried very hard to remain calm while listening to him.
    I told him that if he took a bus to Miami, I would make arrangements to have him get to Haiti on one of the local Haitian cargo ships always docked on the Miami River.  
    Every day, I called Haiti to keep Lou informed of what was going on, and within two weeks I had made arrangements for the fellow to get to Port Au Prince Haiti.
    Lou said that he would pick him up when he arrived and he could stay at his house, so everything went just like clockwork.
    After their meeting, Lou advised me that United Fruit would only pay Lou $22.50 per ton for the rail, and if the price was acceptable,  they would send him a letter of intent, and then they would open up a letter of credit that Lou could cash, but only after the rail was loaded on their ship.
    Lou said that the price they were paying was just above scrap price.
    Lou didn’t like it, but he was running out of money and this was our only customer.
    So he kept calculating, and recalculating all the costs.
    Lou was afraid that the costs would exceed what we were getting paid for the rail, and there might not be any profit left.
    I assumed that whatever happened, my $2.00 a ton commission was still in there.
    About a week later the bank notified Lou that the letter of credit was in place.
    The Minister of the Interior quickly approved it.
    Lou flew to Connecticut to liquidate some more assets to get some cash.
    He then hired fifty laborers at .75 cents a day to start digging out and disconnecting the track. This was no easy task as the laborers were doing it using only big hammers and chisels.
    In the beginning my job included being sure each laborer got 10 cents a  day to buy lunch.
    However, I never saw anyone eating, and by afternoon all work slowed down to a crawl.
    I could see the men were just too weak to work, from lack of food
    I discussed the problem with Lou, and he resolved the problem, by having a Haitian women cook up a big pot of boiled fish, millet and plantains to feed the men. Lou said it cost less that way than giving the men the 10 cents.  
    The next problem was the faster the men worked digging out and disconnecting the track, the farther away we were getting from Port Au Prince and the staging area at Cement Haiti.
    That’s when Lou had located and bought a very old Mack truck and flatbed trailer.
    When I saw it, the truck was sunk in the mud in someone’s back yard.
    The truck had been buried there so long the tires were rotten and nothing on the truck worked.
    Lou hired two mechanics, and with all their broken rusty and mismatched tools they actually got the truck running, except for the air brakes.   
     I had suggested to Lou weld on metal brackets on the flatbed trailer to keep the railroad tracks from sliding off, but Lou wouldn’t listen, he was in too big a hurry to get things rolling, so instead of welded steel he just used pieces of wood.
    Every day, Lou overloaded the flatbed with too much rail.
    Because the air brakes didn’t work his Haitian truck driver got scared and refused to drive the truck down any hills.
    I would follow behind the trailer with Lou in the passenger seat of the Toyota, and whenever the truck driver got scared, Lou would then get in the truck and drive it down the hill himself.
    The Haitian truck driver would sit next to me in Lou’s Toyota, covering his eyes with his hands as Lou drove the terribly overloaded truck down the hills.
    Eventually the overloaded truck did hit a pothole and all the track fell off, breaking the wooden stakes Lou had used on the trailer.
    That was a real bad day for us, the truck and trailer was stuck in the middle of the National Highway with tons of the steel rail leaning against it.
    The stalled truck and rail falling off looked like a big game of pick up sticks.
    I was certain that someone was going to get killed moving the rails, each rail was 35 feet long and weighed about 1000 pounds.
    Because Lou was desperate to get rail to Cement Haiti, he started yelling at everyone to hurry up and remove the rails.
    I tried to calm him down and eventually we got men from a local village and they helped to reload the truck, it cost us $4.00 for their services.
    The entire project was becoming insane, and I didn’t like being involved with it one bit.
    Lou was getting desperate, and I knew someone would eventually get hurt, and I was right.
    The following week I was in Miami and received a call from Lou, he said, “One of the workers had fallen off the truck and had been killed”.
    “The fellow was riding on top of the rail on the truck, when his shoe fell off, and he tried to catch it, but he fell off the back of the truck and onto the roadway.
    I asked Lou if he would be charged with negligence, and he said yes, he would have to give $300.00 to the dead man’s family.
    Despite everything, the rail was now at the Cement Haiti Dock, and Lou was getting ready to load the ship.
    I was certain  that my commission would soon be in my hands, so I offered to take Lou and Gladys to one of Haiti’s finest French restaurants up in the mountains.
    Once there, I recognized another customer, he was the owner of a wood carving factory in Port Au Prince, it was called “Ralph of Miami”.
    He was sitting at the table next to us, so I introduced myself.
    Ralph was there with a very pretty Haitian girl of about 25, who he introduced to me as his factory foreman.
    Ralph said with a smile that they were going to be working on the factories production schedule that evening.
    I asked Ralph if he had any thoughts about carving something out of our wooden railroad ties, we would be interested in selling them to him reasonably.
    Ralph said he had already stolen one from us to inspect it, but the wood was too dry and cracked to use for carving.
    I remember that French restaurant very well as the waiter served the peas with a butter knife scraping them of the serving dish one at a time. Then when the meat was served I couldn’t have cut it with a hacksaw.        
    The day before the ship was to arrive to pick up the rail, Lou was standing on the concrete pier at
Cement Haiti, and that’s when I saw two Tonton Macoute guys walking out towards him.
    Both of them had their chrome plated forty five caliber pistols tucked in their waist.
    I was standing next to the Cement Haiti building,  and they didn’t see me. I watched them talking heatedly to Lou, and Lou became very animated, and he was waving his arms around.
    I was sure they were going to shoot him at any moment, and possibly me as well, so I disappeared around the side of the Cement Haiti building.
    I waited for several minutes, and when I didn't hear any shots fired, I looked down the pier and I saw Lou walking towards me, he was white as a ghost.
    What happened I asked? Lou said, “Those bastards want another $2.00 a ton each, or nothing moves tomorrow. They want me to go to the bank with them now and write up a new contract, which includes them.
    They also said the Minister of the Interior wants to renegotiate with me for more money.
    So what are you going to do? I asked, “What can I do?” Lou said. I should have known better than to think I could deal with these crooked bastards here in Haiti.
    I took a taxi to Lou’s house, packed my bag, and I went to the airport for an evening flight to Miami, and I left Haiti.
    Lou called me the next day, he said he had more bad news. The letter of credit from United Fruit called for metric tons.
    A U.S. ton is 2000 pounds a metric ton is 2250 pounds, so Lou lost 250 pounds on every ton he loaded, and Lou said, unfortunately there was nothing left for my commission.
    Well I already knew that, so to say I was disappointed would be an understatement, as I had put a lot of my own time, and my money into the project.
    Because of that, I never spoke to Lou again.
    However, since Lou and I both shared the same attorney in Miami, I learned that Lou had eventually sold all the metal at the maintenance facility to the Japanese.
    When he came back from Haiti, he bought an apartment building in Miami for $80,000.00 all in cash, and he was looking for a second one.
    In retrospect, the education I received was priceless, and I now knew exactly where the country of Haiti was.
    So in 2010, when I was surfing the internet regarding the Railroad in Haiti, and I found someone was searching for it.
    They said that the railroad seems to have just disappeared, sometimes between 1960 and 1970.  Well I know exactly where the railroad track is, it's in a United Fruit Companies banana plantation in Costa Rica.
    All the Haitian  machinery and bridges, from the maintenance facility, well they are now recycled into Toyota's.