Last September, Ralph Senecal, the owner of a private ambulance company in Port-au-Prince, drove a friend who needed kidney dialysis to the Dominican Republic, where the hospitals are better than they are on the Haitian side of the border. Barbecue joined the police as a young man, and rose to become a member of a special corps known as the Departmental Unit for the Maintenance of Order—but, like many other officers, he apparently determined that working with the gangs was more profitable. At the base was a small vodou altar: an effigy of a Catholic saint, surrounded by conch shells