1899–1905: (Guillaume Sam’s Gamy Record: The Rose Bonds, the Conviction, and the Pardon): Guillaume Sam, as history knows him, had one of the gamiest records…

1899–1905: (Guillaume Sam’s Gamy Record: The Rose Bonds, the Conviction, and the Pardon): Guillaume Sam, as history knows him, had one of the gamiest records among the Consolidards. As Minister of War under Simon Sam, he purchased successive orders of nonexistent supplies and equipment, then allocated to himself in repayment equivalent amounts in the so-called Rose Bonds — one series in the Consolidations. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment and a fine of five hundred gourdes. On appeal in 1905, he was fully pardoned on condition that he pay his fine and give the president six parcels of property he owned. That the man who would become Haiti’s last pre-occupation president had already been convicted of systematic fraud against the state he would later lead — and that his pardon required him to surrender real property to the very president whose administration he had defrauded — captured in miniature the circular logic of Haitian governance: the state as an instrument of self-enrichment, conviction as a temporary inconvenience, and pardon as a transaction in which the spoils were merely redistributed among the same class of men who had stolen them.