Nafissatou Diallo
DA, NYPD ‘divided’ about what happened to DSK Sofitel Maid
It may well be that, in the end, the statements, movements, friendships, family and motives of Dominic Strauss-Kahn’s sex-attack accuser will never be finally established, the Slog learned from New York sources early this afternoon BST. As new details are leaked on an almost hourly basis, it is clear that the NYPD and Cyrus Vance’s DA officers are both confused and demoralised by what has come to light. But we still have nothing like a satisfactory explanation as to why both organisations sat on the new information for 36 days from May 25th until June 30th.
I have been sent an outline of the maid’s movements immediately before and after the alleged attack. I should add that copies of this log are doing the email rounds of New York City in large numbers, so this is no great achievement on my part. It may be that I’m misinterpreting the log, but I doubt it.
Directly round the corner from DSK’s luxury VIP suite was room 2820. The times sent to me show the maid entered 2820 shortly before 10:30 a.m., then again at 11 a.m., and then yet again just after 11:30 a.m. Bear in mind this is before the encounter took place. Why clean the same room three times over ninety minutes?
It’s possible, I think, that she was ‘casing’ DSK’s suite for sounds of movement within.
The key-card log then shows Diallo entering the DSK suite at 12.06 p.m.. During the next 22 minutes, the maid gets attacked, and flees the suite heading once again for 2820, while its VIP occupant checks out. Some who were descending with him in the lift say he is smiling and calm. A desk clerk, however, says he looks flustered and “had toothpaste round his mouth”. So he attacks someone, but is in such a hurry to escape, he cleans his teeth?
Found by a supervisor outside 2820, she takes Diallo back into the DSK suite. Diallo later tells the cops that she went to clean 2820 first, but not that this is the fourth time in two hours she’s done so. (To confuse things totally, the key card record shows that this too was a lie).
Interestingly, the source writes, ‘I hear she did know who DSK was, so it looks like you were right about that’. (This is a reference to an earlier Slog posting speculating about how anyone could be dumb enough not to know who 2820’s occupant was, given his face was plastered all over the hotel as a prestige guest.) It was also reported last weekend that, when told a colleague was on vacation, Diallo asked to take over her shift on DSK’s floor.
Other oddities: apparently Nafissatou Diallo turned out to have more bank accounts than most. Each has in it very similar deposits (large but not life-changing) leading back to underworld operatives. I do not know as yet whether they lead back to the same mobsters, or why the deposits were made. But it seems they are all ‘recent’. The NYPD is reportedly making further enquiries on this front.
However, the sheer number of unknowns, false assertions and mysterious relationships surrounding Nafissatou Diallo have, it seems, caused so many hypotheses and theories among New York’s law enforcement and justice agencies, there are myriad shades of opinion. One I’m paying particular attention to, however, is my original source who does know at least one of the senior players.
“There is a very strong view,” says the informant, “that if you’re being paid by mysterious forces to honey-trap some guy, making a phone call to a prison in Arizona and saying ‘Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing – this guy has lots of money’ doesn’t fit with that. However, the bank account deposits are another kind of enigmatic element. If you’re just a lone agent, why are you being paid by drug dealers? This lady is a spider weaving a four-dimensional web”.
Although I’m 6000 miles away from the action here, my gut instinct from early on in this saga was that Mamoutou Diallo ( the maybe-brother with verbal diarrhorea) was laying it on with a trowel about his ‘sister’s’ holiness from Day One. The more one delves into this, the more there seems to me a case against the Diallos for conspiracy to extort. But it just may be that apart from her immediate family and some closely associated hoods, a small-scale scam is all this ever was.
It seems to me there are three things for the NYPD to do now: haul in Mamoutou for questioning, check out who the mobsters may or may not have been engaged by, and ask the maid why she developed an obsessive passion for Room 2820.
As for Cyrus T. Vance, the main thing he needs to explain remains the same: why the 36-day wait to release his ‘doubts’ until Christine Lagarde had clinched the IMF job?
The Slog 