Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti charity was once a favorite among fellow celebrities. Matt Damon went to Haiti to do charity work with Jean in 2008, Angelina Jolie was once on the board of directors (I believe she left in the summer of 2010, although that’s hard to verify), and she even arranged for People Magazine to donate $500,000 to Yele Haiti in 2006 in exchange for the first photos of her pregnant with Shiloh. In early 2010, following the devastating earthquakes in the country, Yele Haiti was accused of mismanaging funds. Jean defended himself repeatedly and did a teary press conference denying that he’d personally benefited from the charity. In August, Jean ran for President of Haiti but was disqualified for not actually living in the country.

Well now the NY Post has poured over the public tax records for Yele Haiti and they say that not much has changed. Only a third of the money collected by the charity last year actually went to the emergency relief. Hundreds of thousands went to Jean’s brother-in-law’s company, and over a million went to a questionable contract with a company hat may not exist. Of course Jean is claiming this is taken out of context and the people involved have excuses for everything.

Wyclef Jean’s charity, Yele Haiti, is coming under scrutiny again for squandering millions of dollars in charitable donations.

The New York Post reported that the charity took in $16 million from donors in 2010, but only about a third went to fund emergency efforts. The paper also reported that $1 million went to a Florida company called Amisphere Farm Labor, Inc., that doesn’t appear to actually exist. The paper said the address listed for Amisphere is an auto body shop in Miami. The paper also said that Amsterly Pierre, the man who is purportedly Amisphere’s owner, bought three properties in Florida, including a waterfront condo in an upscale area.

“The Post conveniently fails to acknowledge that the decisions that Yele made were a response to one of the world’s most catastrophic natural disasters in modern history and required an immediate humanitarian response,” Jean said in a statement. “We made decisions that enabled us to provide emergency assistance in the midst of chaos and we stand by those decisions.”

Jean also noted that he was no longer part of Yele’s active leadership. “I have acknowledged that Yele has made mistakes in the past, including being late in IRS filings, but that is old news. When I entered politics last summer, I transitioned from being a board member and chairman of Yele Haiti to a supporter. The new and good news is that Yele under new leadership, despite efforts to undermine its credibility and effectiveness, continues its mission to serve people in need.”

Last year, the ex-Fugees rapper mounted an unsuccessful campaign for Haiti’s presidency. That electoral bid was dogged by allegations that Jean took money from Yele for his personal use, which he flatly denied. “Have we made mistakes before? Yes,” Jean said in a press conference last year. “Did I ever use Yele money for personal benefits? Absolutely not. Yele’s books are open and transparent.”

[From Huffington Post]

The Miami Herald has a new interview with Jean in which he claims that everyone is out to get him and that the NY Post didn’t give the full story. They also interviewed the guy who owns the “non-existent” company who got $1 million. That guy claims that the properties he bought in Florida were unrelated to the juicy contract with Yele Haiti, that he had to pay himself through that other shell company since the banks were closed or something, and that his firm provided hot meals in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake at the cost of $10 a plate.

“It’s starting to just be ridiculous. People on the Internet are asking: ‘What is it about this guy that y’all really don’t like?” Jean said in a telephone interview. “There are a lot of foul things going on on the ground in Haiti. The aid money promised, the earthquake relief, the idea of where are we going as a nation, the amount of money disbursed to big organizations, and the New York Post has mentioned nothing of that.”

Responding to the accusation that it only spent a third of its funding on emergency relief, former Yele President Hugh Locke said the organization deliberately decided to hold over a bulk of its 2010 contributions for use in 2011, rather than spend it all in a blitz of emergency projects.

Many charities working in Haiti were criticized in the months following the earthquake for collecting huge sums of money from donors and keeping most of it in the bank while aid projects were designed. Even the American Red Cross still has $153 million — about a third of what it raised in 2010 – left over for long term Haiti projects.

“I feel proud of what we did, and it irritates me to see people dump on it,” Locke said.

The newspaper also suggested that a Yele contractor, Miami-Dade county resident Amsterly Pierre, got a $1 million contract to distribute food, even though the firm “doesn’t seem to exist.” Pierre, the paper noted, bought three properties in 2010, including an upscale waterfront condo.

But Miami-Dade property records show Pierre’s bank documents for the property purchases were notarized before the earthquake, showing the sales were planned before the disaster. The deals closed in some cases just days after the quake.

“Why did they mention my properties?” Pierre said in a telephone interview from Haiti. “They published things that are not true. We are talking about 98,000 hot meals we provided, and the Yele people counted each plate and verified everything before they paid me.

“It’s not like one day they wrote a check for $1 million for hot food.”

Pierre used an inactive company he owns called Amisphere Farm Labor to receive payment from Yele, because Haiti’s banks were not functioning at the time, he said.

The company was paid $10 a plate for a portion large enough to serve two. Yele acknowledges that the price may have been high, but few non profits were taking the time to send contracts out for bid in the middle of an emergency.

“We did this Jan. 24 when there was still very little power in Haiti,” Locke said. “The United Nations did not start distributing food until I think March. At that time, they were doing helicopter distributions, which did not go very well. We were the only ones giving out hot meals.”

[From The Miami Herald]

I guess there are two sides to every story, but the fact that funds were so grossly mismanaged before, that they failed to file taxes for years, and that Jean’s brother-in-law scored a $353,983 contract, makes me question whether this charity is on the up and up. Here’s yet another example of why you should donate to reputable, established charities. I believe this guy’s heart is in the right place, but that he still had his hand in the coffers and made sure that he, and the people close to him, got paid.

These photos are from October, 2011. Credit: WENN.com

A few days ago, the giant baby known as Wyclef Jean was performing stateside, and he decided to riff on two of his biggest critics, Pras and Sean Penn. Both Pras and Penn had offered surprisingly well-spoken criticisms of Wylcef’s presidential run in Haiti. It didn’t matter in the end, because Clef was ineligible for the presidency because of residency rules, but Clef seems to put some of the blame on his critics. Anyway, during the weekend performance, Clef said/sang: “If I was president….I got a message for Sean Penn, maybe he ain’t see me in Haiti because he was too busy sniffing cocaine. I got a message for Praswell, even though you don’t want to support me, I got love for you, even though you only kicked eight bars in the Fugees.”

Thus far, Pras has not said anything. But Sean Penn’s panties were in a wad, so he got his rep to issue this statement:

“Mr. Jean is clearly unfamiliar with the physical demands put upon volunteers in Haiti. As aid workers there, the notion of depleting the body’s immune system thru the use of illicit drugs is ludicrous. More specifically, J/P Haitian Relief Organization (a.k.a. JPHRO) has a ZERO tolerance policy for any and all illegal drugs. As the leader of this organization, Sean Penn has not only set this policy, but adheres to it. That Mr. Jean would make such a false accusation is reckless and saddening, but not surprising.”

[Sean Penn’s rep’s statement, via The Huffington Post]

And the rep added, “By the way, Sean’s is bigger than Clef’s.” You know that’s what it’s all about, really. Two boys arguing about whose humanitarian streak is bigger. I really can’t slam Sean for this though – even though I wouldn’t doubt that he’s using again, or that he was a raging cokehead in the past. Penn probably was genuinely pissed at the accusation, though, and he took this opportunity to slam Clef for not even knowing World Health Organization policy.

A few months ago, Wylcef Jean threw his hat into the ring to be a nominee in Haiti’s presidential election. Wyclef made major waves in America – he is perhaps the best-known Haitian in the American media’s mind, so he got lots of play. Unfortunately, in the end, Wyclef was ineligible to be a presidential nominee because of some regulations regarding residency – it seemed Wyclef had been living in new Jersey too long, and not Port-au-Prince. So just like that, Wyclef’s bid was over. And now it’s time for Wylcef to call out the haters.

Clef’s ex-Fugee friend Pras made an impassioned and well-spoken argument for why Clef shouldn’t be Haiti’s president, but one of the biggest cut-downs was made by Sean Penn, who sat down with Larry King. Sean has become something of an honorary Haitian, and has spent months working in Haiti post-earthquake. Here’s part of what Sean said after Wyclef announced his bid:

I feel that it’s important to say that while President Preval himself has made very clear the value of Wyclef’s voice as a song writer, as someone with whom the youth is quite enamored with, and appointing him, not as he said electing him, ambassador at large, which took place, in fact, three years ago, which does not qualify him as someone who has had residency for the five consecutive years necessary — but that’s an issue of rule of law that we will or won’t respect in our donations, or lack thereof, to campaigns abroad.

… I’m not accusing Wyclef Jean of being on opportunist. I don’t know the man. But I think it’s extremely important that we pay great attention to both the individuals in the United States who are enamored with him, maybe not for his political strengths, and in particular for corporate interests that are enamored with him, and those that may themselves be opportunists on the back of the Haitian people.

Right now, I worry that this is a campaign that is more about a vision of flying around the world, talking to people, as he said. It’s certainly not one of the youth drafting him… What the Haitian people need now is a leader who is genuinely willing to sacrifice.

And one of the reasons I don’t know very much about Wyclef Jean is I haven’t seen or heard anything of him in these last six months that I’ve been in Haiti. I think he’s an important voice. I hope he doesn’t sacrifice that voice by taking the eye off the very devastating realities on the ground and the very difficult strategic future that it’s got in putting itself back together…

[From CNN]

So it’s clear that Sean at that point had never met Wyclef, and probably had no interest in meeting him either. But now it’s Clef’s turn to give his side of the story for why they never met – apparently, it had something to do with Sean being a cokehead…?

“If I was president….I got a message for Sean Penn, maybe he ain’t see me in Haiti because he was too busy sniffing cocaine. I got a message for Praswell, even though you don’t want to support me, I got love for you, even though you only kicked eight bars in the Fugees.”

[From Gawker]

Clef is kind of a whiny little baby, right? It’s not Sean Penn’s fault that Clef didn’t meet the residency requirements. That being said, if Sean is a cokehead, it wouldn’t surprise me. At all.

The Pras dis was rough too, right? UGH. Clef needs to get a grip.

A few weeks ago, Wyclef Jean announced his candidacy for the presidency of Haiti. Everyone kind of freaked out because Wylcef didn’t seem to have the political chops to run for anything, really, considering his past is littered with financial and sexual indiscretions, and because he didn’t really seem to have a plan for Haiti in general. Sean Penn took to the CNN airwaves to blast Wylcef, and even ex-Fugee Pras thought it was a bad idea. Wyclef even had to go into hiding because he was receiving death threats! Anyway, people got their panties in a twitch for no reason, because ‘Clef is ineligible for the presidency:

The hat Wyclef Jean had tossed into the political ring has been tossed back.

The Haiti-born singer-songwriter did not make the final list of approved candidates who satisfy legal requirements to run in his native country’s presidential election, an electoral official tells the Los Angeles Times. The main reason is that Jean, 39, lives primarily in New Jersey – and not on the Caribbean island.

“He is not on the list as I speak,” said the official, whose identity was not revealed.

Jean had left Haiti at the age of 9, for Brooklyn, N.Y.

One of 34 hopefuls in Haiti’s Nov. 28 election, Jean and his potential candidacy brought some much-needed excitement to the island, which on Jan. 12 was ravaged by a devastating earthquake.

So far, there has been no comment from the musician.

[From People]

A motherf-cking technicality! That’s got to hurt for ‘Clef. Oh well. The Great Debacle is over, and now we can go back to not paying any attention to Haitian politics, right? Or is Wyclef going to fight The Man? Will there be Haitian tea partiers demanding to see his birth certificate? We can only hope.

I never thought I’d be paying this much attention to Haitian politics, but there it is. Ever since Wyclef Jean decided to throw his hat in ring in Haiti’s presidential election, the story has become very interesting both politically and celebrity-gossip-wise. Sean Penn called Wyclef out on CNN last week, and now Wyclef’s old Fugees’ bandmate and friend Pras is calling him out (sidenote: Pras and Wyclef are cousins). Except, Pras isn’t talking sh-t, he’s actually making a pretty reasonable argument for why Wyclef shouldn’t be the Haitian president. According to Pras, it’s all about getting people the fundamentals, and Pras sees Wyclef as “trying to seize a moment of opportunity” post-earthquake.

Two days after Wyclef Jean confirmed his plans to run for Haiti’s presidency, hip-hop star Pras says he won’t be casting his vote for his former Fugees bandmate.

“I think he brought Haiti a lot of national spotlight and attention where people are concerned and really want to help out,” Pras, 37, tells UsMagazine.com. “But to be the President of Haiti, I don’t see it because I don’t see what his real plans are. His plans are so general.”

And although Pras (real name: Prakazrel Samuel Michel) says Jean is “like my brother,” he worries that the “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)” singer is merely “trying to seize a moment of opportunity” after a series earthquakes left the country devastated in January.

“If he really wanted to help Haiti, he should have chosen his influence and champion and go around these countries that have pledged money to Haiti who have not given a single dime yet. You don’t even see 3 percent of what’s been pledged,” Pras complains. “You need to say, ‘Listen, we need money!’”

But Jean, 37, recently told Time that his intentions were pure: “I knew I’d have to take the next step. If not for the earthquake, I probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this.”

Still, Pras isn’t wholly convinced.

“At one point, two million people are living in a tent city. These people need water; they need the basic healthcare like band-aids, like alcohol to clean the wounds. Just basic, just the fundamentals,” he says. “We’re not even going to talk about the fact that there’s not a trauma unit there. I just think he’s exhausting his energy in the wrong places.”

As for ex Fugees bandmate Lauryn Hill, Pras tells Us that he “can imagine she would think this is just theatrics.”

The musician — whose working on a new CD with his band Axixs — also warns that while the publicity Jean has brought to Haiti’s plight has been beneficial to relief efforts, his judgment may be clouded by the circle of people surrounding him.

“He’s probably got some corporate people behind him that really want to come in there and exploit the country and basically control it,” Pras tells Us. “So my thing is that right there disqualifies him to be the leader of the country.”

Instead, Pras plans to support Michel Martelly — who, like Jean, is also not a politician — in the upcoming elections.

“He’s the only guy in Haiti who can unite the bourgeoisie, which is the elite, and the masses, which is the youth. They have such an affinity for this guy. They admire him so much and will do anything for him,” Pras says. “A good leader is somebody who can make someone do something, right? A great leader is someone who can make someone say, ‘I need to do this, and I believe I can do this.’”

And though he remains wary of Jean’s proposed foray into politics, he does praise one celebrity for his undeterred relief work in Haiti: award-winning Milk actor Sean Penn.

“Sean Penn has not exhausted. That means you really care. All of these people are what is going to help Haiti go to the next level,” Pras tells Us. “And that moment is now. If it doesn’t happen now, Haiti is forever done.”

[From Us Weekly]

So Pras is Team Penn and not Team ‘Clef. Interesting. It’s hard for me to be objective about this, because I’ve always been a fan of Pras, even more than I was ever into Wyclef. I think Pras has more musical talent and a better voice. So that makes me believe that Pras has a better argument, and I like that Pras isn’t making it personal – he’s talking about Haiti, he’s talking about what Haiti needs, and he comes across as very authentic. Maybe because Pras isn’t running, you know? That tends to give people more authenticity.

Wyclef laid out some specific campaign pledges in the Wall Street Journal, by the way. The piece is online here.

Pras on May 10, 2008, and performing with Wyclef in 2005. Credit: WENN.

Sean Penn was on Larry King Live on CNN last night to talk about his objections to singer Wyclef Jean’s announced run for President of Haiti. Haiti is in desperate straits following the massive earthquake earlier this year. Penn has been working in Haiti in a refugee camp since the earthquake, and has been sanctimoniously talking about it to media outlets complaining that other people aren’t doing enough and don’t have the right attitude about it like he does. As Kaiser wrote in our earlier coverage, we are impressed at Sean’s charity work and commitment. He’s been down in the trenches for a long time and he really walks the walk. He doesn’t see that his way is not the only way, though, and seems to have an inflated sense of his own ability and self importance – not that it takes away from the good work he’s doing. He’s Sean Penn and he’s necessarily talking smack. He may be a great humanitarian but he’s still a jerk in his way.

Getting back to the latest issue, Penn thinks that Jean may be running due to corporate interests, but at first he kind of skirts around the point and tries to present it in a softer way. Penn brings up some important points considering that Jean is accused of mishandling funds through his charity, Yele Haiti. Penn also makes it clear that Jean rolls with a huge entourage and hasn’t done much on the ground in Haiti – unlike himself, of course:

BLITZER: You’re absolutely right. It is heartbreaking to think about it. They make the pledges and then they don’t write the checks. Sean, what’s your reaction to Wyclef Jean deciding he wants to run for the presidency?

SEAN PENN, ACTOR AND ACTIVIST: Well, I’ll tell you when I was asked to be on the show today, I had thought I would reserve judgment. But after paying attention to the things that were said, I feel that it’s important to say that while President Preval himself has made very clear the value of Wyclef’s voice as a song writer, as someone with whom the youth is quite enamored with, and appointing him, not as he said electing him, ambassador at large, which took place, in fact, three years ago, which does not qualify him as someone who has had residency for the five consecutive years necessary — but that’s an issue of rule of law that we will or won’t respect in our donations, or lack thereof, to campaigns abroad.

We are talking on CNN, which has primarily an audience outside of Haiti. And so I think what’s really important is that the last thing in the world Haiti needs — and I’m not accusing Wyclef Jean of being on opportunist. I don’t know the man. But I think it’s extremely important that we pay great attention to both the individuals in the United States who are enamored with him, maybe not for his political strengths, and in particular for corporate interests that are enamored with him, and those that may themselves be opportunists on the back of the Haitian people.

Right now, I worry that this is a campaign that is more about a vision of flying around the world, talking to people, as he said. It’s certainly not one of the youth drafting him. I would be quite sure that this was an influence of corporations here in the United States and private individuals that may well have capitalized on his will to see himself flying around the world doing that. What the Haitian people need now is a leader who is genuinely willing to sacrifice.

And one of the reasons I don’t know very much about Wyclef Jean is I haven’t seen or heard anything of him in these last six months that I’ve been in Haiti. I think he’s an important voice. I hope he doesn’t sacrifice that voice by taking the eye off the very devastating realities on the ground and the very difficult strategic future that it’s got in putting itself back together…

BLITZER: Anderson, stand by for a moment. I want to bring back Sean Penn. because you raised some serious questions about the motives behind Wyclef Jean’s decision to run for president of Haiti. I want you to be more specific if you can, Sean. This notion that there are some corporate interests here in the United States who may be pushing him to do this. What do you mean by that?

PENN: Well, the people that I’ve spoken to related to his campaign and those on the ground in Haiti claim these things, and so really I’m putting this forward to a very important oversight committee, and that’s the media. You know, I watched Rick Sanchez prior to this program talking about himself and his frolic of baseball as a child for a long time. In the meantime, on my Blackberry, a woman of 24 years old is dying because she didn’t have attention to a tooth for the last two months in Haiti.

I see in Wyclef Jean somebody who could well have been influenced by the promise of support from companies. I think that Haiti is clearly vulnerable to, in particular, the manufacturing concerns that it so desperately needs and the jobs that it so desperately needs. But with a history of American interests coming in and underpaying people. This is a culture of one to two dollars a day that they were making. And we really can’t — if we help with them in fixing this house — if it had a leak before the earthquake, it doesn’t make much sense to rebuild it with a leak again.

So what I’m encouraging is that we look very hard at all the donors, because this is somebody who is going to receive an enormous amount of his support, if he continues his campaign, from the United States. And I’m very — I have to say, I’m very suspicious of it simply because he, as an ambassador at large, has been virtually silent. For those of us in Haiti, he has been a non-presence.

He said earlier he was helping to move bodies and so on in the first days. That may well have been. And everybody’s help was very needed. But his voice has really been most loudly that which allegedly has taken over 400,000 dollars of money that was designated for Haitian relief for himself. He claims he didn’t do it. I think that is going to have to be looked into it.

In the meantime, I’ve been there where I know what 400,000 dollars could do for these people’s lives, and for a 24-year-old girl right now who is dying. So this — I want to see someone who is really, really willing to sacrifice for their country, and not just someone who I personally saw with a vulgar entourage of vehicles that demonstrated a wealth in Haiti that, in context, I felt was a very obscene demonstration.

[From Transcripts.CNN.com]

I see what Sean Penn is saying, but it comes from a place of “everyone should do as I do and say” and it’s hard to swallow it from that perspective. Jean talked to the Associated Press about Penn’s criticism, and said that he was committed to Haiti because he was born there, and added that he would welcome the chance to meet him. “I just want Sean Penn to fully understand I am a Haitian, born in Haiti and I’ve been coming to my country ever since (I was) a child. He might just want to pick up the phone and meet, so he fully understands the man.” I don’t know if Jean fully grasps what he’s getting himself into if he becomes President of Haiti, but I doubt that Penn realizes the extent of it either. At least Penn is willing to help, and he’ll tell you all about it.

Last week, Wyclef Jean announced in an interview that he was seriously considering a run for Haiti’s president. The news was met with skepticism – after all, Wyclef has his own history of financial and sex scandals to overcome, and although his name recognition is high, and I believe his motives might be pure, he’s really not the best candidate for higher office. Well, too bad, folks. Wyclef has decided to run anyway. He gave an extensive interview to Time Magazine (full piece here) and he announced that he is definitely going to do it. I have to give him this – I’m glad he announced it in Time Magazine and not on Twitter or something. Somehow, it shows that he’s actually taking it seriously. Here are the highlights from the interview:

After days of helping ferry mangled Haitian corpses to morgues, Wyclef Jean felt as if he’d “finished the journey from my basket in the bulrushes to standing in front of the burning bush,” he told me this week. “I knew I’d have to take the next step.”

That would be running for President of Haiti. Jean told TIME he is going to announce his candidacy for the Nov. 28 election just days before the Aug. 7 deadline. One plan that was discussed, loaded with as much Mosaic symbolism as a news cycle can hold, called for him to declare his candidacy on Aug. 5 upon arriving in Port-au-Prince from New York City, where he grew up after leaving Haiti with his family at age 9.

“If not for the earthquake, I probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this,” Jean says. “The quake drove home to me that Haiti can’t wait another 10 years for us to bring it into the 21st century.” Jean sees no contradiction between his life as an artist and his ambitions as a politician. “If I can’t take five years out to serve my country as President,” he argues, “then everything I’ve been singing about, like equal rights, doesn’t mean anything.”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as flaky performance art… But Jean’s chances as well as his motives seem solid. And there are good reasons for Haitians — and the U.S.-led international donor community, which is bankrolling Haiti’s long slog to the 21st century — to take this particular hip-hop politician seriously. Pop-culture celebrity hardly disqualifies you from high office today… And in Haiti, where half the population of about 9 million is under age 25, it’s an asset as golden as a rapper’s chains. Amid Haiti’s gray postquake rubble, Jean is far more popular with that young cohort than their chronically corrupt and inept mainstream politicians are, and he’ll likely galvanize youth participation in the election.

More important, Jean stands to prove that fame can do more than lift voter turnout — or raise millions of dollars for earthquake victims, as his Yéle Haiti (Haiti Freedom Cry) foundation has this year. His presidential run, win or lose, could build a long-awaited bridge between Haiti and its diaspora: a legion of expatriates and their progeny, many of them successful in pursuits spanning every field, who number 800,000 in the U.S. alone.

International aid managers agree that Haiti really can’t recover from the quake unless it taps into the education, capital, entrepreneurial drive and love for mother country that Jean epitomizes — even if his French (one of Haiti’s official languages) is poor and his Creole (the other) is rusty. “A lot of Haitians are excited about this,” says Marvel Dandin, a popular Port-au-Prince radio broadcaster. “Given the awful situation in Haiti right now,” he says, “most people don’t care if the President speaks fluent Creole.”

Accentuating the Positive
Jean’s celebrity candidacy at least promises to keep an erratic media more regularly focused on Haiti’s awful situation. International donors have pledged some $10 billion in aid, but seven months after the earthquake, mountains of shattered concrete still choke Port-au-Prince’s streets, and more than a million people remain homeless, trapped in squalid tent cities as a sclerotic government bureaucracy and loosely organized aid groups struggle to relocate them to decent temporary shelters. The Caribbean hurricane season, which reaches its peak in about a month, threatens to make conditions even uglier

Jean has spent most of his life trying to show the world the positive side of star-crossed Haiti. Despite his Brooklyn and New Jersey upbringing — where he recalls weekly “beat up a Haitian” days at his schools — he proudly embraced the nation, even when, in the 1980s and ’90s, Haiti was an abject byword for boat people, AIDS and dictators.

“A lot of us focused on assimilation in the U.S.,” says Jean’s younger brother Sam, a New York entertainment lawyer. “Clef was unabashedly proud to be Haitian long before it was in vogue.” So much so that Jean never took U.S. citizenship, instead carrying a Haitian passport on his international concert tours.

Yéle Haiti has secured scholarships and aid for thousands of destitute Haitian kids; since the earthquake, the Yéle Corps has given Haitians jobs removing rubble and housing the displaced. Jean sits through the kind of development conferences in Washington and Europe that would bore most do-gooder celebs to tears.

“I want to be part of a different kind of celebrity,” he says, “one that thinks not just about charity but policy.” He’s been noticed; in 2007, Haitian President René Préval appointed Jean as an ambassador at large.

Yet serious doubts persist that Jean is ready for a role beyond that of goodwill envoy — most of them focused on his controversial management of Yéle Haiti. Shortly after the quake, when Jean had been all but canonized for his Haiti work, skeptics pointed out that his foundation had been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to production companies owned by him or his associates. Florida, where the charity has an office, has sanctioned it four times in the past six years for disclosure violations, and watchdogs like Charity Navigator have questioned it for filing tax returns that were “beyond late.” Jean has acknowledged the questionable payments but blamed them on accounting errors. He insists the problems have been fixed since he hired a reputable Washington accounting firm to whip Yéle Haiti’s books into shape. “I took responsibility,” he says. “I took the bullet.”

Not the Elite’s Favorite Son
More shots may be fired at his claim of eligibility for the presidency. A candidate is required to have resided in Haiti for five consecutive years. Jean’s advisers insist that the nine years he lived in the country after birth satisfy that criterion. But Haiti’s political and business elites — who, after living through the populist ordeal of former Roman Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s two presidencies in the 1990s and 2000s, aren’t exactly thrilled about the prospects of a diaspora hip-hopper getting elected — are likely to grab any challenge they can throw at Jean.

That Haitian political class, it should be remembered, has its own epic shortcomings, whether measured by incompetence or venality. (No other Haitian politician has yet declared a run for the presidency, although Jean’s uncle Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S., is reportedly mulling his own campaign.) Haiti’s traditional elite class has shown an utter failure — and lack of will — to reform a medieval land-ownership system, something that is vital to getting the country’s crucial population-relocation project going. Most Haitians consider President Préval to have been all but AWOL since the quake, and tales of bureaucratic shakedowns to get foreign-donated relief equipment and supplies out of customs are appallingly commonplace.

Against that backdrop, Haitian voters may well decide that Jean and his reformist party, Ensemble Nous Faut (We Must Do It Together), could do no worse than the old guard and could shake things up for the better. His campaign slogan, “Face à Face” (Face to Face), he says, is a signal that “the old school will have to fall in line with a new model. Haitian government will finally be conducted out in the open.”

Outside Haiti, Jean has little trouble finding support. Many diaspora leaders are rooting for him. (He’s married to a Haitian American, New York fashion designer Marie Claudinette.) But given the long-held disdain the island elite holds for expats, the diaspora’s hope is tempered. “I think Wyclef’s candidacy is going to surprise a lot of people,” says Florida state representative Phillip Brutus, a Haitian American from Miami and a candidate for the U.S. Congress. “But I fear that if you parachute him into the Haitian presidency, the culture of corruption and cronyism there may well eat him alive.”

Jean insists he’s not playing “the naive idealist.” He gets much of his platform, he says, “right out of the playbook” of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.N.’s special envoy to Haiti, whose pragmatic vision of bringing business, government and civil society together for development ventures was bearing fruit on the island before the earthquake hit. “I’m the only man who can stand in the middle and get the diaspora and Haiti’s elite families to cooperate that same way,” says Jean. (It’s not a ridiculous claim: If Ivory Coast soccer phenom Didier Drogba could bring his country’s warring factions together a few years ago, who’s to say Jean can’t use his renown to succeed in Haiti?) Jean’s priority — one he shares with Haiti’s Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, who is one of Haiti’s few respected pols but is unlikely to run for President — is to disperse both power and population from overcrowded Port-au-Prince and revive Haiti’s fallow agricultural sector with new rural communities tied to schools, clinics and businesses.

His secret weapon, Jean says, is that Haiti’s “enormous youth population doesn’t believe in [its] politicians anymore.” On one Port-au-Prince street corner, an unemployed tough, Sydney Meristal, 23, says he will vote for the first time in November because of Jean. “Wyclef loves Haiti. He has ideas for Haiti,” says Meristal, idling away the time on his motorcycle. “He’ll win.”

But Steve Burr-Renauld, 23, who hails from an affluent family in the capital, doesn’t think a hip-hop star has the credentials to run. “What if [American rapper] Jay-Z became President of the U.S.?” he asks. “That would never happen.” If Jean were elected President of Haiti, Burr-Renauld warns, it would be like another earthquake aftershock.

Jean admits that “it’s a hard thing for people to take artists seriously” in the political arena. In the chorus of “President” — “I’d get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday, buried on Sunday and back to work on Monday” — Jean makes you wonder if he takes politics all that seriously himself. But the verses remind you that he’s in Old Testament earnestness about it: “The radio won’t play this song/ They call this rebel music/ But how can you refuse it, children of Moses?”

[From Time Magazine]

Yeah, I think this article sums up the mixed bag that Wyclef’s candidacy brings – on one side, he’ll energize a lot of voters who normally wouldn’t get involved in politics. Plus, I really don’t think there’s anyone who doubts his passion, his commitment, his heart and his ideals. But here’s the question: beyond the rhetoric, would Wyclef be a good leader? Would he be a good executive? I don’t know. But Haiti might get the chance to find out.

Header: Wyclef on April 15, 2010. Credit: WENN.

Very soon after the devastated earthquake in Haiti this past January, Wyclef Jean began doing the television rounds, making a massive fundraising push for his Haitian-based charity, Yele Haiti. Wyclef became one of the faces of the tragedy, just because he was and is one of the most prominent Haitians in the world of celebrity/infotainment news. So – with that kind of name recognition, it’s easy to see why Wyclef is considering a run for Haiti’s president. But I have bigger problems with this news, and so will many other people. First, Wyclef’s news:

Wyclef Jean for president?

There are reports that the musician is mulling a run for the top office in Haiti. Reached by phone, Jean told CNN that talk of a campaign is a bit premature as he is still mulling it over.

“I can’t sing forever,” Jean said.

The Canadian publication Le Droit reported over the weekend that Jean would be throwing his hat into the political ring in his native homeland. But Jean told CNN that such reports reflect him being “drafted” but he hasn’t decided for sure yet.

He added that he has filled out the necessary paperwork in case he does decide to move forward with a candidacy. Jean has been an outspoken proponent of Haiti through his Yele Haiti Foundation and was one of the first celebrities to offer aid after the devastating earthquake.

“Wyclef’s commitment to his homeland and its youth is boundless, and he will remain its greatest supporter regardless of whether he is part of the government moving forward,” said a statement released by his foundation. “At this time, Wyclef Jean has not announced his intent to run for Haitian president. If and when a decision is made, media will be alerted immediately. Please let us know if we can help with anything else.”

[From CNN]

On one side it would be interesting to see someone like Wyclef not only run for office in Haiti but actually have to do the heavy lifting of governing the notoriously and historically corrupt country. On the other side, Wyclef has some notorious corruption on his side, too. Just a few short weeks after the earthquake, various analysts began giving the Yele Haiti charity a thorough examination and they discovered that Yele Haiti was rife with financial shenanigans, wasting thousands of dollars and that Wyclef himself might have even dipped into the charity’s coffers for personal reasons. Later, after the Haiti telethon, Yele Haiti didn’t get its piece of the pie, and instead that money went to larger charities doing work in Haiti. So while I can’t say that Wyclef is a financial fraud, there is totally enough information out there to cast serious doubt on Wyclef’s potential candidacy. Also: there’s some sex scandal stuff too – something about Wyclef’s wife finding naked photos of one of his employees on his phone. Ah, politics!

Wylcef on March 15 & April 15, 2010. Credit: WENN.

What is it with stupid, cheating men leaving sexy text messages from their mistress(es) on their phones? It’s almost as if the fools want to get caught. The latest celebrity to get busted by an incriminating digital trail is said to be Wyclef Jean, who recently gave a tearful speech denying allegations of wrongdoing by the charity he runs, Yele Haiti. Did he break down and cry to his wife after she found a naked photo of his female manager on his phone? “Oh, I’m so sorry I got caught, honey!”

Jean’s manager has a creative excuse for the photo though – it was supposedly an artsy picture taken by a photographer for a book. What was it doing on Wyclef’s phone then? Did one of his friends e-mail it to him and if so why did he keep it? Jean’s wife made him fire the manager, and I think she was well within her rights.

“Fugees” star Wyclef Jean may be in trouble at home after his wife discovered a nude picture of his gorgeous manager on his cell phone, sources said.

Marie Claudinette demanded her hip-hop star husband fire Lisa Ellis after finding the sexy shot, sources told the Daily News.

“Claudinette flew into a jealous rage,” claimed one insider. “She jumped to the conclusion that something may be up between Wyclef and Lisa. She told Lisa to stay away from her husband. To embarrass Lisa, she also e-mailed the nude picture to a number of people in the music business.”

Ellis insisted her relationship with the Grammy-winning Jean has always been strictly professional.

“Photographer Mark Baptiste took a portrait of me in December 2008 for an art book,” Ellis said. “It was tastefully done. Someone leaked the photo. I don’t know who did it, but the photo had nothing to do with my resignation as Wyclef Jean’s manager.”

Although the Fugees have long broken up, Jean has been in the spotlight for his efforts on behalf of his native Haiti after a devastating earthquake.

“Wyclef is spending all his time inspiring others to rebuild Haiti. We’re not commenting on any of these rumors,” said Jean’s spokesman, Ken Sunshine.

Jean and his manager parted ways about three weeks ago.

The black-and-white nudie photo, which The News has seen, shows Ellis standing facing forward with her hands crossed over her nether regions.

A friend described Ellis, who has a boyfriend, as “mortified.”

“She resigned because she just was not happy with the way Wyclef was conducting himself. He wasn’t listening to her advice,” the friend said.

“Lisa has no issue with Claudinette.”

The 37-year-old Wyclef married Claudinette, a fashion designer, in 1994. They have a daughter and renewed their vows in August 2009.

[From The NY Daily News]

Again, if it was an art photo and not some kind of sexy “this it to remind you of our hotel trysts” picture, what was it doing on Wyclef’s phone? There’s a remote chance that someone sent it to him, he saved it and didn’t realize it, and his wife found it and flipped out. That sounds far fetched, though. If his wife was checking his phone she probably suspected something, and she may have had more reasons to ask him to fire the manager than just the picture.

Lisa Ellis is shown below in a photo from 3/09. Credit: WENN. Wyclef Jean and his wife are shown on 2/26/10.

While I was eating an early dinner yesterday afternoon (my eating habits are like a senior citizen’s), I watched the first ten minutes of Oprah. She had Wyclef Jean on, and he broke my heart. Within five minutes of clips and discussion about the situation in Haiti, Wyclef’s voice broke and tears started rolling down his cheek. It was genuine – Wyclef has spent a large part of the past two weeks in Haiti, trying to find his friends, employees, family members and just people. People who are trapped, people who have lost everything, people who don’t have water or hospitals or food or communication.

Later on, I was reading Gawker and I came across this interesting summary/essay/appeal to Wyclef in regards to his Oprah appearance and the continuing reports that Wyclef’s charity, Yele Haiti, is perhaps not the best charity to be donating to at this time. In a piece called “Wyclef Jean: Give The Millions You’ve Raised To Those Who Can Help Haiti Now,” Gawker’s John Cook makes it clear that while he completely respects and has sympathy for Wyclef and the truly genuine heartbreak Wyclef is feeling, the best thing for everyone would be if Wyclef pulled back:

Ego and financial improprieties aside, Wyclef Jean has demonstrated a genuine desire to help the people of Haiti. To do that, it’s time he acknowledge his personal foundation isn’t equipped to provide disaster relief and donate to those who can.

We and others have demonstrated this week that his charity Yele Haiti is fraught with chronic management problems that make it less effective, transparent, and ethically managed than any charity ought to be. And this afternoon, Jean appeared on Oprah to address some of those concerns.

During the show he offered abundant proof of his anguish over what has happened to his homeland. When he spoke of what he has seen there, he was earnest, heartfelt, and moving. He told Winfrey about the friend who was crushed when a building collapsed onto his car, and how it took him two days to get the body out. About the 14-year-old he pulled out of the rubble alive. About the school for artists that his charity, Yele Haiti, sponsored that was “wiped out,” killing everyone inside.

He was there to witness it, and deserves credit for that. He also deserves credit for the extent to which he has used his celebrity to draw attention to the problems facing Haiti before and after the earthquake.

In the years before the earthquake, Jean has done some undeniable good for Haiti. Pwoje Lari Pwop, a Yele-affiliated program that employs 2,500 elderly Haitians a day to collect garbage on the streets of Port-au-Prince, has been repeatedly cited to us by even the charity’s harshest internal critics as an example of what Yele is capable of doing. The organization has sponsored thousands of schoolchildren in primary schools. They host rap competitions and soccer matches.

There will be a time, hopefully soon, when clean streets, scholarships, and rap competitions will number once again among Haiti’s most urgent needs. But right now, Haiti needs, as Jean himself put it, “logistics on the ground—the helicopters, the trucks.”

One day, Yele Haiti may outgrow its ethical and administrative failings, but today Yele simply doesn’t have enough of those things to make a dent.

As of 2007, the last year for which it has released a tax return, Yele Haiti was running close to a half million dollar deficit, its president and his deputy were resigning amid a “crisis” brought about by Yele’s failure to reimburse its employees own expenses, and its programs in Haiti were often being administered in what one source who worked for Yele there described as a slapdash and unprofessional fashion. It simply does not have the immediately available organizational capacity to provide the people of Haiti the help that Jean desperately wants them to have.

Which is why the best way for Jean to help is to do what George Clooney is doing: Deploy his celebrity to raise money, and then direct that money to the people who best know how to help. Yele Haiti stands to raise millions of dollars on Friday night as one of five charities participating in the “Hope for Haiti” telethon — vast multiples of the sorts of funds it’s previously had access to. Jean may see this crisis has an opportunity to achieve the ambitions for Yele that he laid out for Winfrey. But it’s not a time for ego.

It’s time for him to remove himself from the equation. He can offer the millions of dollars that have been pledged to Yele to one of the other worthy organizations that will benefit from Friday’s telethon — Partners in Health, the Red Cross, Oxfam and UNICEF — or others who already have helicopters and trucks in Haiti. It would be a laudatory move, which would assure Yele’s future donors — who are going to be vital if Jean wants to expand and beef up its ongoing programs — that its plans are not interwined with its founder’s ego. The appearance that Yele is attempting to take advantage of this situation to transform itself from a shaky if well-intentioned personal foundation into a disaster relief organization does a great injustice both to Yele’s donors and the Haitians they are trying to help.

In explaining why he’s been able to raise an astonishing $1 million a day through text donations, Jean told Winfrey that people who wanted to help said, “We’re gonna give our money to Wyclef, because he came from Haiti, he’s been doing this.” That’s a sad and telling misreading of the shocked and horified Americans who want to help. No one wants to give their money to Wyclef. They want to give it to Haiti. And he can help them do that by turning it over to the professionals.

Giving the money Yele’s raised in the immediate aftermath of the quake to other non-profits would also preserve Jean’s credibility as the most prominent celebrity voice in America when it comes to Haiti. Because he does himself and his homeland a disservice when he goes on Oprah and tells embarrassing lies like, “I put my first $1 million into the charity.” That claim is contradicted both by Yele’s founding executive director and the internal financial documents we reported on earlier today. Or when he flatly — and dishonestly — insists to Winfrey that he has “never in any form taken payment for myself” from Yele, despite clear and repeated evidence to the contrary in Yele’s tax returns and in internal financial documents. Lies do not inspire confidence that Jean and Yele have turned the corner just yet.

[From Gawker]

I think John Cook explains his position really well, and I agree. It’s not about finding fault with Wyclef for what he is and is not doing, or giving him credit for what he’s already done or what he will do – it’s about what can help the Haitian people in real terms, here and now, with an eye towards pragmatism and realistic goals. It’s not about Wyclef, and I’m saying that even though I really do admire him, admire his good heart and his love and passion for Haiti.

Wyclef in Miami, recording a message for Haiti on January 16, 2010. Credit: Johnny Louis/WENN.com