The epitome of his repressive measures came on July 27, 1915, when he ordered the execution of 167 political prisoners, including former president Oreste Zamor, who was being held in a Port-au-Prince jail.

[2] In 1935, when the occupation ended, the mansion was leased to Werner Gustav Oloffson, a Swedish sea captain from Germany, who converted the property into a hotel with his wife Margot and two sons Olaf and Egon.

In the 1950s, Roger Coster, a French photographer, assumed the lease on the hotel and ran it with his Haitian wife, Laura.

In 1987, with the help of his half-brother Jean Max Sam, Richard A. Morse signed a 15-year lease to manage the Hotel Oloffson, then in near-ruins after the final years of Duvalierism.

[1] In restoring the hotel business, Morse hired a local folkloric dance troupe and slowly converted it into a mizik rasin band.

[4] Richard Morse, using the social networking site Twitter, was a major source of news coming out of the disaster area in the early hours.

In a Twitter post from January 12, he states "Our guests are sitting out in the driveway.. no serious damage here at the Oloffson but many large buildings nearby have collapsed.