Why some members of an elite work hardest to overthrow a democracy is the question here, and the answer offered is position in the social network. The authors build a model in which elites exert effort toward a coup because dictatorship lets them tax competitors, and in which that effort rises with a family's centrality among other elites. Testing follows on original Haitian data: genealogies of elite families reaching back to the nineteenth century, matched to firm-level import records, with the United States Treasury sanctions list naming supporters of the 1991 coup against Aristide serving as the measure of participation. Central families, and families with military histories, were more likely to appear on that list. Monthly consumer price data from 2001 to 2012 show that goods imported by those families rose in price during the autocratic years after 2004, and household survey data show urban children born then were shorter and lighter.