American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Taylor’s path to the presidency in Liberia was also obstructed by the army of his former commander Prince Yormie Johnson. Johnson hardly presented the image of a disciplined military leader: he entertained journalists and onlookers with renditions of the reggae spiritual “By the Rivers of Babylon,” complete with his own backing band; he also executed looters and fired into civilian vehicles with little warning.48 At an impromptu meeting with the commander of a newly arrived Nigerian peacekeeping force, he ambushed Doe’s security detail, capturing the president after his men had been gunned down. In one of the most macabre moments of the war, the gruesome torture of President Doe, in the hours leading up to his death, was chronicled on video.49 Johnson oversaw the episode, sitting by nonchalantly drinking a Budweiser and trying to raise the U.S. embassy on a radio, as a shirtless and bloodied Doe begged for his life.

  Doe’s murder threw the U.S. negotiation into disarray. Taylor believed the Americans—in particular Cohen—had misled him. As a Nigerian-backed peacekeeping force established control over the capital, Taylor found all his momentum squandered. Following Doe’s death, a joint offensive between Johnson’s forces and the African peacekeepers pushed Taylor’s army back into the interior. The war ground to a stalemate as his comparably ragtag force now faced off against conventional forces from Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal, including devastating airpower launched from an airfield in Freetown, Sierra Leone.50

  Taylor had been reduced from the heir to executive power in Liberia to a warlord sidelined by history. He was forced to negotiate a peace between himself and Johnson, while the larger, better-equipped peacekeeping force chipped away at his ranks and territorial control. Taylor could not acknowledge to his remaining loyal fighters that he’d capitulated to their rivals.51 In the summer of 1992, when his son visited, he was preparing his defining offensive: Operation Octopus, an attack that would encircle Monrovia and drive out the international peacekeepers in hopes of finally seizing power over the country.52

  Though Chucky was likely too young to realize it, he had arrived at a decisive moment in his father’s career. Taylor was powerful, yet he didn’t have the influence to force compliance among his own fighters. For one thing, his half-Americo identity remained a political liability. Furthermore, the commanders who had helped him win vast swaths of Liberian territory had their own economic interests and had used the lull in fighting to build their own small empires, trading in timber, diamonds, and coffee. This business model worked well in sustaining Taylor’s war machine, but it allowed him little flexibility to negotiate for anything other than total control of the country, since any compromise would likely threaten his loyalists’ economic interests. One commenter at the time called Taylor a “prisoner of his own dream.”53

  As tenuous as Taylor’s hold on power was, he remained in control of Taylorland when his son arrived for the first time. Pine Hills was hardly Mayberry, but Chucky was clearly not accustomed to life in this new environment, where electricity and running water were luxuries rather than essentials. A cousin from Arthington who met Chucky for the first time that summer, Koisee Garmo, marveled at the bizarre contrast of this American boy staying with his father in this environment.54 Despite his surroundings, Chucky at first behaved very much like an American child. “The war was going,” Garmo said, but Chucky “was at home watching TV. Eating cornflakes.”

  Eventually, Chucky began venturing beyond his father’s compound without his mother’s knowledge. One of Taylor’s confidants was given responsibility for the American child, and the two would drive into the bush outside Gbarnga. Later that summer Chucky ventured even farther from the interim capital, following his half sister Zoe and her boyfriend, a fighter named Bill Horace, to Bong Mines, an iron-oremining town halfway between Gbarnga and Monrovia, on the front lines where fighting flared in the spring and summer of 1992.55

  Horace had a reputation for brutality that stood out even among Taylor’s rebels. He served as a commander of a contingent of Taylor fighters called the “Marine Division,” overseeing a sprawling area of operations in Grand Bassa and Maryland County surrounding the port city of Buchanan. In a civil war characterized by atrocities, the Marine Division carried a singular reputation for depredations. As one of Taylor’s generals would explain more than a decade later to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “If the Marine pass somewhere you will know … because of the flies.… the whole NPFL was afraid of them, even the Charles Taylor was afraid of them.… The Marine was the ones that brought the wickedness to the people.”56

  Another member of the unit told the commission, “We don’t take prisoners for they instructed us not to do so.”57 The unit’s rules of engagement were less rules than a license “to kill anybody and destroy anything,” he testified. In the middle of all this violence, Horace became known for a signature act. “He was in the habit of killing the crucifix way,” one former fighter said, describing how Horace would mount victims on makeshift crosses.58

  News filtered back to his father’s inner circle that Chucky had been venturing toward the edge of Taylor’s territory. As one frontline fighter recounted, these trips went beyond a teenage boy exploring the lurid world of violence on the fringe of his father’s area of control; he used the trips as an opportunity to join in on the action. “Chucky would get access to the front lines and use guns,” he said.

  While Chucky will not acknowledge his experiences with Horace that summer, his appearance drew attention among Taylor’s fighters. A Marine Division fighter, Morris Padmore, who would later implicate himself in a series of massacres of civilians, testified to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the American boy. Chucky was naïve but fascinated. At one point he asked for the chance to kill a prisoner, Padmore said, and had his wish granted.

  “That was his first-time killing,” he testified.

  Cindor Reeves said the rumors that Chucky killed prisoners for sport enraged his father. And when Bernice learned of her son’s forays to the battlefront, she also grew livid, Reeves recalled. “She was so angry, but Chucky apparently enjoyed it.”

  The details of what Chucky saw and did in the summer of 1992 are secrets he is determined to keep. What is clear is that the father-son reunion had introduced him to a world with fundamentally different notions of right and wrong, law and order, power and powerlessness. He returned home to Orlando forever changed by the experience.

  4

  Pine Hills

  You be sleepin if you think it’s all Disney and dreads, Impalas and Marauder, known to fuck up some Duke boys, load’n’ lock, before they gone on da block, little nigga done things that I can’t even speak.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4

  One fall afternoon in 1992, a pretty thirteen-year-old named Lynn Henderson walked home from school with a friend.1 Lynn was still in junior high, a petite Korean-American girl with large, round brown eyes, a shy smile, and a soft voice that trailed off as she spoke. Their route took them along Kensington High Boulevard in Pine Hills, a quiet street of drab single-family homes set back by parched lawns and lined with looming yellow pines. The block was the portrait of the stultifying boredom of the suburbs just outside Orlando’s city center, silent except for the hum of traffic in the distance, the residents largely remaining behind closed doors or on screened-in back porches. Lynn had grown up not far from there in a three-bedroom ranch house with a swimming pool tucked in a cul-de-sac near a pond called Horseshoe Lake. Her parents—a Korean mother and an American father—had raised four children in their Pine Hills home after moving to the area in the 1980s. Lynn was the youngest of three sisters.

  As they walked by, a voice called out to the girls. Lynn looked to see a boy sitting alone on the front steps of one of the larger houses on the block. She didn’t know him, but something about him immediately struck her. He’s obnoxious, she thought. Nonetheless, the girls stopped. Lynn’s friend knew him: she played Pan—the traditional Trinidadian music—with him in his stepfather’s steel drum
orchestra.

  Chucky was lean but broad-shouldered, with strong arms and a knowing smirk. He’d arrived home from Liberia weeks earlier, and his return to school had not gone well. That afternoon he was at home for a specific reason: he was under house arrest, with an electronic monitoring device strapped to his ankle to ensure that he didn’t stray into the streets of Orlando. The anklet he was wearing, Lynn would soon learn, was the take-home prize for a brush with the law after returning from Liberia. It kept him confined to his home, but didn’t prevent him from asking for Lynn’s number as she walked by.

  The racial barriers that had once existed in Pine Hills and that might have separated the two teens had collapsed by that time. In Lynn’s house, race was never an issue. Her father, as an American serviceman, had met her mother, a South Korean citizen, while serving in U.S. Army Intelligence in South Korea. The family had moved to Orlando, like many others, from the Northeast. Lynn was bused to a school where her first friends were largely African-American—many of them from West Indian families. She was neither intimidated nor impressed with the older boy who was asking for her number; she just saw him as a juvenile delinquent.

  Chucky offered little to counter that impression. Two years older than Lynn, he should have been enrolled at nearby Evans High School. But by the time he was fourteen, he’d simply stopped attending school altogether. Despite her initial repulsion, something about Chucky convinced Lynn to begin seeing him.

  Chucky ran with a tough crew of Pine Hills kids—a group who called themselves the Blunt Headz.2 Most of the boys had family roots in Haiti, Jamaica, or Trinidad, and all had had more than a few encounters with the law. One story about an arrest was something of a local legend. Chucky and several friends drove to the mall in upscale Winter Park and, once inside a department store, grabbed clothing and bolted, stopping only to smash the front window as they tried to make their escape. Their caper was hardly a success, but it had earned Chucky the pedigree of being something of a criminal.

  Over the next few months, Lynn began sneaking over to Chucky’s house in the afternoons, telling her parents, who both worked, that she was at her friend’s house. Chucky remained confined under house arrest at the time, though she didn’t know the details of his legal situation—and didn’t care to ask. For all his reputation and tough-guy swagger, he showed kindness and tenderness to her. She saw another side of him: a teenage boy who came off more like a grown man, who had presence despite saying very little, who commanded fear and respect within the neighborhood. She was, by her own admission, naïve. They spent hours in his room, listening to music and talking. “He was a bad boy,” Lynn said. “But he was always nice to me.”

  Initially, Chucky’s family life didn’t come up in conversation. But as Lynn spent more time at his house, she came to know his parents. Bernice was kind to her, but Lynn also saw her “very verbal, very aggressive” side, a contrast to the quiet, hardworking demeanor of Roy, to whom she remained married. Lynn noticed that though Chucky had taken his stepfather’s name, he never used it. He went by Charles or Chuck, and to his parents, he was Charlie. Even though he was known to most as Chucky, he took offense when people he was not familiar with used it. Eventually she learned that Charles was his father’s name and that Chucky had taken a trip the prior summer to Africa to visit him, an experience Chucky had little to say about at the time. Like many Americans, Lynn knew little about Liberia back then. The name Charles Taylor meant even less to her.

  As their relationship developed, however, she began to see a darker, more volatile side to Chucky. He remained extremely close to his mother, though the two fought often. This volatility carried over to other relationships. Lynn noticed Chucky’s “wishy-washy” relations with others—one moment he would be close with a person, the next they would be on the outs. Lynn wasn’t scared away by any of it, though. In fact, the more time she spent with Chucky, the closer she felt to him. What began as a teenage crush, over the course of the school year, turned into something completely different.

  “I was totally, totally in love with him,” she recalled.

  An average Saturday night for Lynn included a stop at the nearby roller-skating rink, the Funtastic Skating and Entertainment Center. The rink drew hundreds of kids every weekend, some as young as four, from the surrounding neighborhoods, for what one local preacher described to the Orlando Sentinel as a “powder-keg situation”: horny, unattended, and often armed minors from different gangs converged on one location.3 From Lynn’s perspective, it was relatively harmless teen fun, but the Sentinel’s reporter was aghast at the scene surrounding the dance floor, where “the littlest ones watch, eyes wide, index fingers curved to mouths, while kids as young as eight crouch, bump and grind as if to simulate sex. Floor-level speakers that tower over their heads pound out songs about sex and violence from groups such as 2 Live Crew.” Often a night at the Funtastic would be punctuated with violence. In most cases, these were minor scuffles, but in at least one incident the rink was the site of a shooting. “All the fights were about nothing,” a member of the sheriff’s gang unit told the Sentinel. “This is where they try to impress other kids by fighting.”

  Orlando had set up a dedicated program to cope with children like Chucky called Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime, or TASC. Chucky stood out among the crowd of hoodlums he ran with because of his experience in Liberia. The events of that African summer remain a closely held secret—one that Chucky was reluctant to share with the few people close to him, including Lynn. His stepfather saw Chucky as a “tough” but “normal” kid. For Bernice, the problem was simple: Chucky moved with the wrong crowd.4 But in September 1993, following a scrape with the local police, court officials ordered a mental health assessment of the boy.

  The case officer knew little about Chucky other than that his juvenile court records showed “an extensive history of aggressive criminal charges.”5 When the two sat down, Chucky came across as extremely guarded. But as they spoke, a picture began to emerge. The counselor suspected that drugs and alcohol fueled some of Chucky’s criminal impulses, but there was something deeper at work as well: he had difficulty controlling his anger, and as Chucky acknowledged, he’d even considered killing himself.

  In fact, Chucky had already tried to take his own life. The suicide attempt was a family secret—he never brought it up to Lynn. Instead it was Chucky’s mother who eventually confided to her the details of what had happened. One afternoon, shortly after mother and son had returned from Liberia, Bernice discovered Chucky lying in the bathtub bleeding heavily from his wrist. He had cut vertically, slicing through flesh and tendons. Bernice pulled him from the bathroom, brought him downstairs to their car, and rushed him to a nearby emergency clinic. No clear event had precipitated Chucky’s attempt on his life: no fight, outburst, or insult appeared to have pushed him over the edge. The family’s response to the suicide attempt was unusual according to Lynn: Chucky was not hospitalized and received no medical or psychiatric care beyond physical therapy. Between Lynn and Chucky, the incident wasn’t open for discussion. It represented a vulnerability that she otherwise didn’t see in her boyfriend, who even as an adolescent sought to portray himself as manly and deserving of respect. For Chucky’s stepfather, the suicide attempt blindsided him. “For any parent, when a child does something like that, it’s terrifying,” Belfast recalled.

  According to Lynn, however, Bernice ascribed the suicide attempt to something beyond her control.6 During Chucky’s summer visit to Liberia, one of Charles Taylor’s former wives had given him a gold ring. The ring, Bernice explained, was cursed. “She thought it was black magic,” Lynn said. The ring had pushed Chucky to attempt to take his own life, Bernice told her. It was a telling statement. In some Trinidadian traditions, where Baptist Christian churches often melded European and African mysticism, mental illness is attributed to curses and demonic possession. This superstition, as one study noted, served to provide “escape from unpleasant reality, and diminution of guilt by pr
ojecting blame onto an intruding agent.”7

  In Trinidad, the cure for a curse like this was a “bush bath,” a mixture of roots and herbs concocted as part of a prayer-filled ritual.8 Chucky, however, faced a different kind of healing process. He bore deep scars on his wrist from the suicide attempt and had to work with a physical therapist to regain the full use of his hand.

  It was a missed opportunity for Chucky’s family to pursue the psychological causes of his pain. His mental health assessment only touched on his behaviors: the frequent run-ins with the police, the suspected drug and alcohol abuse, the violence and aggression. A psychologist would have likely tried to understand whether these behaviors reflected deeper problems: whether he was narcissistic, callous, or manipulative; whether environmental factors were at work, like an unstable environment at home or the rejection of a parent; in short, whether he was demonstrating age-appropriate antisocial behavior or was developing into a psychopath. Even if those signs had been discovered, however, Chucky would have likely gone undiagnosed. In 1993 the American Psychiatric Association did not permit the diagnosis of patients under the age of eighteen with any type of antisocial personality disorder.9 The mental health community was split on the point; some viewed adolescence as a transitional period where socially deviant behavior may be isolated, while others saw it as the moment when lifelong disorders first emerge and when prevention of future behaviors can be pursued.

  In any case, Chucky continued on his own trajectory, his parents unable to rein him in and blind to the risk that his antisocial behavior would become more dangerous. Ample evidence pointed to this possibility. Like other cities around the country, Orlando was experiencing the lethal combination of children and guns, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Pine Hills became a front line in this crisis.10 In one incident, two ten-year-old children and a twelve-year-old were arrested for breaking into a home and attempting to steal shotguns. In another, a Pine Hills homeowner was surprised when a barbecue was hurled through his front window; moments later teens in ski masks stormed the house. Before the homeowner could stop them, a teen opened fire, shooting him in the thigh. One of Chucky’s neighbors, a seventeen-year-old boy, was shot twice in the back as he left a local fair by two teens who peppered his car with 9mm and .45-caliber pistols.