by Johnny Dwyer
On the night of February 25, 1994, nearly a year and half after he first met Lynn, Chucky got his hands on a .38 automatic pistol.11 He walked along North Pine Hills Road with two friends, seventeen-year-old Daniel Dasque and Philip Jackson, a twenty-one-year-old who had been arrested two years earlier after leading Orange County sheriff’s deputies on a high-speed chase through Pine Hills. The young men made their way past the one-story Eglise Baptiste Philadelphie Church, toward the Indialantic Drive intersection. Chucky wore a red sweatshirt and black baseball cap. Tucked into his pants was the pistol. He was not the only one armed, according to a police report; either Jackson or Dasque held a concealed stock barrel .410-gauge shotgun.
At around eight-thirty p.m., the trio spotted a lone teenager walking toward them. Steven Klimkowski had grown up nearby but did not know Chucky or his friends. He had only just stepped out of his house. Within moments, Dasque confronted him and demanded money. Klimkowski replied that he didn’t have any.
“Yes, you do,” Dasque responded.
Klimkowski tried to brush past the group, but Chucky and his friends set upon him. He broke free and bolted to his house, just eight doors down the street. The trio chased the teenager to his lawn, where he yelled out for help to his father.
When Robert Klimkowski stepped onto his lawn, a terrifying scene came into view: three young men were accosting his son, one of them armed. At the sight of the boy’s father, Chucky and his friends bolted down the street. Father and son immediately gave chase. Chucky stopped in his tracks and turned on the Klimkowskis. He flashed his .38 and leveled it at Robert Klimkowski’s head.
Klimkowski, who is white, referred to the incident as the time “the black guy pulled a gun out on me.”12 Years later he recalled Chucky saying to him, “What’re you going to do about it?”
Chucky then turned the weapon toward Steven Klimkowski’s head.
Chucky’s accomplice Philip Jackson had stopped to egg him on, according to the police report, crying, “Shoot him! Shoot him!”
Steven backed away, saying, “I ain’t doin’ nothin.”
Chucky didn’t pull the trigger. Instead he let his pistol arm drop to his side, then turned to run off into the night with his friends. They didn’t get far. The trio attempted to hide out at a friend’s house, a few doors from the scene of the crime, but the police easily tracked them. When they placed Chucky under arrest, he still had the .38 in his possession.
The state’s attorney charged him with four felonies: two counts of aggravated assault with a firearm, one count of attempted robbery, and possession of a firearm in commission of a felony. Bernice had to post bail to secure her son’s release pending a trial, which was scheduled for August. For the first time in his juvenile criminal career, Chucky was looking at real jail time.
The house arrest, the suicide attempt, and now a potential jail term—Chucky’s latest arrest marked a turning point for Bernice. She had grown resigned to the fact that she could no longer control her son. But now his behavior had become more than just a threat to himself and his future—it had become a threat to other people. All she had to do was turn on the nightly news or look in the Sentinel to see where her son’s path could lead. She no longer wanted the responsibility of handling the boy.
Soon afterward she called Liberia to speak with her son’s father.13 Taylor had little sway with his son and even less influence in the United States to try to ensure that Chucky would not be imprisoned. But Bernice wasn’t looking for Taylor to intercede on their child’s behalf.
“I’ve had him until he’s seventeen,” she told him. “Now it’s your turn.”
PART II
5
Revolution
Ain’t Kevlar, but a lion when I stand, know to the last strand born to fight, genetic from pops and his clan, to long to hate me.
—United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4
By the time the police were at the door, Chucky had no time to hide his stuff. He wasn’t in any position to fight or flee—he could only hope they didn’t find everything.
He had been in Accra, Ghana, for only several weeks, and somehow he’d already drawn the attention of the local cops.1 Jaded as he was for an American teenager, he was uninitiated in Africa. He had been relocated there by his mother and Charles Taylor, to remove him from the reach of the Florida prosecutors, making him a fugitive from justice and dropping him into the complex and conflicted political situation in West Africa. Taylor’s revolution had progressed little in the two years since Chucky’s first visit to Liberia. A handful of factions had ground to a bloody stalemate, but none was strong enough to claim control over either the capital or the country. It left Liberia a dangerous and chaotic place—hardly the environment to educate a boy who was desperately in need of positive influence.
Taylor chose to enroll Chucky at Accra Academy, a six-hundred-student boys’ boarding school located in Bubiashie, a suburb on the capital’s western side. It was modeled after British-style public schools and intended to educate the children of the country’s elite. In its sixty years, the school had survived Ghana’s struggle against British colonial rule, as well as the series of coups that followed independence. Its crest bore a sun, a cocoa and palm tree, and three connected chain links with the motto Esse Quam Videri, which translates as “To be, rather than to seem.”
Chucky did not want to be there, but he had little choice. He moved into a nearby hotel, rather than bunk in a dormitory on campus with his classmates. Few of his fellow students registered his presence on campus, and even fewer had any sense of who his father was.2 He was noticed for his absence from the typical activities: classes, meals, and sports. He hadn’t attended high school for more than a year before arriving in Accra, and he appeared to have little interest in resuming his education in an African country. His stints in African schools would turn out to be short-lived.
Accra had been a stopping-off point for Charles Taylor as well. Nearly a decade earlier, shortly after escaping from Plymouth, he had appeared in the Ghanaian capital, one of many Liberian dissidents who chose the city as a base. In 1985 Accra had become the nexus for all fragments of the Liberian opposition.3 Dissidents gathered there to collect themselves and plot their next move, eyeing one another warily. Most were resigned to exile on the margins of political action. The scene was reminiscent of Monrovia in the 1960s, when foreign anticolonial fighters had sought shelter in one of Africa’s few black republics.4 Now, in the months following the death of Quiwonkpa, a man whom even Doe appeared to fear, the opposition remained traumatized. If a man with his training, experience, and support within the military—and apparent support from foreign powers—couldn’t unseat Doe, who could?
An air of mystery surrounded Charles Taylor when he first arrived in Accra in the mid-1980s. Liberians who did know him recalled him from his student days in the ULAA or his brief tenure with Doe’s government from the GSA. He had always been outspoken and intelligent but nonetheless content to second an ordained leader like Quiwonkpa. With new status as a fugitive from American justice, he began positioning himself as a potential heir to Quiwonkpa’s mantle.
Accra was the obvious destination for Taylor. He boasted to friends that he was “good friends” with the senior officials in the government of Jerry John Rawlings, an air force officer who had staged a military coup in 1979 and become Ghana’s president in 1981.5 He represented a return to the Pan-African ideals of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian leader to whom Taylor and many other young Africans had been drawn.
The story of his jailbreak, Taylor quickly learned, was both a liability and an asset in Accra’s suspicious environment. Some read into it as a measure of Taylor’s ingenuity and the tacit stamp of approval from the United States. Others doubted the story and assumed that Taylor’s sudden and improbable reappearance could be explained more cynically—that he had cut a deal with the Americans and was under their thumb. Ghanaian authorities briefly placed him under arrest. “You cannot tell us that you got out of …
a maximum security prison in the United States and come here if the CIA didn’t help you to come, so you are a spy,” Taylor recalled the authorities saying.6 They held Taylor for seven months, but after his supporters interceded with Ghanaian officials, they released him.7
Ghana was a decidedly leftist environment. Rawlings had come to power under a party with strongly socialist leanings, views shared by many of the Liberians who had fled to Ghana. In the mid-1980s, ideology did not drive Liberian dissident politics. Tribal affiliation and patronage networks drew supporters more readily than any particular vision for Liberia’s political future. The primary preoccupation shared by these groups concerned how to dismantle the Doe regime, which had evolved over the course of the decade into a vast patronage scheme for members of his tribe rather than a functioning government. A similar relationship bound Doe and the United States; he understood that aid dollars would flow to him as long as Liberia remained a non-Communist state.
Liberian dissidents, such as Amos Sawyer, remained in Accra under the wing of the Rawlings government, where they were safely kept from pursuing any revolutionary plans back home. These arrangements were mutually beneficial: activists could remain safe and comfortable there, provided they made no moves to stir up trouble in Liberia and, by extension, the region. Rawlings had little incentive to push for Doe’s ouster, even if their political views differed. Rawlings and Doe both belonged to a generation of West African military leaders who had recently taken power—including Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, Lansana Conté in Guinea, and Ibrahim Babangida in Nigeria—yet the Liberian and the Ghanaian had little in common. Rawlings, a liberal committed to democracy, ushered in an era of development and economic growth. Doe, whose politics were tribal, paid little attention to the development of the Liberian state. The men were neither rivals nor allies. Rawlings had little reason to come down hard on foreign dissidents arriving in Ghana on behalf of Doe or, for that matter, to actively encourage them.
But Charles Taylor was intent on unseating Samuel Doe. In Accra, he set about building an alternate network of political support, connecting with operatives from Maktub Tasdir al-Thawra, Muammar Qaddafi’s “bureau for the export of revolution,” thereby linking himself with like-minded insurgents—including Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré—and gaining the opportunity to train in revolutionary warfare and politics in Libya.8 The Mathaba, as the group was called, operated throughout Africa proselytizing Qaddafi’s theory of perpetual revolution and Pan-African ideology, dangling the potential for material and political support for ambitious insurrectionists.
Most men who aligned with Qaddafi played along with his politics, which envisioned African nations uniting to become a global power, in exchange for receiving training at Tajura, a former U.S. Air Force base outside Tripoli. But the goals of Compaoré and Taylor were more self-serving: to forcibly seize power in their home countries for their own political purposes. In 1987 in Burkina Faso, Compaoré achieved this. Thomas Sankara, the popular revolutionary president who pursued women’s rights, the abolition of tribal authority, and the nationalization of industries, was assassinated along with his cabinet. Compaoré, who once fought alongside his president, reportedly engineered his death. The Liberian rebel commander Prince Yormie Johnson testified two decades later that both he and Taylor had played a role.9 As Taylor began training rebels in Libya under Qaddafi’s authority, the partnership he forged with Compaoré would prove integral to his own revolution.
By 1988, as his fighters trained at Tajura in the Libyan desert, Taylor approached regional leaders about his plans to depose Doe. In November 1985 Thomas Quiwonkpa had staged his assault on Doe from Sierra Leone; now three years later Taylor approached Joseph Momoh, the Sierra Leonean president. He did not find a receptive audience—Momoh instead threw Taylor in jail. The sudden disappearance of the face of the revolution nearly led to a mutiny in the ranks of the Liberians training in Libya and almost cost Taylor his opportunity to unseat Doe. It was a betrayal he would not forget, long after he successfully launched his invasion—and one that many believed would motivate his incitement of Sierra Leone’s civil war.
Two years later, in February 1991, Taylor took his revenge on Momoh. While training in Libya, he had met several Sierra Leoneans bent on overthrowing their government, including Foday Sankoh and his deputy, Augustine Gbao. Sankoh, the son of a farmer who had served in the Sierra Leone military, then was imprisoned for nearly seven years for his role in an attempted mutiny, was a decade older than Taylor. He had spent many years as an itinerant photographer, shooting weddings and portraits; his time on the road connected him to political activists and ultimately led him to Libya. There he made a connection with the burgeoning NPFL. An NPFL officer named Gen. John Tarnue began to train fighters from Sierra Leone, though he later testified that their purpose was not clear to him at the time.
In 1991 Taylor convened a meeting in Gbarnga that would change the course of his country and Sierra Leone, according to prosecutors and witnesses with the Special Court.10 Around then the Sierra Leonean Army had deployed soldiers to Liberia to support the West African peacekeeping mission, which also included forces from Gambia, Guinea, Nigeria, and Ghana. Taylor had invited Gbao and Sankoh for war planning. Their objective: bring civil war to Sierra Leone.
Taylor called the meeting to order, according to several witnesses, addressing the NPFL leadership and the small cadre of fighters from Sierra Leone. He laid out his intentions to back a group of Sierra Leonean insurgents with weapons and personnel. The initial assault would be part of a broader joint venture. The elements required for success would be: the forced conscription of fighters, men, women, and children; the elimination of those who resisted; and the extraction of resources to support the war effort. Nimba County’s plentiful iron ore was a cumbersome resource, but Sierra Leone had diamonds and gold, which could be easily—and clandestinely—transported across the border into Liberia. Taylor instructed the Sierra Leoneans that any minerals mined from the territory they won would be shipped to Burkina Faso and Libya and returned in the form of ammunition, money, and food to support the revolution against Momoh’s government. When Taylor invaded Liberia in 1989, revolutionaries from Sierra Leone had aided his incursion; he offered to reciprocate with weapons and Liberian fighters to participate in their initial assault on targets in Sierra Leone.
The meeting was by necessity secret, for more than military purposes—it shielded Taylor from the severe political fallout that would follow from launching an incursion into another nation. The NPFL had developed a reputation as a barbaric, undisciplined, and unstable fighting force, but it was intent on replacing the government of Liberia. Any public recognition that Taylor had ambitions beyond Liberia would threaten not only his internal popularity but also the clandestine support he was receiving from Burkina Faso and Libya.
In November 1990, in an interview with the BBC, Taylor issued a warning of his intentions.11 He told African correspondent Robin White, “I have had enough of the Sierra Leonean government permitting Nigerian aircraft to come out and kill my people. I’m saying that planes are taking off from bases at the international airport in Freetown at the end of the runway, that leave and they come and blow Liberian babies, women, and old people away, and my patience has run out in Momoh permitting this to happen from his territory.”
“But how exactly do you propose to stop [it]?” White asked.
“It’s anybody’s guess,” Taylor responded. “Maybe Momoh doesn’t know, but he’ll soon find out.”
“Are you suggesting that you will go and attack Sierra Leone yourself?” White asked.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Taylor said. “But it’s for Momoh to determine.”
The fighting had been going in Sierra Leone for nearly three years when Chucky arrived in Ghana in 1994. He was the definition of a misfit: an American, a fugitive, son to a father he barely knew. He also inherited some of the aura surrounding his father’s reputation as a political fire starter. H
is mother had accompanied him to Ghana and stayed, but Orlando was now firmly in his past.
His arrival in Ghana came at a crucial moment between his father and President Jerry Rawlings. Taylor and Rawlings’s relationship had grown complicated since Ghana intervened in the Liberian civil war as part of the peacekeeping force in 1991. Despite their personal relationship, Taylor’s forces had attacked peacekeepers that Rawlings had sent to Liberia. The Ghanaian president was nevertheless determined to work with Taylor, recognizing that peace in Liberia would require the warlord’s cooperation. Indeed, in meetings with U.S. officials, Rawlings privately insisted to them that Taylor was not Liberia’s central problem.12 U.S. policy makers had adopted a hands-off approach to the conflict, leaving it to West African leaders to broker a peace, but Rawlings feared that the United States would pursue its interests covertly. He warned Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in late 1994 that any efforts to “take Taylor out” would only lead to more violence.
The larger politics surrounding his father had little impact on Chucky’s behavior. In his short time in Ghana, he’d been able to acquire a gun and access to drugs—which likely led to the tip-off to Ghanaian authorities. The officers arriving at his apartment quickly located the contraband among his belongings. Bernice had been through all this before with him. But he was in Africa now, and the stakes were different. This time Bernice couldn’t simply post bail and move him elsewhere. The officers placed him under arrest and continued sifting through the apartment, finding items that didn’t fit with his past life: a military uniform and radio handset.13
