American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  The president acknowledged this obvious fact. Chucky had become a visible figure in Monrovia, tearing through traffic in a Land Rover with a license plate that read “DEMON.”9 Direct appeals to Taylor to protect human rights might not be effective, but Petterson knew that he might be receptive to the argument that his soldiers’ excesses ran counter to his interests and could, for example, scare away foreign investors and donors. Taylor listened for a moment, then offered the diplomat the familiar solution to the problem of his undisciplined security forces: training support from the U.S. military, but problems of indiscipline and human rights violations among Taylor’s force had worsened, rather than improved since Taylor made the same request of President Clinton months earlier. Petterson made it clear that the United States would not be taking on this project and that Taylor “needed to take the initiative to improve the quality of his forces.”

  Over the course of 1999, the U.S. embassy had learned increasingly more about Chucky and his unit—not only the news emerging out of Voinjama, but the sudden, unannounced presence of his fighters outside their compound. Yet his nationality figured into none of the reporting on him. The evening his father met with Petterson, Chucky’s soldiers took control of three checkpoints located near the embassy.10 Whether this was a deliberate show of force is not clear. The move, nonetheless, immediately sparked concern among American officials.

  What followed was a series of confrontations between embassy security and Chucky’s unit. His intentions were never clear, but the ATU fighters at Mamba Point heightened tensions, and Chucky further alarmed embassy security when he personally conducted a search patrol along the beach at the south perimeter of their compound, explaining obliquely that he was searching for “criminals.”11 Chucky’s commanders, meanwhile, began harassing Liberian security officers working for the embassy, prompting the American regional security officer’s intervention. Eventually Chucky met with the embassy’s temporary defense attaché, Michael Bajek, and handed over a copy of the orders he’d given to ATU officers to set up checkpoints, search vehicles, and detail the occupants.12

  This offered little comfort to the embassy or the local staff responsible for guarding the compound’s entryway. Chucky did little to clarify why he was engaged in this game of chicken with the embassy. “At present, some embassy personnel are expressing concerns about having this unit on the compound’s perimeter because of their lack of discipline and training,” a cable reported. “According to one embassy officer, mercenaries have trained this group.”13

  Chucky’s men kept up the pressure on the embassy into July 1999. “The Liberian government continues to deploy elements of the so-called Anti-Terrorist Unit,” the embassy noted, as it began to learn more about these fighters.14 “The ATU is the new name which the Liberian government has given to Chucky Taylor’s notorious ‘Demus Force’ (also known as the Demon Brigade).”15 Embassy officials continued to implore senior Taylor officials, including Jonathan Taylor, the minister of state and first cousin of the president, and Freddy Taylor, the head of the National Security Agency (not related), to turn the checkpoints over to the Liberian National Police. The requests went nowhere; the Liberian officials were not “willing to cross President Taylor or his son, Chucky, on the issue,” an embassy official wrote at the time.16

  Lynn was aware of the fearsome reputation Chucky and his men had developed. “Some of those boys were pure evil,” she recalled.17 Many of the fighters were drawn from the Small Boys Unit. Chucky’s bodyguards bantered openly about cannibalism—shocking her by describing how human hands were the best part of the body to eat. Yet most interactions with Chucky’s men gave her no reason to fear them. “I never saw the evil side of them, but I suppose it was there when [they were] confronted with the enemy. Killing, torture, I’m sure it takes a toll on the soul. I’m sure my boys [bodyguards] like Humphrey, Bobby, Tarnue, were considered evil. But I loved them, and they loved me.”18 Lynn understood why people feared Chucky: “He kind of had, I don’t know, maybe a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde personality.”19 But she had been immune from his outbursts. She says that he had never harmed her; in fact, she always felt safer around him. “I always thought I brought out the better side in him because I’m a good person. I always thought that I made him a better person.”20 The truth was that Chucky led a separate life, characterized not only by the violence of the ATU but by his lying and womanizing.

  Lynn wasn’t the only person in Chucky’s life to feel a pull to Liberia. Bernice regularly shuttled back and forth between Florida and Monrovia, living with her son and carrying out semiofficial duties—like visiting orphanages—typically associated with the first lady.21 As Bernice’s attachments to Liberia grew, her marriage to Roy Belfast began to splinter.

  The exact nature of her renewed affection for Taylor wasn’t clear; nor was it entirely remarkable. Taylor’s wives, current and past, orbited around him, drifting in and out of his residence and benefiting from being connected with him. Bernice eventually openly associated herself as a member of the Taylor family. She went as far as adopting an alternate identity: Yassazoe Emmanuel Taylor.22 The name drew from Charles Taylor’s mother’s first name. Liberia was a break from the other narratives in her life: middle age, divorce, suburbia. Monrovia offered a different sort of drama, the petty jealousies and affections of Taylor’s wives set against the backdrop of political intrigue.

  Lynn’s view on it was clear: “She was obsessed with Charles Taylor.… She wanted to be there. She wanted to be Liberian.”

  Lynn arrived with her sister for another summer vacation in Monrovia in early August 1999, bearing two puppies as gifts.23 Charles Taylor named his German shepherd “Rex,” while Chucky chose to name his pit bull “Danger,” borrowing the middle name from Austin Powers, the Mike Myers spy comedy.

  Chucky indulged the two women in the little sightseeing Monrovia afforded: the dense business district along Broad Street where tailors and jewelers crafted their wares in open-air storefronts; the embassy neighborhood on Mamba Point, which centered on the American compound; the sprawling markets along the Mesurado River in Waterside and Duala, where tin-roofed shops hawked essentials: dried fish, bush meat, plastic bottles filled with gasoline, tiny bundles of hot peppers. The group walked along the beach in Congo Town, near Chucky’s villa, snapping photos, with his bodyguard, Bobby Dixon, standing in the distance. Wherever he went, Lynn noticed, boys and young men saluted him, saying, “Yes, sir, Chief.”24

  The group ventured out of the city on day trips, even dropping in on a chimpanzee-testing facility near Harbel, operated by the New York Blood Bank—a strange artifact left over from pre–civil war Liberia—for an unannounced tour.25 On the way back to Monrovia one afternoon, the group pulled off the road to an isolated berm littered with broken bottles.26 Chucky retrieved a pistol and sawed-off shotgun from the truck for impromptu target practice. He filmed Lynn and her sister with a camcorder as they took turns firing the weapons, providing commentary.

  At night, the group hit the clubs in downtown Monrovia, like the Pepper Bush, a threadbare spot on Warren Street that attracted those who could afford to drink—foreign businessmen, government officials, Lebanese merchants, and security officers. Chucky had a reputation for throwing his weight around at clubs. In one incident, on September 22, 1999, he walked into a nightclub and noticed several members of the National Police’s Special Operations Division (SOD) drinking with three clean-cut Americans—U.S. Marines attached to the embassy.27 He approached the table where the men sat in front of their beers and drinks and demanded to know why the SOD officers were drinking on duty. He then looked at the Americans and asked the men “why the U.S. ambassador would allow Marines to drink late at night?” and demanded to know their names and rank. Rather than engage, the table of Marines stood up and walked out of the nightclub.

  The threat of violence was constant. Chucky wore a sidearm on his hip at all times; his bodyguard, Bobby, with him, an AK-47 at the ready. On August 11 a second rebel attack
struck Voinjama.28 Shortly afterward the BBC’s Africa Service broadcast an interview with a rebel calling himself “2nd Lieutenant Mosquito Spray.”29 The leader made it clear that his group was not aligned with any faction from Liberia’s dormant civil war. (Rebels who had captured several aid workers referred to themselves as “the Joint Forces for the Liberation of Liberia,” a previously unheard-of group.) “Mosquito Spray” gave little indication of the group’s aim other than that it had formed to oppose Charles Taylor’s government.

  The gravity of the news didn’t sink in initially for Lynn, who ran around Chucky’s house in the pitch black wearing night-vision goggles, laughing off the ridiculous name of the new rebel leader.30 Details of the assault trickled back to Monrovia—unlike the April incident, the fighting was sustained. Taylor described the forces as “very heavy, well armed and equipped.”31 He suspected Guinea’s hand in the fighting, which appeared to originate in the neighboring nation. Taylor declared a state of emergency and called up his militia to deploy forces toward the border. It was time for Lynn to go home.

  Lynn returned to Orlando in late summer, the daydream of Liberia over for a moment. Chucky called her when he could—but was vague, rarely discussing the fighting in the bush, which had started with the first assault on Voinjama that spring and resumed after she departed.32 Beyond his security role, he hoped to start making money, dabbling with timber and diamond-mining ventures. In times like these—when everything was going well—he never mentioned coming home. He was content with the idea that America represented his past and Liberia his future. Lynn loved him, but she couldn’t leave her life, her family, and her friends in the United States entirely behind. For better or worse, the couple had grown accustomed to living across the Atlantic from each other.

  Lynn filled in the distance between them with suspicions about his philandering. They had been engaged for more than a year, but now the stakes had changed. That autumn she told Chucky that he was going to be a father.

  If she had known what Chucky was doing in Liberia, it might have given her pause before moving ahead with their marriage. He had stepped to the fore in the ATU as a punisher and enforcer—of both prisoners and his own recruits. This didn’t endear him to his men. Many trainees at the base were still seething with anger over the killing of Justin Parker, when they learned of another punishment Chucky had meted out in Monrovia.33

  The incident involved an ATU soldier Chucky discovered drinking at a nightclub. This violation, while minor, was significant to Chucky. He was incensed that the man—a young, strong fighter from the Mano tribe named Kougbay Dunuma—was in uniform.34 Chucky ordered the man arrested and brought to the Executive Mansion, to be locked in a cell located near the seawall behind the building. Punishments varied for prisoners. Sometimes they were forced to cut grass in the sun using a machete—which Liberians called a cutlass. Others were imprisoned without any legal or disciplinary proceeding. But Chucky had decided to make an example of this young fighter. At daybreak the morning after his arrest, Dunuma was pulled from his cell and tied to a pole.

  Chucky ordered a punishment that amounted to a death sentence: one thousand lashes. (To give context, in antebellum Alabama slaves found in possession of a weapon could receive no more than thirty-nine lashes; those who forged “free passes” for other slaves could receive one hundred lashes.) An officer from Benjamin Yeaten’s unit, Bartuah Gbor, recounted seeing the commotion from his office.35 Dunuma was bound and restrained. For the better part of an hour, two men took turns striking the prisoner with a stick and a rubber truncheon. Gbor stepped out from his office to see what was happening. When the officers had finished, Dunuma looked at Gbor and said, “Can I have water to drink?” But Dunuma didn’t live much longer. Gbor recounted that without making another sound, the man died. Chucky and the others removed the body to bury it outside town.

  The ATU was becoming notorious for human rights abuses. Gbatala became a prison camp as much as a training facility. In early August 1999, as unrest continued near the border, several new detainees arrived at the base from Monrovia and were sent to Vietnam.36 Among them were two men who had been transferred from cells at the Executive Mansion: Nathaniel Koah, a prominent diamond miner in Lofa County, and Anthony Sonkarlay, one of his employees.

  Koah’s story embodied the kleptocratic bent of the Taylor government.37 While he’d been detained by the ATU, his arrest had little bearing on national security. Instead, by Koah’s account, its purpose was to shake him down for a five-carat diamond. Koah, a prominent diamond miner and former supporter of Taylor’s, had been in this position before. In 1994 he had mined a nine-carat stone in territory held by Taylor’s rebels. As he made his way toward Ivory Coast, where he intended to sell the diamond, Taylor’s fighters intercepted him, instructing him to detour to Ganta in northern Liberia because “Charles Taylor wanted this diamond.” That stone, Koah said later, went to the purchase of weapons that helped Taylor retake his stronghold in Gbarnga. But Koah did not have any diamonds this time.

  When Koah arrived at Gbatala, he would later testify, he’d already been subjected to several days of intense abuse and interrogation about a diamond he was allegedly carrying. He’d seen firsthand the person the president’s son had become. Soon after his detention at the Executive Mansion, Koah witnessed the beating death of Duduma. (The two men had briefly been tied to the same pole.) He’d also seen his own wife stripped naked and beaten in an attempt to elicit information. He’d even been brought across Monrovia to White Flower where, he said, President Taylor himself interrogated him about the diamond and an alleged coup plot. Koah told the president nothing—by his account there was nothing to tell. He was turned over to President Taylor’s son.

  Chucky was interested not only in the diamond but also in Koah’s political affiliations. The president’s son directly questioned the prisoner, but Koah could offer no response, he would later testify. The change Chucky had undergone in his few short years in Liberia was alarming. “He came as an innocent child and he saw his father in power and they handed him [a] gun,” Koah recalled. “When he handled gun, he was happy, he was power drunk. He could do anything when his father was president.”38

  When Chucky received no response from Koah, he ratcheted up the pressure, ordering his prisoner to pour a two-pound bag of salt into a cooking pot and begin eating it while he watched. Several days later Koah was taken to the third floor of the Executive Mansion where, he testified, Chucky ordered him to be suspended above a smoking fire. Several fighters stoked the fire below him with cotton and what Koah called “acid liquid,” sending plumes of acrid smoke upward. Koah passed out quickly from the smoke. When he eventually came to, he found himself in a bath of ice water with Chucky standing over him, demanding to know if he was still alive.

  Koah was then delivered to Gbatala. It was at a tenuous moment; indiscipline pervaded, even among the commanders.39 Trainees continued to arrive from Monrovia and surrounding areas, only to find themselves menaced by David Campari. The Gambian would wake the trainees several times over the course of the night to assemble for roll call and deprived them of food, while entertaining women and drinking heavily on the funds set aside for the recruits. He trusted none of the Liberians and would draft vulnerable new recruits as spies to monitor dissent. All this behavior occurred out of Chucky’s sight. When he would arrive on the base, Menephar and the others were too afraid to report Campari to him.

  “Nobody wanted to get hurt,” Menephar recalled. “And this guy is surely going to hurt you, he’s going to hurt you seriously.” The ATU recruits that did cross Campari were ordered held in the same holes as other prisoners. “He send you there. And you’re not going to come [back] from there,” he said.

  With more prisoners on the base, Campari’s attention began to shift to the detainees. Gbatala was a nightmare, Koah and Sonkarlay would later testify, where the prisoners experienced daily beatings and were forced to eat cigarette butts and drink their own urine, scarred with molten
plastic and covered in voracious driver ants. The men claimed they were even forced to witness the killing and mutilation of other prisoners.

  At the time of Koah’s arrival, access to the holes was limited to the MPs, but the guards permitted Menephar to visit his former commander from the days of the civil war—a man named Morris Gbleh—who had also been imprisoned in a hole following the incident where he shot a sentry after returning from the village drunk. Gbleh was treated as a pariah within the ATU after that, but Menephar brought cigarettes to Gbleh’s hole, “because he was like my dad.”

  There Menephar witnessed some of the abuse the prisoners would later recount, including being raped and forced to rape others. (Menephar refuted accusations about prisoner executions: “I never saw that. I never heard it.”40) Word of the sexual assaults made it back to Monrovia, where it crossed a boundary with Charles Taylor. He sent his son to investigate at the end of the rainy season in 1999, between late August and October. Chucky arrived on base shortly thereafter and marched down to Vietnam, where Koah, Sonkarlay, and another man Chucky had ordered detained at the St. Paul River bridge—a furniture maker named Rufus Kpadeh—were being held.

  When Chucky arrived, Koah complained about the rapes, according to testimony Kpadeh later provided.41 Chucky didn’t share his father’s concern over the assaults and instead told the men that “he wanted to see if it was the truth.” The men were then pulled from their holes and forced to rape one another again. Chucky said nothing, the men recalled. Instead, he and the other ATU soldiers stood there shooting photographs. Chucky’s behavior defied explanation, but the mistreatment of the prisoners had real consequences for his father.