American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Pohle claims the mining operation was Houge’s real reason for being in Liberia and that “basically the cover was a school for the deaf.” With the blessing of the authorities, the group set up their machinery in a creek along the Lofa River, near the border of Lower Lofa and Grand Cape Mount Counties. Pohle noticed that nearly everywhere he went in the bush, he found armed men and boys—a sight familiar from his experiences in Sierra Leone.

  “Everybody had an AK, some of ’em just in short pants. Those were the throwaways from Charles [Taylor],” he recalled, saying the fighters never interfered with him. “I didn’t never have to get rough on anyone.” But Pohle decided not to stay around long enough to see whether the operation began yielding diamonds.

  Meanwhile Liberia’s tenuous political situation was an increasing concern for Jeff House. In Monrovia, confrontations between Taylor’s forces and American diplomats were becoming more frequent.25 In the bush, ATU forces lost ground to insurgents in Lofa County, then staged a retaliatory cross-border attack into Macenta, Guinea, where Taylor believed his enemies were operating with American support. For an American businessman, all signs pointed toward a collapse in the relationship between Liberia and the United States. “Vic,” an unidentified business partner, relayed to Akinsanya some of House’s fears, saying that House

  was a bit nervous when he heard that the President had been quoted as saying that the US and Britain are trying to assassinate him. I told him that most of what is on the news is mostly overblown.… You should hear the stories that he has heard about CT [Chucky]. How he has these drug parties, and that he runs drugs from Columbia [sic] and that he hires these $1000 a day hookers from Columbia [sic] that are flown in to service him and his friends. He also has the killing sprees. He said he does not believe these stories and that he really likes CT and that he is an intelligent and articulate man and is very impressed by him. I think it was because of these stories that he wants to help improve the image that the outside world has of CT. He really wants to help. Talk to you later.26

  A handwritten note on a faxed copy of the e-mail read:

  CT,

  Just got this from Vic. As you can see this is why i say that you need to call him every now and then. I will see you later to talk about this.

  Izzy27

  It isn’t known whether Chucky tried to address House’s concerns, but House grew even more distressed. In August 2000 Charles Taylor responded to the allegations that he had been trafficking diamonds with the RUF by accusing the American government of funding a $2 million plot to assassinate him.28 The charges, broadcast over his KISS-FM radio station and published in newspapers sympathetic to Taylor, ratcheted up festering anti-American tensions in Monrovia, particularly among Taylor’s security forces.

  In October, President Clinton signed an executive order barring the entry into the United States of “President Charles Taylor, senior members of the Government of Liberia, their closest supporters, and their family members,” citing the Liberian government’s role in sustaining the crisis in Sierra Leone through the diamonds and weapons trade.29 Akinsanya received another e-mail to an account that he and “Vic” shared, detailing House’s concerns:

  I’ve been trying to call you all morning. I spoke with Jeff yesterday.… Someone has been telling him that going over there would be the dumbest thing he could do since THEY will be removing the chief by force in 30 or 60 days and that they are after CT also. He was also told that there were 11,000 troops waiting at the border that they are planning to send in.30

  By mid-October, however, even as the operation got off the ground, the lawyers continued to finalize the deal. House and Chucky had agreed to incorporate in Nevis, a tiny Caribbean nation—also a tax and regulatory haven—but the Minnesotan objected to several provisions requiring him to report gold and diamond discoveries to the government, while being offered no guarantees of future mining rights.31 Leslie Anderson, the attorney who reviewed the contract for House, recalled his understanding of how profits were to be distributed: “The state of Liberia or the country of Liberia would’ve got the proceeds, part of the proceeds would go to Taylor, part would go to Jeff, and, I think, it was supposed to be very, very lucrative, if they ever hit the diamonds.”32

  They never did, though. According to Anderson, the deal suddenly fell apart. House had been unable to deliver the investors that Chucky required to launch the effort. Anderson said that Chucky had retaliated by kicking the American workers out of the country and taking the only thing left of value: the mining equipment. It was a classic bait and switch, executed perfectly on the unsuspecting Americans who had been “dumb enough to bring all this equipment over,” as Anderson said.

  It was a bitter lesson of dealing in Taylor’s Liberia. House, despite the appearance of official sanction, had been hustled; he returned to Minnesota and filed for bankruptcy.

  Jeff House was not the only business partner whom Chucky threw in with. In early 2000 another opportunity presented itself in an underworld figure named Leonid Minin.33 Minin represented a new type of organized crime figure that had emerged with the fall of the Soviet Union: a global gangster and conflict profiteer unaligned to any ideology. To international law enforcement agencies, his nationality remained a mystery. Minin was believed to be an Israeli citizen born in Ukraine, who leveraged his connections within Russian organized crime and the former Soviet military and intelligence services to provide weapons and equipment to conflicts around the globe. This type of chimerical identity reflected the flux of the post–Cold War world, with diplomatic passports, dual citizenship, and an array of aliases—Minin had thirteen, including “Wolf Breslan,” seemingly ripped straight from the pages of a spy novel.34 Figures like Minin—and Victor Bout, the Russian arms trafficker dubbed “The Lord of War”—had the agility to exploit weak borders and out-of-date international enforcement standards. But most significantly for Taylor—and Chucky—criminals accepted payment in a currency favored in West Africa: diamonds and timber.

  Timber first drew Minin to Liberia in 1998, but by 2000 he began shipping weapons to Robertsfield for Taylor’s government. Liberia had been under an arms embargo for most of Taylor’s political career.35 When he was an insurgent warlord, arms procurement had been a clandestine process, and little had changed now that he was an elected president living under the same arms embargo. Taylor was still required to purchase weapons for his forces on the black market, which required working with men like Leonid Minin.

  Over the first year and a half of his presidency, Taylor relied on an ad hoc pipeline for transitting weapons from Eastern Europe to West Africa. The system was built on the willingness of brokers in well-armed former Soviet bloc nations to sell off weaponry to the highest bidder and on the disarray of the West African aviation infrastructure, which permitted illicit air traffic. Weapons flowed into Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso en route to Liberia, along the way relying on the shared profit motivations of the traffickers, the government, and military officials willing to transit arms to Taylor. The weapons served Taylor’s foreign policy objectives, whether that meant arming his own forces or providing weapons to the RUF in Sierra Leone. In some cases, shipments were driven directly from the airfield to White Flower, where they would remain firmly in his control.

  The flood of Soviet bloc weapons—which were primarily small arms and light conventional systems—had a transformative effect for the rebel groups throughout Africa. Cheap, durable, and—most important—easy to operate, small arms became the engines of the wars not only in Sierra Leone and Liberia but also in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Sudan. As violence had become a way of life in the region, weapons trafficking became an essential industry, one synonymous with power—a line of business into which Chucky sought to insinuate himself.

  Robertsfield became a hub of regional weapons trafficking. Some of Minin’s shipments were small enough to be ferried aboard a BAC-111, a 150-seat passenger jet that had once belonged to the Seattle Sup
ersonics, on flights from Ouagadougou.36 Others arrived in larger Soviet cargo aircraft. In May 2000 another aircraft, an Ilyushin, landed in Robertsfield with a load of Strela and Igba surface-to-air missiles—weapons that far exceeded both the capabilities of Taylor’s forces and the immediate threat he faced. With the prospect of a long war developing in Lofa, Taylor sought to acquire greater amounts of sophisticated weapons to counter the threat.

  Over the preceding year, Minin had become a familiar face for Charles Taylor. Minin was trying to sell to the government of Liberia the aging BAC-111 jet he’d been using for weapons shipments to serve as a presidential jet, but the cost was prohibitive. While Charles Taylor relied on Minin for connections to arms networks throughout the world, for Chucky, Minin represented an opportunity to make money. Chucky had the valuable timber and diamond concessions his father had assigned to him but little means to convert them into profits. When he sought, despite worsening security conditions in the region, to get his ventures off the ground, he turned to his father’s friend.

  The two began meeting in Monrovia in 1999, often with Minin’s partners, including Erkki Tammivuori, from a Finnish family in the export business, and Fernando Robleda, a Spaniard.37 Timber was the shared interest. While Chucky brought little to the table in terms of business experience or financial acumen, he did have proximity to his father. As the foreigners pursued their logging ventures, Chucky would use them as a sounding board for other moneymaking schemes.

  Unlike much of his work with the ATU, Chucky’s business life touched more directly on Lynn. Minin had covered some of the costs of the couple’s honeymoon. Nonetheless, he hadn’t made a positive impression on her—she remembered him as “nasty, dirty-looking,” a functioning drug addict with a taste for heroin.38 “I remember thinking: gross,” she said.

  Minin and Chucky soon partnered in a timber company, Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprises, following the model of the large-scale timber efforts his father had partnered with Dutch, Malaysian, and Lebanese investors on exploiting concessions. The National Forestry Law had passed in January 2000, handing over all old-growth forests to the government without regard to land ownership claims. President Taylor allocated these concessions on a case-by-case basis, granting a limited term for the recipients to turn a profit on a given tract. The practice encouraged hasty clear-cutting and resulted in considerable damage to Liberia’s rain forests.

  At one point, Chucky pitched Minin’s business partner, Fernando Robleda, on a fuel oil deal. The Spaniard faxed a note to his boss afterward: “I’m just coming from Chucky [sic] house. He called me this morning for a business proposal and, for the first time, I think it could be interesting.”39 It would give Minin the sole rights to import crude oil into Liberia for the duration of two to three years at an estimated $3 million profit per month. The profits from this monopoly, presumably, would be charged to the Liberian consumer.

  Chucky pressed Minin to invest in the deal, but he had already paid $2 million in “taxes”—the personal tribute required to do business in Liberia—to Charles Taylor for the Exotic timber venture. Robleda put Chucky off, asking whether the money they had provided to Charles Taylor could be applied toward Chucky’s venture—in effect, asking the son to borrow from the father. “He told me, again, it’s not possible because it’s a matter of respect in front of his father,” Robleda wrote to Minin.

  That deal never went forward.40 But Chucky did manage to insert himself into an Ukrainian arms shipment coming through Minin: a vast load of 7.62mm rifle ammunition and various other arms purchased by his father set to transit through Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The deal represented a $1 million investment for Taylor, from which Chucky could collect a commission. The payments flowed into accounts in Cyprus and New York that belonged to Minin’s company, Aviatrend; they had identical references with Minin’s timber ventures—“Buying Technical Material / Wood Extractions Tools”—to provide cover for the transaction.

  That July an Antonov AN-124, a hulking 446-ton Soviet-era cargo aircraft, took off from Gostomel Airport outside Kiev, loaded with armaments, most notably the five million cartridges of 7.62mm ammunition, bound for Abidjan. The flight had all the markings of an official and legal weapons sale; authorities in both the originating and destination countries had signed off on the export. A Ukrainian military officer accompanied the shipment to Ivory Coast to ensure the cargo was delivered, and when the plane touched down in Abidjan, an Ivorian military officer met the aircraft.

  Nearly all the authorizations provided by the Ivorian government, however, had been forged; the Ivorian general who appeared to have initiated the purchase was, in fact, in hock to Taylor because of arms the Liberian had provided him following a coup a year earlier. Nearly as soon as the weapons hit the tarmac in Ivory Coast, a smaller Ilyushin, similar to the aircraft that had arrived two months earlier, took off from Robertsfield, outside Monrovia. Touching down in Abidjan, the arms were loaded onto it, whereupon it began ferrying the cargo back to Liberia, to deliver it to the actual purchaser.

  As large as the shipment was, it was not complete—the arms accounted for only $250,000 of the order purchased through Minin. What had been meant to be a lucrative and successful weapons transaction between Minin, Chucky, and his father quickly fell apart.

  The next month Italian police officers stormed Minin’s hotel room in a suburb outside Milan.41 They found the short Ukrainian surrounded by prostitutes and in possession of more than 58 grams of cocaine, more than $35,000 in cash, and nearly $500,000 in diamonds. More than fifteen hundred pages of faxes spelled out in incriminating detail his ties to the companies and individuals underwriting a variety of weapons deals—including the Ivorian deal. Several documents directly referenced Chucky, including one from Erkki Tammivuori that mentioned “special packages for Junior.” The Italian investigators surmised that this referred to missiles, though it could have been drugs.

  In either case, the arrest was a huge humiliation for Chucky, who cut his ties with Minin, faxing him a handwritten note that read: “From this day forward never in your life ever contact me again.” Chucky never discussed arms deals, Lynn said, though she didn’t doubt he tried to engage in some. Other Taylor insiders insist that Chucky never had a hand in any weapons deals. “Chucky was irresponsible so his father could not trust him for bringing in weapons,” one of Chucky’s deputies said.

  All the advantages of being the president’s son yielded very little in the way of easy profits for Chucky. Even with the deck stacked entirely in his favor, he failed to distinguish himself in the field of hustlers, entrepreneurs, and monopolists in Taylor’s Liberia. In business, as with the ATU, Chucky seemed to be the biggest obstacle to his own success.

  10

  War Business

  I tote dat gunn dat, feelin fear as I blast spreadin rumors with your ruger.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4

  Lynn had been married just four months before she became a mother; six months later she packed up her newborn son and embarked with him on his first trip to Africa and his first meeting with his father. She was just twenty-one years old—an age when many of her friends were focused on graduating from college—but she hoped to settle down and start a life with her husband. Their teenage romance had barely survived the years they’d spent apart; it was unclear how their marriage would last when they were finally together.

  It was October 2000 when she returned to Monrovia. Until then she had been connected to Liberia only through conversations and e-mails with Chucky. While she remained in the dark about much of his life, she knew that in the year he had been without his unit, he had made very little money off his various schemes and ventures. More important, she knew that the pressure on his father’s government had increased significantly. What she did not know, when she finally arrived, was that Chucky had given up on the idea of being a husband and father.

  “I never wanted her there,” he said, even though he’d lured her to Liberia as a teenager, begged
her forgiveness after she discovered his infidelity, married her, and fathered her son.1 It was characteristic of Chucky’s personality to discard people when he no longer felt they served a purpose in his life.

  Indeed, having a child had not been the catalyst for change in Chucky’s life that Lynn had hoped for; if anything, it pushed him away and did nothing to change his behavior. As much as she still loved him, she couldn’t deny that his darker side had become more present. His temper flared with his bodyguards, as he was constantly yelling at them. Then there was Danger; he never acknowledged what had happened to the dog.

  When Chucky mysteriously injured his hand, Lynn understood that he’d broken it hitting someone. But as with many of the shrouded details of his life outside of their home, she didn’t pursue it. “All through my time in Africa, I really believed he hadn’t killed someone,” she said.2

  The end came quickly and without incident, she recalled: “One day he just decided he didn’t want to be married anymore.” She knew all the failures in Chucky’s life were weighing on him, but the more fundamental problem was that “he just became a different person.” She returned to Florida and filed for divorce. For nearly a year, the couple did not communicate. She remained in Orlando raising her son as a single mother, hearing little of Chucky’s life in Monrovia and receiving no financial support for their child.

  Eventually, Chucky wanted their two-year-old son to travel with Bernice to Africa to accompany him on a medical trip to South Africa to receive surgery on his hand. She refused. Furious at being denied access to his son, Chucky called Lynn in Orlando and reached her sister. When Lynn refused to get on the phone, Chucky grew enraged, according to a member of her family.3 He threatened the family member and parents in specific terms: “He told me that he was going to line me and my mom and dad up and shoot us in the back of the head.” (The family member asked to not be identified, given the nature of the threat.)