American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  He began plotting his return to the United States. The UN travel ban made it impossible for him to travel under his Liberian passport, but he held out hope that his name could be removed from the sanctions. At one point he contacted the head of the UN mission in Liberia, an ex–U.S. Air Force major general named Jacques Klein, to see what redress he had. Klein, who had been in Monrovia only a short time, had struck up a romantic relationship with Linda Fawaz, who stood as a bridesmaid in Chucky’s wedding. In the end, the connection yielded nothing. Klein never returned his calls.

  Chucky had little to negotiate with, but he still hoped his connection, to his father could avail him something. In October 2004, he dialed the telephone number of the defense attaché at the U.S. embassy in Monrovia.13 Major Ryan McMullen was new to the post, having arrived earlier that month. He had spent nearly fifteen years in the army, including a two-year stint as the desk officer for sub-Saharan Africa for the Pentagon, where he had covered more than forty-three countries. He had a good idea what had transpired in Liberia before his arrival.

  When McMullen picked up his phone, the caller asked for Major Butler, the former attaché.

  “This is Chucky Taylor, Jr.,” the caller said. The major knew who Chucky was, but he wasn’t clear on why the former president’s son would be calling. McMullen explained that he was the new attaché and asked what he could do for him.

  Chucky launched into a meandering proposal. He explained that he wanted to join the U.S. Marine Corps. His experience in the ATU and the skills he’d acquired as a commander, he reasoned, would be of use to the Marines. Moreover, he said, he was an American citizen. He simply needed a new passport so that he could return to the United States to enlist. He then asked McMullen whether his name remained on the UN travel ban for Liberia.

  McMullen wasn’t entirely surprised by the call—Chucky had been in touch with the post prior to the major’s arrival. But his expectation that the embassy would assist him was strange. The ATU, after all, had antagonized embassy personnel from the outset. Nor did Chucky’s reputation comport with the Marines Corps values. McMullen saw the request as a pretense. Chucky was clamoring for a way—any way—back into the United States.

  Chucky continued calling for the next several months. The major showed no interest in his offer, but Chucky had few options at that moment. He explained his situation to McMullen: he was running low on money, he needed a change of scenery, and he wanted to travel to Iraq to work as a contractor for the U.S. government. McMullen asked him to put his request in an e-mail.

  Two months later McMullen received an e-mail from “Charlie Tango,” an online alias Chucky used. The note revisited the request to return to the United States. “Legally I have all the right to go back home if I want to,” Chucky wrote. “I will say again I am an American first before anything.”

  Chucky was correct—nothing was preventing him from applying for a U.S. passport. But he did have reason to be concerned about the blowback from his connections to the Taylor government, so what he sought was to open a channel to the federal government to pave the way for his return home.

  Other members of Taylor’s inner circle—Gen. John Tarnue and Cindor Reeves—had successfully converted their willingness to talk about Charles Taylor into temporary immigration status in the United States and elsewhere.14 (While Chucky was aware that both men had disappeared, he unlikely knew the extent of their cooperation.) His knowledge of his father’s activities was far more intimate, and in the e-mail he made an offer to speak to the government about what had gone on in Liberia. The remainder of the e-mail remains classified, so it isn’t clear what level of cooperation Chucky was offering.

  But after reading the contents of the e-mail, Major McMullen printed it out and jotted a note at the top of the paper.

  “He wants to talk,” it read.

  What went wrong? Why am I in this situation?15 In early 2005 these were the questions that dogged Chucky. He’d been in Trinidad for nearly two years since he’d left Monrovia, but the collapse of his father’s regime remained raw in his mind. The memories were reinforced by his isolation. He was marooned on the island, cut off not only from family and friends but also from his identity.

  Lynn had visited him once, but by the time she arrived in Trinidad, there was nothing left of their marriage.16 In June 2005, she filed for divorce, seeking full custody of their son, indicating in court papers that the “Father has no relationship with the minor child of the marriage.… It is in the child’s best interest that the Husband / Father, who is a fugitive from justice, have no access” to him. 17

  Trinidad remained foreign to him, but he began to make connections to the culture. At first, it was a girlfriend—a schoolteacher who lived in his apartment complex—and, eventually, a child. While living there, he was drawn to some of the island’s spiritual practices.18 He sought out advice from an Obeah woman, the type of sorceress who could cast spells or read his future. According to Lynn, the fact that her son was not relying on her advice drove Bernice to jealous anger.

  But island life proved small and claustrophobic. Chucky sought an outlet. If he were stuck on the island, he at least could make something of the experience. Just as he had insinuated himself into Liberia’s national preoccupation with politics, he waded into the cultural lifeblood of Trinidad: music.

  It began in his tiny apartment. A cousin from Lithonia, Georgia, had sent Chucky CDs of instrumental music she had composed and then layered over with hip-hop beats. He would flip on a track, set it on repeat for thirty or forty minutes, and, as he explained, allow “the track to speak to me instead of me trying to impose my concept or approach on it.”

  He began filling legal pads with pages and pages of lyrics, gutting the past of images and ideas, giving memories shape and form between drum breaks and oscillating keyboard lines. Months passed. Chucky’s cousin continued to send music. He continued to write. Eventually he decided it was time to put it all down in the studio.

  Eclipse Audio was a small, four-room recording studio run by three friends on Maraval Road, a tidy, shadeless residential street not far from Saint James, Port of Spain’s nightlife strip. The studio’s proprietors, Dion Camacho, Phil Hill, and Sean Poland, were musicians in their late thirties making a living tracking everything from radio jingles to local calypso and Soca legends. Hip-hop wasn’t Eclipse’s particular forte—Dion and Phil played together in a Britpop band—and when Chucky arrived at the studio, his presence immediately raised questions.

  “What is an American dude doing in Trinidad recording rap?”19 Camacho recalled asking his colleagues.

  Chucky booked a few forty-dollar-an-hour sessions, several hours at a time, always paying in cash. But he remained vague about himself, explaining only that “he had family” in Trinidad and “was down here chilling for a while.”

  Chucky would usually arrive at the studio alone, carrying his lyrics and a few bottles of Guinness. For the most part, Dion and Phil remained downstairs working in the office while Sean Poland, the studio’s engineer, ran the sessions. Poland, a soft-spoken, heavyset Indo-Trinidadian, sat upstairs at the controls in the mixing room, which looked across a narrow hallway into the isolation booth. Chucky handed him a CD that he wanted to lay vocals over, stepped into the booth, and put his headphones on.

  Poland sized Chucky up. He seemed nice, direct, and confident. He always showed up in name-brand shoes and clothes, but didn’t necessarily look or carry himself like a rapper—no bling, no entourage. Chucky gave him the instrumental music for a track he called “Brains.” Poland was not anticipating what came through the speakers the moment he hit “record.” A frenetic, Cypress Hills–esque loop kicked in. Chucky paused a measure, then let loose:

  ATU boy, ATU fought in the

  Streets, where you at man?

  You know

  You gonna make me call your names out

  Beat your brains out

  Bust your fuckin’ ass, got you laid out

  Poland focus
ed on the levels on the board, not giving the lyrics much thought. The initials ATU—which Chucky called out as “Alpha Tango Uniform”—meant nothing to him. If anything, he figured it was Chucky’s clique back in the States. This sort of bravado and bluster went hand in hand with hip-hop. Poland queued up another track, one Chucky called “Beef.”20 It bumped without instrumentation and a stripped-down, midtempo, four-four beat. Chucky rolled into the verse with a clunky, put-on dance-hall patois, then switched back into his American accent, growling through the lyrics:

  True beef I make you stitch up your top lip

  True beef make me blow off your face bitch

  True beef I bring case murder one bitch

  Between takes, Poland and Chucky would step out onto a small balcony directly outside of the isolation booth, smoking cigarettes and sipping beers as the low sun washed over the rooftops of the surrounding pastel concrete homes. Chucky didn’t project any of the violence he described in his lyrics. The two men made small talk about music—Chucky had a love for Method Man and Biggie Smalls—but Poland never pressed him for any insight into the lyrics. It never occurred to him that Chucky could be rapping from experience.

  One day Chucky showed up at the studio and asked Dion and Sean whether they had seen a new movie called Lord of War. Neither of the men had. Chucky explained to them, somewhat incensed, that one of the main characters, “Andre Baptiste Junior,” was based on him. The character was the son of the bloodthirsty dictator “Andre Baptiste,” based, more or less directly, on Charles Taylor. Chucky confided to the men that he was Taylor’s son.

  It was an unbelievable claim. The men said nothing until Chucky left. But then Poland asked the obvious question: “Why would Charles Taylor’s son come to Trinidad to record hip-hop?”

  Camacho rented the film and returned to the studio dumbfounded. When he found Poland, he said, “Sean, Chuck talking shit.”

  He couldn’t believe that this guy who had walked in off the streets of Port of Spain into their studio could be who he said he was. “Impossible,” he recalled saying.

  Chucky stopped by Eclipse Audio one morning in March 2006 and told the men he was preparing for a flight to Miami. He had asked Sean to burn several copies of the CD he had recorded, explaining that he was going to the States to shop his music for a record deal. It was the sort of big talk they had come to expect from him—just like the confession that he was Charles Taylor’s American son.

  In the studio, Chucky asked Dion and Sean for help choosing his demo’s cover. He spread out a set of photographs on the table. The men gathered around to look through them. In the pictures they saw rebels, clad in uniforms, clutching AKs; Chucky with them, drawing troop movements in the sand; Chucky in full camouflage standing with Charles Taylor, dressed in white, clutching his walking stick. The men were dumbstruck, speechless.

  “I’ll see you guys in a month,” Chucky told them as he left. “I’m just going away to chill, get some vibes, come back.”

  After he walked out, Dion took stock of the year this American had spent cutting tracks at their studio.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he thought to himself. “This fella tellin’ the truth the whole time.”

  14

  ICE

  Tru urban soldier man only feast with my clan, bread with my killers, that’s the code as it stands.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4

  For Special Agent Matthew Baechtle, it began with a stack of papers on his desk in Washington, D.C.1 Grimly titled dispatches from NGOs and human rights groups like Global Witness, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Newspaper and magazine articles dating back through the last decade. Reports from investigators with the UN Security Council. In the fall of 2003, this was the history of the Liberian civil war: a disjointed maze of names, dates, acronyms, incidents, and allegations. The first step was to make sense of it. Only after doing that could he even think of walking out the door to do the job he’d been trained to do: to investigate crimes, to find suspects, to bring back cases that could be prosecuted. As beginnings go, it was a just that—a beginning—and not much else.

  Baechtle was a rookie who had only recently joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as it was then becoming known. He’d been assigned to the Arms and Strategic Technology Investigations Unit (ASTI), housed in the agency’s Washington field office. When he walked into work, he looked like a clean-cut, well-mannered fraternity brother, twenty-three years old with jet-black hair, a placekicker’s build, and a bemused smile. Customs enforcement wasn’t the obvious career path for Baechtle. None of his family members were in law enforcement. (Nor were any of his fraternity brothers, for that matter.) He didn’t expect to get rich in this line of work, but he’d always had an interest in solving crimes. He split his childhood between Kingston, Jamaica, where his father worked for Colgate-Palmolive, and Monmouth County, in what he fondly called “the greatest state in the union,” New Jersey. When it came time to go to college, he already knew the direction he wanted his life to take. He enrolled at the University of Richmond, majoring in criminal justice.

  As graduation approached, he considered his next steps. He ventured with a group of friends to a job fair in Washington. Walking through the booths, he came across a recruiter for the U.S. Customs Service. The agent, at six foot seven, stood about a foot taller than Baechtle; in fact, he was an ex-NFL player who’d blown out his knee before joining the service. He delivered his pitch explaining that the customs service was the investigative arm of the Treasury Department, with a mandate that covered everything from confiscating counterfeit goods to drug interdiction. For many criminal justice majors, the FBI was the obvious dream job, but Baechtle saw that customs’ crime base was broad and varied—it seemed an ideal opportunity to break into federal law enforcement. He applied on the spot.

  Shortly after September 11, the government’s investigative agencies had entered a period of uncertainty. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington represented a systemic failure not only of intelligence but also of law enforcement. As the Bush administration was forced to confront this, the foundations began to shift underneath the sprawling infrastructure of agencies and administrations charged with enforcing American laws. Bureaucracies that had hardened into territorial and self-perpetuating entities now had to reassess how best to protect the United States. President Bush hastily created an Office of Homeland Security, appointing Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to head up the effort.2 Until the summer of 2002, Bush resisted creating a cabinet-level homeland security position, as he sought to balance national security imperatives against the politically unwieldy notion of a massive bureaucratic overhaul. Eventually, the overhaul won out. In November, the Homeland Security Act was passed. When Bush signed the act into law, more than twenty federal agencies and offices were subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security, ballooning into the third-largest government department, with more than 180,000 employees and an annual budget upward of $33 billion.

  The changes in Washington had a direct impact on Baechtle’s career. When he entered the Customs Basic Enforcement School in the spring of 2003, he joined the final class hired into the service. By the time he graduated, the service simply no longer existed. He would be joining the principal investigative arm of the new Department of Homeland Security, an agency with a sprawling mandate called Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

  Baechtle showed up at the Washington field office for his first assignment. It was a grim seven-story box-shaped federal building that had housed the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The drab surroundings contradicted the urgency of his first assignment with ASTI. The unit’s priority, especially important following 9/11, was investigating the transfer of weapons of mass destruction or any related sensitive technologies, from fissile material, chemicals, and germs that could be weaponized to materials that would be potentially used to construct centrifuges. At its disposal was a set of extraterritorial laws that allowed ICE to p
ursue crimes that were committed outside the United States.

  Unwittingly, Baechtle had been placed not only on the front lines of the post-9/11 domestic security effort but also at the cusp of American law enforcement. Just as terror threats had to be addressed at their source, criminals falling under the increasingly broad jurisdiction of U.S. laws had to be confronted where they operated. This presented an exciting, if daunting, challenge for junior agents. It certainly beat raiding poultry plants in Iowa to roust illegal aliens. But in terms of the career he was undertaking, it also broadened the crimes that the rookie could pursue. Baechtle had little idea of what sort of cases he’d be working or where they would take him. The answer to that lay in the stack of papers his boss had tossed on his desk.

  “Hey, why don’t you look at what’s here,” the supervisor who handed him the stack of papers said, then walked away.3

  Baechtle started reading through the pile. One common link that ran through the documents: Liberia, a country that was barely familiar to him but would define his career for years to come.

  Baechtle’s assignment did not simply appear from the ether. After Charles Taylor stepped down, American policy continued to isolate him in his exile in Nigeria. This position was articulated as policy several months later with Executive Order 13348, in which the White House had identified Taylor as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States” and declared “a national emergency to deal with that threat.”4 The order forbade American citizens or businesses to have dealings with Taylor or his insiders and family members, including Chucky. It was one of 291 such orders Bush issued during his presidency that were promulgated to the departments and agencies responsible for enforcing the provisions.

  Meanwhile Agent Baechtle started to absorb information about Liberia.5 He would eventually refer to this process as “schooling up”: he pored through every available document and public source report to develop an expertise. The process was imperative. He knew very little about Liberia, having caught his first glimpses of the country just months earlier in between summer classes at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia, where he was finishing his training. That summer fighting in Liberia had, for a moment, shouldered aside images of the war in Iraq on CNN. Reports on the violence were otherworldly—footage of T-shirt-clad fighters haplessly spraying automatic weapons in the middle of the deserted streets of the capital. Baechtle had no reason to believe that his career would have anything to do with it.