American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

Wylie attacked Dulleh’s credibility, pointing out that he had lied about his identity in order to escape Liberia. But just as with Turay and Jusu’s fabrications on their refugee claims, Dulleh’s lies were easily understood as necessary for his own survival. The defense counsel pursued Dulleh’s motivations for testifying, trying to tie the funds that Dulleh had been provided and the health care he had received to his appearance before the court. Finally Wylie pressed the underlying politics between the defendant and witness, seeking to connect Dulleh to his uncle Alhaji Kromah, the leader of a faction at odds with Taylor. Dulleh responded calmly and clearly throughout.

  Chucky’s attorney eventually focused on statements that Dulleh had provided to the representatives for the UN High Commission for Refugees who had vetted his claim to be resettled in a host country. To be resettled in the United States, applicants either are selected by lottery or need to provide proof that they have suffered religious or political persecution in their home country. The defense attorney pointed out that Dulleh’s accusations had particular currency because they involved a political figure: Chucky, the son of the president.

  “Now, when you were telling the story to the United Nations, was Chucky Taylor present?” Wylie asked.

  “No,” Dulleh responded.

  “Was his lawyer or a lawyer for Chucky Taylor present when you were telling the story to the United Nations?” he continued, raising the idea that the first time this story was told—and allegedly fabricated—Chucky could not defend himself from the accusation.

  “No,” the witness said.

  On redirect, Assistant U.S. Attorney Graveline picked up Wylie’s thread, emphasizing the ridiculousness of the line pursued in the cross-examination. He referred to the subterranean pit where the men were held for a time beneath a trucking weigh scale during their ordeal.

  “Was Chucky Taylor’s lawyer under the weigh scale at Kle when you accused him with those men of torture?” The defense objected, and Graveline rephrased the question. “What, if any, lawyers did you see under the weigh station at Kle?” he asked.

  Dulleh responded, “Absolutely no lawyers.”

  The prosecution’s case had been devastating. Much of the local and national media attention focused on the depravity of the accusations rather than the legal and political significance of the case. For Liberians following Chucky’s story in Monrovia’s dailies, the trial represented a stunning reversal of power. In the United States victims of violent crime take for granted that they have the right to face their perpetrator in court, but those who had been victimized during Liberia’s civil war could have made no such assumption.

  After the civil war, Liberia pursued its own type of reckoning through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The process was intended to give both victims and perpetrators the opportunity to air their experiences before investigators and at public hearings. Ultimately, though, the TRC process was toothless: hundreds of victims recounted the horrors they suffered, and dozens of perpetrators recounted in detail the torture, murder, and mutilation they took part in, yet nobody faced any criminal charges. While his father was being prosecuted for crimes he had committed in another country—Sierra Leone—Chucky Taylor, in fact, was the only participant in the entire fourteen-year conflict to be brought before a judge and jury.

  For fourteen days the jury heard accounts of Chucky’s brutality. They learned of his connection to his father’s regime. They saw the scars on his alleged victims’ skin. But one voice they hadn’t yet heard was Chucky’s. And his attorneys hoped to ensure it remained that way.

  The prosecution sought to introduce the rap lyrics that the agents had discovered in Chucky’s personal effects when he was arrested.21 At sidebar, defense attorney Miguel Caridad fought vociferously to exclude the lyrics from the trial as irrelevant and prejudicial. He knew that, in the context of a criminal trial, they would not reflect well on his client.

  “Rap lyrics are notoriously violent no matter who writes them,” he argued before the judge.22 “This is pure and simple character assassination. They want to make him look like a violent guy because his character is violent. That’s a complete character smear. They do not need it for anything. It doesn’t say anything about torture.”

  “It’s probably good it doesn’t from your perspective,” the judge said, then overruled his objection.

  In a flat, unaffected tone, a customs agent read the lyrics to the jury:

  Ways and my heart dump stays all day as we plot and give way. We see the burst from your muzzle have ya bleedin for days. More sweat in my training means less blood in my life. So wit the shots from guns keep it dead and precise. Bull-doze ambushes in the midst of a fight. Try to cut my supply, you’ll be losing your life. Heed this warning.

  It required only a small, if circumstantial, leap to connect these lyrics with the allegations the jury had already heard detailed. The words had their own force: they provided a window into the imagination of the one person who had remained silent throughout the trial.

  For Chucky’s case, the admission of the lyrics was catastrophic—the image that he was a cold-blooded and violent killer wasn’t simply a figment of the government’s imagination—it was one that the defendant himself cultivated.

  The last investigator scheduled to testify for the prosecution was Special Agent Baechtle. The defense had fought to keep his most compelling testimony—his account of Chucky’s statements to him at Miami International Airport—out of the trial. Knowing that U.S. Attorney Miller would be questioning him, and familiar with her thorough, methodical approach to witness, Baechtle prepared to testify. Like other ICE agents, he’d been trained to do so, facing down stand-in prosecutors and defenders in a mock courtroom setting at the academy. But this case marked his first significant criminal trial, and his testimony held, potentially, the most incriminating evidence of the prosecution’s case.

  Baechtle took the stand on the afternoon of October 16, 2008. U.S. Attorney Miller walked him through the events of the evening of March 30, two years earlier—Chucky’s arrest and interrogation.23 The agent recounted that the actual arrest was a small part of what turned into a three-hour conversation. Chucky, in the agent’s retelling, detailed his experiences in Liberia from when he first met his father in 1992 until the moment he fled eleven years later. Baechtle’s recollections of the conversation clung to the facts. He offered no opinion of Chucky, nor was any solicited by the prosecutor.

  Based on Baechtle’s testimony, what Chucky told him on the night of his arrest amounted to an admission that he not only had command responsibility for the ATU but was present for the torture of one individual at Yeaten’s house, presumably Varmuyan Dulleh. The fact that these admissions were elicited only after Chucky was confronted by specific information and accusations created the impression that the defendant had hoped to obfuscate the details of his past. Most significant, based on the agent’s testimony, Chucky had made all his admissions willingly, with little or no pressure from the investigators.

  “Were you present for the duration of that three-hour interview?” Miller asked.

  “Yes, I was,” Baechtle responded.

  “Was the defendant responsive to your questions?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Were there any questions you asked that he refused to answer?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Not that I recall,” Baechtle said.

  The trial broke for the day, and Baechtle returned to his hotel with his testimony scheduled to resume in the morning. The judge forbade him to speak to anyone until he concluded testifying, which gave Baechtle his first night off since the trial began more than two weeks earlier.

  It provided him a moment to look back on the experience.24 The trial had been a period of exhilarating uncertainty, but he felt confident in the evidence that the witnesses could provide and in the abilities of the prosecutors. The investigation had been long and meticulous, leaving very little to chance, but Baechtle recognized the inherently unpred
ictable nature of a criminal trial.

  Chucky’s public defender, John Wylie, had made an undeniable point when he laid out the challenge facing the jury: they were being asked to go back in time to determine whether the crimes Chucky had been accused of had actually occurred.25 The government had provided the evidence and witnesses, but had they made the crimes real enough for the jury to convict Chucky?

  Baechtle knew what had made the crimes real to him: Marching along a thread of dirt into the swamp at Gbatala and coming upon the water-filled holes of Vietnam exactly as they had been described to him.26 Peering into the dark, fetid weigh station at Kle and feeling physically repulsed at the thought that men had been imprisoned for weeks on end in the garbage and filth. Interviewing the witnesses, not just hearing the details of their stories, but listening to the manner in which they told them. Noticing how their vivid memories of these brutal acts overlapped, and seeing how they punctuated their recollections with physical scars across their arms, legs, chests. And then realizing how all these moments, places, and people connected back to decisions made by a man who wasn’t some supernatural monster but came from a Florida suburb. Chucky’s story had been improbable and at times surreal, but its brutality was real, and he made this palpable at the trial.

  More than a month after the trial began, Miguel Caridad, the senior federal public defender, delivered the closing, after calling eleven witnesses (including Baechtle and Naples).27 The defense case had suffered a crushing setback when nine witnesses, primarily ATU members flown in from Liberia, disappeared the night before their testimony. To date the jury had heard a remarkable stream of testimony, much of it in Liberian- or Sierra Leonean–inflected English, delivered by witnesses who had never before set foot in an American courtroom. The defense played on their foreignness to thread together the witnesses’ testimony under one theme of implausibility—the stunning escapes, the life-saving interventions. He asked them to consider these stories as if a resident of Miami was telling them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, what is going on in this country? What is going on in Liberia? How can you possibly understand such a tale? It seems like a different planet to me. Maybe a Liberian jury could make sense of this, but an American jury? How can you possibly evaluate the credibility of such a tale?”

  It was a question that cut to the core of any extraterritorial case. When Congress ratified the Convention Against Torture and passed the federal antitorture statute, it had taken political and legal steps toward an idea of international justice. But ultimately the validity of that idea fell to an American jury to determine. Could an American jury deliver a just verdict on such an extraordinary and foreign set of facts?

  Caridad returned to the familiar element in the case, the American and Floridian accused of the crimes. And even though his client had not testified, Caridad sought to use the statements Chucky gave Baechtle to support the defense. “Ladies and gentlemen, the only statement that makes any sense in this case is the statement made by Chucky Taylor, the American,” Caridad said. “He sits with these agents for two hours, tells them all that they could possibly want to know.”

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller attacked Caridad’s attempt to set up an impossible cultural distance between the jurors and the victims in the prosecution’s rebuttal. “Ladies and gentlemen, we submit that you should reject this,” she argued. “Their bodies are not different. Blood is red. Knives cut. Fire burns. Pain hurts. That’s what this case is about, and it is about that for all victims in this case.”

  She also attacked Caridad’s notion that much of the testimony was implausible. She acknowledged that many of the witnesses had escaped near-death experiences to be able to testify, but the remarkable nature of their survival didn’t impugn their credibility. “A survivor may always appear to be lucky by hindsight,” she said. But survival—as miraculous as it might seem—was the miracle that all witnesses shared, she pointed out. “There was no miracle for Abdul Cole or no miracle for those people on the beach, certainly the luck for Albert Williams and the other men who were pulled out of the group and were shot was very bad. For them, also, there was no miracle.”

  Miller closed for the government with a poetic turn, referencing a fountain wall at the courthouse. “That wall reminds me of words that have been quoted at another time in our history, words of the Prophet Amos. ‘Let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.’ It is time for those waters of justice now, ladies and gentlemen, for those waters to flush out and cleanse the filth of the pits of Gbatala, to short-circuit the dreadful electricity in Benjamin Yeaten’s garage and to cleanse, finally, the tears of suffering by human beings at the hands [of] and caused by this man here, the defendant.”

  The jury deliberated for a day and a half. Shortly after two p.m. on October 30, 2008, the foreman notified the court’s deputy that they were prepared to return the verdict.

  Several months earlier Chucky had written a letter to his son telling him that he had some “things to take care of,” asking him to write to him, to tell him about school, sports, his friends. “I’ve always loved you and always will your [sic] my first son my only son, I pray for you all the time and I want you to grow strong, smart, and disciplined,” he wrote. Most significantly, he wrote that he was sorry “for not being there, and sorry for the times when you came to visit, I was not a better man, and Father.” These were words that Charles Taylor could have just as easily written to Chucky a decade earlier, before their lives together spun out into the darkness of violence and power.

  It took less than four minutes for the verdict to be read. The foreman responded to each count with the word guilty. Each count compounded the sentence he would face, until it became clear he would likely never be set free.

  With the verdict read, the court officer asked those in the courtroom to rise for the jury to depart the room.

  Chucky refused.28

  Three months later, on the morning of January 9, 2009, Bernice Emmanuel stood outside courtroom 12-2 dressed in a trim black blazer and white blouse with teardrop pearls hanging from her ears, her silver hair smartly parted across her face. The hallway was subdued; only the thrum of the ventilation and clicking of footsteps punctuated the quiet. She clutched a yellow legal pad, giving the appearance that she might be one of the small group of attorneys preparing to enter Chucky Taylor’s sentencing hearing. A reporter approached her and addressed her as “Ms. Emmanuel.” She appeared startled for a moment, then smiled and said, “I’m sorry, you have the wrong person.” She turned and walked inside the courtroom.

  Emmanuel had appeared at the court that morning bearing a letter for Judge Altonaga. Chucky’s mother had been absent from the trial, but this day, above all others, would determine her son’s future. The contents of her letter to the judge will forever remain between those two women. Perhaps Emmanuel recognized her own complicity in her son’s descent. Perhaps she chose to reiterate his claim of innocence. But one could reasonably expect that from woman to woman, mother to mother, it would be an appropriate moment to beg mercy for her son.

  That morning Chucky did not ask for mercy.29 In their presentencing comments, his attorneys struggled to distance him from his crimes. In an at times awkward presentation, Caridad leaned heavily on the “nurture” scale of the argument, pitting much of the brutality of his actions on the company Chucky had been introduced into in Liberia: David Campari, Benjamin Yeaten, and finally, his own father. But that rationale delivered Chucky to a pitiful conclusion, as offered by Miguel Caridad: “It’s fair to say that if he had stayed in the United States, he wouldn’t be a torturer.”

  Chucky rose to address the court, wearing his prison khakis, appearing more heavyset with his beard heavily grown in. He pointed out that he had expected to lose at trial, and even though the government had dangled before him a plea deal of thirteen years, he said, he had chosen to attempt to prove his innocence. He criticized the court as unable to adequately address the issues raised by the c
ivil wars that his father had engineered.

  “Every family has had some tragedy and trauma physically and mentally,” he said. “No one was immune, whether the witnesses involved in this case or my own family, be it my grandfather, my uncles or my cousins whose lives were taken during the war. My sympathy and heart goes out to all of those families caught up in the former conflicts of Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

  He then addressed the witnesses gathered there that day. “As many consider these witnesses foreign, both in culture and speech, these witnesses are my African brothers and it is wajib [duty as a Muslim] that I extend my prayers to them and their families and will continue to do so even after this sentence is handed down. I also maintain Liberian and West African traditions by saying sorry. Sorry, my brothers, to what has happened to you during the fourteen-year civil conflict and the war that lasted in Sierra Leone.”

  He did not acknowledge his crimes. He did not offer any explanation for how he had found himself in this situation. He simply asked the judge to place him in a penitentiary proximate to his mother and his son. Had he expressed contrition, he would have jeopardized his chance of appeal. But by not doing so, his words came across as a final, passive act of defiance.

  Judge Altonaga addressed the courtroom shortly before noon. “I have given careful thought as well to the history and characteristics of the defendant,” she said. “While there is some appeal to saying he went to Liberia at a young, impressionable age and was surrounded by his biological father and that father’s cohorts for whom this lifestyle was acceptable is to only look at one piece of the history and characteristics of the defendant.”

  Altonaga noted that Chucky had a “normal upbringing here and he left the United States for the incorrect reasons … the acts which he committed, and by the jury’s decision he has been found to have committed, occurred when he was a young man in his twenties and occurred at his direction, occurred through his imagination, through his control, sadistic, cruel, atrocious acts, which may become commonplace after a time if one sees it occurring day after day after day and which immunize any shock or concern after one participates in those events day after day after day, but which, nonetheless, constitute unacceptable universally condemned torture.”