American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  The government sought a 147-year sentence, while Caridad had sought a “fair and reasonable” punishment. Judge Altonaga sentenced Chucky to 1,164 months—ninety-seven years in prison.

  Throughout his criminal case, Chucky had fought divorce proceedings with Lynn. She did not follow his trial in any detail.30 It was a painful reminder of the lost opportunities he had come to represent. Much of her life was now devoted to putting him and Liberia behind her. She worked as a nurse, raising her son outside Pine Hills, while trying to finalize her divorce.

  Chucky argued in family court—somewhat fantastically—that the two had never been married, apparently to avoid any future claims that Lynn and his child were entitled to any of his assets. (To refute his claim, Lynn’s attorney’s introduced wedding photos and a copy of the menu at their reception.)

  “It really saddens me,” Lynn said after the verdict. “It saddens me because the only thing we’ll ever be entitled to is a legacy of torture and murder along with some horrific memories.”

  Charles Taylor learned of his son’s sentencing at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, where his own trial for crimes against humanity continued. Taylor offered no public comment, but his attorney told the press that the former president was distressed by the punishment meted out to Chucky.

  On May 30, 2012, three and a half years after his son’s punishment came down, Charles Taylor received a fifty-year sentence from the Special Court for Sierra Leone for crimes against humanity.

  Despite the sentence, Chucky didn’t consider his battle over. His attorneys appealed to the 11th Circuit, largely on constitutional grounds, asking the appellate court to throw out the conviction.31 That process wound forward with very little involvement from Chucky—he could only wait for the determination.

  Several of Chucky’s victims, including Rufus Kpadeh and Nathaniel Koah, filed a federal lawsuit against him in Miami, seeking damages for the suffering they had endured at his hands and under the control of the ATU.32 Chucky did not contest that suit, which resulted in a default ruling, but he later chose to represent himself in the penalty phase of the lawsuit. With his appeal pending, there was little contribution he could make to the proceeding without jeopardizing his criminal case. The judge eventually awarded the plaintiffs $22.4 million in damages, an amount that they could never hope to recover from an indigent Chucky.33

  In letters from prison, Chucky drew more distant from his father, referring to him as “President Taylor” or simply “Taylor.” He blamed his father for the collapse of discipline in the ATU. He insisted that he belonged in a separate category from the sycophants surrounding his father. Ultimately, he laid the entire tragedy of Liberia at his father’s feet. “President Taylor my father has very little to be proud of ‘a legacy of ashes’ the death of the innocent and the brave can never be forgotten,” he wrote. “I never wanted to see it play out like this.”

  After the fall of Charles Taylor, Liberia achieved a milestone it had not reached in more than a quarter of a century: a decade of peace. This was due, in large part, to the support of the international community and the presence of one of the largest UN military missions in history.34 President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf accomplished something that none of her predecessors had: she changed the narrative of the nation from one of destruction to one of rebuilding. The international community embraced her as a reformer and an antidote to the warlord politics that had ruled the region for so long. In 2011 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Yet beneath the surface little had changed in Liberia. Graft and bribery plagued the government and judicial systems even as President Sirleaf declared war on corruption. War criminals implicated by the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission went unpunished, despite official recommendations for prosecutions.35 The rain forests continued to be harvested for timber, palm oil, and rubber with little oversight; the same NGOs that had reported on Taylor’s pillaging of state resources now issued reports critical of the new government. As Chucky and his father had predicted, U.S. oil interests staked their claims in Liberia: both Chevron and Exxon purchased development rights for offshore prospects. In April 2013 Chevron drilled its first wells.36

  Even the security apparatus in the Liberian government bore reflections of the Taylor era. While the ATU had been disbanded, former members of the unit were quietly integrated into the Liberian National Police and President Sirleaf’s National Security Agency, which was led by her son.37

  On February 22, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chucky’s submission to hear his appeal.38 When he received the news at Big Sandy United States Penitentiary in Kentucky, far from his mother’s home in Florida, he was left to contemplate the facts that had determined his fate: the beginnings of his family history in slavery, the creation of Liberia, the injustice perpetrated by his forebears, his father’s revolution. There were his crimes and the survivors who lived to tell their stories. Then there was his identity, defined not only by the fact of his birth but by how he had led his life.

  “I personally won’t be defined by my father’s legacy. I’m an individual,” he said in a call from prison.39 “It’s just unfortunate that my father’s leadership was the way that it was. Disappointing not because he’s my father or what the personal relationship we had was, but the fact that he failed so many people. My anger is directed at him for failing the people who committed themselves to his dream and those who died as a result of his dream.”

  Like his father, Chucky has never taken responsibility for his crimes.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  In June 2007, a few months before Rufus Kpadeh led the investigators there, I drove in a two-truck convoy for the first of several visits to Chucky Taylor’s training base at Gbatala, Liberia. My guides were several human rights workers from Gbarnga whom I had met only hours earlier. These men had lived through the successive stages of the war and carved out a niche in the type of information valuable to international human rights groups, reporters, and, as it would turn out, law enforcement officers. When I arrived at their office—a single-story structure tucked behind the local archdiocese—the men sat me down for an unsolicited debrief on Chucky. As a group of former combatants went through vocational training outside the window, the men offered up a string of fascinating, if completely unverifiable, tales of Chucky’s excesses and abuses. I was eager to get the day going but had been warned off of going to the base alone because, as one of the men explained, “people who lived in Gbatala were psychologically held hostage,” and it wasn’t clear how they would react to a foreigner.1

  My driver for the day was Mr. King, a rotund man in his sixties with a toothy smile and wearing a neatly pressed charcoal jumpsuit. The truck reeked of rotten fruit, and, despite the heat, we drove with open windows toward the base. When I ventured small talk—Charles Taylor was about to be tried at the Special Court at The Hague—Mr. King simply said: “I don’t like to hear about Charles Taylor, to be frank with you. When I hear it, it vex my nerves.” Mr. King hadn’t asked our specific destination, and I decided he might not really care to know. We continued toward Gbatala in silence.

  Eventually we pulled off of the mud roadway and drove up an incline through a stand of trees, stopping outside a huddle of small mud-brick huts. We got out of our vehicles and walked past a community kitchen, an A-frame shelter built of palm and timber with a dirt floor coated in ash. One building we passed had the second hand-drawn etching of a kung fu fighter I had seen that day. Hibiscus seemed to pour out of every bush. Hens clucked nervously underfoot. A skinny dingo skittered past.

  As I approached the center of the village, a small clutch of women in torn T-shirts and patterned skirts circled a set of wooden preschoolsize chairs beneath a large mango tree. As they instructed me to sit down, a child ran off into the bush. Moments later a woman with chalky dust covering her clothing appeared from the tree line.

  A small crowd gathered. The woman told me her name was Annie Perry. What was meant to be an interview quick
ly turned into something of a public performance. She knew Chucky, she told me. He would bring supplies to the women as they prepared meals in the kitchen at the base. She hadn’t been forced to work. In fact, she was paid for her labor, she said, noting that things had been lean around Gbatala since Taylor left power. She and other members of the crowd searched my face for a reaction.

  I had arrived at Gbatala with a set of wrong assumptions. I had assumed that the people I met there would eagerly pick up the historical thread that was popular in the West: that the collapse of the Taylor government should be followed by the pursuit of justice for the people who had been victimized by him and his son. But this idea, it turned out, had nothing to do with the interests of the desperately poor people in the village.

  Sitting with Perry and her neighbors, I nonetheless felt obligated to ask about torture at the base. Unsolicited, one of the human rights workers translated my query into something of a statement in Liberian English: “The question is: ‘Chucky is in the States now in jail. They accusing him for committing torture. Suffering human beings. Suffering people. Grabbing people. Sometimes they carried them there. They suffered there.’ ”

  I could feel the crowd lean in to hear Perry’s response.

  “No, it never happened presently me being there,” Perry said, smiling.

  To wrap up the interview, I asked Perry her age—she was thirty-nine—then thanked her. And as I walked away, she said to one of the human rights workers, “I did that for nothing?”

  Perry and another woman followed me, climbing into Mr. King’s truck as we drove up the hillside to the base. When we arrived, they remained in the truck—I realized—because Mr. King had turned on the air-conditioning. One of the human rights workers pulled me aside and offered that with a little “motivation” the women might be more willing to speak. I tried to explain to him why I could not do that but felt like I was explaining the rules of hockey to someone who had never stood on ice.

  The hillside at Gbatala was now a working quarry. At that time of day, with the sun hanging high in the sky, the ground was bathed in searing white light reflecting off the stone cliff face. There men, women, and children worked breaking large rocks into smaller rocks with medium-size rocks, a method that had likely changed little over the previous millennia. The youngest children—whom I estimated to be about three years old—carried stones in straw baskets to the adolescents tasked with cutting them down. A load of gravel, a pyramid about knee high, required three days’ labor and could net seventeen dollars from an NGO or local business. But, as the locals explained, among the many casualties of the war was the local gravel market.

  I spoke with a few of the villagers working at the quarry. In those conversations, it became clear that the locals had their own assumptions about me. They assumed that if I had traveled that far, I must surely be willing to offer a small sum of money in exchange for the information they had about the activities of the base. After a few more awkward exchanges, I gave up on gathering more than an image of this place. A small crowd of the rock-breakers had stopped working and gathered near our vehicles. I could sense a sort of festering rage frothing to the surface. Several people demanded compensation for their time, presumably wasted on me, and demanded that we bring NGOs here to purchase their rocks.

  I climbed into Mr. King’s truck. Whatever expectation the villagers of Gbatala had of me had shattered against my incomprehensible cheapness. I didn’t give them any money, less out of any high-minded ethical rigidity than out of a more basic cowardice of breaking from professional convention—even in the face of grinding poverty.

  We pulled back onto Kakata Highway. I sat silent for a few minutes, then Mr. King spoke. “Those women didn’t want to tell you the truth,” he said. “She was there. She saw everything. But she didn’t want to say anything to you. That’s the base. They grab you. They bury you alive.”

  “Did she tell you that?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Most of those women over there were with Taylor. Especially that lady. She used to cook for Chucky and the soldiers. And she was there on the base. But she don’t want to tell you everything. That’s what she told me.”

  Chucky likely would have been amused by the obstacles I ran into at Gbatala. I can say that with some confidence, because in the seven years reporting this book, he became my most important—and least cooperative—source.

  In April 2006, shortly after he was arrested at Miami International Airport on a passport violation, I wrote Chucky a letter requesting an in-person interview. Journalistically, this was a Hail Mary pass. There was no indication at that time that he was the target of a federal human rights investigation. Little was known about his identity beyond the sketchy biographical basics reported after his arrest. And the public source reporting on his activities in Liberia was vague and unclear. I’d heard the name “Chucky Taylor” only while reporting on Liberian émigrés living in housing projects on Staten Island, many of them refugees from one of the phases of his father’s civil war. Chucky was always treated as an aside, an asterisk on his father’s destructive campaign for power, a sort of bogeyman who inspired fear among many but whom few had ever seen or interacted with.

  That sit-down interview never occurred. In the moments when he agreed to sit down with me, prison officials would not permit it. When prison officials appeared ready to relent, he refused. Instead I came to know Chucky through letters, phone calls, and eventually e-mails exchanged when I first began reporting on him for Rolling Stone. He even gave me a nickname: Glass Chin.

  That is to say, I came to know several Chuckys in those years: the Chucky who was unaware that he would be subject to a federal torture indictment, the Chucky who was fighting to defend himself before a jury in Miami, the Chucky who was confronting a ninety-seven-year sentence. “Dwyer, true men of strength reflect and accept the past,” he wrote me in 2010. “There’s nothing in my past, I’m not prepared to confront.”2

  Yet he never once shared with me his version of the remarkable, strange, and at times unbelievable trajectory of his life. But he did unwittingly share something equally important: the revelation that he wasn’t capable of being truthful with himself.

  I pieced that narrative together with reporting on the ground in Liberia, Trinidad, Pine Hills, and at his trial, appeal, and civil case in Miami, speaking with family, friends, victims, and comrades. I used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain more than a thousand documents from the State Department, Department of Defense, and National Security Council to write the diplomatic history behind Taylor’s rise and fall. And after much pleading, I sat with the investigators from ICE and the FBI, as well as prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

  Chucky warned me in a letter from 2007 that “any attempts to gather information about me will be met with dead ends.” That was not the case. In Liberia I met many people close to him interested in hagiography, but others who were willing to speak truthfully, without fear of retribution and without the aim of receiving compensation. Yet the ethical terrain there was extraordinarily challenging. I walked away from several important interviews and reporting trips because the sources demanded compensation. My most reliable sources were those who, despite the daily struggles to survive that they faced, sought nothing in return. In one case, without being asked, I spent fifteen dollars on toys and groceries for a source’s family after being shaken at the sight of his hungry children. I knew that was wrong as a journalist, but I was willing to take the ethical hit so that I could sleep a little better that night. The endnotes that follow strive to be both a thorough and concise accounting of my reporting.

  Throughout this process, I communicated with Chucky, not because I felt he would shed any light on the crimes he had been convicted of or that he would reveal the secrets of his father to me. I sought to understand him. I’d seen glimmers of emotion from him: at his trial when his stepfather testified, in his angry phone calls to me from prison, in the let
ter he wrote to his son. I held out hope that I would witness a moment of change that would illuminate his character in a way that his actions and words had not.

  I’m still waiting for that moment to arrive.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book exists because of the dedication and support of others. I owe much of what is written here to my sources in the United States, the United Kingdom, Liberia, and Trinidad who tolerated my presence, answered my questions, and kept the lines open until my reporting was complete. This includes Chucky Taylor, who—despite the distaste he voiced for me and this endeavor—maintained contact until the end. My editor Andrew Miller at Knopf, and his assistants, Will Heyward and Mark Chiusano, built this book, draft by draft, providing thoughtful and demanding feedback through the revisions, encouraging me to realize the full potential of this remarkable story. Sean Woods, my editor at Rolling Stone, taught me that collaboration creates better work, a lesson I carry with me. Shawn Coyne looked past many of the outward impossibilities of this story and found this manuscript a home, while Eric Lupfer provided the needed support to see it through. In Liberia, my driver James made this journey possible, not only navigating the horrible roads, but enabling me to navigate the culture and painful history of each place we visited. While many others who helped me need to go unnamed, I’d like to acknowledge a few who lent a hand along the way, giving me a place to crash, assigning stories, helping me source documents, reading early drafts, or just picking up the phone: Howard Chua-Eoan, Mark Schoofs, Elizabeth Dickinson, Josh Keating, Rufus Arkoi, Tim Hetherington, Glenna Gordon, Barbara Medina, Nicholai Lidow, Yvette Chin, Ernestine Fobbs, Matthew Cole, John Bowe, Chris O’Connell, Peter Kline, and Chapin Clark. My mother, brothers and sisters, and children helped me through all of the hassles and heartaches, while the proud memory of my father carried me through the most difficult moments in telling this story.