American Warlord (27 page)

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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)

Lynn called President Taylor, hysterically crying. Taylor had grown accustomed to these phone calls from his daughter-in-law, according to Lynn. But he grew upset when she relayed Chucky’s threat. Chucky was even more enraged when he heard that Lynn had contacted his father. Taylor warned his son that “he cannot go threatening me or my family, period,” according to Lynn.

But Charles Taylor’s hands were tied; he could place his son under house arrest, but this was a temporary solution. Taylor was the most powerful man in Liberia, but his power was increasingly limited. He had no influence with or leverage against the foreign powers seeking to isolate him. He had little control over the countryside, where rebels operated relatively freely. And he had even less control over his son, who followed his own violent whims.

In late 2001 Chucky invited Israel Akinsanya to join him on a trip to Singapore. According to Akinsanya, Chucky told him little about the nature of the trip other than that “he has his business partners he wants to see.”
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Chucky often kept things compartmentalized, Akinsanya said, but his account defies credibility. Not only had Akinsanya been closely involved with the Jeff House deal, he had good reason to deny knowledge of the details of Chucky’s trip. At that time, Chucky, along with dozens of members of Taylor’s government and certain associates, had been barred from international travel under new UN sanctions targeting the regime’s involvement in Sierra Leone.
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For all his unpredictable behavior, Chucky remained loyal to his father in the face of the sanctions. The travel ban represented the first time the international community tied Chucky to his father’s regime, even though it made no mention of his nationality, which was not a well-known fact. For much of 2001, he simply withdrew from public life, making only occasional appearances at some of the late-night haunts that Taylor’s officials were known to frequent.

Akinsanya had grown accustomed to Chucky’s tendency to drop out of society, holing up at his house, keeping nocturnal hours, and cutting himself off from outside contact. “I really didn’t have any close friends,” Chucky said. He felt culturally isolated as an American and suspicious that those around him saw something to gain in his friendship.

Even as Chucky isolated himself, Akinsanya befriended Bernice, whom he described as something like a stage parent. “She was a very nice person, but you could tell that she was manipulative,” he recalled, saying that she was more than happy to use the fact that she was the mother of the president’s son for leverage.

Mother and son fought bitterly, Akinsanya recalled, often about Chucky’s father. By both Akinsanya’s and his own account, Chucky was the lone voice of truth among the “sycophants” surrounding Charles Taylor. As the end of Taylor’s five-year term loomed, Chucky was candid with his father about the future. “There’s going to be elections in this country,” he told him, according to Akinsanya. “And if there are elections, you’re not going to win.”

Taylor likely understood that. His administration had accomplished little or nothing in improving the lives of Liberians. The violence of the civil war had devolved into a low-grade conflict that he met with persistent repression of political enemies, dissidents, and journalists. And fear that war would return in force set in.

When Chucky and Akinsanya landed in Geneva for a stopover en route to Singapore, it was a rare respite outside the region. He filled the few short hours between flights splurging on clothes and luxury watches. While Akinsanya said he wasn’t clear on whom they were traveling to see, a former Defense Department official said that Chucky made multiple trips to Singapore on the dime of Joseph Wong, a businessman connected to the Oriental Timber Company.
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Wong was linked to arms-for-timber transactions by UN investigators in a 2001 report to the Security Council that described large quantities of Liberian timber moving to Asian markets and moving weapons, which eventually fueled RUF offensives in Sierra Leone, to Liberia.
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“Chucky would go there [to Singapore] and drink and play with the girls,” the official said. “It got to the point that he was embarrassing Mr. Wong, so he told the president that he would not pay for [his son] anymore.”

As the two men arrived in Singapore, Chucky began receiving phone calls from Liberia. Since March 2001, rebels had staged several attacks in Lofa County, and President Taylor was growing concerned. The fighting in the bush was chaotic—government forces engaged the rebels and then, at times, fought one another to secure looting rights over an area. By October the situation briefly stabilized, but the damage was significant. The town of Zorzor was razed, UN investigators passing through the area noted, and on the rural back roads, armed young men crammed into the beds of Isuzu pickups.
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