American Warlord (34 page)

In Trinidad, mystery immediately surrounded the mother and son staying at the Hilton. Not long after their arrival, rumors began to circulate that they had fled Liberia and were in hiding. Reporters began appearing at the hotel. Chucky knew better than to talk to the press, but his mother agreed to speak with one journalist, offering a stunning and strange interview to a reporter with Trinidad’s
Guardian
newspaper.
¹⁰
Calling herself Liberia’s “special envoy for presidential affairs,” Bernice told the paper that she had been married to Taylor and had two children by him, a daughter, Zoe, and a fourteen-year-old son, Charles Taylor Jr. She claimed to be a trained Foreign Service officer. Despite being an American citizen of Trinidadian descent, she told the paper that she “didn’t get this job because of Charles Taylor.”

She also tried to deflect rumors that she had arrived with laden with diamonds from West Africa. “If I had these diamonds, honey, trust me, I would have a mansion somewhere in Trinidad,” the
Guardian
quoted her as saying.

Bernice offered a defense of her son’s father, claiming that Taylor had never been given the opportunity to govern. When questioned about his human rights abuses and the allegations of war crimes, she insisted that he was being held responsible for others’ actions and that the efforts to bring him to court traced “all the way back to the United States.”

The money dried up soon after their arrival, and eventually Bernice returned to Florida, while Chucky, remaining in Trinidad, was forced to move from the Hilton to a studio apartment in Carenage, a hillside ghetto overlooking the Caribbean.
¹¹
He had few connections in the country—an aunt who lived in Glencoe, a neighboring, upscale community, and a cousin who worked as a cop in downtown Port of Spain.
¹²
When it came time to find work, the best Chucky could muster was a job as an unarmed security guard.

Trinidad, a tiny, relatively insulated island, had very little to offer Chucky. He could not follow his mother home to Orlando because he no longer had a valid U.S. passport. Having been out of the country for nearly a decade, he remained a fugitive in Orange County, Florida. The island quickly became a place stuck between the Liberia of Chucky’s past and the United States where he hoped to build his future.

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:

Poland focused 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:

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.”