American Warlord (39 page)

Inside the interrogation room, Baechtle began questioning Chucky.
¹⁴

You were born Charles McArthur Emmanuel on February 2, 1977, at St. Margaret’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, he said.

Chucky nodded. Baechtle continued through other vital information: his Social Security number, other names he was known by as a student.

Your mother’s name is Bernice Yolanda Emmanuel? Baechtle asked.

Correct, he said.

You indicated on the passport application you filled out in Trinidad that your father’s name is Steven Daniel Smith. Is that correct? Baechtle asked.

I think it’s one of the names my pops used, Chucky responded.

Did he go by any other names? Baechtle asked.

Charles McArthur Taylor, he replied.

The former president of Liberia? Baechtle asked.

Chucky congratulated the agent. “You’re making a jump.”

Chucky had done what little he could to conceal his connection to his father. But the measure he took, providing the false name “Steven Daniel Smith,” instead provided ICE with a valuable break: this seemingly minor obfuscation was a felony under federal law. Baechtle now had a charge to detain Chucky on: passport fraud. The crime carried a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison, though it was unlikely he would receive that much time. Chucky could be arraigned on that charge and, given his history fleeing criminal charges, held as a flight risk until trial. This sort of administrative charge had been used in recent years on a variety of cases against drug traffickers, fugitive murderers, and outlaw radicals, like a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. For Baechtle and his colleagues at ICE, it provided a good starting point—but they were after much more.

As the evening dragged on, Chucky spoke with a sort of detached confidence. When the two men sat down, Baechtle had planned to work chronologically, covering the timeline of his suspect’s life, then circling back to events he wanted more details on. Chucky wasn’t self-conscious or evasive about the milestones of his past: his reunion with his father in 1992, his return to West Africa two years later, the fighting of April 6, his father’s election. Baechtle knew this story line, but as soon as he began asking about Charles Taylor’s security apparatus, Chucky distanced himself.

Were you a member of the Executive Mansion Special Security Unit? the agent asked.

No, Chucky replied.

Were you the head of any unit? Baechtle asked.

No, he responded, but I was privy to their activities.

Do you know what the initials ATU stand for? Baechtle asked him.

Anti-Terrorist Unit, Chucky said.

Did you command the ATU? Baechtle asked.

No, Chucky responded. I had an advisory role.

It quickly became clear that this federal agent had more than superficial knowledge of the ATU—his questions suggested knowledge of information that couldn’t easily be gleaned on the Internet or from reports published by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. The information suggested that Baechtle had had direct contact with individuals familiar with the unit. His questions had started broadly, but as the interrogation continued, he winnowed down to particulars.
Who constructed Gbatala base? Did you have ATU bodyguards? Who commanded those bodyguards?

Chucky initially equivocated about his involvement. But Baechtle’s questions quickly cut through his efforts to obscure the past. Eventually Chucky admitted that the ATU was his “pet project.” Yes, he had helped build the base, and, yes, he had provided support.

Baechtle circled in on two incidents that had received wide press coverage in Liberia: the death of the little girl who had been run over by Chucky’s truck and the murder of Isaac Gono.

These were unfortunate incidents, Chucky said, but the deaths were accidental. The responsibility for both fell on his driver and his bodyguards, not on him. His bodyguards could be overzealous at times, he said.

Baechtle switched tacks and focused on Chucky’s role with the “pet project.”

You had the ability to order people to be arrested and detained, he said. You took command functions such as arranging for food and clothes and fuel to be brought to this base. You helped build this base, and you say you were not a commander?

No, Chucky maintained.

The thrust of Baechtle’s questions became apparent: had Chucky been involved in human rights abuses in Liberia? Chucky readily denied that he had ever served on the front lines during the fighting, had ever beaten or shot anyone or witnessed the death of any person. Nor, he said, had he tortured or ordered the torture of anyone.

What’s the worst behavior you saw by the ATU? Baechtle asked.

I saw someone slapped with an open hand, he replied.

Going into the interview, Baechtle had sensed that Chucky would talk, but after several hours, the man had yet to refuse to answer a single question. Instead, he chose to directly deny allegations and talk around certain issues—the command history of the ATU, for example. Then Baechtle would follow up with a detailed question, making it clear that ICE already had independent knowledge of the subject.

Eventually, after Baechtle pressed him on human rights abuses, Chucky offered something up. Now I know what you must be referring to, he said. That incident with that “press guy.”

Chucky recounted a situation where he had been present for something violent: a prisoner had been beaten and burned with an iron.
I did not take part in any beating or torture
, Chucky insisted.

Special Agent Malone stepped into the room and took over, giving Baechtle a chance to sit back and observe for a moment. Malone took a sharper tone with Chucky, reeling off allegations against the ATU—that the unit had raped women, stolen cars, tortured and killed people.

He asked whether Chucky had ever seen anyone killed.

He denied that he had.

Have you ever been taught about the Geneva Conventions?

Chucky responded that he had.

Did you learn about what torture was during that training?

Chucky acknowledged he had.

The agents explained to Chucky that they had already spoken to one man who claimed that he’d been tortured by him, as well as corroborating witnesses. ICE would continue identifying witnesses, they explained, as well as more victims who had been tortured by him.

Chucky had been back in the United States less than three hours, but his decade in exile in Liberia was collapsing in on him.

“I didn’t do any of that,” Chucky countered. His enemies were after him, he said. “I’m being framed.”

News of Chucky’s arrest broke immediately, but only as a footnote to the larger story of the capture of Charles Taylor.
The Miami Herald
and wire services picked up on the fact that within twenty-four hours of Taylor’s arrest in Nigeria, his son had been detained in Miami. The Homeland Security chain of command also took notice—while ICE was developing a record for tracking down human rights violators in the United States, Chucky’s status as the son of a former head of state put him in a separate category from the individuals they had arrested to date.

Baechtle’s ICE team had developed a strong case on the passport fraud charge, but they didn’t have much else against Chucky. From nearly the moment he was arrested, demands to bring him to justice for human rights violations grew. Human Rights Watch and other organizations pressed Homeland Security to charge Chucky with crimes committed in Liberia. Almost overnight the case developed from a body of potential evidence that Baechtle and his colleagues had been quietly exploring out of public view into an investigation with international implications. Soon after the arrest, the decision was made to loop in the FBI.

The Department of Justice paired Baechtle with Special Agent Gregory Naples, an ex–Army Ranger and West Point graduate assigned to the extraterritorial counterterrorism squad in the Washington, D.C., field office.
¹
While competition between federal law enforcement agencies could be expected, Baechtle knew that the complex and logistically challenging task of tracking down further evidence would require the FBI’s support and expertise.

Chucky remained locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Miami awaiting trial on the passport fraud charges. It was unlikely the present charges would result in significant jail time; any sentence he received would be reduced by his time in pretrial detention. But he learned soon after his incarceration that Baechtle and the federal investigators were continuing to probe his activities in Liberia.

Chucky had few resources to contest any charges. He had claimed indigence upon his arrest and, to defend his passport fraud case, had been assigned an experienced attorney out of Miami’s federal public defender’s office, Miguel Caridad.
²
Yet even with Caridad representing him, Chucky had reason to wish to avoid a trial.

He eventually agreed to attend a proffer session with the prosecutors and agents in Miami, a meeting typically used to negotiate immunity from prosecution in exchange for information. In drug and organized crime cases, prosecutors often leaned on defendants to implicate others higher up the rung in order to avoid jail time; for that reason the vast majority of criminal cases terminate in a plea—avoiding prosecutors the costly and time-consuming process of a trial and securing reduced sentences for the guilty defendants.
³
Negotiating a proffer, also called a “Queen for a Day” agreement, presented an inherent risk to both parties. On the one hand, a suspect could leverage his knowledge of crimes to avert prosecution, but on the other, anything the suspect disclosed during the session could be used as a potential lead for investigators. If the prosecutors caught any inkling that a suspect was lying or omitting information, any deal would be taken off the table. Chucky’s proffer was unique—he didn’t belong to a traditional criminal enterprise, and any crimes in which he could implicate anyone would likely be of little interest. He thought the session signaled that the government’s real interest in him was to elicit intelligence on his father rather than pursue a conviction.
⁴
But his case involved crimes of impunity where the process of a trial served justice better than a plea would.

For the agents and prosecutors recently assigned to the case, the session provided the first opportunity to meet with Chucky outside a courtroom. The U.S. attorney for Florida’s Southern District had assigned two of his most accomplished prosecutors, Caroline Heck Miller and Karen Rochlin.
⁵
Miller ranked among the most experienced federal prosecutors in Miami. At fifty-eight, she had been with the office since 1980.
⁶
A tiny figure with a diminutive presence, she could have passed for an elementary school principal. But she’d litigated some of the U.S. attorney’s office highest-profile cases in Miami, including the criminal prosecution surrounding the 1996 ValuJet crash that killed 110 people in the Everglades and the trial of the Cuban Five, intelligence agents for Castro’s government living in Miami. The men had been implicated in spying and conspiring to commit murder after Cuban MIGs shot down two planes from the activist group Brothers to the Rescue.

Rochlin, forty-six years old, had seventeen years’ experience in Florida as an assistant U.S. attorney.
⁷
Seeking out trial experience, she made the improbable leap from a Beltway corporate law firm to the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami. Among the first cases she pitched in on was the Manuel Noriega prosecution. Over the next decade, she worked her way through major crimes, organized crime, public corruption, and eventually to the narcotics division of the office—a job that carried her to every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Along the way she developed a reputation as a formidable and effective prosecutor with the nickname “The Rock.”

The attorneys and agents sat down in the stark conference room at Miami’s federal courthouse for the session. Chucky walked into the room wearing a dun khaki federal detention center–issued uniform and took his seat. While Baechtle had spent time with Chucky during the initial interview, Naples had no firsthand experience with their suspect.
⁸
As Chucky began addressing the room, the FBI agent noticed something odd: Chucky spoke with confidence and didn’t seem to recognize that those gathered in the room could incarcerate him for the rest of his life.

Naples thought, This is going to be a very interesting interview.

Chucky informed those gathered that he believed everyone assembled had been appointed directly by President Bush. He unpacked this idea, according to Naples, drifting into a quasi-legal argument, all the while trying to evince an educated air to the audience of attorneys and federal agents. He dropped phrases and terms that didn’t fit with his intended meaning. It quickly became clear that he had no idea how to correctly assemble thoughts into words and was not at all self-conscious of this fact. In very real terms, he was out of his element. In Liberia, where the literacy rate hovered at 20 percent, he could pass for educated, parroting the language and ideas of his father. Those who did see through him wouldn’t dare speak up. But here the charade did not hold up well.

“It was awkward,” the agent said.

During a break in the session, Chucky ventured small talk with Agent Naples. In a preliminary hearing, he had learned about Naples’s background. He told Naples he “wanted his [own] son to go to West Point.”

By Chucky’s account, he declined to cooperate with the government in exchange for a ten-year sentence; the U.S. attorney’s office would not comment on any potential plea.
⁹
“There is intense anger based on my declines [
sic
],” he wrote in a letter from federal detention, with the same incomprehensibility, shortly after the session. “Now the question arises, am I a big fish in Liberia, and among panafricanists [
sic
] in the region, my response is I’m a mere tadpole in a vast ocean, filed [
sic
] w/ sharks, scavengers, and whales, pounded by hurricanes.”