American Warlord (40 page)

But the two sides failed to come to an agreement. Prosecutors typically cut a deal to either avoid the resource drain of a criminal trial or to trade up for information on other crimes. In this case, the government had every incentive to stage a public trial and little interest in eliciting information from Chucky on his father or the regime.

Meanwhile Chucky still had to confront the passport violation: either plead guilty or go to trial. Since he had implicated himself in the interview with Baechtle, a trial threatened to draw out the inevitable—a conviction and sentence. A guilty plea, on the other hand, could put a positive end to the proceedings. Figuring in his time served, Chucky could realistically expect to be released in months rather than years. The agents focused on the new investigation understood that the charges could put him behind bars for the rest of his life.

Early in December 2006, nearly eight months after Chucky’s arrest, Agents Baechtle and Naples walked into a Starbucks in Chicago.
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They had traveled there to meet a Liberian whom they had learned about some months earlier, Varmuyan Dulleh. While this was not the first time agents had met Dulleh, the success of their case hinged on the outcome of that day’s meeting with him. A Department of Justice trial attorney accompanied the agents, while Dulleh had with him an attorney from one of Chicago’s top law firms, Mayer Brown. The attorney, Lori Lightfoot, had taken on Dulleh pro bono, not as a target of investigation but as a potentially crucial witness in the government’s case against Chucky.
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Agent Naples laid out a spread of mug shots for Dulleh to consider. The agents hoped he could locate an image of one of the men responsible for his exile.

Nearly four years had passed since he’d been forced to flee Liberia.
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After his arrest in the summer of 2002, he’d been held for another year, shuttled from primitive prisons throughout Liberia. The following summer, as the regime collapsed and the Taylor era came to an end, he fled in fear for his life. The thirty-three-year-old Mandingo man had landed at O’Hare International Airport with his wife and son in 2005, the end of a long, tortuous journey from Monrovia via Guinea. He had been resettled in the United States as a refugee—one of nearly twenty thousand arriving from Africa that year. While thousands of other Liberians had been selected to resettle based on a lottery, Dulleh had been granted asylum as a victim of political violence. He spelled out the ordeal he had lived through to the Red Cross and UNHCR and, after receiving approval from the State Department, was paired with a charity in Chicago and sent to start his new life. He was given a small apartment and his son was enrolled in school, but Dulleh’s health had been compromised by his experience.

A month after his arrival Dulleh traveled to Heartland Health Outreach, a nonprofit that provided health care to refugees and the homeless. A nurse entered the examination room and handed him a robe to change into. When she began taking his history, she noticed that he was anxious, responding to her questions in a dull monotone. When she looked at him, he averted his gaze. He removed his shirt. A large scar ran across his right arm. A series of smaller scars and abrasions spread across his legs, and two oval burn marks dotted his shoulders.

The nurse pulled out a body map to detail each one. How did you get these scars? she asked.

Later, at the Starbucks in Chicago, Dulleh told this story to the agents. He spoke in a quiet, sullen voice. It is unclear whether he knew how significant his memories were in the case against Chucky.

Dulleh stared down at the six photographs arrayed in front of him. They were booking shots, from the U.S. marshals, of African-American males. Naples watched Dulleh scan the images.
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Dulleh was a proud, intelligent man, Naples could tell, but whatever had happened to him, he wore heavily. Most of the men in the lineup conjured nothing from him. But he recognized a light-skinned black man with a beard, his head cocked slightly, an annoyed look on his face.

When they met four years earlier, that same face had seethed with rage. In that moment, Dulleh had not doubted that this man would take his life. Chucky had called out to him, “Do you know I can kill you and nothing can happen?”

That was no longer true. Dulleh pointed to the third photograph in the array.

That is Chucky Taylor, he said.

Are you positive? Naples asked.

One hundred percent.

Dulleh’s identification had an immediate impact. On December 6, 2006, the day before Chucky faced sentencing on the passport violation, the Justice Department unsealed a seven-page indictment accusing him both of conspiracy to commit torture and of the act of torture.
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He had remained in federal custody at the detention center in downtown Miami as his charge for passport fraud made its way to court. But even as he and his attorneys prepared to enter a guilty plea, he looked forward to his release. The new indictment guaranteed that he would not be freed anytime soon.

In anticipation of his sentencing, Chucky had prepared a rambling letter to Judge Donald L. Graham.
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It opened vaguely: “for the last 8 out of 10 years, I lived in a place where Western covert support was permanent, and isolation of an administration was an overt action.” In the letter he admitted to lying on the passport application, described his failed efforts to mediate an agreement with the State Department, and made clear his willingness to discuss his experience in Liberia.

The statement seemed crafted for a wider audience. Chucky had designs on publicizing his story, hoping that someone would pay him money for an interview.
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But he also seemed to want to preempt further legal action against him. He knew that his past was being investigated but knew little else beyond that. His mother had received a subpoena from federal prosecutors that suggested a broader investigation. Eventually, his lawyers learned of the intention to indict him on torture charges.

The new indictment detailed the events of the early morning hours of July 24, 2002, in Monrovia, referring to Dulleh simply as “the Victim” and to Yeaten as the “co-conspirator,” but implicating Chucky, under his four aliases, as the son of Charles Taylor and the commander of the Anti-Terrorist Unit.

“This marks the first time the Justice Department has charged a defendant with the crime of torture,” Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher said in a prepared statement. “Crimes such as these will not go unanswered.”

It was a strange quote coming from the Bush administration Justice Department—in particular from Fisher, who would later become embroiled in the scandal surrounding the Office of Legal Counsel’s interpretation of the very statute that Chucky had been indicted under. Fisher’s connections to the interrogation practices used on detainees in the war on terror stretched back to 2002, when she had joined a delegation that toured Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay (incidentally just weeks after Dulleh was detained by the ATU). According to journalist Jane Mayer, the lawyers on that junket sat in on an interrogation of a detainee.
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Later, in 2005, Senator Carl M. Levin, who was looking into detainee abuse allegations, briefly held up Fisher’s nomination for assistant attorney general. Following her confirmation, the issue continued to dog her.
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The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility probed whether in her prior role as deputy assistant attorney general she had sanctioned the use of torture, or—as the Bush administration referred to it—enhanced interrogation methods on terrorism suspects.

But ultimately the Justice Department’s own entanglement with the torture of terrorism suspects did nothing to stop it from pursuing Chucky’s case. Human rights groups applauded his indictment, but Chucky thought he was being made a scapegoat. “It’s evident that Washington,” he wrote in a letter from prison, “cannot determine my precise involvement in business or any other sector in Liberia and has had to rely on streams of information, not intelligence, coming from shady questionable accounts by Human Rights Watch, who in turn got it from other human rights groups, Liberian opposition, UN reports, who some consider motivated by ethnic and trible [
sic
] also political reasons.”
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Yet he was also defiant, saying, “How do I prove my innocence, and not make this intelligence gathering excercise [
sic
] for these cocksuckers in Washington, that’s the challenge presented.”

At his sentencing for the passport violation—the day after the indictment was announced—Chucky addressed Judge Graham directly, striking a much more reserved tone. “I’ve been placed in a very difficult position over the years due to my father’s role as former President of Liberia and my status as an American citizen,” he explained. “Throughout all, I’ve maintained my loyalty to both family and country. I fully respected and observed the laws of Liberia during my time there. I remained neutral as strenuous diplomatic issues emerged between my father’s administration and Washington.… It seems that there are attempts to make me pay for being the son of a former African leader who now stands as the second former head of state in history to be indicted for war crimes.”

Chucky’s assumptions about the federal government were wrong. Washington wasn’t using the threat of prosecution to lean on him for intelligence. Both ICE and the Justice Department had one interest in him—gathering enough witnesses and evidence to ensure that he was the first person in history to be convicted under the federal antitorture statute.

On a Sunday morning in November 2007, Special Agent Baechtle and an ICE colleague, Special Agent Julian Doyle, climbed into a white SUV at the U.S. embassy in Monrovia.
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Baechtle had become familiar with the journey to Liberia over several visits, but on this trip was Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller, who accompanied him for the first time. Before departing the capital, the investigators and attorneys had a stop to make, to pick up their guide for the day, a man named Rufus Kpadeh.

Kpadeh had met the agents once before, three months earlier, inside the U.S. embassy.
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The path that led the agents to Kpadeh illustrates the networks Taylor had inadvertently fashioned with his brand of authoritarian rule. Early in the investigation the agents had located Nathaniel Koah, the diamond broker who had been arrested and brutalized at Gbatala. Koah’s vocal publicity campaign following his arrest by the Anti-Terrorist Unit had drawn considerable attention. A human rights group took up his cause and brought it to the attention of the U.S. embassy, which worked directly with the visiting ICE and FBI agents. But Koah was a complex witness: raw and excitable, a former Taylor supporter who had abandoned his wife and daughter to be sexually assaulted as retribution for his decision to go public. His primary motivation now was not to see Chucky and the other perpetrators punished but to be compensated for his ordeal.

In the course of the agents’ interview with Koah, he mentioned that he’d been detained with another man from Lofa County. Unlike Koah, Kpadeh had never gone public with his story and had only recently returned to Liberia from refuge in Ivory Coast and Guinea. He made his living farming and building furniture. While he belonged to an opposition political party, his political affiliations did not run much deeper than that. He was, compared to Koah and Dulleh, relatively unattached to the parties involved in the civil war; most important, he wasn’t interested in money.

When Kpadeh first met with the investigators, he told them his story: he fled Voinjama in August 1999, was detained at the St. Paul River bridge, and was brought to the office in the building alongside the road. There he met Chucky for the first time and on his orders was sent to Gbatala.

He spoke with a soft, raspy voice—when he paused, he wheezed audibly.
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While Koah remained deeply angry and vengeful over the suffering his family endured, Kpadeh presented himself as calm and free from ulterior motives. When pressed, he acknowledged he wanted justice, but mostly he wanted to continue with his life in Liberia.

News of Chucky’s arrest and indictment had made it back to Monrovia, but the indictment listed only one, unnamed victim. The secrecy was meant to ensure the safety of Dulleh and his family prior to trial. But whether through Monrovia’s gossip mill or because of familiarity with the circumstances surrounding the accusations, Chucky’s former commanders quickly learned the accuser’s identity.

They did nothing, however; they had no incentive to help Chucky. Taylor-era figures, by and large, were keeping a low profile. Chucky’s former fighters felt no loyalty to a commander who had abandoned them. Finally, there was no money in helping him.

Yet Kpadeh faced a risk going into his first meeting with the Americans. He lived in Voinjama but spent enough time in Monrovia to be targeted by former ATU members living in the capital. Despite this risk, he told his story to the agents. At one point he stood up to remove his shirt—revealing a trail of scars stretched across his torso. He agreed, upon the agents’ return, to take them to the place where he’d received those injuries.

Some three months after that initial meeting, the agents prepared to travel into the countryside with Kpadeh and an attorney overseeing Chucky’s new criminal case. The group left Monrovia before daybreak, threading through the capital’s streets to Paynesville, where the typically overrun, trash-strewn marketplace of Red Light—named for the single, out-of-service traffic light—began to stir with activity. By the time the group reached Margibi County, an hour’s drive outside the capital, the road pointed through the rolling green groves of the hinterland toward the rising sun.

Nearly one hundred miles from the city, the group passed over a small bridge into the village of Gbatala. On the left side of the road stood a hand-painted billboard dug into the mud shoulder. It depicted a reunion scene, set against a village backdrop: a sleeveless teenager with a headband discarded a machete and an AK-47 with one hand and shook the hand of a neatly dressed older man with the other.
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In the background, a woman and two children—a boy and a girl—rushed out from a tin-roofed hut wearing jubilant smiles. In large block letters it read
THE WAR IS OVER
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