American Warlord (43 page)

Belfast spoke in a soft, lilting Trinidadian accent. As he testified, he called his stepson “Charlie,” recounting the first time he met the boy, when Chucky was just five. Chucky eventually came to call him “Pop.” The family’s migration south to Orlando, Belfast testified, was a deliberate act of protection. He and Bernice had intended to “put some distance” between Charles Taylor and Chucky, but as events unfolded in West Africa and Belfast’s marriage unraveled, Bernice no longer felt the need to protect her son from his father. In fact, she chose to close that distance.

Chucky wiped tears from his eyes with a folded handkerchief. Wylie patted his back, as if to console him. On cross-examination, public defender Caridad made Chucky stand so that Belfast could identify him.

“Did you consider him your son?” Caridad asked.

“He was considered my son. I was his father,” Belfast said. He stood and stepped down from the stand. As he passed the defense table, he nodded toward Chucky, who looked back at him, then leaned forward, holding his hand over his eyes, rocking slightly in his chair.

On October 1, 2008, two men milled about the fourteenth-floor lobby of the courthouse waiting to testify: Sulaiman Jusu and Momoh Turay. Baechtle had tracked them to Sweden and, after the U.S. attorneys interviewed them, determined that they would appear at trial. That day Turay, a small, broad-chested man, wore a denim suit; Jusu, lanky and tall, donned more traditional linen garb. From the east, fragments of Biscayne Bay shone through the buildings and rooftops of downtown Miami as glints of cobalt. A calm quiet echoed through the hallway as they entered the courtroom.

Nearly a decade had passed since their ordeal ended in Liberia. After the United Nations secured their release in Monrovia in 1999, the men had received treatment in a clinic adjacent to the U.S. embassy for several weeks, then were relocated to a refugee camp outside Monrovia.
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Eventually Taylor’s security forces discovered the men there, harassing and beating them until they were forced to flee again. As horrifying as their ordeal had been, it proved helpful in establishing a case for resettlement. Finally, Sweden accepted both, along with their families, for resettlement, and they left Liberia in March 2000. Jusu settled in Stockholm, and Turay, farther north, in a small Swedish town just below the Arctic Circle.

It was there that Special Agent Baechtle had found them.
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In interviews, they offered parallel accounts of arrest, detention, and torture at the Gbatala base, but more significantly, both implicated Chucky in killings. He had not been indicted for murder but faced potentially harsher sentence under an “enhancement” if murder were proved.

The government put both men on the stand and took the jury through each one’s experience in painstaking detail. When Jusu testified, he recalled the executions the men had witnessed Chucky carry out at the St. Paul River bridge. He described the decapitation they had seen Chucky order at Gbatala. For the jurors, this testimony illustrated that there were no boundaries to the brutality the defendant had been accused of. It also lent credibility to the fear of death that other victims in the case would testify to.

Credibility was a problem for both men, though.
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They had lied during the process of resettlement, to allow women who were not their wives to accompany them to Sweden. That made the men vulnerable under cross-examination. During cross-examination, John Wylie often talked over Turay, trying to raise any skepticism he could from the jury—drawing attention to the fact that he’d been convicted of hitting a child and pushing him to acknowledge past lies. Wylie was laying the groundwork for his closing, where he would seek to discredit Turay, portray him as an opportunist, and sow seeds of doubt in the veracity of his testimony.

On October 10, Varmuyan Dulleh took the stand; as the first victim to appear in the indictment, his testimony was crucial to the government’s case.
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If the idea of Charles Taylor’s power, and Chucky’s connection to it, had been abstract for the jury, Dulleh’s account of his arrest brought the jurors directly into Taylor’s inner sanctum. Assistant U.S. Attorney Graveline asked Dulleh to describe the scene at White Flower after he had been hauled there from his home. Dulleh related that Taylor’s commanders Momoh Gibba and Benjamin Yeaten, along with his ministers, had been sitting along a wall, and he explained where Chucky fit within this group.

Wylie attacked Dulleh’s credibility, pointing out that he had lied about his identity in order to escape Liberia. But just as with Turay and Jusu’s fabrications on their refugee claims, Dulleh’s lies were easily understood as necessary for his own survival. The defense counsel pursued Dulleh’s motivations for testifying, trying to tie the funds that Dulleh had been provided and the health care he had received to his appearance before the court. Finally Wylie pressed the underlying politics between the defendant and witness, seeking to connect Dulleh to his uncle Alhaji Kromah, the leader of a faction at odds with Taylor. Dulleh responded calmly and clearly throughout.

Chucky’s attorney eventually focused on statements that Dulleh had provided to the representatives for the UN High Commission for Refugees who had vetted his claim to be resettled in a host country. To be resettled in the United States, applicants either are selected by lottery or need to provide proof that they have suffered religious or political persecution in their home country. The defense attorney pointed out that Dulleh’s accusations had particular currency because they involved a political figure: Chucky, the son of the president.

“Now, when you were telling the story to the United Nations, was Chucky Taylor present?” Wylie asked.

“No,” Dulleh responded.

“Was his lawyer or a lawyer for Chucky Taylor present when you were telling the story to the United Nations?” he continued, raising the idea that the first time this story was told—and allegedly fabricated—Chucky could not defend himself from the accusation.

“No,” the witness said.

On redirect, Assistant U.S. Attorney Graveline picked up Wylie’s thread, emphasizing the ridiculousness of the line pursued in the cross-examination. He referred to the subterranean pit where the men were held for a time beneath a trucking weigh scale during their ordeal.

“Was Chucky Taylor’s lawyer under the weigh scale at Kle when you accused him with those men of torture?” The defense objected, and Graveline rephrased the question. “What, if any, lawyers did you see under the weigh station at Kle?” he asked.

Dulleh responded, “Absolutely no lawyers.”

The prosecution’s case had been devastating. Much of the local and national media attention focused on the depravity of the accusations rather than the legal and political significance of the case. For Liberians following Chucky’s story in Monrovia’s dailies, the trial represented a stunning reversal of power. In the United States victims of violent crime take for granted that they have the right to face their perpetrator in court, but those who had been victimized during Liberia’s civil war could have made no such assumption.

After the civil war, Liberia pursued its own type of reckoning through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The process was intended to give both victims and perpetrators the opportunity to air their experiences before investigators and at public hearings. Ultimately, though, the TRC process was toothless: hundreds of victims recounted the horrors they suffered, and dozens of perpetrators recounted in detail the torture, murder, and mutilation they took part in, yet nobody faced any criminal charges. While his father was being prosecuted for crimes he had committed in another country—Sierra Leone—Chucky Taylor, in fact, was the only participant in the entire fourteen-year conflict to be brought before a judge and jury.

For fourteen days the jury heard accounts of Chucky’s brutality. They learned of his connection to his father’s regime. They saw the scars on his alleged victims’ skin. But one voice they hadn’t yet heard was Chucky’s. And his attorneys hoped to ensure it remained that way.

The prosecution sought to introduce the rap lyrics that the agents had discovered in Chucky’s personal effects when he was arrested.
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At sidebar, defense attorney Miguel Caridad fought vociferously to exclude the lyrics from the trial as irrelevant and prejudicial. He knew that, in the context of a criminal trial, they would not reflect well on his client.

“Rap lyrics are notoriously violent no matter who writes them,” he argued before the judge.
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“This is pure and simple character assassination. They want to make him look like a violent guy because his character is violent. That’s a complete character smear. They do not need it for anything. It doesn’t say anything about torture.”

“It’s probably good it doesn’t from your perspective,” the judge said, then overruled his objection.

In a flat, unaffected tone, a customs agent read the lyrics to the jury:

It required only a small, if circumstantial, leap to connect these lyrics with the allegations the jury had already heard detailed. The words had their own force: they provided a window into the imagination of the one person who had remained silent throughout the trial.

For Chucky’s case, the admission of the lyrics was catastrophic—the image that he was a cold-blooded and violent killer wasn’t simply a figment of the government’s imagination—it was one that the defendant himself cultivated.

The last investigator scheduled to testify for the prosecution was Special Agent Baechtle. The defense had fought to keep his most compelling testimony—his account of Chucky’s statements to him at Miami International Airport—out of the trial. Knowing that U.S. Attorney Miller would be questioning him, and familiar with her thorough, methodical approach to witness, Baechtle prepared to testify. Like other ICE agents, he’d been trained to do so, facing down stand-in prosecutors and defenders in a mock courtroom setting at the academy. But this case marked his first significant criminal trial, and his testimony held, potentially, the most incriminating evidence of the prosecution’s case.

Baechtle took the stand on the afternoon of October 16, 2008. U.S. Attorney Miller walked him through the events of the evening of March 30, two years earlier—Chucky’s arrest and interrogation.
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The agent recounted that the actual arrest was a small part of what turned into a three-hour conversation. Chucky, in the agent’s retelling, detailed his experiences in Liberia from when he first met his father in 1992 until the moment he fled eleven years later. Baechtle’s recollections of the conversation clung to the facts. He offered no opinion of Chucky, nor was any solicited by the prosecutor.

Based on Baechtle’s testimony, what Chucky told him on the night of his arrest amounted to an admission that he not only had command responsibility for the ATU but was present for the torture of one individual at Yeaten’s house, presumably Varmuyan Dulleh. The fact that these admissions were elicited only after Chucky was confronted by specific information and accusations created the impression that the defendant had hoped to obfuscate the details of his past. Most significant, based on the agent’s testimony, Chucky had made all his admissions willingly, with little or no pressure from the investigators.

“Were you present for the duration of that three-hour interview?” Miller asked.

“Yes, I was,” Baechtle responded.

“Was the defendant responsive to your questions?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Were there any questions you asked that he refused to answer?” the prosecutor asked.

“Not that I recall,” Baechtle said.

The trial broke for the day, and Baechtle returned to his hotel with his testimony scheduled to resume in the morning. The judge forbade him to speak to anyone until he concluded testifying, which gave Baechtle his first night off since the trial began more than two weeks earlier.

It provided him a moment to look back on the experience.
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The trial had been a period of exhilarating uncertainty, but he felt confident in the evidence that the witnesses could provide and in the abilities of the prosecutors. The investigation had been long and meticulous, leaving very little to chance, but Baechtle recognized the inherently unpredictable nature of a criminal trial.

Chucky’s public defender, John Wylie, had made an undeniable point when he laid out the challenge facing the jury: they were being asked to go back in time to determine whether the crimes Chucky had been accused of had actually occurred.
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The government had provided the evidence and witnesses, but had they made the crimes real enough for the jury to convict Chucky?

Baechtle knew what had made the crimes real to him: Marching along a thread of dirt into the swamp at Gbatala and coming upon the water-filled holes of Vietnam exactly as they had been described to him.
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Peering into the dark, fetid weigh station at Kle and feeling physically repulsed at the thought that men had been imprisoned for weeks on end in the garbage and filth. Interviewing the witnesses, not just hearing the details of their stories, but listening to the manner in which they told them. Noticing how their vivid memories of these brutal acts overlapped, and seeing how they punctuated their recollections with physical scars across their arms, legs, chests. And then realizing how all these moments, places, and people connected back to decisions made by a man who wasn’t some supernatural monster but came from a Florida suburb. Chucky’s story had been improbable and at times surreal, but its brutality was real, and he made this palpable at the trial.

More than a month after the trial began, Miguel Caridad, the senior federal public defender, delivered the closing, after calling eleven witnesses (including Baechtle and Naples).
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The defense case had suffered a crushing setback when nine witnesses, primarily ATU members flown in from Liberia, disappeared the night before their testimony. To date the jury had heard a remarkable stream of testimony, much of it in Liberian- or Sierra Leonean–inflected English, delivered by witnesses who had never before set foot in an American courtroom. The defense played on their foreignness to thread together the witnesses’ testimony under one theme of implausibility—the stunning escapes, the life-saving interventions. He asked them to consider these stories as if a resident of Miami was telling them.