American Warlord (44 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen, what is going on in this country? What is going on in Liberia? How can you possibly understand such a tale? It seems like a different planet to me. Maybe a Liberian jury could make sense of this, but an American jury? How can you possibly evaluate the credibility of such a tale?”

It was a question that cut to the core of any extraterritorial case. When Congress ratified the Convention Against Torture and passed the federal antitorture statute, it had taken political and legal steps toward an idea of international justice. But ultimately the validity of that idea fell to an American jury to determine. Could an American jury deliver a just verdict on such an extraordinary and foreign set of facts?

Caridad returned to the familiar element in the case, the American and Floridian accused of the crimes. And even though his client had not testified, Caridad sought to use the statements Chucky gave Baechtle to support the defense. “Ladies and gentlemen, the only statement that makes any sense in this case is the statement made by Chucky Taylor, the American,” Caridad said. “He sits with these agents for two hours, tells them all that they could possibly want to know.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller attacked Caridad’s attempt to set up an impossible cultural distance between the jurors and the victims in the prosecution’s rebuttal. “Ladies and gentlemen, we submit that you should reject this,” she argued. “Their bodies are not different. Blood is red. Knives cut. Fire burns. Pain hurts. That’s what this case is about, and it is about that for all victims in this case.”

She also attacked Caridad’s notion that much of the testimony was implausible. She acknowledged that many of the witnesses had escaped near-death experiences to be able to testify, but the remarkable nature of their survival didn’t impugn their credibility. “A survivor may always appear to be lucky by hindsight,” she said. But survival—as miraculous as it might seem—was the miracle that all witnesses shared, she pointed out. “There was no miracle for Abdul Cole or no miracle for those people on the beach, certainly the luck for Albert Williams and the other men who were pulled out of the group and were shot was very bad. For them, also, there was no miracle.”

Miller closed for the government with a poetic turn, referencing a fountain wall at the courthouse. “That wall reminds me of words that have been quoted at another time in our history, words of the Prophet Amos. ‘Let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.’ It is time for those waters of justice now, ladies and gentlemen, for those waters to flush out and cleanse the filth of the pits of Gbatala, to short-circuit the dreadful electricity in Benjamin Yeaten’s garage and to cleanse, finally, the tears of suffering by human beings at the hands [of] and caused by this man here, the defendant.”

The jury deliberated for a day and a half. Shortly after two p.m. on October 30, 2008, the foreman notified the court’s deputy that they were prepared to return the verdict.

Several months earlier Chucky had written a letter to his son telling him that he had some “things to take care of,” asking him to write to him, to tell him about school, sports, his friends. “I’ve always loved you and always will your [
sic
] my first son my only son, I pray for you all the time and I want you to grow strong, smart, and disciplined,” he wrote. Most significantly, he wrote that he was sorry “for not being there, and sorry for the times when you came to visit, I was not a better man, and Father.” These were words that Charles Taylor could have just as easily written to Chucky a decade earlier, before their lives together spun out into the darkness of violence and power.

It took less than four minutes for the verdict to be read. The foreman responded to each count with the word
guilty.
Each count compounded the sentence he would face, until it became clear he would likely never be set free.

With the verdict read, the court officer asked those in the courtroom to rise for the jury to depart the room.

Chucky refused.
²⁸

Three months later, on the morning of January 9, 2009, Bernice Emmanuel stood outside courtroom 12-2 dressed in a trim black blazer and white blouse with teardrop pearls hanging from her ears, her silver hair smartly parted across her face. The hallway was subdued; only the thrum of the ventilation and clicking of footsteps punctuated the quiet. She clutched a yellow legal pad, giving the appearance that she might be one of the small group of attorneys preparing to enter Chucky Taylor’s sentencing hearing. A reporter approached her and addressed her as “Ms. Emmanuel.” She appeared startled for a moment, then smiled and said, “I’m sorry, you have the wrong person.” She turned and walked inside the courtroom.

Emmanuel had appeared at the court that morning bearing a letter for Judge Altonaga. Chucky’s mother had been absent from the trial, but this day, above all others, would determine her son’s future. The contents of her letter to the judge will forever remain between those two women. Perhaps Emmanuel recognized her own complicity in her son’s descent. Perhaps she chose to reiterate his claim of innocence. But one could reasonably expect that from woman to woman, mother to mother, it would be an appropriate moment to beg mercy for her son.

That morning Chucky did not ask for mercy.
²⁹
In their presentencing comments, his attorneys struggled to distance him from his crimes. In an at times awkward presentation, Caridad leaned heavily on the “nurture” scale of the argument, pitting much of the brutality of his actions on the company Chucky had been introduced into in Liberia: David Campari, Benjamin Yeaten, and finally, his own father. But that rationale delivered Chucky to a pitiful conclusion, as offered by Miguel Caridad: “It’s fair to say that if he had stayed in the United States, he wouldn’t be a torturer.”

Chucky rose to address the court, wearing his prison khakis, appearing more heavyset with his beard heavily grown in. He pointed out that he had expected to lose at trial, and even though the government had dangled before him a plea deal of thirteen years, he said, he had chosen to attempt to prove his innocence. He criticized the court as unable to adequately address the issues raised by the civil wars that his father had engineered.

“Every family has had some tragedy and trauma physically and mentally,” he said. “No one was immune, whether the witnesses involved in this case or my own family, be it my grandfather, my uncles or my cousins whose lives were taken during the war. My sympathy and heart goes out to all of those families caught up in the former conflicts of Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

He then addressed the witnesses gathered there that day. “As many consider these witnesses foreign, both in culture and speech, these witnesses are my African brothers and it is
wajib
[duty as a Muslim] that I extend my prayers to them and their families and will continue to do so even after this sentence is handed down. I also maintain Liberian and West African traditions by saying sorry. Sorry, my brothers, to what has happened to you during the fourteen-year civil conflict and the war that lasted in Sierra Leone.”

He did not acknowledge his crimes. He did not offer any explanation for how he had found himself in this situation. He simply asked the judge to place him in a penitentiary proximate to his mother and his son. Had he expressed contrition, he would have jeopardized his chance of appeal. But by not doing so, his words came across as a final, passive act of defiance.

Judge Altonaga addressed the courtroom shortly before noon. “I have given careful thought as well to the history and characteristics of the defendant,” she said. “While there is some appeal to saying he went to Liberia at a young, impressionable age and was surrounded by his biological father and that father’s cohorts for whom this lifestyle was acceptable is to only look at one piece of the history and characteristics of the defendant.”

Altonaga noted that Chucky had a “normal upbringing here and he left the United States for the incorrect reasons … the acts which he committed, and by the jury’s decision he has been found to have committed, occurred when he was a young man in his twenties and occurred at his direction, occurred through his imagination, through his control, sadistic, cruel, atrocious acts, which may become commonplace after a time if one sees it occurring day after day after day and which immunize any shock or concern after one participates in those events day after day after day, but which, nonetheless, constitute unacceptable universally condemned torture.”

The government sought a 147-year sentence, while Caridad had sought a “fair and reasonable” punishment. Judge Altonaga sentenced Chucky to 1,164 months—ninety-seven years in prison.

Throughout his criminal case, Chucky had fought divorce proceedings with Lynn. She did not follow his trial in any detail.
³⁰
It was a painful reminder of the lost opportunities he had come to represent. Much of her life was now devoted to putting him and Liberia behind her. She worked as a nurse, raising her son outside Pine Hills, while trying to finalize her divorce.

Chucky argued in family court—somewhat fantastically—that the two had never been married, apparently to avoid any future claims that Lynn and his child were entitled to any of his assets. (To refute his claim, Lynn’s attorney’s introduced wedding photos and a copy of the menu at their reception.)

“It really saddens me,” Lynn said after the verdict. “It saddens me because the only thing we’ll ever be entitled to is a legacy of torture and murder along with some horrific memories.”

Charles Taylor learned of his son’s sentencing at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, where his own trial for crimes against humanity continued. Taylor offered no public comment, but his attorney told the press that the former president was distressed by the punishment meted out to Chucky.

On May 30, 2012, three and a half years after his son’s punishment came down, Charles Taylor received a fifty-year sentence from the Special Court for Sierra Leone for crimes against humanity.

Despite the sentence, Chucky didn’t consider his battle over. His attorneys appealed to the 11th Circuit, largely on constitutional grounds, asking the appellate court to throw out the conviction.
³¹
That process wound forward with very little involvement from Chucky—he could only wait for the determination.

Several of Chucky’s victims, including Rufus Kpadeh and Nathaniel Koah, filed a federal lawsuit against him in Miami, seeking damages for the suffering they had endured at his hands and under the control of the ATU.
³²
Chucky did not contest that suit, which resulted in a default ruling, but he later chose to represent himself in the penalty phase of the lawsuit. With his appeal pending, there was little contribution he could make to the proceeding without jeopardizing his criminal case. The judge eventually awarded the plaintiffs $22.4 million in damages, an amount that they could never hope to recover from an indigent Chucky.
³³

In letters from prison, Chucky drew more distant from his father, referring to him as “President Taylor” or simply “Taylor.” He blamed his father for the collapse of discipline in the ATU. He insisted that he belonged in a separate category from the sycophants surrounding his father. Ultimately, he laid the entire tragedy of Liberia at his father’s feet. “President Taylor my father has very little to be proud of ‘a legacy of ashes’ the death of the innocent and the brave can never be forgotten,” he wrote. “I never wanted to see it play out like this.”

After the fall of Charles Taylor, Liberia achieved a milestone it had not reached in more than a quarter of a century: a decade of peace. This was due, in large part, to the support of the international community and the presence of one of the largest UN military missions in history.
³⁴
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf accomplished something that none of her predecessors had: she changed the narrative of the nation from one of destruction to one of rebuilding. The international community embraced her as a reformer and an antidote to the warlord politics that had ruled the region for so long. In 2011 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet beneath the surface little had changed in Liberia. Graft and bribery plagued the government and judicial systems even as President Sirleaf declared war on corruption. War criminals implicated by the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission went unpunished, despite official recommendations for prosecutions.
³⁵
The rain forests continued to be harvested for timber, palm oil, and rubber with little oversight; the same NGOs that had reported on Taylor’s pillaging of state resources now issued reports critical of the new government. As Chucky and his father had predicted, U.S. oil interests staked their claims in Liberia: both Chevron and Exxon purchased development rights for offshore prospects. In April 2013 Chevron drilled its first wells.
³⁶

Even the security apparatus in the Liberian government bore reflections of the Taylor era. While the ATU had been disbanded, former members of the unit were quietly integrated into the Liberian National Police and President Sirleaf’s National Security Agency, which was led by her son.
³⁷

On February 22, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chucky’s submission to hear his appeal.
³⁸
When he received the news at Big Sandy United States Penitentiary in Kentucky, far from his mother’s home in Florida, he was left to contemplate the facts that had determined his fate: the beginnings of his family history in slavery, the creation of Liberia, the injustice perpetrated by his forebears, his father’s revolution. There were his crimes and the survivors who lived to tell their stories. Then there was his identity, defined not only by the fact of his birth but by how he had led his life.

“I personally won’t be defined by my father’s legacy. I’m an individual,” he said in a call from prison.
³⁹
“It’s just unfortunate that my father’s leadership was the way that it was. Disappointing not because he’s my father or what the personal relationship we had was, but the fact that he failed so many people. My anger is directed at him for failing the people who committed themselves to his dream and those who died as a result of his dream.”