American Warlord (26 page)

For an investor like House, however, Chucky offered the influence of being the president’s son, access to untapped diamond and gold concessions, and detailed satellite imaging that would help guide their exploration. Chucky needed capital—and hoped House could provide investors.

House returned to the States and embarked on a road show to seek out backing for the venture. He immediately encountered resistance; after speaking with the corporate finance arms of multiple “junior mining ventures in the US and Canada,” he wrote to Akinsanya in mid-August, “it is impossible to attract investment capital in Liberia. There were no exceptions. They stated no exceptions. They stated many reasons but mainly the threat of war, political instability, and the terrible PR of conflict diamonds.”
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This was an unwelcome revelation. Inside his father’s inner circle, there was little reliable information about how the government was perceived. But doors were beginning to shut—from the inability to attract foreign donors to the increased scrutiny of the United Nations. This posed a fundamental challenge to Taylor: without wealth, he would rapidly lose strength.

House now had serious misgivings about the project, but he told Akinsanya that he would move ahead with his own money to purchase the concessions and begin alluvial mining, hoping that if they hit “the right spots in the river this will generate a substantial cash flow which will allow us to bootstrap” the later stages of exploration.
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Chucky wanted to assuage House’s concerns about working in Liberia. He responded directly to House’s note to Akinsanya, somewhat incoherently, with a note that read, “As for the question of threats of war, political instability we must remember that the 100 (hundred years) of peace that the world had enjoyed, Africa has not experienced the same and is the last continent of conflict. So it is the ability of a [
sic
] administration through its political part and National Security Measures that one should analyse and African Administration.”
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“As for the banning of conflict diamonds,” Chucky wrote, “not only I as an individual but the Government of Liberia fully supports UN Resolution 1306.”

The resolution Chucky referred to had passed in the Security Council in early July, banning the sales of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone without authorization of the government of Sierra Leone. To give the ban some force, the Security Council created an investigative body—referred to as the Panel of Experts—to report on compliance of parties believed to be involved in the trade.

The decision was a blow for Chucky and his father, effectively criminalizing a significant source of revenue for the regime. The diamonds flowing from Sierra Leone through Liberia onto the world’s market were estimated to be at 31 million carats between 1994 and 1998.
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This made the need for Liberia to develop its much smaller diamond resources all the more urgent. In his negotiations with House, Chucky eventually acknowledged that the South Africans wouldn’t be able to provide any help for further phases of exploration. House sought out his own geologist, attempting to hire a Czech scientist who was familiar with the region and could provide an assessment independent of the preliminary findings of the South Africans. (It’s unclear whether that relationship ever materialized.)

To equip the operation, House turned to an ex–Green Beret and veteran diamond hunter based out of Indiana named Daniel Pohle, who had traveled throughout Africa and South America, outfitting diamond- and gold-mining operations with mechanical dredges that automated the laborious operation of separating out precious stones and metals from dirt and mud.
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“I build the toys and make sure people know how to use them,” he said.

Pohle was also a veteran of West Africa—he had spent time in Sierra Leone during the 1990s, setting up mining equipment in the Kono District while it was under RUF control. As a former U.S. Special Operations soldier, he was dismissive of the severity of the fighting between the Taylor-backed rebels and government troops. (“I was there when they were playin’ cowboys and Indians,” he recalled with some bravado.)

Pohle arrived in Liberia in September 2000. He was there to do the actual labor of mining and to oversee the operation of two pieces of machinery the men had purchased: an excavator and what was called a “diamond and gold plant,” a machine that could move through forty yards of riverbed each hour. He hoped to prove whether diamonds existed in any quantity and had brought along another American to help operate the equipment. House did not make an appearance; instead the group’s local contact was an attorney from the Twin Cities named Ben Houge who ran a school for the deaf with his hearing-impaired daughter deep in the bush.
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Houge was a character that could emerge only in Liberia: a charity worker with a sideline in diamonds. Houge said if all went well, the mining would bankroll the charitable school.

Pohle claims the mining operation was Houge’s real reason for being in Liberia and that “basically the cover was a school for the deaf.” With the blessing of the authorities, the group set up their machinery in a creek along the Lofa River, near the border of Lower Lofa and Grand Cape Mount Counties. Pohle noticed that nearly everywhere he went in the bush, he found armed men and boys—a sight familiar from his experiences in Sierra Leone.

“Everybody had an AK, some of ’em just in short pants. Those were the throwaways from Charles [Taylor],” he recalled, saying the fighters never interfered with him. “I didn’t never have to get rough on anyone.” But Pohle decided not to stay around long enough to see whether the operation began yielding diamonds.

Meanwhile Liberia’s tenuous political situation was an increasing concern for Jeff House. In Monrovia, confrontations between Taylor’s forces and American diplomats were becoming more frequent.
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In the bush, ATU forces lost ground to insurgents in Lofa County, then staged a retaliatory cross-border attack into Macenta, Guinea, where Taylor believed his enemies were operating with American support. For an American businessman, all signs pointed toward a collapse in the relationship between Liberia and the United States. “Vic,” an unidentified business partner, relayed to Akinsanya some of House’s fears, saying that House

A handwritten note on a faxed copy of the e-mail read:

It isn’t known whether Chucky tried to address House’s concerns, but House grew even more distressed. In August 2000 Charles Taylor responded to the allegations that he had been trafficking diamonds with the RUF by accusing the American government of funding a $2 million plot to assassinate him.
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The charges, broadcast over his KISS-FM radio station and published in newspapers sympathetic to Taylor, ratcheted up festering anti-American tensions in Monrovia, particularly among Taylor’s security forces.

In October, President Clinton signed an executive order barring the entry into the United States of “President Charles Taylor, senior members of the Government of Liberia, their closest supporters, and their family members,” citing the Liberian government’s role in sustaining the crisis in Sierra Leone through the diamonds and weapons trade.
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Akinsanya received another e-mail to an account that he and “Vic” shared, detailing House’s concerns:

By mid-October, however, even as the operation got off the ground, the lawyers continued to finalize the deal. House and Chucky had agreed to incorporate in Nevis, a tiny Caribbean nation—also a tax and regulatory haven—but the Minnesotan objected to several provisions requiring him to report gold and diamond discoveries to the government, while being offered no guarantees of future mining rights.
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Leslie Anderson, the attorney who reviewed the contract for House, recalled his understanding of how profits were to be distributed: “The state of Liberia or the country of Liberia would’ve got the proceeds, part of the proceeds would go to Taylor, part would go to Jeff, and, I think, it was supposed to be very, very lucrative, if they ever hit the diamonds.”
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They never did, though. According to Anderson, the deal suddenly fell apart. House had been unable to deliver the investors that Chucky required to launch the effort. Anderson said that Chucky had retaliated by kicking the American workers out of the country and taking the only thing left of value: the mining equipment. It was a classic bait and switch, executed perfectly on the unsuspecting Americans who had been “dumb enough to bring all this equipment over,” as Anderson said.

It was a bitter lesson of dealing in Taylor’s Liberia. House, despite the appearance of official sanction, had been hustled; he returned to Minnesota and filed for bankruptcy.

Jeff House was not the only business partner whom Chucky threw in with. In early 2000 another opportunity presented itself in an underworld figure named Leonid Minin.
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Minin represented a new type of organized crime figure that had emerged with the fall of the Soviet Union: a global gangster and conflict profiteer unaligned to any ideology. To international law enforcement agencies, his nationality remained a mystery. Minin was believed to be an Israeli citizen born in Ukraine, who leveraged his connections within Russian organized crime and the former Soviet military and intelligence services to provide weapons and equipment to conflicts around the globe. This type of chimerical identity reflected the flux of the post–Cold War world, with diplomatic passports, dual citizenship, and an array of aliases—Minin had thirteen, including “Wolf Breslan,” seemingly ripped straight from the pages of a spy novel.
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Figures like Minin—and Victor Bout, the Russian arms trafficker dubbed “The Lord of War”—had the agility to exploit weak borders and out-of-date international enforcement standards. But most significantly for Taylor—and Chucky—criminals accepted payment in a currency favored in West Africa: diamonds and timber.

Timber first drew Minin to Liberia in 1998, but by 2000 he began shipping weapons to Robertsfield for Taylor’s government. Liberia had been under an arms embargo for most of Taylor’s political career.
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When he was an insurgent warlord, arms procurement had been a clandestine process, and little had changed now that he was an elected president living under the same arms embargo. Taylor was still required to purchase weapons for his forces on the black market, which required working with men like Leonid Minin.

Over the first year and a half of his presidency, Taylor relied on an ad hoc pipeline for transitting weapons from Eastern Europe to West Africa. The system was built on the willingness of brokers in well-armed former Soviet bloc nations to sell off weaponry to the highest bidder and on the disarray of the West African aviation infrastructure, which permitted illicit air traffic. Weapons flowed into Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso en route to Liberia, along the way relying on the shared profit motivations of the traffickers, the government, and military officials willing to transit arms to Taylor. The weapons served Taylor’s foreign policy objectives, whether that meant arming his own forces or providing weapons to the RUF in Sierra Leone. In some cases, shipments were driven directly from the airfield to White Flower, where they would remain firmly in his control.

The flood of Soviet bloc weapons—which were primarily small arms and light conventional systems—had a transformative effect for the rebel groups throughout Africa. Cheap, durable, and—most important—easy to operate, small arms became the engines of the wars not only in Sierra Leone and Liberia but also in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Sudan. As violence had become a way of life in the region, weapons trafficking became an essential industry, one synonymous with power—a line of business into which Chucky sought to insinuate himself.

Robertsfield became a hub of regional weapons trafficking. Some of Minin’s shipments were small enough to be ferried aboard a BAC-111, a 150-seat passenger jet that had once belonged to the Seattle Supersonics, on flights from Ouagadougou.
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Others arrived in larger Soviet cargo aircraft. In May 2000 another aircraft, an Ilyushin, landed in Robertsfield with a load of Strela and Igba surface-to-air missiles—weapons that far exceeded both the capabilities of Taylor’s forces and the immediate threat he faced. With the prospect of a long war developing in Lofa, Taylor sought to acquire greater amounts of sophisticated weapons to counter the threat.

Over the preceding year, Minin had become a familiar face for Charles Taylor. Minin was trying to sell to the government of Liberia the aging BAC-111 jet he’d been using for weapons shipments to serve as a presidential jet, but the cost was prohibitive. While Charles Taylor relied on Minin for connections to arms networks throughout the world, for Chucky, Minin represented an opportunity to make money. Chucky had the valuable timber and diamond concessions his father had assigned to him but little means to convert them into profits. When he sought, despite worsening security conditions in the region, to get his ventures off the ground, he turned to his father’s friend.