American Warlord (30 page)

In an address to the nation, the president offered a candid, if not entirely sincere, perspective on the violence plaguing his country: “This government has no desire for conflict and violence, neither war. We do not wish to fight our own brothers and sisters nor do we believe that military success of the troops will bring lasting peace. We believe that dialogue through the process of reconciliation will bring peace through the grace of almighty God.”
²⁸

Taylor’s choice of language was appropriate; yet again Liberia had turned on itself. Legions of disenfranchised men and women—particularly from the Mandingo and Krahn tribes—eagerly joined in the fight to unseat the president, while others were forced into servitude by the new faction. Within Taylor’s inner ring of security, there was also tension: Taylor did not trust the ATU and relied instead on the black-clad “ninjas” from the Special Security Service for close protection.

Chucky sat shotgun in his BMW along the roadside in Kakata, a market town east of the Monrovia suburb of Paynesville.
²⁹
His and several other vehicles full of ATU officers waited to escort the president back to the capital, through the rubber plantations and glowing green plains of Margibi County, into the choked commercial district of Red Light at the edge of Monrovia. An ATU lieutenant named Isaac Gono sat behind the wheel of Chucky’s car, watching the convoy approach. Gono—known as “Papa”—had been by Chucky’s side ever since he was a troubled American teenager venturing into Africa for the first time. He was just one of a handful of drivers Chucky trusted to carry him throughout Monrovia and on trips like this, a rare and increasingly dangerous trip out of the capital.

President Taylor was en route from Gbarnga, Bong County. At one time, Bong County had been the center of his power, but it had since suffered assaults by LURD forces raiding from Lofa County. Just days earlier the rebels had staged a tactical retreat from Gbarpolu, an inland town that had once served as the NPFL headquarters after fighting with government forces left hundreds of civilians dead.
³⁰

As Taylor’s convoy approached, the waiting ATU vehicles cut a slow U-turn across the roadway to join it, Gono following the other vehicles. A dog darted across the road, and Gono hit the animal with full force, killing it, smashing the car’s headlight.

It was an accident, perhaps careless, but it nonetheless enraged Chucky. On the journey back to Monrovia, he seethed. When the convoy arrived back in Congo Town, the ATU detachment peeled off toward Chucky’s beachfront villa. As the group dismounted from their vehicles, he surprised many by his response to the minor incident: he ordered Gono placed under arrest.

He could have had his driver thrown into the cell behind the Executive Mansion for a few days—that sort of punishment wasn’t uncommon in his father’s forces. But Chucky wanted something more immediate—he wanted to see Gono punished. According to a human rights report detailing the incident, he ordered his men to beat the lieutenant “ ’til you see his bones and shit.”
³¹
Two ATU officers—Maj. George Davis and Capt. D. Histine Teaiyer—complied, thrashing the driver with long sticks. Before long Gono lay in the grass in front of Chucky’s house, dead.

Chucky would later insist that he did not intend for his driver to die, but the evidence showed that he did nothing to stop it.
³²
As soon as he realized the gravity of what he had done, he began making panicked phone calls to other ATU officers. The Liberian National Police arrived on the scene and arrested the two ATU officers who had carried out the order. One ATU commander recalled Chucky’s state when he arrived at the villa: “He was dejected. He was confused. He couldn’t believe it. That Isaac was dead. I’m sure he was under the influence of something. I’m very sure.… He was sweating.… [He] couldn’t get over it.”
³³

More officers converged on the scene. Samuel Nimley, who had also received a call from Chucky, was incredulous to learn that someone so close to Chucky could be killed for such a trivial reason. Nimley had been part of the convoy when the accident occurred but had returned home rather than follow the unit to Chucky’s house. “Just the damn [head]light,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

Like the killing of Justin Parker, the death of Isaac Gono became a mess for those around Chucky to clean up. When Gono’s brother-in-law, George Wortuah, went to claim the body at John F. Kennedy Hospital, he found that the driver had been trundled into a bag by the ATU officers and brought to the hospital morgue. When the officials showed him his brother-in-law’s body, he saw that Gono’s clothes had been shredded with the force of the beating.

Soon afterward the family learned that it was Chucky who had given the order that resulted in Isaac’s death. They wanted everyone involved to be held accountable, including the president’s son. While Gono’s wife hoped for justice, his brother-in-law Wortuah privately contemplated retaliation. Eventually the family sought one of the few means of recourse available in Taylor’s Liberia: the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission (JPC), a human rights group connected to the Archdiocese of Monrovia. The JPC still enjoyed a degree of protection over its activities through its affiliation with the Catholic Church. Liberians victimized by the Taylor government often turned to the organization, which also served as a liaison to international human rights groups researching violations in Liberia.

The JPC had continually received reports of ATU abuses ever since the unit’s creation. But the letter from Isaac Gono’s sister, which arrived a few days after the killing, was among the first complaints it had received about violence committed by the ATU against one of its own. The JPC issued a statement about the murder to the press. Taylor briefly succeeded in pressuring one paper to bury a story on the killing, but eventually the Monrovia dailies ran with the story, which quickly leaped to international wire services—some outlets erroneously reporting that Gono had been tortured to death.

The press coverage forced the Ministry of Defense to issue a response. The ATU officers who had acted on Chucky’s orders were to blame, the ministry said, noting that they had killed the driver “during the process of interrogating 1st/Lt. Gono over the accident, used unusual harsh methods, rendering 1st/Lt. Gono unconscious,” and that Chucky “awoke and came downstairs to only find his chief driver lying unconscious. He immediately ordered an ambulance to rush the Lt. to the nearest hospital.”
³⁴

President Taylor ordered a military commission to investigate the case. At a press conference, he distanced his son from direct involvement in the killing. He qualified that statement, saying, “in military term he’s responsible. As a General Officer commanding that unit he’s responsible for what his men do or fail to do; to that extent, he’s responsible.”

The U.S. embassy monitored the situation from a remove. “Although there is clearly a bit of showmanship in these allegations,” a cable reported, “the fact is that a man is dead. The reason for the beating was trivial and the decision to do it capricious and egregious.… The incident shows how blatant disregard for human life is among the security thugs of the ATU. Meanwhile, given the personalities involved, the call for justice is a courageous one.”
³⁵

The military commission never proceeded beyond charging the two ATU commanders who had carried out the beating. They were held for several days, then conveniently “escaped.” After the family stopped cooperating, the JPC abandoned its investigation.

The police director eventually delivered a message to Gono’s family: Chucky wished to see them. “He was afraid,” Wortuah recalled of their meeting. “He assured us he ordered his bodyguard to punish Isaac, [but] he [didn’t] say you should beat him to kill him. And that was [a] mistake.”

Before the meeting ended, Chucky gave the family $1,000. Eventually, the family received $16,000 to cover funeral expenses and to provide for Gono’s two children. “All the assistance was done through President Taylor,” Wortuah said.

Charles Taylor’s government was struggling to defend itself against the most serious threat to its power that it had faced in five years, yet the president was reaching into his own pocket to pay for his son’s senseless excesses. If Taylor couldn’t count on the commanders closest to him to be disciplined enough not to kill their own men, he had little reason to hope that they could stop the rebel advance.

Taylor began to fear that rebels were infiltrating the capital, stashing weapons and preparing for the assault. One of the men who came under his suspicion was a student and dockworker, Varmuyan Dulleh.

Dulleh lived in Paynesville, outside Monrovia, and worked for the National Port Authority while attending school at the University of Liberia. His uncle was Alhaji Kromah, the former leader of ULIMO-K—the faction that had nearly wiped out Taylor’s army during the war. Kromah, Taylor’s nemesis, now lived quietly in Arlington, Virginia, but Taylor feared that he and his young nephew were part of a plot involving the Americans and his neighbors in Guinea to remove him from power.

That July, shortly after two a.m., Dulleh heard a familiar voice calling to him from the darkness outside his house.
³⁶
He recognized the voice—it belonged to a man named Abraham Kelleh. As strange as the request was, coming in the middle of the night, Kelleh asked Dulleh whether he could stay at his home. Annoyed, Dulleh opened his front door. The only light illuminating the night came from Dulleh’s neighbor’s home, across the swamp. Kelleh stood stock-still.

Dulleh immediately sensed something was wrong. As he stepped out to ask his friend what had happened, he noticed several men bounding across the yard toward him. They were carrying weapons. He turned and bolted along the exterior of the house toward a mango tree at the edge of the property. He wore only his bedclothes and no shoes. Before he could make it any farther, soldiers surrounded him, training their weapons on him. He glanced over his property. There seemed to be more than one hundred soldiers, most wearing solid black uniforms bearing the distinct badge of a cobra and scorpion.

“So you want to overthrow the papay?” one of the voices barked at him.

The men set upon him and threw him into a vehicle, to be carried to the president’s residence. After a short drive to Congo Town, Dulleh was brought before the president at White Flower, wearing only the white T-shirt he had been sleeping in and a pair of black trousers.

“Mr. President, we have got him. This is him,” the police director said.

Taylor was seated in his office at his desk with two Liberian flags perched behind him, a Bible near his hand. A young man who bore a distinct resemblance to the president waited silently among the security personnel in the room.

“I have a few questions to ask you,” Taylor said to him. “How many rebel soldiers have [you] been able to smuggle from the bush into the United States Embassy? Where do you have the arms?”

“President Taylor, I have no idea what you are talking about. I have no idea absolutely,” Dulleh responded. He began to weep out of terror.

Taylor continued questioning Dulleh. Had he ever been to Guinea?

Dulleh had lived in Guinea, which was an unremarkable fact. Many Liberians, particularly Mandingos, had fled to Guinea at some point during the war. But the LURD rebels had enjoyed relatively free access to Guinean territory throughout the uprising and, presumably, military support from President Lansana Conté.

Dulleh looked at the president and lied.

President Taylor flipped through his passport and paged through the numbers on his cell phone. Then he looked up at the prisoner and said, “Look down that man.”

Dulleh turned around and saw a slight, wan man with bloodshot, spectral eyes standing behind him.

“That’s General Benjamin Yeaten,” Taylor said. “I’m going to turn you over to General Benjamin Yeaten, and he’s going to beat you until you tell the truth.”

Dulleh had never seen Yeaten before that night, but he knew the man’s reputation as a murderer—he was one of the men Taylor turned to to carry out his execution orders. Yeaten reached down, yanked Dulleh to his feet, and dragged him from the room.

Dulleh called from the hallway, “President Taylor, can I make a statement?”

“Yes, come in,” the president said.

“President Taylor, my life is in your hands—” he pleaded.

The president cut Dulleh off. “No, your life is not in my hands. Your life is in God’s hands.”

Dulleh was loaded into a jeep full of gunmen and driven down the darkened hillside to a single-story home with an adjoining wall. He was led inside by Yeaten, past a group of men dressed in civilian clothing. Yeaten then produced a small box.

“This box you see is a box filled of money. We’re going to give you money and do nothing to you. Just tell us the truth,” he told Dulleh.

He was presented with an impossible situation: confess to a crime he had not committed or face interrogation that wouldn’t end until a confession was reached.

“I am not involved with anything. The information about me was not true,” he pleaded.

Yeaten’s countenance shifted. The statement clearly enraged him. Armed guards then led Dulleh into a garage, where men stuffed a filthy rag into his mouth and forced him to the floor. Yeaten appeared, holding an electric iron. Behind him was the young man resembling the president—Chucky. Yeaten grabbed Dulleh’s right arm and pressed the hot iron into his flesh.

The torture continued for some time. Several gunmen held Dulleh down as Yeaten seared the prisoner’s other arm, his stomach, his leg. Dulleh struggled to cry out, but the rag stuffed in his mouth muffled the sound. He was helpless.

Yeaten yanked the rag from his mouth. “Are you ready to talk?” he asked.

“Yes,” Dulleh responded.

Yeaten stared at him. “So why you involved with the rebel movement to overthrow the president?” he asked.

Dulleh could only say, “No.”

A fighter appeared in the room with a pot of steaming water. Yeaten filled a cup and poured it over the prisoner’s head; he filled a second cup, dousing Dulleh’s back.