American Warlord (38 page)

One experience stood out in her memory as a lesson on the impractical nature of bringing human rights cases. ICE investigators had unearthed information that implicated a Bosnian Serb living in Boston in acts of torture committed in the Balkans. The U.S. attorney’s office in Boston strongly supported that charge, but in order to move toward an indictment, the prosecutors needed approval from the Justice Department. The Boston assistant U.S. attorneys prepared a memo detailing their case for the Criminal Division—the attorneys in D.C. who would review the questions of law raised by the potential charge. The prosecutors even flew down to Washington to present their evidence to the division. Ragheb’s office felt that this was a strong case—sufficiently strong to justify the use of the statute for the first time.

But Justice disagreed. Its finding wasn’t based on the quality of the evidence; it was political. The preferred method for dealing with human rights violators living in the United States was not to put them on trial but to find an administrative charge—such as lying about their involvement in human rights abuses—with which to commence a deportation proceeding. The decision came down to a matter of policy, not law. When prosecuting “an individual that’s not a native-born U.S. citizen, then you run into the realm of exerting universal jurisdiction,” Ragheb said of the case. “That’s something that, from a policy standpoint, the government may not want to pursue.”

Underlying the statute was the controversial legal principle of “universal jurisdiction.” Based on the notion that some crimes are so abhorrent to international interests that all states are obligated to prosecute them regardless of borders, nationality, or relation to the crimes, universal jurisdiction wasn’t an entirely new idea. It had been the underpinning for prosecutions of pirates in the nineteenth century, the trials at Nuremberg, and, in recent history, Spain’s warrant that led to the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.
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Nonetheless, it remained largely untested in the United States. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in an essay in
Foreign Policy
in 2001, warned that it would “risk substituting the tyranny of judges for that of governments; historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witch-hunts.”
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The U.S. government had not pressed any universal jurisdiction cases, wary of opening American officials to potential prosecution.

Ragheb reviewed the initial evidence. The allegations typified the scenarios envisioned by the Convention Against Torture. But the identity of the alleged criminal distinguished this case from others. “This guy was a native-born U.S. citizen,” she said. “So all the arguments about universal jurisdiction that had been a concern in people’s minds were thrown out.”

Baechtle pulled up to the house of the Criminal Division attorney.
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He explained the sequence of events unfolding, the details he’d turned up within his investigation, and his belief that he could build a case against Chucky. The attorney read through the material Baechtle provided and saw how the pieces fit together. Baechtle couldn’t expect the Justice Department to indict Chucky at that moment, but he hoped to get some indication that he was headed down the right road.

“Yeah,” the attorney told Baechtle. “This looks about right.”

For the team preparing for Chucky’s arrival back at ICE headquarters, the case looked more than right.

“It was the perfect case,” Ragheb said.

Two suitcases and one carry-on bag.
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For all his hopes, plans, and schemes, for all his father’s conquests and ambitions, for all the suffering, humiliation, and pain he’d caused, he was returning home just as empty-handed as he’d left more than a decade earlier—all his belongings stashed in what could easily be loaded into the trunk of a car.

It was approaching seven p.m. on March 30, 2006. Shortly before sunset, as the 767 dropped below the clouds, Chucky sat among the passengers waiting to land. At that time of day, the black waves of the Atlantic boiled down into the shoreline in long white ripples. As the cabin lights dimmed and a noisy hush set in, Miami’s skyline came into view.

Chucky hoped to step off of that flight, into this crowd, retrieve his bags, and climb into an old friend’s car for the three-and-half-hour drive north to Orlando. He hoped to disappear from his actions in the past and from the person who had committed them. These hopes weren’t unreasonable. Few Americans knew where Liberia was or what had transpired there during the civil war. Even fewer understood the legacy of suffering that Charles Taylor had left on the region. Only a handful knew that Taylor’s American son bore some role in it. Special Agent Baechtle and his colleagues were among them.

Chucky, meanwhile, almost hadn’t made it out of Trinidad. Even after obtaining the passport, he faced a more immediate challenge to return to the United States: he had no money for airfare.
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He turned to his few remaining friends in Liberia, according to a former commander, asking for $1,500. It wasn’t the first time he had reached out for help; he seemed perennially broke, having squandered the opportunity to make money while his father was in power. “He was too much involved in this killing and fighting and fighting. He never put in the time to make some money for himself,” commander Sam Nimley said. Eventually a Lebanese friend fronted the cash for Chucky, no questions asked. “We didn’t know he was going to use it for a ticket,” Nimley said.

Before departing, Chucky had a final piece of unresolved business to attend to. It’s not clear what contact, if any, he had maintained with his father while in Trinidad, but on March 25, as he prepared to leave, he called him in Calabar, Nigeria. Without the protection of Nigeria, it was only a matter of time before UN authorities tracked Charles Taylor down. Taylor warned his son against returning to the United States, his attorney later said, though it’s unlikely the former president had any inkling of the efforts coalescing to detain his son.
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Chucky reminded his father that, regardless of what happened, he had children to take care of. It was strange counsel coming from his son who had neglected his own children. The irony was that it wasn’t his father’s abandonment that had destroyed Chucky’s life but their reconciliation.

“You’ve lived your life,” Chucky told his father. “Have you provided for all these other people?”
⁴

The morning of Chucky’s arrival
The Washington Post
ran a story buried on the sixteenth page with the headline “Liberia’s Taylor Found and Arrested”:

With his attempt to escape Nigeria scuttled, Charles Taylor appeared hours later at Robertsfield, draped in a flak jacket, being led down a stairwell from an airliner by an armed guard, his hands cuffed in front of him. Gone was the cool, magisterial expression, with eyes hidden behind Ray-Ban aviators; it was replaced by a look of numb shock. He was returning to Liberia, as he had promised, but with his hands bound, being marched across the tarmac to a UN helicopter waiting to carry him to Freetown. He would be the first African head of state in history to face trial before an international criminal tribunal.

That morning Special Agent Baechtle put on a pressed suit.
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He typically wore blue jeans and a collared shirt, but he had dressed up for no particular reason. Nearly as soon as he arrived in the office, he turned around and raced to Reagan International to catch a flight to Miami. He had hurriedly assembled his team to leave Washington to meet the flight. One of his ICE colleagues would follow him to deliver the warrant to Miami. Baechtle put a call into the Customs and Border Protection supervisor at Miami International Airport, asking him to meet in the international terminal. As Chucky’s flight taxied to the gate, Baechtle stood at the end of the jetway in the airport’s Concourse D.

As crowds of vacationers and business travelers streamed past, adrenaline coursed through the agent. All the work of the last two years had coalesced in the prior thirty-six hours. The moment came to seem all but inevitable.

Yet aspects of it didn’t make sense. For one, why would Chucky risk coming home when he knew federal agents were investigating him? The United States had successfully pressured Liberia and Nigeria to remove their protections of his father, but it was unlikely to make the same efforts with Trinidad. As long as he remained there, he was relatively safe from prosecution; but once he set foot on U.S. soil, everything would change. For the first time in nearly fifteen years, he would face the full force of American law. Baechtle could only wonder “Why?”

He had spent the prior day on the phone with the regional security officer at the Port of Spain embassy trying to determine whether Chucky had applied for an American passport. That information was privileged; in order for the embassy to pass the lead on to ICE, the Diplomatic Security Service had to open a case on Chucky, which it did almost immediately.

At the gate, Baechtle watched American Airlines flight 1668 taxi to the jetway.
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Jacques Smith, an antiterrorism officer with Customs and Border Protection, stood a few steps ahead of him. He would be the one to initially detain Chucky. Baechtle made it clear that he did not want Chucky to be handcuffed.

A banal quote had been on Baechtle’s mind—“Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.”
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It wasn’t something he’d picked up in college or in ICE training, for that matter. This shred of wisdom had hung on the kitchen wall of the Elberon Bathing Club, where he’d worked summers on the Jersey shore flipping burgers and waiting tables. It had stuck with him over the years. Going into Miami, he’d worked through a mental checklist of what he wanted to accomplish, what needed to happen. He’d thought through contingencies and how he’d react to them, preparing for what could be his only shot at speaking to his target one on one.

Aboard the plane, an announcement alerted the cabin that customs would be checking passports at the gate. Passengers around Chucky readied their documents. The passport he held was virtually untouched. As he filed out of the aircraft with the other passengers into a carpeted hallway, enclosed by panes of glass on each side, Smith, down the hallway, scanned the crowd.
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Smith let a stream of passengers pass, then stopped a man clutching a single carry-on bag. Baechtle, watching from a remove, caught a glimpse of the man’s face—he looked like a younger version of Charles Taylor.

There are some people here who’d like to speak with you, Inspector Smith told Chucky, pointing to Baechtle, standing farther down the jetway. The customs officer led him over, holding on to the passport. Another agent took Chucky’s carry-on bag. As they approached, Baechtle presented his badge.

Would you mind speaking with me? Baechtle asked him, indicating that they could sit privately in an office.

Chucky agreed. He wasn’t compelled to talk with anyone; at any moment, he could have requested his lawyer and waited out his arrival in silence. For some reason, he did not. As the men walked, they made small talk—chatting about Carnival, which had just passed, and the weather.
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The men stopped at a window marked “Special Services.” Smith handed over Chucky’s passport to be stamped. After nearly twelve years, he had entered the United States.

The agents led Chucky into a windowless office in the lower level of the terminal. In one corner sat a humming photocopier, at the opposite end a doorway. Special Agent Christopher Malone unlocked a door and led him into a smaller room with two desks and four chairs. Baechtle introduced himself again and explained that he was the agent who had planned on meeting him in Trinidad in 2005.

Normally customs would cuff you, Baechtle said. But I asked them to waive the policy since in the past you’ve indicated that you’d like to speak.

Chucky acknowledged the agent’s gesture.

At the outset, Baechtle wanted to establish a rapport with him as he would any suspect or witness he was interviewing.

I have to advise you that you are the subject of a federal arrest warrant, Baechtle said. It’s necessary that I advise you of your rights.

What’s the warrant for? Chucky asked.

Baechtle referred to the penal code, 18 U.S.C. 1542, making it a crime to make a “false statement in the application and use of passport.”

“You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can …” Baechtle began. Chucky recited along with him, as any child raised on American television could.

Do you understand these rights? Baechtle asked.

I do, Chucky said, asking how long it would take.

Outside the interrogation room, Inspector Jacques Smith pulled surgical gloves over his hands and opened up Chucky’s bag.
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He removed the notebooks one by one and laid them across a table. He opened one notebook. Page upon page was filled with neat, almost feminine handwriting. A sample of the lines read:

Farther down the page, it was signed “Charles Taylor II.” He pulled out a book from Chucky’s bag
—Guerrilla Strategies
—a survey of insurrections around the world written by French theorist Gérard Chaliand.
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The cover displayed Goya’s
And There’s Nothing to Be Done
, an etching depicting a blindfolded prisoner bound to a pole awaiting execution, the corpse of a comrade at his feet. Inscribed on the inside cover was “Return to G 2 section after reading instruction by GOC” signed “Brigadier Charles McArthur Taylor, II.”