American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Several hours after Menephar received the call, Chucky’s jeep appeared on the base. Gizzie climbed out and told Menephar, “Chucky said that these guys should be put into the prison—into the holes.” Menephar was unable to see any prisoners through the truck’s tinted windows. Still, he climbed into the car and drove the short distance to the shooting range—down the hillside, behind the College of Knowledge, where he climbed out and opened the jeep’s rear gate.

  A thick pool of blood appeared, Menephar recalled, covering the trunk of the vehicle. He still couldn’t make out any prisoners, but he saw three tarpaulins. The men had been wrapped in the tough canvas and thrown into the vehicle for the two-hour journey to the base. Menephar unloaded one of the men, and when his face came into view, he recognized him as a bodyguard of Chucky’s named Obadiah Henry. Henry had been beaten so severely that his eyes were rolling into the back of his head. The second prisoner was a boy Menephar didn’t know but estimated to be about sixteen years old. The third prisoner Menephar also knew: another bodyguard of Chucky’s, Justin Parker. When Menephar pulled the tarpaulin from his face, Parker appeared to be barely clinging to life. “He took these deep breaths. He just breathed one or two times,” Menephar recalled, then died.

  The other men were also near death, and Menephar knew they would not survive very long in the holes. He jumped into the jeep and drove back to the base to call Monrovia. He reached a bodyguard of Chucky’s and told him that Parker had died and that “these guys have to go to the hospital because they are almost to the point.” He received permission to deliver the men to Phebe Hospital, a short distance up the highway.

  Menephar was accustomed to commanders beating their recruits, but the violence of this incident was alarming. He eventually learned what had happened to the men, but he couldn’t understand what would drive Chucky to such a rage. According to that account, Chucky discovered that Henry and Parker had been stealing cash from the reserves President Taylor had provided for the unit. Over time, and with the help of a third thief—the sixteen-year-old boy—the trio had taken more than $23,000. Chucky immediately ordered that the three men be arrested and brought to his home in Monrovia. With the men in his custody, he ordered them into a room. Until now, there had been little record of violence carried out by the president’s son. He was a relative newcomer to the security scene and, as a few of the recruits understood, an American. Whether those factors had encouraged the recruits to risk stealing from Chucky is not clear. But if the crime became public and went unpunished, it would badly undermine him.

  As the captives waited, Chucky turned on music, then cranked up the volume on his stereo. He began beating and stabbing the men, Menephar was told, the screams concealed by the music. (A senior ATU commander who asked not to be identified said that Chucky did not directly participate, but “he gave the order.”28) When the beatings ended, Chucky ordered the men to be taken to the base at Gbatala.

  The next day Chucky rolled into Gbatala in a convoy. He was escorted by Benjamin Yeaten, who had become known to most of the fighters simply as “50”—his radio call sign. Yeaten had little direct involvement with the ATU at that time. If anything, his own unit—the SSS—competed with Chucky’s for the president’s attention. Yeaten served Taylor directly, overseeing his bodyguards and executing his personal orders, including the assassination of opponents. (The SSS had carried out the grisly assassination of Samuel Dokie.) But on that day Charles Taylor did not know that his commander was with his son at Gbatala.

  “They decided to bring him in to find a solution,” Menephar would later say of Yeaten.

  Yeaten said little while he was on the base—he did not need to.29 Despite his small stature, Yeaten was one of the most feared figures in Liberia. Though Chucky was larger, he appeared cowed by the SSS commander. Menephar escorted the visitors down a path behind the College of Knowledge to the spot where Justin Parker’s body had been buried. It lay halfway between the base and the prison holes. (The fate of the two men taken to the hospital is not known.)

  When the group returned to the base, Chucky ordered the recruits to fall in. News of Parker’s death had quickly passed through the ranks, including to several young fighters who had grown up with Parker in Yekepa and were also members of his Mano tribe. According to Menephar, Parker’s killing had angered many of the recruits. At muster, rather than join the others, a recruit named Thomas Quoa stepped out of formation to confront Chucky. He shouted that Chucky had killed “his brother” and said that “he was going to make sure that the president hears about it.”

  Quoa’s decision to call out the president’s son in front of Campari, Yeaten, and the rest of the recruits was reckless and nearly suicidal. Campari immediately placed him under arrest and dragged him across the gravel and into the bush toward where Parker was buried. He wasn’t killed but was thrown into one of the holes at Vietnam. For Chucky, it had been an embarrassing public rebuke of his authority; he and Yeaten climbed into their trucks and eventually returned to the capital.

  News of Parker’s death nonetheless reached Chucky’s father. The story had not leaked to the press in Monrovia; it would have not only shed light on yet another killing by Taylor’s security forces but also revealed the secret training occurring at Gbatala. Taylor took no public action against his son, but the incident only contributed to the belief among veteran fighters that Chucky was not fit for command.

  “Chucky, he was a little boy,” said the former senior commander, who had served in Taylor’s NPFL and was appointed deputy to the president’s son.30 “He was not mature. Inexperienced. Not educated. It was a tough time to work with him.” Chucky was gullible, he said, given to taking gossip at face value and acting on it without investigating further. His erratic behavior made it difficult to accomplish anything. “Chucky was very untimely. He could behave very well. In two or three hours time, he [would] change,” he said. “[When] he comes back he’s abnormal.”

  Even as these deputies struggled to handle the president’s son, recruits began to fear Chucky and his impunity. Commanders worried that he was using drugs and alcohol. Menephar noticed something else that he couldn’t quite explain: Chucky appeared to be frightened by his own actions.

  Regardless of its origins or causes, Chucky’s behavior became both unpredictable and of ever-greater consequence to the ATU. This was apparent in an incident that federal investigators would focus on nearly a decade later, when he encountered Sulaiman Jusu at the St. Paul River bridge. It was on April 21, 1999, and Jusu, the refugee from Sierra Leone, had witnessed Chucky execute his brother-in-law and several other unarmed men.31 Jusu had little insight into the mind of the president’s son, but he saw Chucky’s anger and knew that he considered the prisoners responsible for the attack on Voinjama that marked the first challenge to his father’s government. Still he could make little sense of the killings or what immediately followed.

  Jusu’s ordeal did not end with the killings. The ATU fighters thrust the remaining prisoners onto their stomachs, bound their elbows together behind their backs, and wrapped their ankles with plastic Zip Ties, threading the plastic cords across their backs and around their necks. This practice was known as tabay—a manner of immobilizing prisoners common in West Africa. An indescribable pain shot through Sulaiman Jusu’s body. He and ten to fifteen others were thrown into the back of a truck, unable to either stand or sit, as the convoy rolled away from the bridge and deeper into Liberia. With each mile, the men were carried farther from the help of their family, friends, or the international community.

  Like Jusu, several of the other prisoners taken from the bridge also hailed from Kenema, Sierra Leone. Momoh Turay, a twenty-four-year-old, had fled the fighting months earlier after rebels killed his father and burned down his family’s home.32 He’d crossed into Liberia and registered as a refugee before reaching Voinjama, where he found work as a security guard for the World Food Program. While Voinjama was a city of more than 25,000, the group of refugees from Kenema was sm
all enough that Turay could recognize others who had been detained at the bridge, including Jusu, his brother Maada, and another refugee, Foday Conteh. Turay had also watched Chucky shoot Albert and the others. (He would testify later, however, that only two other men had been shot.) The killings had terrified him. He had seen Chucky once before, at a meeting in Voinjama, where the group of refugees were offered the opportunity to train in Gbarnga. Both Turay and Jusu, who had fled the fighting in Sierra Leone, did not jump at the opportunity to return as combatants—a choice that didn’t register with Taylor and the commanders he was traveling with.

  Jusu, Turay, and the other prisoners lay in the back of the trucks, hog-tied, as the convoy wound down the broken bush roads toward Gbarnga. The men were in intense pain. Some cried. They could see nothing, and their cries were met with the butt of a weapon or a boot from the darkness.

  The convoy arrived at a police station at Gbarnga after dark. Turay’s blindfold was pulled from his face and a flashlight briefly shone into his eyes. Despite the late hour, police officers, Special Operations Division, and ATU fighters filled the station. The scene turned chaotic. The prisoners were brought in, and the fighters set upon them, thrashing them with sticks. The violence of the beating was so intense that Turay lost control of his bowels. After the officers finished, the police locked the Sierra Leoneans into a cell, without any charge or indication of why they were being held.

  Chucky arrived at the police station the next day and, following some discussion, sought to conceal Jusu, Turay, and the surviving prisoners. The men were pulled from the cell.

  Chucky again ordered them bound and blindfolded. When Jusu realized they were going to be tabayed again, he fought and struggled. He felt a gun slam into him; the fighters started kicking him. Chucky struck him, forced him to the ground, and stepped on his head before tying him up.

  The men were driven out of Gbarnga on the road through Charles Taylor’s heartland. It was narrow and tidy, cleared of fallen palms by the local Kpelle people. After an hour, the truck reached Gbatala. Even if they had been told it, the name would have meant very little. The convoy slowed, pulled off the road, and wound up a gravel incline into the forest.

  It was night when the men were pulled from the trucks. They could hardly see through the blindfolds. Flashlights flickered across the ground, but otherwise the only light was from the moon and stars overhead. The group walked to a small plateau. Turay heard Chucky tell Campari, the Gambian, to “take care of them.”

  The blindfolds were pulled from the prisoners’ faces. Turay could finally see the other prisoners who had been brought with him: Sulaiman Jusu, Foday Conteh, Abdul Cole. Chucky walked away, and the group was forced to march down a sloping path into the bush. They passed through a small swamp and were led to a set of holes in the ground.

  In the darkness, Turay was forced into a hole. A guard lowered a makeshift cover, heavy iron bars wound with barbed wire; his left hand was bound to the grate. It forced him to crouch; the hole was too shallow to stand, and fetid water filled the bottom, making it impossible to sit or lie. The cries and shouts of the other men punctuated the quiet of the night.

  Sulaiman Jusu found himself in a similar hole—with a rotting corpse. It was just two and half feet deep and filled with water. The water rose so close to his mouth that he was forced to crane his head upward to avoid drinking it.

  Even with the men in the holes, the abuse continued. Guards jabbed bayonets through the bars, stabbing the prisoners; one burned sheets of plastic, letting the molten drippings fall down on Turay’s naked body. Jusu was forced to eat a burning cassava stem that had been pulled directly from the fire. At one point a guard stood over Turay, aiming his rifle into the pit, threatening to open fire. This persisted through the night into daylight. Eventually Turay fell asleep.

  The next night a steady rain pounded the hillside. The guard watching over Vietnam left his post to find more shelter than the thatched lean-to offered. Jusu heard something outside his hole. It was Abdul Cole, one of the other prisoners—he had freed himself. Jusu begged Cole to release him. Once Jusu climbed out of the hole, he went to Turay, prepared to release him. Turay refused, terrified of getting caught.

  Jusu and Cole tore off into the dark, unfamiliar terrain. Dense forests surrounded the base, which was set back from the main road. Neither man had any idea where they were or where they should go. They passed through a cassava patch and then into a rubber plantation, following close to the road. They didn’t realize it, but they had not ventured far beyond the perimeter of the base.

  A guard almost immediately discovered the escape. He confronted Turay, still in the hole, demanding to know where the other prisoners had gone and why he hadn’t alerted the guards. Several fighters—who Turay referred to as “Demons” for the group’s popular moniker “Demon Forces”—began punishing him, tying his wrists to the gate, stepping on his hands, burning plastic over his body, jabbing pointed truncheons into the pit. As the night dragged on—and the prisoners remained at large—the abuse continued.

  After daybreak, Turay heard men crying. He peered out and saw Chucky and several Demons smoking. Jusu and Cole had been caught. Chucky appeared over Turay’s hole. He could see the anger in Chucky’s face. Turay’s hands remained bound to the bars above his head. Chucky removed a cigarette from his mouth and crushed it into Turay’s wrist. Turay squirmed in pain. Then he heard Chucky order him removed from the hole.

  Jusu and Cole had been severely beaten after the guards recaptured them, the butts of weapons slammed into their faces, chests, and legs. The soldiers had restrained the men with plastic Zip Ties and continued to punish them back at the base. When Chucky saw them, he too beat them.

  Jusu and Cole were brought to the center of the base, between two buildings and a mango tree. Turay and Conteh were brought down the hillside from their holes to where the other escaped prisoners were bound.

  The prisoners could see the anger in Chucky.33 He told them that “this [is] Gbatala camp, nobody should escape from here and when you escape from here, he’s coming to teach us a lesson.” Then he issued an execution order.

  One of the Demons cocked his gun.34 “No, no firing,” Chucky told the soldier. “Silent.” He then ordered a soldier to cut off Cole’s head.

  The soldier unsheathed a three-foot-long knife from a pouch. Another appeared with a plastic bucket. Several soldiers held Cole down. He began crying, shouting, begging for his life. The prisoners watched as one of the soldiers carried out the order, sawing off Cole’s head, back to front. If anyone escapes, that is the punishment, Chucky said. He ordered the men back into the holes.

  That night the men felt they had no choice but to try to escape again. Jusu and Turay had been thrown into a hole together; they were joined later that evening by a third prisoner, a former officer with an opposition rebel group who identified himself as Dumbaya Dokule. The new prisoner was crying in pain; he’d had all his toes severed.

  “If you have the chance to escape,” Dokule told them, “do that.”35 Dokule had heard the soldiers talking and planning to “kill us in the morning when Chucky returns.”

  After seeing Cole’s murder, the men had little doubt what would happen to them. A steady rain fell again that night. The men quietly went to work, cutting their restraints using a metal spoon. (The guards had used the spoon to shovel food into the prisoners’ mouths, but when it fell into the hole, the guard feeding them hadn’t bothered to retrieve it.) Eventually the three men were able break their bonds and open the gate over their hole.

  They climbed out into the night and broke into a run. Dokule lurched behind them, unable to keep up, crying in pain. Jusu and Turay were concerned that the sound would attract the MPs, so they ducked into the brush along the roadway, lying flat in the dirt.

  It didn’t take long for the MPs to discover their escape. Waiting in the brush, the two men heard ATU officers pass by and descend upon Dokule, who was only a few yards from them. He began crying, and fr
om their hiding spot, the two men could hear the soldiers beating him. After several gunshots, Dokule fell silent.

  Jusu and Turay waited until morning to set out again. They walked the entire day and into the evening. Along the way, they found an encampment where they were able to pull pairs of pants from a clothesline, so they wouldn’t be naked. They were unsure where they were but felt they had traveled a good distance from the base and began walking along a rugged farm road.

  The men soon came to a junction. Too late, they realized they were standing just a few feet from several ATU officers, who caught sight of them. Jusu froze in the middle of the road. Turay tried to pretend he was urinating along the roadside. The fighters rushed at them.

  Jusu’s mind fogged over; he didn’t notice who the fighters were—he simply knew he would be killed. He put up no resistance. The soldiers threw him to the ground and tied him. Turay tried to run but was caught. He resisted, telling the fighters to kill him. He didn’t want to be tortured again. The men were stripped naked, blindfolded, and driven back to the base, certain they would be killed.

  Chucky was waiting for them at the base. Campari, the base commandant, argued for executing the men outright. The second escape had further humiliated the ATU fighters under his command. There was only one way to ensure that it did not happen again.

  As soon as Jusu and Turay were pulled from the truck, the MPs set upon them. Jusu recalled Chucky standing over him, melting plastic onto his genitals, butt, and feet. MPs kicked him while the torture continued.

  During the beatings, a man in civilian clothing appeared, pulling Chucky aside. “Papay wants to see these men,” Jusu heard him say.