by Johnny Dwyer
On June 3, Chucky made a rare appearance on the front lines, when he met his commander, Christopher Menephar.24 Unlike Chucky, Menephar had spent much of the end of the dry season in direct combat, leading small ATU units into battle against the rebels. In May rebels had overrun his position in Gbarnga, forcing him to retreat along bush trails toward Charles Taylor’s farm in Bong County. The next month Menephar led two platoons to assault the rebel headquarters in Bomi Hills, surprising the enemy with a midmorning assault. But as the firefight raged, the ATU fighters depleted their ammunition and were forced to flee through the jungle back toward the capital.
After the assault on Bomi, Menephar remained on the new front lines at Duala Market. The ATU regrouped in anticipation of another assault on the capital. Once the rebels hit Duala, the combat shifted: no longer were the rebels fighting the government soldiers along a single asphalt roadway and red dirt paths in the jungle; now they battled amid the maze of low-slung buildings lining the one road that led to Monrovia. Taylor’s men had little with which to defend the city beyond small arms and antiaircraft guns mounted in the beds of pickup trucks.
That day Chucky drove his jeep to the front, approaching Menephar’s position, a building off the road where ATU soldiers had sought shelter. The two men had a brief, confused conversation, in the midst of the fighting. Not far from their position, a rocket slammed into the middle of a roadway, cutting down two SSS officers. As Menephar helped load the wounded into a vehicle, Chucky told him, “Stay right here! I’m gonna get you more ammo.”
That was the last time Menephar saw Chucky. Three days later, just after eight a.m., an RPG slammed into the building where Menephar had sought shelter. The explosion brought the building down around him, sending a shard of shrapnel into his forehead. Menephar lay there unconscious. The fighting around him did not stop. The rebels pushed on toward the forking bridges leading into Monrovia.
Instead of returning with ammo, Chucky retreated across the bridge to the relative safety of the capital. As the fighting encircled the capital, he holed up at his villa, on the opposite side of Monrovia, while his comrades were forced to retreat.25 In the diminishing area of his father’s control, the house was considered safe. Lynn remained there with their son. The city took on the air of surreal desperation. At night, after the generator cut off, Lynn could hear the all-night prayer sessions called “the tarry” going on until dawn, the neighbors praying together against some horrible future that seemed to be bearing down on the capital.26
One afternoon that June an ATU officer ran to Chucky’s house demanding to see him. Rebels had breached the city, he warned. Mortars sounded in the distance, punctuated by the faint rattle of gunfire. Bushrod Island lay several miles away, separated only by some of Monrovia’s most densely populated neighborhoods. It was impossible to tell how long it would take for the rebels to fight their way to Congo Town or what they would do once they got there. But Lynn didn’t need to speculate; when Chucky appeared, she saw panic in his eyes.
Chucky rushed Lynn and their son into the back of his truck, haphazardly throwing a Kevlar vest over them, then tore out of his compound gate, down the mud roadway leading to his father’s house. As they turned out onto the road, Chucky’s bodyguard smashed the truck’s rear window to clear a firing position. Lynn caught a glimpse of Monrovia out the window of the racing truck. Civilians pushed their dead along in wheelbarrows. The ground was littered with debris; inexplicably, bloodred corn syrup spilled across the road.
“Okay, we’re going to die,” Lynn said to herself.
Her son responded, “It’s okay, Momma.”
But when the family arrived at White Flower, all the panic they had felt rushed from the room. They were met, instead, with an almost surreal calm. Charles Taylor sat outside in the back of the house, the mothers of his children seated in chairs in a circle around him. Seeing Chucky arrive in a panic, with wife and child in tow, all Charles Taylor could do was laugh at his son for overreacting.
Taylor displayed outward calm in the face of the rebel threat, but the Special Court’s indictment troubled him. He had warned the American ambassador that he would fight “to the death” rather than face trial in Sierra Leone. But he also recognized that he had other options. If he could outlast the rebels, he said, he would abide by the promise he had made at Accra to step down.
“I’m done gone,” he told the American ambassador, but remained vague on the terms or timing of his departure.27 While Taylor had alienated most of his neighbors in West Africa, some considered allowing him a comfortable retirement to be an acceptable compromise if it would spare the Liberian people further suffering. Each hour Taylor delayed and deliberated could be measured in lives. The cousins of war—starvation and disease—had followed the displaced into the capital. As stray bullets and mortar shells from rebel forces rained down on the capital, it forced Taylor to choose between his political future and the safety of the Liberian people.
Meanwhile Chucky had been disappearing into himself ever since his father’s return from Ghana. It wasn’t just the drugs—though he’d clearly gone over the edge—but also the painful realization that Lynn could see dawning over him: it was over.28 The war. Liberia. His father. There was nothing left for him. And he had nothing to show. When Lynn found him shut inside the bathroom one day that summer, she stood outside the door, pondering whether she should open it.
Like many others who had tied their fortunes to Charles Taylor, Chucky was looking for a way out of Liberia. The UN travel ban had rendered his Liberian diplomatic passport largely useless. Even if consular services had been available at the embassy in Monrovia, the act of walking, hat in hand, through the embassy gates that the ATU had patrolled so menacingly would have been impossible for him. Chucky’s mother pursued a workaround: she worked to secure him a Trinidadian passport that could, at least, get him to Port of Spain, Trinidad.29 But even then—as the few airlines that serviced Robertsfield folded up local operations—the window to escape was quickly closing.
Lynn feared what would come next. Around Taylor, everyone scrambled to make arrangements to leave the country. Benjamin Yeaten, meanwhile, continued to do Taylor’s bidding, liquidating anyone who “could turn on him and be witness,” Lynn recalled.30
But even as the last hours of the Taylor government ticked down, Lynn still knew very little of what Chucky had been involved in, or what specific role he had played in his father’s power. She had no idea whether he was really the sadist and murderer that much of Liberia believed him to be. Chucky had learned two lessons from his father: keep things compartmentalized, and manage your liabilities.31 “He taught me that without ever speaking of it,” he said years later.
But as the war raged around them, these boundaries became more difficult to maintain. One afternoon an ATU officer appeared at the house with a handful of photographs. Chucky made no attempt to hide them from Lynn—he barely registered them. But when Lynn glanced over at them, she saw “dead bodies. There were at least six or seven of them, they were all layed down and all shot in the head.” The images stunned her.
That afternoon as Chucky holed up in the bathroom, she found the courage to push open the door, startling him.32 He held something in his hands—drugs—she couldn’t tell whether it was cocaine or heroin. But when she knocked it away, Chucky turned on her. He leaped toward her, wrapping his hands around her neck.
Despite all the violence surrounding him all these years, Chucky had never laid a hand on Lynn. But now it seemed as if he could kill her. Her screams carried through the house, sending her mother-in-law racing to the bathroom. The fairy tale had ended—the ugly reality was undeniable. This was not the future Lynn wanted for herself or her child. When she looked up, with her husband’s hands around her neck, her three-year-old boy was standing there looking at his father.
“That’s my son’s last memory of his dad,” she recalled.
As the siege threatened to finally boil over into the city, Charles Taylor gave
Chucky $50,000 in cash. Many government officials, Charles Taylor included, were making preparations to leave the country. According to Samuel Nimley, who spent early July 2003 with the president’s son, Chucky burned through $10,000 on drugs, even as staples like food grew scarce in the capital.33
One of the few places with reliable stores of food was the Mamba Point Hotel, situated several hundred yards from the embassy gates, where Chucky went to eat and drink. As the crisis grew and the final days approached, Robert Ferguson bumped into a paranoid Chucky at the hotel. “What are you doing here?” he recalled Chucky saying to him. “Are you here to kill me?”34
“I wouldn’t waste my time,” Ferguson told him.
Ferguson and the embassy staff had been living under fire for several weeks, bearing witness to—and receiving much of the outward blame for—the worsening humanitarian situation in the capital. Desperate Monrovians stacked their dead at the embassy gates in a plea for American intervention. Beyond its diplomatic efforts to stop the war, the U.S. embassy could do little to alleviate the suffering of the Liberian people. That power belonged to Charles Taylor.
Chucky was an American citizen, Ferguson knew, but he wasn’t so desperate as to ask for his help. He was forced to consider his options: hold out with his father and risk his life, in the hope that the rebel advance would peter out; flee Liberia into the uncertainty of exile; or trade on his knowledge of his father’s crimes to secure his own freedom. This was referred to as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Theoretically, the most advantageous course of action would be to hold out, though the most likely to succeed would be defection. In studies of the Prisoner’s Dilemma involving psychopathic subjects, their choice was nearly always the same: they chose the option they felt served their best interests and ratted out their partner.35 Chucky did not deliberate publicly. Within days, he simply disappeared.
PART III
13
Exile
Knowledge can’t bear, nigga handle your fear.
—United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-5
The mountains of Trinidad’s Northern Range come into view first. Green cliffs drop directly into the churning Caribbean; then the peaks give way to steep, overgrown valleys decorated by houses and winding roadways. At the base of this descent lies Port of Spain, resting on the Gulf of Paria, the wedge-shaped inland sea that separates the island of Trinidad from its closest neighbor, Venezuela. Descending airliners cut a wide arc over the gulf lining up with Piarco International Airport. Ships litter the harbor below: fuel tankers and container vessels ambling away from port, fishing vessels gliding toward the coast, and, visible as the aircraft approaches land, shipwrecks sitting in the shallows, keeled to reveal their sun-bleached hulls basking above the milky blue waterline.
Chucky landed here in mid-July 2003. Two weeks earlier he and his mother had slipped out of Monrovia, chartering a flight to Ghana and eventually on to Lomé, Togo.1 Lynn had left Monrovia shortly after their altercation, and Charles Taylor had begun preparations to abandon the presidency. Chucky and his mother remained in Lomé for several days before flying to Port of Spain via Paris. Just as when he’d fled Orlando as a teenager, Chucky told nobody that he was leaving Monrovia, not even his closest commanders, who were making a desperate last stand at Waterside Market on the opposite shore from Bushrod Island. The CIA tracked his departure, noting that shortly after he fled, armed men overtook the guards at his villa.2
After Lynn’s departure from Liberia, the end came swiftly. On June 26, President George W. Bush—on the eve of a five-nation trip to Africa—had called for Charles Taylor to leave Liberia immediately.3 The president’s statement surprised even the U.S. embassy in Monrovia, where the staff greeted the decision with enthusiasm.4 Surprisingly, Taylor responded to President Bush’s demand with neither defiance nor defensiveness. Instead, he replied, “The government of Liberia welcomes the interest that the U.S. President George Bush has taken in the Liberian conflict and urges the U.S. government to remain proactive in the peace process.”5
But as Chucky fled Liberia, he knew that even though he was an American citizen, he was also clearly an enemy to the United States.
News of his flight spread quickly. In the end, his presence in Monrovia was immaterial to the resolution of the crisis. Several days later, as Christopher Menephar raced to the battlefront with a load of ammunition, his cell phone rang.6 It was Chucky calling from outside the country.
“Why are you calling me for at this time?” Menephar said. After being wounded in Duala in early June, Menephar had brought himself to JFK Hospital, several miles from the front. The hospital was crowded with the wounded and dying and lacked food, medicine, or enough staff to treat many of the patients. Not a single commander or comrade visited him to bring him food or offer help. After five days he had the strength to walk out of the hospital on his own. The war was still raging just blocks from his home, so he returned to the battle, shrapnel still embedded in his skull.
On the phone Chucky stated the obvious—that he had left the country. “I wanted to say sorry for what happened,” he told the commander, promising to send him money.
The call annoyed Menephar. Chucky wanted to talk, but he was in the midst of a fight. He had been a loyal fighter all his life. He respected the chain of command and performed as he had been trained to. But none of his training or experience prepared him for how to confront the cowardice of his own commander. In the end they had each been fighting for something very different: Liberia was Christopher’s home, the home of his ancestors, and the home of his children. Liberia was a chapter in Chucky’s life that had come to end. There was little Menephar could say to him, so he told Chucky to call him back later.
Chucky’s disappearance disappointed even his most loyal commanders. “He panicked, he panicked. He couldn’t take the pressure anymore,” recalled Samuel Nimley.7 It also surprised Charles Taylor, according to Nimley, who despite providing his son with money to escape, hadn’t expected that he would leave while the battle for Monrovia still raged. “That was a cowardly move. To leave your father in the fight,” Nimley said.
Taylor’s options rapidly diminished as the war zeroed in on the capital, not only from the north but also from the south, where the Krahn faction, MODEL, had taken Buchanan. The warring parties, meanwhile, continued to treat the peace talks in Accra as a paid vacation, idling the hours away, attempting to negotiate ministerial positions in the government to follow Taylor’s departure.
His departure seemed a forgone conclusion in Liberia, but it did not take away any of the sting of his son’s abandonment. “All that helped to break the old man,” Nimley recalled.
In Port of Spain, Chucky and his mother arrived at the Hilton, a forty-year-old hotel and convention center that sat on a hillside shrouded behind a wall of açaí trees opposite the sprawling Queen’s Park Savannah at the center of the city.8 From there, mother and son watched the end of Charles Taylor’s presidency play out as much as the world did: on CNN. In a desultory ceremony at the Executive Mansion, Taylor handed over power to Moses Blah, then boarded a chartered plane to his exile in Calabar, Nigeria. Although his capitulation marked a final humiliation, he had succeeded in something his two predecessors had not: leaving office alive. Before his departure, he feebly told those gathered, “God willing, I will be back.”9
In Trinidad, mystery immediately surrounded the mother and son staying at the Hilton. Not long after their arrival, rumors began to circulate that they had fled Liberia and were in hiding. Reporters began appearing at the hotel. Chucky knew better than to talk to the press, but his mother agreed to speak with one journalist, offering a stunning and strange interview to a reporter with Trinidad’s Guardian newspaper.10 Calling herself Liberia’s “special envoy for presidential affairs,” Bernice told the paper that she had been married to Taylor and had two children by him, a daughter, Zoe, and a fourteen-year-old son, Charles Taylor Jr. She claimed to be a trained Foreign Service officer. Despite being an American citizen o
f Trinidadian descent, she told the paper that she “didn’t get this job because of Charles Taylor.”
She also tried to deflect rumors that she had arrived with laden with diamonds from West Africa. “If I had these diamonds, honey, trust me, I would have a mansion somewhere in Trinidad,” the Guardian quoted her as saying.
Bernice offered a defense of her son’s father, claiming that Taylor had never been given the opportunity to govern. When questioned about his human rights abuses and the allegations of war crimes, she insisted that he was being held responsible for others’ actions and that the efforts to bring him to court traced “all the way back to the United States.”
The money dried up soon after their arrival, and eventually Bernice returned to Florida, while Chucky, remaining in Trinidad, was forced to move from the Hilton to a studio apartment in Carenage, a hillside ghetto overlooking the Caribbean.11 He had few connections in the country—an aunt who lived in Glencoe, a neighboring, upscale community, and a cousin who worked as a cop in downtown Port of Spain.12 When it came time to find work, the best Chucky could muster was a job as an unarmed security guard.
Trinidad, a tiny, relatively insulated island, had very little to offer Chucky. He could not follow his mother home to Orlando because he no longer had a valid U.S. passport. Having been out of the country for nearly a decade, he remained a fugitive in Orange County, Florida. The island quickly became a place stuck between the Liberia of Chucky’s past and the United States where he hoped to build his future.