by Johnny Dwyer
Special Agent Malone stepped into the room and took over, giving Baechtle a chance to sit back and observe for a moment. Malone took a sharper tone with Chucky, reeling off allegations against the ATU—that the unit had raped women, stolen cars, tortured and killed people.
He asked whether Chucky had ever seen anyone killed.
He denied that he had.
Have you ever been taught about the Geneva Conventions?
Chucky responded that he had.
Did you learn about what torture was during that training?
Chucky acknowledged he had.
The agents explained to Chucky that they had already spoken to one man who claimed that he’d been tortured by him, as well as corroborating witnesses. ICE would continue identifying witnesses, they explained, as well as more victims who had been tortured by him.
Chucky had been back in the United States less than three hours, but his decade in exile in Liberia was collapsing in on him.
“I didn’t do any of that,” Chucky countered. His enemies were after him, he said. “I’m being framed.”
16
18 U.S.C. § 2340
From da days we was kids been restin bids, thru hands nuff times over firvaless shit.
—United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4
News of Chucky’s arrest broke immediately, but only as a footnote to the larger story of the capture of Charles Taylor. The Miami Herald and wire services picked up on the fact that within twenty-four hours of Taylor’s arrest in Nigeria, his son had been detained in Miami. The Homeland Security chain of command also took notice—while ICE was developing a record for tracking down human rights violators in the United States, Chucky’s status as the son of a former head of state put him in a separate category from the individuals they had arrested to date.
Baechtle’s ICE team had developed a strong case on the passport fraud charge, but they didn’t have much else against Chucky. From nearly the moment he was arrested, demands to bring him to justice for human rights violations grew. Human Rights Watch and other organizations pressed Homeland Security to charge Chucky with crimes committed in Liberia. Almost overnight the case developed from a body of potential evidence that Baechtle and his colleagues had been quietly exploring out of public view into an investigation with international implications. Soon after the arrest, the decision was made to loop in the FBI.
The Department of Justice paired Baechtle with Special Agent Gregory Naples, an ex–Army Ranger and West Point graduate assigned to the extraterritorial counterterrorism squad in the Washington, D.C., field office.1 While competition between federal law enforcement agencies could be expected, Baechtle knew that the complex and logistically challenging task of tracking down further evidence would require the FBI’s support and expertise.
Chucky remained locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Miami awaiting trial on the passport fraud charges. It was unlikely the present charges would result in significant jail time; any sentence he received would be reduced by his time in pretrial detention. But he learned soon after his incarceration that Baechtle and the federal investigators were continuing to probe his activities in Liberia.
Chucky had few resources to contest any charges. He had claimed indigence upon his arrest and, to defend his passport fraud case, had been assigned an experienced attorney out of Miami’s federal public defender’s office, Miguel Caridad.2 Yet even with Caridad representing him, Chucky had reason to wish to avoid a trial.
He eventually agreed to attend a proffer session with the prosecutors and agents in Miami, a meeting typically used to negotiate immunity from prosecution in exchange for information. In drug and organized crime cases, prosecutors often leaned on defendants to implicate others higher up the rung in order to avoid jail time; for that reason the vast majority of criminal cases terminate in a plea—avoiding prosecutors the costly and time-consuming process of a trial and securing reduced sentences for the guilty defendants.3 Negotiating a proffer, also called a “Queen for a Day” agreement, presented an inherent risk to both parties. On the one hand, a suspect could leverage his knowledge of crimes to avert prosecution, but on the other, anything the suspect disclosed during the session could be used as a potential lead for investigators. If the prosecutors caught any inkling that a suspect was lying or omitting information, any deal would be taken off the table. Chucky’s proffer was unique—he didn’t belong to a traditional criminal enterprise, and any crimes in which he could implicate anyone would likely be of little interest. He thought the session signaled that the government’s real interest in him was to elicit intelligence on his father rather than pursue a conviction.4 But his case involved crimes of impunity where the process of a trial served justice better than a plea would.
For the agents and prosecutors recently assigned to the case, the session provided the first opportunity to meet with Chucky outside a courtroom. The U.S. attorney for Florida’s Southern District had assigned two of his most accomplished prosecutors, Caroline Heck Miller and Karen Rochlin.5 Miller ranked among the most experienced federal prosecutors in Miami. At fifty-eight, she had been with the office since 1980.6 A tiny figure with a diminutive presence, she could have passed for an elementary school principal. But she’d litigated some of the U.S. attorney’s office highest-profile cases in Miami, including the criminal prosecution surrounding the 1996 ValuJet crash that killed 110 people in the Everglades and the trial of the Cuban Five, intelligence agents for Castro’s government living in Miami. The men had been implicated in spying and conspiring to commit murder after Cuban MIGs shot down two planes from the activist group Brothers to the Rescue.
Rochlin, forty-six years old, had seventeen years’ experience in Florida as an assistant U.S. attorney.7 Seeking out trial experience, she made the improbable leap from a Beltway corporate law firm to the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami. Among the first cases she pitched in on was the Manuel Noriega prosecution. Over the next decade, she worked her way through major crimes, organized crime, public corruption, and eventually to the narcotics division of the office—a job that carried her to every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Along the way she developed a reputation as a formidable and effective prosecutor with the nickname “The Rock.”
The attorneys and agents sat down in the stark conference room at Miami’s federal courthouse for the session. Chucky walked into the room wearing a dun khaki federal detention center–issued uniform and took his seat. While Baechtle had spent time with Chucky during the initial interview, Naples had no firsthand experience with their suspect.8 As Chucky began addressing the room, the FBI agent noticed something odd: Chucky spoke with confidence and didn’t seem to recognize that those gathered in the room could incarcerate him for the rest of his life.
Naples thought, This is going to be a very interesting interview.
Chucky informed those gathered that he believed everyone assembled had been appointed directly by President Bush. He unpacked this idea, according to Naples, drifting into a quasi-legal argument, all the while trying to evince an educated air to the audience of attorneys and federal agents. He dropped phrases and terms that didn’t fit with his intended meaning. It quickly became clear that he had no idea how to correctly assemble thoughts into words and was not at all self-conscious of this fact. In very real terms, he was out of his element. In Liberia, where the literacy rate hovered at 20 percent, he could pass for educated, parroting the language and ideas of his father. Those who did see through him wouldn’t dare speak up. But here the charade did not hold up well.
“It was awkward,” the agent said.
During a break in the session, Chucky ventured small talk with Agent Naples. In a preliminary hearing, he had learned about Naples’s background. He told Naples he “wanted his [own] son to go to West Point.”
By Chucky’s account, he declined to cooperate with the government in exchange for a ten-year sentence; the U.S. attorney’s office would not comment on any potential plea.9 “There is intens
e anger based on my declines [sic],” he wrote in a letter from federal detention, with the same incomprehensibility, shortly after the session. “Now the question arises, am I a big fish in Liberia, and among panafricanists [sic] in the region, my response is I’m a mere tadpole in a vast ocean, filed [sic] w/ sharks, scavengers, and whales, pounded by hurricanes.”
But the two sides failed to come to an agreement. Prosecutors typically cut a deal to either avoid the resource drain of a criminal trial or to trade up for information on other crimes. In this case, the government had every incentive to stage a public trial and little interest in eliciting information from Chucky on his father or the regime.
Meanwhile Chucky still had to confront the passport violation: either plead guilty or go to trial. Since he had implicated himself in the interview with Baechtle, a trial threatened to draw out the inevitable—a conviction and sentence. A guilty plea, on the other hand, could put a positive end to the proceedings. Figuring in his time served, Chucky could realistically expect to be released in months rather than years. The agents focused on the new investigation understood that the charges could put him behind bars for the rest of his life.
Early in December 2006, nearly eight months after Chucky’s arrest, Agents Baechtle and Naples walked into a Starbucks in Chicago.10 They had traveled there to meet a Liberian whom they had learned about some months earlier, Varmuyan Dulleh. While this was not the first time agents had met Dulleh, the success of their case hinged on the outcome of that day’s meeting with him. A Department of Justice trial attorney accompanied the agents, while Dulleh had with him an attorney from one of Chicago’s top law firms, Mayer Brown. The attorney, Lori Lightfoot, had taken on Dulleh pro bono, not as a target of investigation but as a potentially crucial witness in the government’s case against Chucky.11
Agent Naples laid out a spread of mug shots for Dulleh to consider. The agents hoped he could locate an image of one of the men responsible for his exile.
Nearly four years had passed since he’d been forced to flee Liberia.12 After his arrest in the summer of 2002, he’d been held for another year, shuttled from primitive prisons throughout Liberia. The following summer, as the regime collapsed and the Taylor era came to an end, he fled in fear for his life. The thirty-three-year-old Mandingo man had landed at O’Hare International Airport with his wife and son in 2005, the end of a long, tortuous journey from Monrovia via Guinea. He had been resettled in the United States as a refugee—one of nearly twenty thousand arriving from Africa that year. While thousands of other Liberians had been selected to resettle based on a lottery, Dulleh had been granted asylum as a victim of political violence. He spelled out the ordeal he had lived through to the Red Cross and UNHCR and, after receiving approval from the State Department, was paired with a charity in Chicago and sent to start his new life. He was given a small apartment and his son was enrolled in school, but Dulleh’s health had been compromised by his experience.
A month after his arrival Dulleh traveled to Heartland Health Outreach, a nonprofit that provided health care to refugees and the homeless. A nurse entered the examination room and handed him a robe to change into. When she began taking his history, she noticed that he was anxious, responding to her questions in a dull monotone. When she looked at him, he averted his gaze. He removed his shirt. A large scar ran across his right arm. A series of smaller scars and abrasions spread across his legs, and two oval burn marks dotted his shoulders.
The nurse pulled out a body map to detail each one. How did you get these scars? she asked.
Later, at the Starbucks in Chicago, Dulleh told this story to the agents. He spoke in a quiet, sullen voice. It is unclear whether he knew how significant his memories were in the case against Chucky.
Dulleh stared down at the six photographs arrayed in front of him. They were booking shots, from the U.S. marshals, of African-American males. Naples watched Dulleh scan the images.13 Dulleh was a proud, intelligent man, Naples could tell, but whatever had happened to him, he wore heavily. Most of the men in the lineup conjured nothing from him. But he recognized a light-skinned black man with a beard, his head cocked slightly, an annoyed look on his face.
When they met four years earlier, that same face had seethed with rage. In that moment, Dulleh had not doubted that this man would take his life. Chucky had called out to him, “Do you know I can kill you and nothing can happen?”
That was no longer true. Dulleh pointed to the third photograph in the array.
That is Chucky Taylor, he said.
Are you positive? Naples asked.
One hundred percent.
Dulleh’s identification had an immediate impact. On December 6, 2006, the day before Chucky faced sentencing on the passport violation, the Justice Department unsealed a seven-page indictment accusing him both of conspiracy to commit torture and of the act of torture.14 He had remained in federal custody at the detention center in downtown Miami as his charge for passport fraud made its way to court. But even as he and his attorneys prepared to enter a guilty plea, he looked forward to his release. The new indictment guaranteed that he would not be freed anytime soon.
In anticipation of his sentencing, Chucky had prepared a rambling letter to Judge Donald L. Graham.15 It opened vaguely: “for the last 8 out of 10 years, I lived in a place where Western covert support was permanent, and isolation of an administration was an overt action.” In the letter he admitted to lying on the passport application, described his failed efforts to mediate an agreement with the State Department, and made clear his willingness to discuss his experience in Liberia.
The statement seemed crafted for a wider audience. Chucky had designs on publicizing his story, hoping that someone would pay him money for an interview.16 But he also seemed to want to preempt further legal action against him. He knew that his past was being investigated but knew little else beyond that. His mother had received a subpoena from federal prosecutors that suggested a broader investigation. Eventually, his lawyers learned of the intention to indict him on torture charges.
The new indictment detailed the events of the early morning hours of July 24, 2002, in Monrovia, referring to Dulleh simply as “the Victim” and to Yeaten as the “co-conspirator,” but implicating Chucky, under his four aliases, as the son of Charles Taylor and the commander of the Anti-Terrorist Unit.
“This marks the first time the Justice Department has charged a defendant with the crime of torture,” Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher said in a prepared statement. “Crimes such as these will not go unanswered.”
It was a strange quote coming from the Bush administration Justice Department—in particular from Fisher, who would later become embroiled in the scandal surrounding the Office of Legal Counsel’s interpretation of the very statute that Chucky had been indicted under. Fisher’s connections to the interrogation practices used on detainees in the war on terror stretched back to 2002, when she had joined a delegation that toured Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay (incidentally just weeks after Dulleh was detained by the ATU). According to journalist Jane Mayer, the lawyers on that junket sat in on an interrogation of a detainee.17 Later, in 2005, Senator Carl M. Levin, who was looking into detainee abuse allegations, briefly held up Fisher’s nomination for assistant attorney general. Following her confirmation, the issue continued to dog her.18 The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility probed whether in her prior role as deputy assistant attorney general she had sanctioned the use of torture, or—as the Bush administration referred to it—enhanced interrogation methods on terrorism suspects.
But ultimately the Justice Department’s own entanglement with the torture of terrorism suspects did nothing to stop it from pursuing Chucky’s case. Human rights groups applauded his indictment, but Chucky thought he was being made a scapegoat. “It’s evident that Washington,” he wrote in a letter from prison, “cannot determine my precise involvement in business or any other sector in Liberia and has had to rely on streams of information, not i
ntelligence, coming from shady questionable accounts by Human Rights Watch, who in turn got it from other human rights groups, Liberian opposition, UN reports, who some consider motivated by ethnic and trible [sic] also political reasons.”19 Yet he was also defiant, saying, “How do I prove my innocence, and not make this intelligence gathering excercise [sic] for these cocksuckers in Washington, that’s the challenge presented.”
At his sentencing for the passport violation—the day after the indictment was announced—Chucky addressed Judge Graham directly, striking a much more reserved tone. “I’ve been placed in a very difficult position over the years due to my father’s role as former President of Liberia and my status as an American citizen,” he explained. “Throughout all, I’ve maintained my loyalty to both family and country. I fully respected and observed the laws of Liberia during my time there. I remained neutral as strenuous diplomatic issues emerged between my father’s administration and Washington.… It seems that there are attempts to make me pay for being the son of a former African leader who now stands as the second former head of state in history to be indicted for war crimes.”
Chucky’s assumptions about the federal government were wrong. Washington wasn’t using the threat of prosecution to lean on him for intelligence. Both ICE and the Justice Department had one interest in him—gathering enough witnesses and evidence to ensure that he was the first person in history to be convicted under the federal antitorture statute.
On a Sunday morning in November 2007, Special Agent Baechtle and an ICE colleague, Special Agent Julian Doyle, climbed into a white SUV at the U.S. embassy in Monrovia.20 Baechtle had become familiar with the journey to Liberia over several visits, but on this trip was Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller, who accompanied him for the first time. Before departing the capital, the investigators and attorneys had a stop to make, to pick up their guide for the day, a man named Rufus Kpadeh.