American Warlord

Now, standing in the villa outside Monrovia, Chucky leveled his gun at the helpless university student before him. He wanted information. His father's opponents were closing in on the capital, on the brink of overthrowing the government. Where were the rebels? Who was providing them weapons? Were the Americans involved? There was little to keep Chucky from extracting the information any way he wanted. After all, he was a U.S. citizen. His father was president of the country. No one could touch him. "Chucky was very much like the Hussein sons," says David Crane, the founding chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. "He was completely above the law, protected by his father and his henchmen."

Chucky tried threatening the student with his gun. Then, as dawn approached, he and Yeaten began to torture the man. According to a 17-page federal indictment brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami, Yeaten, who is referred to as "co-conspirator B," burned the student with a hot iron and doused him with scalding water. Chucky shocked the victim's genitals repeatedly with an electrical device. It was the kind of interrogation that those closest to Chucky had seen him conduct many times before. "Chucky Taylor executed a lot of people," says retired Brig. Gen. John Tarnue, who served under Chucky in the Anti-Terrorist Unit. "In my presence he tortured people. He tied them. He called it tabay. Elbow to elbow. And twine went into the flesh. He sit there, cross his legs, and smoke cigars. He didn't touch them, but he gave them the order. He said, 'I want to see blood.' "

Today, as his father stands trial for war crimes at the U.N.'s court in The Hague, Chucky Taylor sits in the Federal Detention Center in Miami. On September 15th, he will face trial as the first civilian in American history to be charged with committing torture abroad. In phone calls and letters to me over the past two years, he has repeatedly denied the charges, implying that he is a victim of an American policy targeting his father. His conversations, like his letters, ramble, alternating between swaggering defiance and confused despair. At the very least, he suggests, he is a victim of a bizarre double standard, prosecuted by a U.S. government that itself has engaged in torture, in open defiance of the Geneva Conventions.

"Innocence is not my dilemma," he wrote in March 2007 in a letter that covered five handwritten pages torn from a yellow legal pad, punctuated with the occasional smiley face. "It is how do I prove my innocence, and not make this intelligence-gathering exercise for these cocksuckers in Washington — that's the challenge presented. . . . They say absolute power corrupts absolutely [but] there is no other government in the world that operates with [more] impunity than Washington, and those that operated with its covert support."

Chucky's mother, Bernice Emmanuel, first saw Charles Taylor in the mid-1970s in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, when he was an economics student at nearby Bentley College. "I met him through one of his neighbors," she recalls. "I was coming out of the building, and he asked for my number." She quickly fell for the handsome young man, the son of an elite Liberian family. Taylor belonged to a close-knit community of expat students who had been sent to Boston to receive an American education. At the time, revolution was sweeping across Africa, and the Liberian students were agitating for a seismic change in their nation, from the rule of the traditional elite to political power for the tribal disenfranchised.