American Warlord Read Online Free Page B

to these phone calls from his daughter-in-law, according to Lynn. But he grew upset when she relayed Chucky’s threat. Chucky was even more enraged when he heard that Lynn had contacted his father. Taylor warned his son that “he cannot go threatening me or my family, period,” according to Lynn.
    But Charles Taylor’s hands were tied; he could place his son under house arrest, but this was a temporary solution. Taylor was the most powerful man in Liberia, but his power was increasingly limited. He had no influence with or leverage against the foreign powers seeking to isolate him. He had little control over the countryside, where rebels operated relatively freely. And he had even less control over his son, who followed his own violent whims.
    In late 2001 Chucky invited Israel Akinsanya to join him on a trip to Singapore. According to Akinsanya, Chucky told him little about the nature of the trip other than that “he has his business partners he wants to see.” 4 Chucky often kept things compartmentalized, Akinsanya said, but his account defies credibility. Not only had Akinsanya been closely involved with the Jeff House deal, he had good reason to deny knowledge of the details of Chucky’s trip. At that time, Chucky, along with dozens of members of Taylor’s government and certain associates, had been barred from international travel under new UN sanctions targeting the regime’s involvement in Sierra Leone. 5
    For all his unpredictable behavior, Chucky remained loyal to his father in the face of the sanctions. The travel ban represented the first time the international community tied Chucky to his father’s regime, even though it made no mention of his nationality, which was not a well-known fact. For much of 2001, he simply withdrew from public life, making only occasional appearances at some of the late-night haunts that Taylor’s officials were known to frequent.
    Akinsanya had grown accustomed to Chucky’s tendency to drop out of society, holing up at his house, keeping nocturnal hours, and cutting himself off from outside contact. “I really didn’t have any close friends,” Chucky said. He felt culturally isolated as an American and suspicious that those around him saw something to gain in his friendship.
    Even as Chucky isolated himself, Akinsanya befriended Bernice, whom he described as something like a stage parent. “She was a very nice person, but you could tell that she was manipulative,” he recalled, saying that she was more than happy to use the fact that she was the mother of the president’s son for leverage.
    Mother and son fought bitterly, Akinsanya recalled, often about Chucky’s father. By both Akinsanya’s and his own account, Chucky was the lone voice of truth among the “sycophants” surrounding Charles Taylor. As the end of Taylor’s five-year term loomed, Chucky was candid with his father about the future. “There’s going to be elections in this country,” he told him, according to Akinsanya. “And if there are elections, you’re not going to win.”
    Taylor likely understood that. His administration had accomplished little or nothing in improving the lives of Liberians. The violence of the civil war had devolved into a low-grade conflict that he met with persistent repression of political enemies, dissidents, and journalists. And fear that war would return in force set in.
    When Chucky and Akinsanya landed in Geneva for a stopover en route to Singapore, it was a rare respite outside the region. He filled the few short hours between flights splurging on clothes and luxury watches. While Akinsanya said he wasn’t clear on whom they were traveling to see, a former Defense Department official said that Chucky made multiple trips to Singapore on the dime of Joseph Wong, a businessman connected to the Oriental Timber Company. 6 Wong was linked to arms-for-timber transactions by UN investigators in a 2001 report to the Security Council that described large quantities of