American Warlord by Johnny Dwyer

unreasonable. Few Americans knew where Liberia was or what had transpired there during the civil war. Even fewer understood the legacy of suffering that Charles Taylor had left on the region. Only a handful knew that Taylor’s American son bore some role in it. Special Agent Baechtle and his colleagues were among them.
    Chucky, meanwhile, almost hadn’t made it out of Trinidad. Even after obtaining the passport, he faced a more immediate challenge to return to the United States: he had no money for airfare. 2 He turned to his few remaining friends in Liberia, according to a former commander, asking for $1,500. It wasn’t the first time he had reached out for help; he seemed perennially broke, having squandered the opportunity to make money while his father was in power. “He was too much involved in this killing and fighting and fighting. He never put in the time to make some money for himself,” commander Sam Nimley said. Eventually a Lebanese friend fronted the cash for Chucky, no questions asked. “We didn’t know he was going to use it for a ticket,” Nimley said.
    Before departing, Chucky had a final piece of unresolved business to attend to. It’s not clear what contact, if any, he had maintained with his father while in Trinidad, but on March 25, as he prepared to leave, he called him in Calabar, Nigeria. Without the protection of Nigeria, it was only a matter of time before UN authorities tracked Charles Taylor down. Taylor warned his son against returning to the United States, his attorney later said, though it’s unlikely the former president had any inkling of the efforts coalescing to detain his son. 3 Chucky reminded his father that, regardless of what happened, he had children to take care of. It was strange counsel coming from his son who had neglected his own children. The irony was that it wasn’t his father’s abandonment that had destroyed Chucky’s life but their reconciliation.
    “You’ve lived your life,” Chucky told his father. “Have you provided for all these other people?” 4
    The morning of Chucky’s arrival
The Washington Post
ran a story buried on the sixteenth page with the headline “Liberia’s Taylor Found and Arrested”:
    An immigration official in Gamboru, in northeastern Nigeria, spotted Taylor in a jeep with diplomatic tags that was attempting to cross into Cameroon about 7:30 a.m., according to Nigerian authorities. Under orders from President Obasanjo, who for years had resisted pressure to deliver Taylor to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Taylor was taken into custody and, in the confines of a sleek green-and-white government jet, flown to Monrovia. 5
    With his attempt to escape Nigeria scuttled, Charles Taylor appeared hours later at Robertsfield, draped in a flak jacket, being led down a stairwell from an airliner by an armed guard, his hands cuffed in front of him. Gone was the cool, magisterial expression, with eyes hidden behind Ray-Ban aviators; it was replaced by a look of numb shock. He was returning to Liberia, as he had promised, but with his hands bound, being marched across the tarmac to a UN helicopter waiting to carry him to Freetown. He would be the first African head of state in history to face trial before an international criminal tribunal.
    That morning Special Agent Baechtle put on a pressed suit. 6 He typically wore blue jeans and a collared shirt, but he had dressed up for no particular reason. Nearly as soon as he arrived in the office, he turned around and raced to Reagan International to catch a flight to Miami. He had hurriedly assembled his team to leave Washington to meet the flight. One of his ICE colleagues would follow him to deliver the warrant to Miami. Baechtle put a call into the Customs and Border Protection supervisor at Miami International Airport, asking him to meet in the international terminal. As Chucky’s flight taxied to the gate, Baechtle stood at the end of the jetway in the airport’s Concourse D.
    As crowds of