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"Chuckie" Taylor was a notorious henchman for his father, whose merciless presidency defined a generation of fear in Liberia. While Charles Taylor faces a war crimes trial at The Hague, his son "Chuckie" will be making history of his own in U.S. federal court.
By Matthew McAllester
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Charles Taylor, as Liberian
President
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March marks the one-year anniversary of two significant victories for the international justice movement: the capture of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, by Nigerian forces on the Nigeria-Cameroon border, and the arrest of his son "Chuckie" Taylor one day later at the Miami International Airport. Taylor Sr. faces trial by the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, which has indicted him for war crimes allegedly committed during Sierra Leone's civil war (1991- 2002); Taylor Jr. will stand trial in U.S. federal court in September for crimes he is alleged to have committed as head of Liberia's Anti-Terrorist Unit while his father was president.
Taylor Jr.'s indictment by a federal grand jury in Miami received far less attention than the proceedings against his father in The Hague, in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, said Vienna Colucci, director of Amnesty International USA's Program for International Justice and Accountability, "It represents a watershed for the human rights movement in the United States because it is the first time the U.S. government has invoked the federal anti-torture statute." First enacted in 1994, the law (18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A) allows the U.S. government to prosecute anyone suspected of committing torture abroad, regardless of nationality, whether the suspect is a U.S. citizen, a legal resident, or a foreign national who just happens to be in the country.
After Congress passed the anti-torture statute, it lay unused for 12 years. "It was a law that was never meant to be used, really," said one federal investigator. Rather, its passage in 1994 was, more or less, a formality necessary to bring U.S. law in line with the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified in October 1994.
As it happened, however, the law was enacted between the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 during the war in Bosnia, two conscience-pricking events that accelerated Congress' concern with egregious human rights violations overseas. Conflicts in Haiti, the Balkans and a number of African countries pushed tens of thousands of refugees to the United States throughout the 1990s. Human rights groups and news organizations documented a number of cases of notorious criminals who slipped into the country during this influx.
In response, Congress passed the 2001 Alien Anti-Atrocity Deportation Act, co-sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and former Representative Mark Foley (R-Fl.); the law allowed for deportation of foreign perpetrators of human rights abuses, and extradition of those who came from countries with which the United States had agreements.
Yet federal agents and attorneys within the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) knew the 1994 law would reach beyond the immigration charges, which have proved effective but insufficiently punitive to human rights campaigners and many federal investigators. Yet those same law enforcement officials and activists suspected that no attorney general would ever sign off on a torture case-especially not President George W. Bush's appointee Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales seemed unlikely to green-light the U.S. prosecution of torture committed abroad because doing so would allow any decent defense attorney to air the United States' dirty laundry (Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo) and potentially open the door for the federal prosecution of military personnel and CIA officers.
The law itself presents other hurdles, for while its jurisdiction is broad, it is also restrictive: prosecutors can only consider crimes committed after the law was enacted in 1994. In addition, it's not enough to have executed people nor even to have caused someone incredible pain, physical or mental. The prosecutor must prove the defendant intended to cause that pain and anguish. In 2005, for example, the DOJ abandoned a torture case that federal agents and prosecutors in Massachusetts had been building against Marko Boskic, a Bosnian Croat who was a member of an execution squad at the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. Boskic's defense claimed that he had been interned in a Bosnian Serb camp and was forced to take part in the massacre. Although the decision not to bring charges of torture against Boskic deeply upset the victims' families, it is unlikely that prosecutors could have won a conviction for the charge of torture. Federal investigators kept searching for the right case, well aware of the importance of winning the first test of the law. They eventually found the perfect target in Taylor Jr.
"Chuckie" Taylor is a U.S. citizen with a storied career of human rights abuses in Liberia and is, by many accounts, an extremely violent man. On March 30, 2006, U.S. immigration agents apprehended him trying to sneak back into the United States from Trinidad, where he had been waiting out Florida indictments dating back to 1994 for attempted robbery, aggravated assault and firearms possession. U.S. District Judge Donald Graham sentenced him to 11 months for passport fraud. But U.S. investigators had bigger plans for him than the immigration case or even the Florida felonies.
Born in Boston in 1977, Taylor Jr. was 20 when his father became president of Liberia in 1997. By then, the young Bostonian was already getting into trouble with the law. Taylor appointed his son as the head of his Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), a paramilitary squad also known as the Demon Forces. Taylor Jr. became, in the words of an American businessman who knew him in West Africa, "a sociopath." The businessman, who requested anonymity, said he had seen him shoot and kill two people for no apparent reason. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, believe that the ATU, under Taylor Jr.'s leadership from 1997 to 2002, committed rapes, murders, beatings, burnings, assaults and abductions, as well as the recruitment of child soldiers.
While Taylor Jr. was awaiting sentencing on his immigration charge, agents from the Human Rights Violators and Public Safety Unit within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement worked alongside the FBI to gather evidence for crimes he had committed in Liberia: torture, conspiracy to torture and the use of a firearm during a violent crime. At times, federal officials have said, up to ten agents searched through documents to find potential witnesses while others canvassed both the United States and West Africa for corroborating evidence. They built their case around one unnamed survivor, whom Taylor Jr. and his cohorts allegedly tortured in Monrovia on July 24, 2002. Among the allegations: Taylor Jr. pointed a gun to the survivor's head and forced him to cup his hands while someone poured boiling water over them, and he applied electric shock to the man's genitals.
Over the coming months, federal prosecutors will continue to build the case against Taylor Jr. If convicted, he could face life in U.S. prison. At the same time, prosecutors from The Hague are gathering evidence for the trial of "Chuckie's" father, Charles Taylor. Human rights groups and the Liberian exile community are watching developments in both cases closely.
"Charles Taylor and 'Chuckie' Taylor are facing trial in two very dissimilar
venues," says AIUSA's Colucci, "But the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the
federal court in Miami are actually acting as part of a safety net-the international
justice system that covers the gap when domestic systems are unable or unwilling
to take action. The fact that both father and son are being prosecuted, despite
their efforts to leave the country in which they committed their crimes, demonstrates
the growing power and reach of this net." 
Rogue's Gallery
Where Are They Now?
Former Chilean President Gen. Augusto Pinochet died of heart failure, at the ripe old age of 91, before he could be prosecuted in Chile for crimes such as kidnapping and murder. Former Haitian president Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier fled into lavish exile, with his wife Michelle and their two children, on a U.S. Air Force jet as Haiti succumbed to mass rioting in 1986-leaving behind a legacy of brutal dictatorship.
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