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‘American Warlord,’ by Johnny Dwyer

Charles Taylor Jr.Credit...Courtesy of Johnny Dwyer and Lynn Henderson

What happens when you give a disturbed American teenager unlimited power and weaponry and put him in a zone where law and morality don’t exist?

The answer comes in “American Warlord,” Johnny Dwyer’s disturbing account of the gruesome rise and unlikely fall of the son of the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor — Charles Taylor Jr., widely known as Chucky. In 2006 Chucky became the first person ever charged under a federal anti-­torture statute. He was 29. Remarkably, the crimes for which he is now serving a 97‑year sentence took place outside America, in the faraway Liberian civil war of the 1990s — demonstrating that Americans can be prosecuted for torture inflicted in distant places.

But Dwyer, a journalist who has written for Esquire, Time and Foreign Policy, isn’t out to score political points. Instead, he revels in the sheer strangeness of this tale: how an Orlando high school dropout from a seedy subdivision became one of the most brutal killers in an already savage civil war, embarrassing even his amoral father, a man whose decade-long warmongering continues to scar Liberia and its neighbor Sierra Leone.

Dwyer skillfully meshes interviews, documents and court testimony to ­reconstruct in painful detail the full panoply of the ghastly crimes. Chucky was the sadistic head of a special “security” unit in Liberia, and we are told how he cranked up the stereo to block the screams of a bodyguard he was beating to death (or having beaten) for stealing; how he sentenced another man under his command to 1,000 lashes, which killed him; how prisoners at his security-unit training camp at Gbatala were made to eat cigarette butts and drink their own urine, covered with molten plastic and tormented with flesh-eating ants; how he ordered an escapee beheaded in front of him; how prisoners under his command at Gbatala were forced to assault one ­another sexually.

It is the juxtaposition of this descent into depravity with Chucky’s ­relatively innocuous origins that gives force to ­Dwyer’s fluid narrative. The civil wars in West Africa are mostly over now, but the casual extreme violence that serves as Dwyer’s backdrop unfortunately persists. Liberia, a shell of a country hollowed out by years of corruption and finished off by Charles Taylor, was predictably overwhelmed by last year’s Ebola epidemic, against which it had no defenses.

Chucky was the product of Taylor’s relationship with a woman in the United States. Neglected by his mother, the teenage Chucky occupied himself with petty thuggery in his Orlando neighborhood. In 1992, when he was 15, a visit to his father, a budding warlord in rural Liberia, initiated him into the Liberian killing game: He was allowed to casually shoot a prisoner, giving rise to well-founded “rumors that Chucky killed prisoners for sport.”

When his father gained power in 1997, the son’s penchant for sadism at first dovetailed neatly with a regime that was built on blood. “Unexplained killings were becoming more common around the capital,” Dwyer demurely puts it. Amid the butchery, Chucky celebrated a lavish wedding in Monrovia with the stunningly clueless American girlfriend — “Killing, torture, I’m sure it takes a toll on the soul,” she says — who had followed him from Orlando. But Chucky’s unbridled excesses eventually became a liability even for the smooth-talking Taylor. And when the regime crumbled and Taylor was indicted for crimes against humanity, both father and son fled into ignominious exile.

Dwyer highlights the role of a sharp-eyed American immigration agent who nabbed Chucky after he flew to Miami in March 2006. This provides the reader with at least a partial catharsis in an otherwise brutal but well-told tale.

AMERICAN WARLORD

A True Story

By Johnny Dwyer

Illustrated. 344 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

Adam Nossiter is the West and Central Africa bureau chief for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Bad Seed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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