Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 269 - Chuckie Taylor. The Nerd Turned War Criminal

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Everyone has heard of Charles Taylor, the brutal dictator of Liberia. This is the story of his son, Chuckie Taylor, an American born nerd turned head of Liberian national security, international diamond smuggler, and one of the worst war criminals in Liberian history. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys *UPDATE* WE FOUND HIS RAP MUSIC https://www.youtube.com/@BentmanOfficial/about Sources: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chucky-taylor-liberias-other-monster/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/09/charles-taylor-jr-torture-liberia https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2009/January/09-crm-021.html Johnny Dwer. American Warlord: A True Story. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/23/liberia-war-crimes-chucky-taylor

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast i am joe and with me uh several thousand miles to the left is tom and nate how you guys doing i'm okay uh tom how are you doing i fucking hate crossfitters fucking crap like they are the bane of my existence i was talking to joe yesterday i'm sorry to open this with a ram it's been boiling for two days now like two different gyms, opposite sides of the city, went to the gym in the afternoon yesterday, because I have a weird

job I can go to the gym in the middle of the day. Got my bench out of the way, hit a bench PR, woohoo. Had other stuff to do. And then this, like, crew of maybe, like, four or five CrossFitters came in, took every single barbell and took up the entire floor of

the free weight section doing like shit doing like circuits and i was like you people are such fucking dickheads like there is literally a crossfit gym in this sports center but they refuse to pay for the crossfit gym so instead they use like the actual gym floor and like they had over like two-thirds of the dumbbells they had all the bars and i was like i am so lucky that i did my bench beforehand because i'd be so fucking pissed if i came in and there's people like coming up and asking them was like oh can i use this can you use that and you're like no no no no we're using this for the next half an hour we're gonna use this for next half an hour it's like you shower that also feels like the gym being fucking idiots too yeah they shouldn't allow that they're basically getting they're

getting ripped off by these assholes and also it's going to make people not want to go to that gym yeah yeah i think the problem is is like the dude who was like running the group works in the gym as well i was just about to say i've there was okay i should say i have nothing against like the concept of crossfit like do whatever you want to do that is fun uh that keeps you in shape and healthy or whatever but also you should you should go to the places that these things are meant for it's like you know you're not going to try to max out your fucking deadlift at like 400 or 500 pounds or whatever in like a gold gym generally or like you know if you box or do mma

you're not gonna waltz into planet fitness and like set up in the free weight section like you're gonna set off the long alarm going i would say that i actually hate crossfit for two reasons i don't necessarily hate crossfitters as people but people who are into it annoy me the cultures of the gym is pretty toxic um yeah and i would also say with crossfit for me the problem has always been number two two things rather number one it's like a wiki how for with bad cartoon illustrations called give yourself a repetitive stress injury and that's that's point one and point two is and i'm sure you can identify with this to some degree joe having been in the army the last fucking thing on earth i want as regards my own fitness

is someone yelling at me even if it's like hey let's do it like fuck that shut up yeah yeah i mean it's certainly not self-directed it's not for me 11 years of that and then also high school sports before especially in swimming with a coach who screamed at us a lot it's just not my thing yeah fuck off it's not for me same with like the tough mutters or whatever like it appeals to a certain subsect of people you know what go nuts in your own space i'm not gonna walk into a crossfit gym and start like shooting double legs on people like don't you know like do do whatever makes you happy but do it in the correct area because you're just fucking over everyone else but then as if it wasn't bad enough yesterday

i went to the gym by the studio and i was like okay gonna get a workout in before we record more crossfitters literally i was there trying to do like strict overhead press and they were doing like sled pushes like two inches behind me and i was like i was like going for like a real heavy day and i was like if i have to bail out of this i am fucked if they are behind me because like no i have a few inches of space and it's just like look do whatever exercise suits you but it just seems to be the most ubiquitous problem with any gym is people hate people who do crossfit because it's like they come in they have like five different things on the go at once and they're taking like five minutes to complete

a circuit then they're sitting down i'm like if you're doing like a bench then you're like just chilling out whatever you in between your sets but like crossfit just like takes up so much space and if you say it to anyone then there's like five people who are going to be on your ass who's like oh we we're just as entitled to use the stuff as you it's like fuck off no you're not you're taking up like 200 times the amount of space as any single person in here yeah so weirdly um if it's if it's a proto pseudo dad chat before we talk about a fun fucked up historical figure i'm actually i'm not gonna talk about the weather but rather i do have a funny thing where the source of my problems in aggregate is the brits and i think tom can appreciate this i'm sure that's i'm sure that's

news to uh to everyone listening well no it's just funny because i mean look there's i don't want to do an overly simplified sort of explanation here because there's a lot of dumb things. But basically, my wife's pregnant and she's far enough along that flying is not a good idea right now. And some airlines won't carry you. They won't fly you depending on how far along you are. So she had to go down to Geneva for work and we opted to take the train, which is fine. It's great. Except Eurostar and Britain.

Oh, God. And so Ireland and Britain did not join the Schengen zone. Ireland is still in the EU. Britain is not. But a lot of people blame Brexit for this. But basically, even when Brexit had not yet taken place, when it had not yet gone into effect, you have to go through basically airport security

and a bunch of border checks to get on the Eurostar train to take the channel tunnel to get to London from continental Europe. So basically, it's just very funny to me because, right, I understand how shit works, but it's also so incredibly stupid because the whole point of taking the train is you just rock up to the fucking train and get on it. It's nice. It's like whatever. Whereas, Tom, you've taken Eurostar. Joe, have you taken Eurostar? No, I have not. No. All right, guys, let me just tell you about Eurostar. It is basically airport security, except imagine if airport security

fed you into the smallest fucking airport terminal you've ever been in your life. There's no seating room. There's nothing. It sucks. The trains are always late. It's always crowded. In Paris, you're standing the whole time. In London, you're basically standing the whole time because there's almost no seating. The train is balls expensive. It's more expensive than a Swiss train for a trip, basically a two-hour train ride from London to Paris or less than two hours from London to Brussels. And so it's like, there's a lot of things at play here, et cetera, et cetera. I don't want to rehash it. I certainly don't want to get into a fucking dumb Brexit argument because

whatever. The Brits did it to themselves. They always will. And then they'll be like, no, actually someone else did this to us and we're the victims here when it's like, there's a fucking court affidavit with a notary stamp that says this person shot themselves in the dick um so i just found it very very funny because like when we were coming back we got on the train in geneva and like they can and we'll and sometimes we'll do border checks there like before you get on the train to france to make sure everyone has their passports etc but weirdly the train at midday they just never seem to and so you get on the train it's super easy you go to paris then you got to use a commuter train, like a commuter subway system thing, the RER, to get to the other train stations.

So you have train stations. And then it's like every step as you get closer and closer to Britain gets more and more annoying. And there's just a part of me that's just like... I mean, it's a perfect deterrent from coming to this horrible country yeah and that's like is i feel like i feel like i never really understood why britain had such a bad reputation among continental europeans i mean the war okay got it the wars etc but like in terms of just culturally post-war like at this point my parents are mid-range boomers in terms of how old they are and they are about to both turn 70 so like for better or worse the war is a long time ago and yet everything post-war they have such a fucking terrible in everything and

it's like i don't know tom i'd love your your perspective joe you've encountered them i'd love your perspective maybe we'll do this another episode but there's just something about it it's just like it's a very funny to me that like the thing that people like oh isn't this this great side of european integration before brexit and? It's like, yes, but to get to Britain, it's going to be fucking annoying. And there's something about that that's so perfect. You know, I don't really have much of an experience. I don't really want to get into it

because I was only in the UK for like a week. But I did have a very interesting time flying from Armenia to the UK because there are no like direct flight paths. You have to take a series of singular tickets and then run to catch the next one um all of them through wiz air which thankfully uh they were all staggered late by an hour because that's what you could expect from was there so i didn't miss any of my flights but i can say as far as customs is getting uh into the uk was incredibly easy like there wasn't even

anybody there to check my passport i think i just had to scan it that's the thing was incredibly easy like there wasn't even anybody there to check my passport i think i just had to scan it that's the thing right is that like for all so like oh we couldn't join shanghai we're a fucking we're an island we need more border check public yeah but y'all don't even fucking do them like you just don't fucking do shit this is what's so funny is like i know me and joe talked about like me bringing 800 cigarettes into the uk is like like traveling between because tom is culturally balkan um like traveling from ireland to the uk is like so easy but it's also really funny traveling back from continental europe into the uk because it's like like you did just see your password it's like okay go ahead but like i couldn't imagine like you joe playing like a game of where in the world is joe kasabian like trying to get like four different

connecting flights to get to the uk like to their credit like i will give britain credit where credit's due like the public transport is incredible it works like and like it's so funny when like people get so incredulous that like the tube is late by like four minutes whereas like half time the buses just don't show yeah i mean i will say i feel like that's a specifically london thing because obviously having i've taken buses outside london and they're pretty bad but i mean compared to new york i also had an uh outside london bus experience that was pretty bad you sure and it wound up with me finding a like a cab service in fucking oxfordshire to just come pick it up yeah it was no nothing available back in my day we had to walk down pit i we walked 17 hours worth it's so funny because

we're gonna be talking about basically this the the rapper's son of a liberian war criminal but like all conversations have to go to gym dudes and the brits because that's just who we are that's just who we are like that's that's the station we're at in our lives right now yeah and i would complain about where i live but that's not acceptable because neither of you are armenian i'm not allowed to do that yeah exactly you're not until i get the surgery yeah uh what the sonic the hedgehog surgery yeah exactly god damn it armenian affirming care forgot about that um now fellas i've gathered you here today because we're going to talk about a kind of guy um that i was not previously uh aware of his existence and that is the american-born

african war criminal uh and before we get to that point, we've talked about the Liberian Civil War before. A long time ago, it was our first year of a show in an era that I would generally like to call bad. And it will probably need to be redone at some point. But we do need to do a long story short here. What is generally known as the Liberian Civil War was actually two different civil wars with a short break in the middle, like a hal story short here what is generally known as the liberian civil war was actually two different civil wars with a short break in the middle like a half time after the first civil war lasting from 1989 to 1997 a man named charles taylor came to power when his victorious national patriotic liberation front of liberia seized power the story i love a revolutionary movement that has

once again its name is just a sentence the more things you tack on to it the less true it is that that is generally how that works the story is much weirder and longer than that and one day we will definitely talk about it in a series however long story short samuel doe loses power via being executed on camera while people around him drink budweiser. Around 10% of the entire population of Liberia dies, leading to a peace deal between various factions years later. And then in 1997, there was elections. Now, the elections came down to Charles Taylor and a woman named Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Liberia being a country founded by freed American slaves has an election system that basically functions the exact same as the American system. For example, there is even a political party running called the True Whigs. This is a weird Americana down to the bones. It's very strange that you have the capital of Liberia is Monrovia, named after James Monroe, the president who more or less authorized the back to Africa movement in the early 19th century. The flag is an American flag, but with a single star. There's another town. I don't know if it's one of the bigger towns in Liberia, but it certainly is a city on the coast called Buchanan, like James Buchanan. If I remember correctly, it is something of a slum, which honestly, that tracks with James Buchanan.

Yeah. It's just very, very interesting because pre-Civil War America, post the Revolutionary War, with the notable exception of the War of 1812, we basically gloss over like four decades yeah in american history and certainly in terms of like popular history as people are constantly you know making reference to that period of like when you have presidents like was it uh james k polk and uh yeah james buchanan um what's it uh what's this uh the fillmore i can't millard fillmore genuinely they're just like trivia names yeah we don't remember shit um and so it's very funny because like this is this massive event that's massively affected by early 19th century american politics and it's not canada yeah when we when we eventually talk about the liberians of war in depth we will have to talk

about the back that back to Africa movement and how that all came to be and how pretty much as soon as the freed American slaves got to Liberia, they did the exact same thing that settlers in the United States did, which was upon arrival, oppressed the indigenous population. It's like we learned from you. It's a very fucked up story.

However, all these fancy rules in place of American Jeffersonian democracy does not really matter when you have corrupt warlord number one running. A population has no idea what an election even looks like or voting for that matter, because this has been going on for over a decade. because this has been going on for over a decade. The first war had completely devastated the country and torn apart all of the things that make a country a country and a society a society. The education system had been completely destroyed and collapsed. And even before the war, it wasn't exactly stellar to begin with. So by the time... There was like the government was overthrown by a military coup in 1980.

Yeah. You know, what was it? Samuel Doe took took over he was like an nco in the liberian army like we talked about in the civil war episode like you said a long time ago but basically since it's like it's not quite as destabilized as afghanistan but basically since the 70s yeah it's just been it's pretty it's been unstable it's been bad it's much better these days i will say uh but yeah up until that point it's it was pretty bad and by the time of the 1997 elections a full 90 percent of the population were considered functionally illiterate.

Now, while other people knew that and attempted to start education drives for the population on not only the political system, but how representative democracy and voting works, Charles Taylor had a different idea. Now, during the Civil War, he had taken over pretty much every radio station in the country. And radio happened to be the most popular and easily consumable media platform in Liberia, because you don't have to be literate to use it. So he monopolized his control over radio to blanket the country in campaign messaging to the point that, for most people, he was the only candidate anybody had ever heard of. He used his former militia to plaster his face everywhere and a poster and billboard campaign.

And his campaign slogan goes down in history as one of the most insane anybody has ever used quote. He killed my ma. He killed my pa, but I'll vote for him. He's not making this up no he won with 70 of the vote i mean look it's strong it's memorable you know you don't want to seem yeah if it's on a button fit it's scalable you could put it on a bumper sticker on a t-shirt

it's very funny to me that like a a banging slogan overcomes a political hurdle like it's richard nixon and the whole checkers thing with the dog that was given him as a gift and he was like yeah we got a dog we're gonna keep it our daughters love it and everyone saw that it's like this humanizing thing and they're like let's come with a nice slogan for he slaughtered your family you know and unfortunately because of my age whenever i hear of course like i know about richard nixon and everything but whenever i hear about richard nixon and checkers i only think about Futurama now, which I actually am rewatching now. Everybody says that this campaign was very successful because he won him and his party. His party swept both chambers of government.

He won with 70% of the vote. But people should also understand there was the implicit threat that if he didn't win, he would start the fucking war again. And, you know, after about 20 years of instability and war, most people just wanted it to end. It wasn't because they were such a big fan of Charles Taylor. You know, it was like, look, maybe if we give this guy the presidency for a couple of years, he'll stop killing people. This ended up not being true. See, this is what they could have done if they just let Hillary Clinton be president. I was going to say there's going to be a lot more dead dogs if Pete Buttigieg had been

elected. For the record, no, I'm not one of those Hillary people. If you've never listened to this fucking show before, we're all left wing on this podcast to varying degrees. What did Charles Taylor know about Hillary Clinton? It's just it is always very, very funny when people, like, because all the Clintons ever do is just find ways to

like get people to donate fucking huge amounts of money to their foundation and for Bill Clinton to sexually harass like women under the age of 25. The idea that they've got like the technodrome for having their enemies murdered is just very, very funny to imagine. Like Hillary couldn't not fucking just find a way to

trip on every goddamn banana peel yes ever put in front of her she didn't bother to campaign in michigan ignoring all of the uh the advice of her staff but yeah i'm sure she's running a super secret black hand cell of assassins exactly it's like it's like every you know colin powell fucking rest in piss because he failed the moral test of his lifetime did in one of his leaked emails say about Hillary, even though he was friends with it, everything she does, she manages to screw up with hubris somehow. That's a direct quote. But like, so take that. That's the guy who knows it. Do you really think she was running Foxhound?

Well, that's generally my thought about general like American conspiracy theory. Like, you know, they plan the 9-11 attacks and they covered up like the government couldn't even roll out a health care website well see i was gonna say like the true true link between charles taylor and the clintons is they're both very good at killing mass amounts of impoverished people yeah i mean Now, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Charles Taylor rapidly turned into a tyrant. He oppressed minorities even more than normal. He ruled by decree. He murdered political opponents and attempted to make Liberia into a regional power by funding rebel groups in neighboring countries.

Most famously, the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, in Sierra Leone. Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, in Sierra Leone, one of the most psychotic groups of people to ever grace the planet Earth, and one day will be a topic of a series. He probably became the most infamous and well-known weapons and blood diamond smugglers in the modern world, getting most of them from Russian arms dealer Viktor But, who has the sick nickname the Merchant of Death, and became much more known in recent news articles for being switched back to Russia for Brittany Griner in a prisoner exchange, where he promptly joined the most psychotic far-right political party in Russia and started talking about how the federal prison system has like 72 genders or something. Yeah, exactly. Basically, this guy who was a

Soviet Jew who grew up in Brighton beach that they made a movie about starring Nicholas Cage is now basically like a, an anti-woke Facebook grandpa. I should have Russian. He, that part of the movie is not based on boots life. That's, that's like an amalgamation of other people.

Boot was born and raised in the Soviet union. I believe he was in the Soviet air force and he was a Colonel. um yeah i just watch movies with nicholas cage and get all my history yeah did you know that there was a fucking there's a guy who got to wear john travolos's face wait are you saying it was some kind of face off something like that yeah nick nicholas cage and both got that privilege oh god you have to cut that part out. Now, finally, he... Finally, Charles Taylor pissed off enough people they began funding rebel groups to oppose him.

He pissed off so many people that the entire economic community of the Western African states, or ECOWAS, who had literally just monitored the election that put him in power, plotted against him, leading to two different rebel invasions in the North and South,

starting a second civil war in 1999. Now, to really get into the meat of our story, we have to jump back in time where all good African dictator stories begin in Boston, Massachusetts. Oh, God. Okay. Hell yeah.

Because Charles Taylor visited America once upon a time, like many Liberians, he traveled there for university. He eventually met Bernice Emanuel in Boston in 1970. The two eventually fell in love, moved in together, and Bernice eventually got pregnant. They had a baby boy named, and this is a very Liberian name, Charles MacArthur Emanuel. And they settled in for a normal life. Taylor at the time was still in college, but he was in the process of dropping out. And he was working at shit jobs at Sears and selling insurance for the Mutual of Omaha company in order to pay the bills. I just want to know, like, what was Charles Taylor Sr's uh opinion on duncan donuts like was it was he getting his tall ice was he getting some munchkins to go along with it look i think it's fair to say

that uh he's probably a fan he's a pretty big americana guy uh don't talk to charles taylor until he's had his morning dunk i mean it would be also very funny if it turned out that he didn't get into rap until much later that he he was just a huge extreme fan. Charles Taylor himself, probably not the biggest. Actually, if you guys want to talk to him, he's closer to you than you think, but we'll get to that point. Now, this went on for eight years. Taylor eventually said, fuck this noise and went back to Liberia and helped launch a coup

in the 1980s. He also married someone else and only went... Incredible divorce divorced dad energy him and bernice were never married um and and the person that he marries back in liberia is more of a political power play than anything else uh so like big dead instead of like paying child support and you know like being there for my family i'm going to abscond and launch a coup it gets worse um he he went back to the u the US because political heat in Liberia got so bad he thought he might get murdered.

This is probably a pretty good feeling that he had because he embezzled around $10 million from the government and ran away with it. He then used this money to lavish it upon his American family, buying them anything they could ever want. Though he had eventually caught

a warrant for this little embezzlement trick from the Liberian government and was eventually arrested upon it, pending extradition to almost certain execution when he was in the United States. Though this wasn't going to hold down old Tricky Chuck. Taylor conned a car thief into arranging his escape and broke out of the Plymouth County Jail in Massachusetts, fled the country and ran for you guessed it Libya to get training for Muammar Gaddafi. Yes! Yes!

The unifying theory of Muammar Gaddafi it all comes back to Gaddafi if you don't understand my enthusiasm sign up to the Patreon listen to the episode we did about Gaddafi we had a very very fun episode on the patreon you should sign up for it it's really good when i read the sentence that he ended up working with goddavi i audibly sighed and like put my head in my hands because i was

just like of course he did um oh i feel like that's also like kind of the the mise en abyme of this show is you put your head in your hands and you're like knowing both that it's fucked up and also that we're just gonna start hooting about it yes that is i am hooting i am hollering did like charles taylor give um i'm slapping my green book on my desk did charles taylor bring back like you know like a grandmaster flash like tape and give it to gaddafi and he's like hmm this is very good now bernice and her son moved on with their lives. She married another guy and the family moved to Orlando, Florida. And it's noted in a source, they're like one street over from the amusement park that's there. I don't know why that's important.

It's just funny to me when in the context of this episode. As Charles, his son, because there's Charles, I'll call Charles Taylor, Charles Taylor, and Charles the son, Charles, until he eventually steps in by Chucky, but not yet. His son grows up, and he never heard from his dad. They assumed that he was dead or in prison, which they were about 50% correct

because he did end up in more than one prison over this gap year. Then in 1989, on Christmas Eve, Taylor reemerged as a self-styled revolutionary leader invading Liberia with a small rebel army. A month later, Charles, now going by the nickname Chucky,

went with his mother to county clerk's office to change his name to that of his stepfather, becoming Roy Belfast Jr. This is still his legal name. Once again, combs back to Gaddafi. This is still his legal name. Once again, comes back to Gaddafi. This is still his legal name.

Pretty much everybody who knew Chucky, which I'll keep using that name because it's generally what he's known by, even though his legal name, per the Bureau of Prisons, is Roy Belfast Jr. I'm going to go with Chucky. He says that everybody says he was very shy,

he was super awkward, and he was a nerd. He never partied or drank and instead of play Dungeons and Dragons with his friends, which he had very few of. Keep that in mind for later goals. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not hating on Chucky. I'm not. I'm not hating on Chucky. I that's not me, but I have in this field in which we work.

We have simply met that guy. Now, he wasn't the son of a West African dictator, but we have met that guy. That we know of. That we know of. This is my podcast co-host, Jerk Van Der Kloof. His family moved to Armenia in 1996 and won't say why. But see, it's funny because this just proves that all of the 80s satanic panic around dungeons and dragons is totally justified because if your kid is playing dungeons

and dragons or doing any tabletop role-playing game they too could become a west african warlord hold just imagine the guy who armenianized his name is now jerk vander clurkian is like 100% fucking in your mentions yelling at you about how like he wants to be anti-trans he's just like a super super system of a down he's just like massive he's calling me a turk and a traitor exactly he's a system of the down fan but he basically he got the stems of their original recording so we can only listen to john dolmian's part this is this is a type of guy massive system of a down fan but hate Serge Tonkin for his politics you know it's really it's really really funny that like cultural entryism

that's another one of those examples the fucking like system of a down does this and it's like the most right-wing shit has liked their music but I feel like the best example of cultural entryism trying to change like facilitate political change failing is rage against the machine oh yeah it's like every single one of us knows right-wing shititheads. In fact, Joe and I were in the military with them who, like, fucking love Rage Against the Machine. Yeah. And it's like,

yep, sorry, buddy. Maybe blaring, like, killing in the name of, like, who do you think they're singing about, guys? I wonder. Like, rolling into fucking Fallujah playing, like,

Vietnam. I was like, I wonder what this song's about. It's badass, though. But this guy we're imagining is just the Armenian version of Olly London. Ugh.

Fuck. Now, Chucky did not like his biological father and never talked about ever wanting to reconnect with him in any way. For example, one time Charles called him but asked to speak to Bernice, who was not there. Chucky didn't recognize Charles' voice. And when Charles said, hey, by the way, I'm your dad. Do you want to talk? Chucky said no and hung up the phone, which I identify with Chucky in this situation. I was going to ask, I didn't want to be a dickhead joke, but I was just sort of like, I felt as though there were many, many opportunities in just what you've said so

far to be like, oh yeah, that's basically my dad too. So I'm actually glad you said it and cleared the air because I felt like I was going to be an asshole if I made a joke about it. You could cut the dad joke tension with a machete in this situation. Though a few years later, Charles called and kept calling, constantly inviting to come to Liberia, where

he was a warlord, and Liberia is trapped in the middle of a civil war. Finally, for some reason, Bernice accepted the invitation and took chucky um because liberia in the middle of a civil war sounds like the perfect time and place for a vacation i don't know what they were thinking here um but this is this is like uh like my friends who are like different context not a war zone but like my friends from Ghana and Nigeria who are like, their parents

threaten them if they were bad as a teenager. It's like, oh, you're going to get sent to the home country. And then you fuck up in school and you think you're going on a holiday and suddenly you're in Lagos for an entire summer or a year. I have an even better example of this. It's really

funny. There was an American teenager whose parents were immigrants from Jamaica who, growing up in new york kept getting kept fucking around and while he was like a middle schooler got kicked out of school and so his parents like that's it you're living with your aunt and uncle in fucking morcombe lancashire and his name is buster rhymes buster rhymes lived in morcombe for like a year. That's the ultimate punishment. Yes, it literally was. Yes. But like, this is like when I found out or when the world found out that 21 Savage is English. It's like, this is so strange and he cannot leave the US.

But it's one of those things that's different. Like, yes, he's English in the sense that like, okay, his mom was from Dominica. She moved over to the United Kingdom after Dominica. It was like one of the last caribbean colonies to gain independence so he was technically a british citizen who's born and then like but he was raised in atlanta and he was absolutely american but like much like mf doom was fucked because of stupid passport laws and citizenship laws yeah like it's exactly it's like it's not like it's not like 21 savage was gonna say you know like fucking you know pints with the lads in it or something like that like he's american

she's stuck on my willy oh it's so delightful if i kept you in west gloucestershire you'll soon catch the rifle yes roger charles arranged for bernice and their daughter because they did have a daughter as well to stay at a separate house but insisted that chucky stay with him chucky a kid from orlando who played Dungeons and Dragons, soon found himself surrounded by one of the strangest militias of all time. They would dress up like clowns, cross-dress as women, be ripped out of their minds on

various kinds of drugs, and wear amulets that they insisted made them invincible. Many of them were child soldiers from the, and this is, I swear to God, this is actually called the boys unit that would call charles taylor dad wasn't there another thing with a small boy unit because i thought that was such is this the same thing yes because i remember the backstory in metal gear solid 2 about how like i

want to say it was riding was like trained in the small boy unit i was like this is so fucking stupid this is so funny and then i was like's like, no, actually that's legitimately a real thing. Yeah. I know this, but Kojima is a huge fan of Charles Taylor. That's not true. That's not true. Kojima loves,

Kojima loves Mads Mikkelsen. He loves Guillermo del Toro and Charles Taylor. But I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking of Chucky, like, do you guys want to play Dungeons and Dragons? I'm a level 12 maid. It's just so funny though, because you have

these really kind of melodramatic this year movie announcer voice actors doing the characters in Mel Garcelle. He was trained in the small boy unit. It just sounds so fucking ridiculous, but it's like no, it was a real thing. What if we got Charles Taylor to make the world's deadliest

twing? His name is Raiden and everyone hates him. Get ready for this video game. Two thirds of it is Raiden being a bitch to his girlfriend. And just imagining Chucky like, hey, guys, you want to roll for initiative? He looks at all the young, the child soldiers are doing lines of heroin mixed with gunpowder. Like, no, we're good, dog. You do your own thing yeah exactly it's like trying trying to fucking break out the 12-sided dice with like a bunch

of kids younger than you who are just like sucking on gin popsicles being like yo what the fuck is a board game you want to go uh fire a rocket launcher wildly into the air um oh and this is unimportant but this is all taking place in uh in charles taylor stronghold bong city yes we're getting ripped out of it we're listening to reefer sutherland we're like throwing around dice talking about wizards with like kids ripped out their minds on opium really insane detail about liberia that i happen to know i promise this won't take too long friend of mine uh his brother-in-law was diplomatic security for a long time for the state department and then did private security stuff like not like fucking contractor in iraq shit but like private security where it was not war zones but almost and one of the places that he

did it was in liberia uh post the end of the conflict. But he had been there during the conflict, I think, with the State Department. And he said that there was a... And like I said, this is apocryphal and this is heard third hand. So if someone who knows this to be false, please fucking comment. He said that there was a kind of a folk legend. It may not be true or not, but that people who, because there was a second wave of people, black Americans emigrating to Liberia, repatriating to Africa in the 60s and 70s. And that one of the things that was sort of known that people would do was kind of like they would make it almost a ceremony of either tearing up or just throwing their US passport

into the ocean. And he said that apparently in the late 90s early 2000s there was this this phenomenon they called these people beachcombers who were completely out of their mind who would just go out on the beach all day and dig holes with their hands trying to find an american passport and it wasn't necessarily their passport it's yamashita's gold but passports it's just a rumor that there would be an american passport in the beach but like they're trying to find the one piece that's the level of fucking just like insane desperation that was going on there and it's just like also because it's like people like oh they want to get

their passports back it's like listen dude if you're still an american citizen you can fucking repatriate they'll get you back yeah like they may not ripping up your passport does not delete your citizenship it doesn't believe believe me as someone who would probably long term be advantaged by renouncing their american citizenship that emphatically does not make you no longer an american citizen and it certainly doesn't obviate your requirements to fucking file your taxes and pay pay and basically be surveilled by the u.s government everywhere you go so i correct join us next week for netflix's live action rendition of liberian one piece so that's the end of my etiquette sorry sorry for the uh for the

chuck you i mean not to be fair if it's gonna be if we're gonna have african one piece it's gonna be in somalia it'd almost certainly be in like nigeria with their sick uh movie industry that they have have you ever seen a nigerian one piece have you ever seen a nigerian action movie they fucking rule they fucking whip ass they do so much with like a stolen copy of 3d studio from 1999 it's incredible yeah nollywood movies are great i mean look like i think nollywood movies are extremely entertaining but i know nothing about the cultural context one of my friends in the army was nigerian american he's just like i cannot fucking believe you like those movies do you know how many times i've been forced to sit by my aunt my aunties and uncles to watch shit i fucking hate now now you know how I feel about Mrs. Brown's boys being the most popular tv show in the UK

Chucky was impressed by his warlord father and this seemed to have a massive impression on him because when he returned to the United States he was a completely different person now there is like stories that he saw like a lot of violence when he was there but i can't actually confirm that because it mostly is just stories from him and he lies a lot about himself um he began partying drinking a ton and doing every drug he'd get his hands on some of this may have just been because he was now in his late teens and he's in orlando When his friends were getting arrested by the police one night,

Chucky, a guy who had seemingly never been in a fight before in his life, jumped in and started fighting the cops. In 1994, he and a friend of his attempted to mug a man at gunpoint. When the victim ran home and his friend followed him, they broke into his house,

held the entire family up with a pistol, and then when the cops showed up, he tried to run, run but was arrested he was charged with four different felonies but because he was 16 he faced a much reduced sentence of three years was released on bail and was pending a trial then he attempted suicide in a bathtub like this was shocking to everyone who knew him i mean charles taylor doesn't know his son but uh bernice was completely like taken aback she like she often said that he was a completely different person when he came back from liberia the first time um and his mom had no idea what to do for her son and because you know it's the united states in the early to mid 90s and also it's just the united

states in general there is no real mental health care to see you know what what has happened to my son so instead she called up charles taylor who is again still in the middle of a civil war and said i'm sending you chucky he's it's your turn to deal with him see if they had intervention health care we could have saved chucky taylor and also stopped people from listening to car seat headrest i don't know what that is every time you guys talk about music it's you're speaking a foreign language to me no that that that is that is for a certain you could just invent a fucking band name and i wouldn't i'd be like yeah that sounds like some indie band i don't know no that that that's a joke for the discord they'll get it now despite him still facing again four felonies he left the united

states becoming a you know a wanted person and arrived in bong county liberia in his dad's rebel camp which was in bong city fucks i should i will say that as many times as i can i will i am gonna put so many like sounds into the recording. Now, even Charles Taylor knew this was not a great place for his son. Other kids, sure, but not his. And sent him to Accra, a private academy, which was in Ghana.

Now, I think at this point he started to learn the kind of person that he had turned his son into because Chucky was promptly arrested and expelled from Accra for possessing a kalashnikov rifle on school grounds he's doing fucking like red hot dabs out of an ak-47 he's just trying to bring ghana american culture or bring an assault rifle to school he also had a ton he also had a ton of drugs um now yeah now like we said eventually charles taylor took over liberia

and he took his son back with him from ghana moving into a palace in monrovia and putting him in another prep school the college of west africa he also got expelled from that one again for bringing a gun to school um so how do you uh this shocked me right this college is in liberia and it says college but it's like high school um how do you manage to get expelled from a school in a country where your dad is not only president but that president is charles fucking taylor yeah you got to be a massive dickhead i'm not gonna lie the school like trustee board is like look we know your dad's gonna kill us all but like we you can't come here anymore yeah i mean it's one of those things where you really have to fuck up so undeniably before they're actually willing to do that so one imagines that that it was it was more worth their time to be rid of him while running a school

than to worry about pleasing Charles Taylor. Which, yeah, like you said, saying something. It's impressive. At this point of his life, Chucky began to pretend to be a gangster from the streets of the US. Remember, he grew up in the 90s, heavily influenced by East Coast rap culture. And this is not the kind of person he ever was in any kind of reality.

He dressed up like his favorite East Coast rappers. He did his hair in cornrows, which was a hairstyle pretty much unheard of in Liberia. He wore a Kevlar vest everywhere he went. He wore a do-rag and he carried a pistol. Mind you, again, Chucky was never really, he was never in a gang. He never knew anybody in a gang. But now that he had the power of his dad as president at his back it allowed him to live out his wildest fantasies with zero repercussions at all and for people

who are listening and that have seen lord of war nate i know you have tom i don't think you have but now when i watch lord of war the first time obviously that meant like that guy is supposed to be a stand-in for charles taylor but what I didn't know is the stand-in for his son in the film, the stand-in for Chucky drives around, I believe, in a Cadillac, and he fires a machine gun into the air wherever he goes. The Gun of Rambo guy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring the Gun of Rambo, yeah.

I did not know that was actually based on Charles Taylor's actual son. And to be clear, Chucky did not have a sick cadillac or a machine gun he probably didn't talk with a funny accent like no he was american he probably but he was dead he was desperate to write shock ones part three what he did he had to settle for driving around in a volkswagen jetta and firing a pistol out of the window which is significantly less cool nobody is cool driving around a volkswagen jetta it's impossible i disagree i fucking disagree when i was back in bedford indiana i saw a dude who had gotten a diesel jetta and he put a fucking rolling coal smokestack on the front hood that totally

blocked the fucking drivers who filled a vision but was rolling coal on the on like state road 32 that was simultaneously less cool and so dumb it's awesome. Look, man, Southern Indiana is not a place I ever want to live again, but it does periodically amaze me, and that was one of those examples. Whipping shitties in a Volkswagen Jetta in Liberia while firing a pistol out the window and playing

airy Rick Ross tapes. I think at this point, Rick Ross is still a prison guard. All right. Now, he had a girlfriend back in the united states uh they're both about 18 and they've been writing letters the whole time and he eventually talked her into moving liberia moving to liberia and they got married there in 2000 now obviously charles taylor was supporting his son this entire time but unlike kind of weirdly like adolf hitler uh he would not allow

his like stupid relative to just coast on his money and he tried to get him to have a job if you remember willie hitler in an episode a long time ago um attempted to leverage his uncle being adolf hitler for a cushy job where he did nothing and hitler just got him a job at a used car lot i mean willie hitler sounds like a terrible game she was like willie hitler yeah he uh he insisted on keeping his last name for a long time um so charles taylor pushed him his son to go get a job and it turned out chucky wasn't so good at working he got into the timber industry but even with the influence of his dad couldn't keep his job. He kept getting fired for simple things such as never going to work.

All of the expulsions and all around shitbaggery had also ruined the budding relationship with his father. But as things in Liberia got worse and worse because of his dad being president, he told his dad he had a new idea for a job. Security. being president he told his dad he had a new idea for a job security national security to be specific despite the fact he had no experience or education on most things but specifically this because eco was had already supported the north and south invasions of the country specifically the from the north out of guinea So Charles Taylor is like peak paranoid, and he wants people loyal to himself rather than anybody who's competent, right?

He wants people who aren't going to overthrow him. As much of a monster as Charles Taylor is, you do appreciate that he wasn't going to raise no nepo baby. Oh, hold on to that thought. See, you got ahead of yourself, Tom. You got ahead of yourself. It's like you're new around here or something. So with the backing of his dad,

Chucky founded the Anti-Terrorist Unit, or the ATU. He built an entire training facility for this new unit in Bonn County. This headquarters quickly turned to a fortress of doom that everyone was terrified of. And because Chucky is a teenager, he calls this place Cobra Base because he's still a huge fucking nerd. Now, Chucky knew he had no idea what he was doing when he talked his father into making him the head of national security of a country. So he imported mercenaries, mostly from the Gambia, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, and

Liberia. Because he knew Gaddafi was going to come back up here somewhere, right? Now, together, these guys created what had to be the most psychotic training program the world has ever seen since the Kryptia in Sparta. The government

would consistently feed the ATU conscripts, many of whom are child soldiers. Most of whom are child soldiers. Training mostly boiled down to non-stop physical training combined with starvation and savage beatings. Conscripts who didn't drop dead from the combination of those things, which many of them did, would routinely be killed in other ways. Again, this was meant to be training.

This included ordering conscripts to shoot other conscripts while they learned to use their rifles. Others were burned alive during rope drills, which required them to climb over flaming barrels of gasoline. This was so insane that it was even beyond the pale for Charles Taylor, the world's most renowned champion of child soldier slavery, and he removed and replaced Chucky from Cobra Base multiple times. However, because Charles could trust his son to not overthrow him, he was always quickly put back in command, and the ATU rapidly became the most powerful arm of the government security apparatus, so much so that Taylor gutted the liberian military

down to nothing because he was worried that it would overthrow him the atu got almost all of the money and the best equipment that could be found in the country which they promptly used to commit some of the most horrific war crimes of the second liberian civil war i think it's also worth noting as well that like like chucky was a kind of an understudy of bill horace as well who like escaped liberia like in the early 2000s who's like no unit did like crucifixions like the most insane levels of torture so like this is the guy he's learned from at one point rebels raided a town in the north and the atu is dispatched to handle it instead of trying to explain what happens next i will simply read directly from the federal indictment against him he selected three persons from the group and similarly shot them in front of the others the atu detained several survivors

and brought them to a base at gabata by that time the prisoners had been pistol whipped by chucky and several atu officers the prisoners were then then... Okay, before I go on, content warning. The prisoners were then tossed into pits which were covered with iron bars and barbed wire. The torture, including being burned by cigarettes, having plastic melted onto their genitals. Chucky ordered the execution of a prisoner, but

when an ATU officer raised his gun, Chucky instructed him to cut off the man's head instead. Several officers held the man down, forced his head over a bucket then the soldier severed the victim's head from uh cutting his throat from back to front and then dumped the bucket full of blood on the other prisoners remember when he was just a nerd playing dungeons and dragons yeah that was nice as tom's gonna have to cut out all the fucking cathartic vaping sounds from my audio track um it's like the jokes are ridiculous,

but then you realize that these people are actual fucking monsters. Yeah, exactly. Chucky Taylor is a fucking asshole. And one of Liberia's generals complained to Charles Taylor about his son's death squad. The general was then arrested

and delivered to Cobra Base. This general, General Tarnui, was a fucking vicious war criminal himself, like everybody within the Liberian government at the time, and he still thought Chucky had gone too far. However, in my opinion, what is much more likely is that he was worried that the AT would eventually come to

him and arrest him and do that to him because of their growing sense of paranoia. Now, Tarnui did survive the torture that came next. He managed to flee liberia and he became a parking lot security guard in baltimore maryland a little bit not giving back to the community important but i thought it was weird that like if you if you pull into somewhere in baltimore maryland your car might be being protected by a liberian war criminal yeah or you

go to like you you buy anything from a grocery store on the south side of staten island like yeah it's yeah soon yeah like i i suppose maybe this is a random thought but given its cobra base do you reckon uh chucky taylor dressed up as cobra commander i would like to think like well he's because he's a nerd of course he's going to be into cosplay if you look at the rest of the the wild militias that made up the Liberian security apparatus, dressing up as Cobra Commander doesn't even rate as the top five weirdest thing out there. That's just a normal military uniform. Soon, Chucky got into the family business, gun-rutting and dealing in blood diamonds out of Sierra Leone.

He became so well-known in this trade, working for some of the worst people in the world, including fucking Al-Qaeda, that he eventually had something in common with his dad, a UN-mandated security travel ban. Like father, like son. At one point, when infamous gunrunner, Leonid Minin, had his Italian apartment raided, they found direct faxes between him and Chucky, as well as four prostitutes and a kilo of cocaine.

Though he was in Italy, I assume they just gave him those things when he crossed the border. There's a Blood song called huge gold ak-47 and it's not the kind of music that fucking chucky taylor would like or produce as we'll get into later but that's all i can think of when i think of these guys like a huge gold ak-47 would probably be impractical as fuck but it's the kind of thing these dudes would just have i wouldn't be surprised if he had one yeah now this might shock you all this torture and murder really weighed heavily on his marriage and he had pretty much abandoned his family at this point eventually in 2002 he simply walked into his family home in monrovia and told his wife he wanted a divorce bought her and

their child a one-way ticket back to florida and didn't speak to them. Though they never actually signed the divorce papers. I think Chucky, because he hadn't matured since the age of 16, I think. I think he just kind of thought if he said that he wanted a divorce, it made it happen. And he is slowly peeling away from the realm of reality. Through a combination of drugs and being allowed to do whatever the fuck he wanted, reality was bending and breaking around him. His wife and kids seemed to be the

only thing keeping him somewhat tethered to Earth. With them out of the picture, Chucky got even worse. He murdered his own personal driver for hitting a dog with his car. He didn't kill him because he liked dogs. He killed him for denting his BMW, which makes him just the average bmw owner yeah that's what i was about to say like uh as the commonly known acronym for bmw is big massive wanker i mean look living in the united kingdom

i would fully fucking support that absolutely that's correct if I'm going to die on my bike, it's probably going to be somewhere in Hackney or Bethnal Green, or rather Hackney or Tower Hamlets, and I'm going to get hit by a 7 Series going 100 miles an hour on a road that was built for a single horse cart. I have no choice but to agree with both of you, but also elevate Mercedes drivers along with them. That's true. In my opinion, and Tom can correct me, mercedes nowhere near as popular here as bmw you should come to the caucuses sometimes like it it's kind of a difference like if you are like a young guy

who like and it's funny because like all these guys have cars on finance like they are two payments away from getting all this shit repossessed yeah but it's like like you want to get like a blacked out bmw with like tinted windows and like alloy wheels or you're getting like a silver merc like i nearly got knocked over crossing the street a couple of weeks ago by a dude in like a murk because i was like going across the street he pulled out he like drove up street pulled directly to where people are supposed to cross and it's just like a little nate you know the place down the street it's like a little narrow gap where it's one way and like there's a woman who like nearly got her foot ran over and just started

slamming on his car and he just looked over and told her to fuck off. And I'm like... As anybody who knows, I was hit by a car a few months ago in the parking lot of my own apartment and it was a Mercedes. Now, when his driver hit this dog, he ordered the rest of his bodyguards to beat the driver until, quote, you see his bones and shit.

This is also from the federal indictment. Now, by this point, Charles Taylor was badly losing the war and the special court for Sierra Leone had indicted Charles Taylor on 17 counts of crimes against humanity, which is pretty much all of them outside of genocide. So Chucky eventually reached back out to his wife and managed to talk her back into returning Liberia with her kid. She was urged by Chucky's mom to try to control him and rein him back from his more insane tendencies.

And his wife agreed, saying, quote, even though he was a shitty father and a shitty husband, I didn't want him to die. Though when she returned, he was long gone, constantly juiced to the gills on drugs. Though when she returned, he was long gone, constantly juiced to the gills on drugs, most likely truly an impressive amount of cocaine that could only being a warlord could bring someone. She said that the international court indictment of his father had cemented the idea to him that it was only a matter of time before their little empire of whores came crashing down and they both died. He spent his days ripping fat lines of coke and heroin, wandering out into the streets to direct the ATU to kidnap and murder people at random. As rebels closed in on Monrovia, Chucky's wife flushed his drugs down the toilet, causing him to nearly murder her. So she and their child got back on the plane and got the hell out of the country for the last time, and they haven't seen each other since. When the Battle of Monrovia started, it immediately turned into such a chaotic clusterfuck that people who live in Monrovia call it World War III.

Multiple different sides fought one another in a swirling miasma of war crimes, petty crimes, robbery, and things I don't really feel like talking about right now. Rather than face the same fate as Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor and his son ran, going first to Nigeria. Though Chucky himself kind of bounced around around doing drugs and crime everywhere he went he uh before like the you know the heat closed in on him he'd fuck off somewhere else at one point he landed in trinidad and cut a 20 track mixtape and as badly as i want to hear this mixtape i can't find it because i don't think he tried to do anything with it like this is before the the era of like online music like soundcloud isn't a thing yet so he probably just

like if a physical copy exists that's probably the only way that it does exist however however however thanks to a guardian article i do have some of his lyrics oh we read them out we ain't taking no slack y'all try to handle my lane bodies and stacks take this for free six feet under is where you're gonna be so yeah he's a horror core rapper but i was gonna say like if he had like essentially gotten away with everything he could have have been on a very mid Lil Wayne mixtape. I was guessing on a Juicy J song, like an album deep cut or a mixtape. He has the clout.

Who wouldn't want the son of a dictator slash convicted war criminal within a couple years on their tape, right? It's like having any other annoying instagram personality who has no distinctive talent but having them in the background is like the hype man is is

you know yeah i mean like for those i've been i've been out of paying attention to the to the mixtape scene for a while but for those who may remember before gucci man got sober and became like uh mr positivity when he was really in the doldrums of his career falling apart when he was like mega addicted and like going to prison for throwing a woman out of a car he did a mixtape with V Nasty now if that name doesn't ring a bell don't it does not she so remember Crayshon and the Gucci Gucci song big up Crayshon who is a white girl from oakland who had a trillion times less flow than she did unbelievably bad and yet for some reason gucci man did a mixtape with her

because it's one of those things where it's like well there's enough of a following this is gonna get some eyeballs on it someone's people are gonna listen to it just because and it's like so i agree with you had he gotten out of liberia unscathed from this, like he might very well have been like on one of the sort of like people who, who, whose career fell off when they were no longer involved with three six, but we're still wrapping in Memphis mixtapes. I really like the idea of him doing a collab with little Zan. No,

but like, imagine what the cover of a collab album between chucky taylor and gucci main would have been like like that that exact era like you know 2006 7 until like when he went away and got like sober and everything just like banger after banger after banger like cover art like imagine like it's just like the two of them like with ak's or some shit like i don't know also it's like this guy obviously had a lot of bricks of cocaine in his life so he's gonna have to partner up with a cocaine rapper so i would see i can't imagine pusha t wanting to do a track with him but who does that leave fucking rick ross it all comes full circle exactly i think rick ross is

still a prison guard no way oh nine by oh nine ten nah man he was he that's where we're at now aren't we like we're like 2005 2006 yeah i don't really know it was rick ross to be honest i think he was a prison guard in the 90s to be honest with you but yeah because we're around like the carter three the carter two yeah three was oh eight so yeah we're good no i i do think rick ross i i'm i'm live googling because i so we got to do sometimes is you know like like there's it's not even google i'm using fucking microsoft edge every single one of us on this recording is going to die from a sunburn we have to google rap facts first of all memorized tom is fired for using bing

yeah no first rick ross album august 8th 2006 port of miami there you go there you go it's possible he done it he should he could have done a collab with rick ross there we have it wake up in a new bugatti but it's uh volkswagen jetta i think i'm big meech chucky taylor something something something something, something, something. You come from Liberia. What color is your bugatti?

Chuckie Taylor would have been more like big lurch. Okay. Uh, for people who don't know who big lurch is, don't Google what he did. It's awful. Okay. Well,

I won't, I won't do that at all. Big, big lurch. It was a horror core rapper who ate a person. Um, Oh, so he's like,

he's like fucking, what is it? Like mayhem, but for horror yes uh now eventually eventually in 2006 nigeria arrest charles taylor for extradition to the hague to stay in trial for countless crimes this made chucky panic and decide that he was finally going to go home back to florida and he was arrested upon arrival now he was not arrested for what you think he was arrested for he was arrested because he was traveling at a forged passport now this is al capone talks the thing is reading that big and the thing is like the government had no

fucking idea what he'd been up to in liberia like they knew about his weapon smuggling and diamond smuggling and shit, but they originally only charged him for traveling on a falsified passport. He pled guilty and was sentenced to 11 months in prison. Only then did his crimes slowly start to bubble to the surface as the FBI worked on their investigation about his smuggling. So the arm smuggling and diamond smuggling, stuff like that. So when the FBI started interviewing people involved in the smuggling. So the arm smuggling and diamond smuggling, stuff like that. So when the FBI started interviewing people involved in the smuggling ring, only then

did they learn about the crimes of the ATU, and the investigation quickly switched directions. Chucky managed to fall victim to probably the most obscure criminal statue on the books in the United States. One that prohibits US citizens from torturing

people abroad and he is so far the he was the first person to ever be charged with that crime and to my understanding the only one you're going to get charged with that for like making me sit on this show he pled not guilty and his defense did not inspire confidence in his ability to beat the charges. Now, he claimed that everything he did was covered by the Geneva Conventions, which I would argue is true, but not the way that he thinks it is. Another thing his lawyer did was attempt to compare the actions by the ATU to the United States so-called enhanced interrogation methods, also known as torture. Now, as funny as this is to do as a defense tactic, I don't think anybody in good faith could compare the two. Two things can be

bad at the same time while being very, very different and also bad. We're not going to go into the enhanced interrogation methods, but nobody is being thrown into barrels of burning gasoline. Though he couldn't escape the pile of evidence against him he broke down into complete nonsense he wrote to a guardian journalist who asked him to defend himself against some of the charges he said quote now the question arises am i a big fish in liberia and among pan-africanists in the region my response is i'm a mere tadpole in a vast ocean filled with sharks and mind you in his letter he's he has with as W with a slash through it. Scavengers and whales pounded by hurricanes.

Doesn't make any fucking sense. Then when his lawyers are busy attempting to explain away his crimes using America's own crimes, Chucky did the most Chucky thing possible and went on a long rant defending himself by defending US Marines who were charged with executing POWs

in Iraq. Again, this was to excuse what he had done. Somehow. Yeah, it's using the two things cannot be bad at once defense. And he was also operating under the idea that those Marines would not be prosecuted, and they were.

Yeah, but it's also interesting how legality has changed so much in the intervening years that like if that had happened if he'd have been in court now they would have used his music as well as evidence yeah probably or all of the pictures and documents and i mean like he was an official government employee now as you can imagine things are not going great for chucky in federal court. The federal prosecutor asked for 147 years in prison. His lawyer in his defense said, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, he's not being charged with murdering anybody. Let's say seven to 20 years, which is true.

He was not being charged with murdering anybody. They couldn't prove it behind a reasonable doubt. But in the indictment, they pretty much accepted that he killed at least seven people personally on top of ordering the deaths of what could conservatively hundreds of people. They just lacked the evidence to prove it. on five counts of torture, one count of conspiracy to torture, one count of using a firearm during the commission of a violent crime, that violent crime being torture, and one count of conspiracy to use a firearm in the commission of a violent crime, that crime also being torture. He was sentenced to 97 years in prison under the name Roy Belfast Jr., at which point he was sent to United States Penitentiary Lee, a high security prison in Virginia, and at this time of recording, he is still there and still insists he never did anything

wrong. At the same time Chucky was being brought up on charges, so was his dad, Charles Taylor, though his trial would go on for much longer because, you know, international criminal court trial, and it would come to a close in 2012, making him the first head of state to be prosecuted by the international court since Karl Donitz of Nazi Germany. Somehow, Taylor got less time in prison than his son. He was only sentenced to 50 years to Chucky's 97. Like his son, however, he is effectively a life prisoner because Charles Taylor is in his 60s and will die in prison.

And Nate, remember how I said Charles Taylor's closer to you guys than you'd think? Yeah. He is serving his life sentence, pretty much a life sentence, in His Majesty's Prison, Franklin in County Durham, England. All right. There you have it. Another reason to not go to Durham. You know who else is in Franklin prison?

Thomas Mayer, the man who murdered Joe Cox. Right, yeah. That would be the worst collab ever. I'm sorry, all the horrible politics in Britain first notwithstanding. I just even look at Thomas Mayer and know that man can never find the beat. It just will not happen. Charles Taylor's just writing letters to jk rowling and is insanely transphobic now he's he saw the he saw the victor boot thing with russian

he's like i just have to be anti-trans enough that maybe the brits will let me out they'll trade me back for somebody yeah yeah he signed that a that a let open letter that came out the other day oh yeah oh god so did the so did the guy who wrote the irish author who wrote a boy in the striped pajamas oh john boyne so bad the auschwitz birkenau memorial museum had to tell people to avoid it yeah it's like what if the holocaust was twee it's like great i mean i'm not gonna go super maybe that we could do as a bonus episode one day but like it's it's real bad for various reasons yeah it borders on holocaust denial so it's terrible charles taylor spends his time filing lawsuits against liberian government for failing to pay him his pension as former president i really really hope that someday i can fucking

pull this off but it depends on whether or not this guy in Liberia checks Facebook messages. I've told the story before that I went to infantry school with an exchange student from the Liberian Army who was a second lieutenant who had been a child soldier in the first Liberian Civil War. But because of, well, as you can imagine things in a country like that, he, as I most recently

checked, was the chief of staff of the Liberian Armed Forces. So when I was still a junior captain, he was a four-star general in Liberia. So if Dan ever checks his Facebook messages, maybe I can get him on the show. I will try. I will fucking try.

At the time of this podcast, Charles Taylor's ex-wife, Jewel Taylor, is the vice president of Liberia. During this time, she attempted to get a bill passed that made being gay punishable by death. This bill was blocked by then-president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the woman that Taylor

beat in the original election that started this entire fucking story in the first place. The end. This is one of those things where it's like you really have to kind of prepare yourself for the sort of sine wave experience of high highs and low lows like

funny in some parts and just that is your lion sled by donkeys guarantee yes yes honestly this is like the just the quintessential episode in so many ways and one day we'll absolutely revisit the librarians of war on a deep series

so we did that for a single episode years ago it is in our bad era of shows that i'm slowly thinking about redoing um i think that episode nick and i actually recorded into a single mic as well yeah like it's all it was some audio crimes but you guys the content was But yeah, I was just thinking about this as a closing thought. Like I recently, a bunch of people were laughing because they didn't know this, but if you were, you know, in high school or college age and listened to indie music in the early 2000s, you've heard of Broken Social Scene, the Canadian indie band that were like the fucking, like every cool kid's fucking favorite band.

But that's the one band you guys have brought up that I've actually fucking heard of. What you may not know is that one of the guys in broken social scheme one of the founding members of version social scene was also in the band len and helped write steal my sunshine all right that that is weird because canada has like 10 musicians i mean canada's got a ton of great bands actually i love canadian music but i will say this is very funny it's just like that's what this is like except then if both if both bands went on to commit like a mass killing that's what this show is like to be fair there's still time well i mean you could say that len len committed a mass killing in putting any other any of the other songs on you can't stop the bum rush one of the worst albums i've ever

heard in my life it just happens to have steal my sunshine on it this is the first time we've ever compared a horrific war crimes to canadian pop music um don't worry i won't stop there fucking moxie fruvius what's wrong with you guys in canada but beyond the fact that john gomeshi is now a fucking weird sex pest it sucked it was terrible anyway once again you're you're speaking bad names to me that might as well be in french right basically all i'm saying is just we can talk maybe maybe we can do lines led by donkeys where we do we met we do like historical fact than canadian music fact that would be my favorite episode ever but i know we've gone long so i We can talk. Maybe we can do Lions Led by Donkeys where we do historical fact and then Canadian music fact.

That would be my favorite episode ever. But I know we've gone long, so I will stop talking. Now, fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, you can donate to the show a single dollar on Patreon, ask us through a Patreon DM or through our Discord, or you can write it in a rap lyric and send it to Tom, uh we will ask it on air today's question is uh what is your least favorite regional cuisine of where you're from i'm assuming this can mean where we're actually we all live in different places from where we're

born now so i'm going to add an addendum you can make it something where you live or where you're from oh i i have an irish one coddle what's like boiled you say boiled mickey soup coddle so c-o-d-d-l-e it's like okay first what is mickey soup yeah what is this mickey mouse reduced into a sauce no so it's like a clarified broth that has like stuff like cabbage and carrots and like other veg in it, but it has boiled sausages in it. So they look like flaccid cocks. So is it a taste thing or you just don't want to eat boiled sausage? I don't know. Like, it's just like looking at it just gives me a visceral reaction.

It's just like floating pinkish sausages in a clear broth with loads of like veg in it i'm sure it's fine i think a clear broth is just water i made some pork bone broth the other night when i was making a i made it was braised no it was pork ribs. So I took all the meat off the pork ribs, had some marinated chicken, then made a bone broth out of the pork bones, and then used that broth to boil my rice. That sounds good. That sounds much better than whatever the fuck you just talked about.

Yeah, but I will say that if you skim the broth and get all the foam and shit out as you go, then I think that pork bone can be pretty clear. Not like completely fucking like water, but yeah, it won't be, it certainly isn't going to look like roasted beef bone broth. But yeah, fuck man, for me, you know, this is, I'm interested in yours, Joe, because we're both from the Midwest, but I would say, honestly, it's kind of a quotidian one, but coleslaw. And the reason I say it is that no one makes good coleslaw. It always tastes like shit. Best you can hope for at for at a barbecue or picnic a fucking potluck is that someone bought a container of coleslaw from like sam's club or costco because then it at least tastes like coleslaw that you get in

restaurants coleslaw can be really good but like as a midwest side dish coleslaw is disgusting i'm sorry coleslaw is disgusting it's an abomination you're fired again but fucking i don't know joe maybe your experience varies but in my experience every time someone makes coleslots bad it's always bad i will say midwest coleslaw does suck yeah well in the south they tend to use more mayonnaise and sometimes like vinegar like it's just a little more flavorful and also like a lot of midwest fucking indiana etc during general region people's like homemade food casseroles are just bland as hell yeah i'd say that like the blandness is what really gets me and once again britain is big indiana because that's my complaint with the place i moved to it's because the midwest is is when it comes to

food culture a post-soviet state but like we were we were on the train yesterday coming back like i said earlier in the episode and it was funny because like i got train food on the sncf train on the tgv and it was really good. And then I got a thing of not dull, like curried lentils. And it was good on the Eurostar, except it just didn't have any salt in it because it was made for British people. They hate salt. So it's just bland food, I guess. But yeah, I would say coleslaw is my answer. So I'm interested in yours, Joe, as a guy from one state north of me. My answer is going to piss off everyone who is from Michigan. worth of me my answer is going to piss off everyone who is from michigan um so a big michigan culinary thing is coney dogs um it now for people who are unaware of that is i don't

expect you to notice it is a hot dog with shit on top of it it's you know has it's it's has chili that doesn't sound appetizing i mean why would you want to eat it it's it's fine like there's like you know shitty chili on it like it comes from a can onions whatever but it's literally just the cheapest fucking hot dog on earth it's like saying oh man you know what i really miss about back home and you just say like taco bell like it's yeah it's just a hot dog and the stuff they put on top of it isn't even good it's like wolf brand chili from a can or some shit uh the only upside of it is you go to a diner that serves them also called a coney like and they're a dollar or two dollars or something but as a food it sucks it's not good we shouldn't be proud of that we made poor guy

hot dogs i thought we got rid of this in 2012 it's it's not good uh i mean i'm not saying that if like you go to one of these late night diners and you're drunk or whatever you can fuck up some conies and you feel better about it sure but you can do that literally with anything you go through a drive-thru and like i don't know get mcdonald's it's having the same effect it's greasy like awfulness that makes you feel better in the moment and makes you paint the toilet like you have dysentery the next morning like that that is the concept of a coney dog so that

is my answer because it's just a hot dog guys it's just a hot dog with canned chili on it we shouldn't be proud of this and that is our episode gentlemen plug your shows listen to trash future listen to what a hell of a way to shows listen to Trash Future listen to

What a Hell of a Way to Die listen to Kill James Vaughn get on the Patreon of this show great content out there $5 a month listen to everything Nate just said because I work on most of it listen to Beneath the Skin show about the history of everything told you the history of tattooing even if you don't like tattoos

or have tattoos it's a fun history show kind of like the way this show is meant to like tattoos or have tattoos it's a fun history show kind of like the way this show is meant to be about military history but it's about everything else other than military history and everybody thank you so much for listening if you like what we do here consider supporting the show on patreon for five dollars a month you can get everything five years of bonus content discord access um i'm working on the audiobook for hooligans of kandahar which will only be available on Patreon what else we have

premium series but like the history of Armenia and Sharpshow consider checking out my books of which there are a lot of wherever it is that you get books and until next time just just stay playing Dungeons and Dragons