Blood diamonds and Charles Taylor: the inside story

Should Naomi Campbell ever wish for some more dodgy diamonds to grace her supermodel limbs, Cindor Reeves knows the right people to call. It is a long way from his new home in Canada to the war-ravaged gem fields of his native West Africa, and a long time since the trade in "blood diamonds" was officially banned, but as long as Ms Campbell sticks to her habit of not asking where they came from, he says a deal could probably be done.

"I tell you, I could get on the phone to people out there tomorrow, and they will fly them to wherever you want," he says, shaking his head. "They are supposed to have brought this trade under control, but it still goes on, and as long as it does, we will have wars in Africa."

On the subject of illegal gemstones, it is fair to say that Mr Reeves is uniquely well connected, even if many of his best contacts are now either dead, on the run, or in jail. The tall, quietly spoken 38-year-old is the brother-in-law, no less, of Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator who gave Ms Campbell a gift of uncut diamonds in 1997, according to her recent testimony at his war crimes trial in the Hague. For four turbulent years, he was at the centre of the blood diamonds trade, acting as Taylor's personal envoy in his infamous arms-for-gems deals with the rebels in next door Sierra Leone, whose drug-crazed recruits raped, maimed and slaughtered their way through a war that claimed some 150,000 lives.

As such, he also knows about the appalling price in human misery that was paid so that "the chief", as his brother-in-law was known, could flatter pretty girls at parties. The gifts Taylor used to hand out to the likes of Ms Campbell were the proceeds of dozens of clandestine trips that Mr Reeves made into the Sierra Leone bush, where he would swap truckloads of weapons for tiny but highly valuable packages of stones, many from rebel-held mines being run as virtual slave camps.

Today, though, Mr Reeves' diamond smuggling days are over. Appalled by the slaughter that the trade was fuelling, in 2001 he turned against his own family and secretly approached the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, providing inside information that helped build much of the prosecution case against the former president and his cronies. He claims Taylor tried to have a hit squad kill him before he left Africa, and after an attempted kidnapping in Paris in 2004, allegedly conducted by a notorious Ukrainian arms dealer, he fled to Canada. Today, rather like the Mafioso-turned-informant Henry Hill, whose life was depicted in the film Goodfellas, he lives in suburban anonymity, although even here his mobile phone still rings with death threats.

"Taylor still has a lot of supporters," he told me, looking out over a street lined with station wagons, neatly kept lawns and garages with basketball hoops. "Nobody has done anything yet, but they tell me they know where my kids go to school."

Last week, though, on condition that his location was not disclosed, Mr Reeves agreed to an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, shedding first-hand light on the violent, sordid world that Ms Campbell became the chance beneficiary of during her meeting with Taylor at a party at Nelson Mandela's house in 1997. While the supermodel professed almost complete ignorance of the blood gems trade, describing Taylor's gift only as "dirty pebbles", Mr Reeves saw its every facet: the psychotic rebel commanders who ran the mines, the traumatised civilians forced to work in them, and the networks of shady middlemen who connected the trade with the outside world, including arms dealers and alleged agents of both al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

His story begins at a more innocent time, however, back in the early 1980s, when Taylor, then a senior figure in Liberia's military government, married Mr Reeves's elder sister Agnes. Then, as now, Mr Reeves recalls his brother-in-law as someone who was generous with gifts but ruthless if crossed: the uniformed figure who would buy him ice cream and sweets once beat up one of Agnes's other suitors in front of him. After being sacked for embezzlement and banished to the US, where he served time in jail, Taylor returned to Liberia to fight his way to power with a guerrilla army. During the 1990s he also backed the Revolutionary United Front rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone, whose troops were notorious for recruiting child soldiers into their ranks and mutilating civilians.

One reason for his support for such a brutal movement was that Taylor was a pal of the RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, who had trained with him in Libya as part of Colonel Gaddafi's now defunct programme for grooming foreign revolutionaries. Another, though, was that the RUF had seized control of some of the richest diamond fields in the world, Sierra Leone being one of the rare spots on the planet where they practically spring up out of the ground.

"A rough diamond looks a bit like a sugar lump, it's only when you wash it and the sunlight hits it that you see the gemstone beneath," said Mr Reeves, his eyes gleaming a little. "The diamonds from Sierra Leone are like no others. They are much less rough than those from Angola, South Africa or Australia – all they need is

a little cutting."

While diamonds in other countries are mostly accessible only by mining firms, in Sierra Leone they can be dug by anyone with a spade and panning set. The result, in such a poor, weakly-governed country, has for decades been an anarchic free-for-all, from which criminal gangs and armed groups have grown powerful.

Ironically, it was to inject a little honesty and transparency into the business that Taylor first recruited his brother-in-law. The Liberian leader was already thought to be earning millions from the trade, funding a lifestyle that included designer suits, Mercedes cars, his own personal throne and at least 30 children by different women. However, he grew exasperated at the way his diamond packages were often pilfered in transit, and turned to his relative as one of the few people he felt he could trust. From 1998 onwards, Mr Reeves would accompany a heavily armed convoy that would drive along the sunbaked tracks into Sierra Leone's RUF strongholds, trade weapons and ammunition for diamonds, and then ensure that every stone came home accounted for.

None of the parties involved in these deals were the kind of people whom it was wise to double-cross. On Mr Reeves's side was Taylor's diamond-buyer, a Senegalese-born jihadist who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and trained with Hezbollah, plus members of the president's feared "special security service". On the RUF side was commander Sam "Mosquito" Bockarie, a former disco-dancer and hairdresser known for his fondness for hacking off the limbs, ears and lips of his victims. His footsoldiers, meanwhile, had a fondness for drink and marijuana.

"Commanders would come in with parcels of diamonds wrapped in paper and tied with Scotch tape," said Mr Reeves. "We would meet in Bockarie's house and then stick a chair in the middle of the room for the diamonds to be counted on, with a white sheet draped underneath so that if any got dropped we could see them. Then I would declare how many we had received, and Bockarie would tell the commanders, 'Look, President Taylor's brother-in-law is here in person, so nothing is going to go missing'."

As Taylor's own emissary, Mr Reeves had little fear of being robbed en route: in his possession was a special ID card identifying him as a member of the First Family, which guaranteed him passage through any militia checkpoint, and warned that he should not be "molested" in any way. Even so, he would never let the diamonds out of his sight. "At night, I would put them in my front pocket and sleep face down so that nobody could get at them, although any robber would have been crazy to try. The guards would have shot them if they saw so much as a movement in the bushes."

Back in the crumbling Liberian capital, Monrovia, Mr Reeves would deliver the packages to Taylor: in similar fashion to the delivery to Naomi Campbell, the president preferred the hand-over to be done in the small hours. The stones duly checked by an expert, Taylor would then call the international dealers he retained, who included members of the Lebanese diaspora that has long operated all over Africa, and Europeans connected to the diamond market in Antwerp. All had a remarkable ability to summon millions of dollars in cash at short notice, although if they ran short, Taylor was always happy to help. On one occasion, when a buyer turned up with $240,000 in travellers' cheques, his security men forced a bank in Monrovia to cash the lot on the spot. "They didn't normally take travellers' cheques, but were told that this particular 'tourist' was special," Mr Reeves recalled.

On one occasion in 1999, Mr Reeves even accompanied a dealer to Antwerp, where a dozen local diamantaires were invited to submit sealed bids for a pile of stones laid out in the middle of a hotel room. The dealer pocketed $2.35 million that afternoon, with no questions asked. "It was long before anybody knew about blood diamonds," said Mr Reeve. "As far as they were concerned, there was nothing wrong at all."

He knew otherwise, having visited the RUF-controlled mines, where men, women and children were being conscripted to work in appalling conditions. "It was horrific – at one point I saw three or four guards beating a guy with their rifle butts just because he had stopped for a drink of water. They thought he was trying to steal a diamond, and at one point they were going to force-feed him laxative so that it would come out. When I saw that with my own eyes, I began to realise just how bad it all was."

Despite the danger it put him in, Mr Reeves quietly turned supergrass, working with prosecutors from the special court, and, allegedly, with Britain's M16. He handed them records of every transaction he had done, and during field trips began to gather evidence of the atrocities carried out by militia commanders. While he is not expected to give direct evidence to the Hague court, owing partly to a falling-out over the way court officials handled his witness protection provision, he is one of the key sources of information for a trial in which very few people have been brave enough to tell the truth. Among those who have been afraid to do so, he reckons, is Ms Campbell, who denied in court knowing that the stones she got were actually from Mr Taylor. "You could see the fear in her eyes, because she knows who Taylor is now," he said.

Mr Reeves was surprised to hear testimony that he told bodyguards to give her the diamonds in the middle of the night. "For one thing, she is a supermodel – strangers wouldn't be allowed to come knocking on her bedroom door just like that. And Taylor is a flamboyant character – he would want to give her the diamonds in person, because he liked impressing people. If fact, if she hadn't been there, he would have probably given them to Nelson Mandela."