1
THE SOLE MIRACLE
“We will go through the motions, we will push democracy, but we’ll live with what’s put together there because we do not have any good options. We need their oil.”
—American official on Equatorial Guinea1
When Teodorin was born in 1968, Equatorial Guinea—a small hangnail of a nation on the central African Atlantic coast, sandwiched between the much larger Cameroon and Gabon—was still a vestigial remnant of Spain’s onetime empire. While much of Spain’s power concentrated in Latin America, bookended by Christopher Columbus’s voyages and Simón Bolívar’s eventual wars of independence, Spain had also grabbed this small, Massachusetts-size chunk of central Africa, which it would eventually call Guinea Ecuatorial.
By the late 1960s, as the wave of decolonization crested across Africa, calls grew for Madrid to join the march of European nations out of the African continent. And in late 1968, with Teodorin only a few months old, the Spanish government finally acceded. Equatorial Guinea gained its independence, and was almost immediately subsumed by a newly established dictatorship under the rule of Francisco Macias Nguema. After Macias won the country’s initial presidential election, he set the tone for the kind of governance the country would experience for decades thereafter—and the kinds of governmental predations, and human rights violations, that would condemn Equatorial Guinea to a pariah status for the rest of the twentieth century.
“Macias destroyed the whole country,” Ken Hurwitz, an American lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative, told me.2 Macias’s alleged crimes ranged from the brutal (reportedly offing his main electoral opponent, with the death formally listed as a “suicide”) to the fantastical (including burying the entire Equatoguinean treasury underneath his house, and dubbing himself “The Sole Miracle of Equatorial Guinea”3). Tens of thousands of Equatoguineans died or disappeared under Macias’s decade-long rule. By the late 1970s, he changed his nickname to the “Implacable Apostle of Freedom,” and became “a genuine psychopath,” added Hurwitz, who’s tracked Teodorin’s exploits for years. “He would have been as famous as [Ugandan despot] Idi Amin if Equatorial Guinea had been bigger.”4
Throughout his reign, Macias compiled a roster of domestic enemies. One of those—unbeknownst to Macias, until it was too late—included his nephew who oversaw the National Guard and Equatorial Guinea’s Black Beach prison, dubbed “Africa’s most notorious jail,” where he was specifically tasked with torturing those who would dare to speak up against the Sole Miracle. That nephew was Teodorin’s father, named Teodoro.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, born in 1942, exudes an air of refined scholarship, with wire-rimmed glasses and prim suits. If you passed him on the street, you might mistake him for an accountant. Even when he was charged with torturing Macias’s political enemies, real or imagined, he never gave off an especially intimidating air—even when, in 1979, he turned on his uncle, leading to Macias’s overthrow and execution, and announced the formation of the longest-running dictatorship in the world.
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IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Equatoguineans to realize that Obiang’s regime would offer much of the same as Macias’s. Under Obiang, dissidents have disappeared, and independent media remains an oxymoron. He even tried to one-up his deposed uncle when it came to his outlandish claims, with state media proclaiming that Obiang is “in permanent contact with the Almighty”5—and that he could “kill without anyone calling him to account,” which Obiang and his regime have done for decades without much consequence.6
In nearly half a century, Obiang has become a dictator who makes the other regional despots—those in Rwanda and Gabon and Cameroon, even the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko and Idi Amin—look restrained by comparison. At last check, Freedom House pegged his rule as the sixth most repressive regime in the world, between those in Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Reporters Without Borders scores the country’s media freedoms worse than Somalia and Kazakhstan.
In his four decades of rule, Obiang has managed to create a police state that rivals those of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in terms of rank brutality—but, surprisingly, even exceeds them in terms of elite predation. “The unification of the state with the ruler, and the chutzpah of the corruption—the brazenness of the corruption,” Hurwitz said, positions Obiang’s regime as “off the rails in terms of pure state capture.”7 The dictator rarely pretends to have his population’s best interests at heart. Not that many would necessarily believe him. Nearly 80 percent of the country lives in abject poverty, slogging by on subsistence farming and little else, with most Equatoguineans living almost completely outside the monetary economy. Over half the country has no access to clean water. Some 15 percent of the country’s children die before reaching the age of five, while a staggering two-thirds of those who survive don’t stay in school past middle school. One out of every three Equatoguineans never sees the age of 40. None of this is different from the precedent Macias set. As one American official drearily summed up, “The political leadership is illiterate and brutal in its crude way, but they know how to stay in power.”8
And Obiang’s regime has one key tool that allowed it to stay in power: oil. In the 1990s, after Equatorial Guinea spent years existing as what journalist Ken Silverstein—one of the leading reporters to catalogue the family’s malfeasance—described as a “pariah state with few international allies,” oil began gushing forth off its coastline. It was a gift of geography, and the key to the kleptocracy that soon followed.9 The discovery lubricated everything, including relations with cloying Western governments in search of oil who, in return, hoped to transform Equatorial Guinea into the Dubai of central Africa—a glitzy, dictatorial regime and an indispensable energy hub. With riches comes protection, and Obiang benefited in two ways. First, the oil accelerated access to international resources in ways previously unavailable to a burgeoning despot, and second, any international criticism of his suffocating rule—and human rights abuses—was drowned out by an army of paid-off lackeys, lawyers, and lobbyists who operated on the regime’s behalf.
“Before oil money came in there was not a lot of money to steal, and when the oil money did start coming in there were no safeguards in place,” one local consultant admitted, watching Obiang’s government siphon billions into his family’s personal coffers that should have been spent on public works. “There was no culture of government oversight, no media, let alone an independent media, no independent judiciary, and no outside scrutiny, because the country had been largely forgotten by the outside world. That all allowed corruption to flourish in ways it did in very few other countries.”10
Nor was Obiang alone in such dreams about the doors the oil could open. His son, Teodorin, was in his early twenties when the oil burst forth, and suddenly enjoyed pride of place in a regime watching its annual oil revenues climb into the hundreds of millions of dollars—figures that would only continue climbing as oil prices grew through the turn of the century. The specific numbers, though, were almost so gargantuan that they became immaterial; when the oil started flowing, Teodorin suddenly had, in effect, unlimited wealth. Unlike his father, though, Teodorin wanted that money spent. And he wanted it seen. Unlimited wealth offered unlimited potential for him to upend entire industries—and, as we’ll see, to exploit the mile-wide loopholes the U.S. provided to launder as much money as he could.
* * *
TEODORIN FIRST ARRIVED in the U.S. in the early 1990s to study at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. That, at least, is what he claimed on his visa application. Instead of hitting the books, though, he began exploring and enjoying the kind of celebrity lifestyle he’d always wanted—the kind that Hollywood created, produced, and projected around the world. Almost immediately, he dropped any pretense of being a normal student. Rather than staying in dorms, Teodorin rented rooms at the luxe Beverly Wilshire Hotel. One former professor said that he loved to arrive on campus in a range of sports cars and limousines. “He rarely came to class,” the professor added.11
Late nights and bottle service, lavish meals and expensive rides: Teodorin loved it all, and all of it added up. His bills soon climbed to tens of thousands of dollars per month. However, he had a patron who would pick up the tab: Waller International, an oil firm out of Houston that had begun exploring Equatorial Guinea’s oil reserves. As part of their explorations, executives at Waller International were willing to take steps to remain in the Obiangs’ good graces. Not that things were necessarily easy for the firm; one rep, according to Harper’s, was reportedly “pulling out her hair” trying to manage Teodorin’s finances.12
Teodorin enjoyed all the Southern California trappings—the parties at his hotel, the late-night joyrides in his luxury cars, the benders that bled into the mornings—during his time at Pepperdine. But he eventually tired of the pretense of being a student and announced he would be dropping out of the university. His father, by all appearances, was unsurprised by his son’s academic failure. But he wouldn’t let him remain in the U.S. Instead, he flew him back to Equatorial Guinea, where the dictator had an assignment for his son.
The fact that Obiang wanted Teodorin by his side wasn’t necessarily a surprise—though, according to those who know them both, the two are hardly close, and have never really been. “The typical Equatorial Guinea kid does not tend to have a very strong relationship with their father,” said Tutu Alicante.13 Teodorin was no different, instead spending much more time with his mother, Constancia. He also spent much of his youth apart from his father, living with extended family in neighboring Gabon, away from his great-uncle’s and, later, his father’s dictatorship.
But as Teodorin grew and his father aged, both of them realized that there was a significant problem to address: succession, and whom Obiang would appoint as his heir. As the eldest son, Teodorin was the natural heir. To be sure, even then, the dictator never thought much of his son’s skill set, political or otherwise. (“The only reason Teodorin will be president is because he’s going to kill everyone else around him,” one former Equatoguinean official told me.14) But with Teodorin dropping out of Pepperdine, Obiang had an offer for his son, one that would allow his son to dip his toes into political waters—to get a feel for what dictatorship really required. He wanted him to become Equatorial Guinea’s newest Minister of Forestry.
Teodorin knew nothing about forestry management, or timber harvesting, and was far more familiar with different hard liquors than different hardwoods. But timber was, and remains, the country’s second largest export commodity, outpaced only by the flood of oil that continues to pour out. And Teodorin’s father wanted someone he could trust overseeing such a lucrative industry. He also wanted his son to try to at least learn something, anything, when it came to overseeing others—a skill set he’d need when he eventually succeeded his father. And Teodorin was only too happy to oblige, and to prove he could run the portfolio as effectively as his father expected.
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WHEN OIL WAS first discovered in Equatorial Guinea, American oil firms were quick to woo the family in order to access the country’s fields. Feting Obiang and his family, they threw lavish junkets, paid for lavish entertainment, and hosted lavish parties, praising Obiang and his rule at every step. American oil companies couldn’t outright bribe officials like Obiang—such bribery was made illegal by the U.S.’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which we’ll revisit in chapter 15—but there were workarounds available, such as overpaying the Obiang family’s security firm for protection, or offering to pay for the tuition of younger family members attending American schools (as Waller International was doing for Teodorin).
On its face, the oil wealth should have belonged to the broader nation. It could have gone to buoy education budgets, health budgets, and infrastructure budgets, as it has in other oil-rich places like Norway or Alaska. But instead, the flush of new money went primarily to those at the top—to a predatory regime creating a patronage network to solidify and fund the country’s dictatorship. It may not have been illegal—Obiang could simply rewrite the laws to make sure everything was technically legal—but it was clearly corrupt. Obiang directed the millions of dollars coming in every month in a series of different directions. Some of it went to security services dedicated to tracking and muffling (or worse) opposition figures. Some of it went to funding the military, keeping the country’s army brass happy and preventing any coup similar to the one that had initially launched Obiang to power. And much of it went directly into Obiang’s pockets, or into the pockets of his family and cronies, who continued to pledge fealty to the dictator making all of them obscenely rich.
Indeed, Equatorial Guinea may be the purest example of the “resource curse” described by political scientists, which sees economies built largely around a single commodity like oil tending toward autocracy and dictatorship.15 Much of the country remains mired in poverty, stripped of any democratic rights, while those at the top watch their bank accounts continue to swell.
Teodorin saw how his father dominated the country’s oil industry, and he was well aware of the millions pocketed every month from the proceeds. He realized he could bring the same playbook to the country’s timber sector. Shortly after assuming his new position, Teodorin immediately demanded the foreign timber export companies operating in the country pay a personal fee just to work, equal to 10 percent of the total export value of the wood they shipped. Malaysian companies, Filipino companies, European companies, African companies—all of whom, unlike American firms, had no restrictions on bribing local officials—agreed to Teodorin’s terms. All of them would have to effectively bribe Teodorin just for the right to harvest the country’s wide-open forests. Equatorial Guinea’s beleaguered national forests were also available, for the right price. (Teodorin would soon become known as the “minister of chopping down trees.”16)
Yet those personal fees weren’t enough. In 1996, he took things further, implementing a retroactive “tax” on these foreign companies, calculated at an extra $10 per cubic meter of timber that they had ever harvested from Equatorial Guinea. When a handful of companies refused to pay the new “tax,” he promptly confiscated their machinery, claiming the legion of bulldozers and backhoes as his own.17
Teodorin’s interactions with one company, the Spain-based ABM lumber firm, encapsulated his corrupt management style. According to Antonio Cabanellas, who oversaw ABM’s operations in the country, dealing with him was like dealing with a combination of Jimmy Buffett and Jimmy Hoffa. “He would call us to come to his office, which meant wearing a suit and tie,” Cabanellas remembered. “He would keep you waiting for five hours and then appear wearing shorts. He would then tell you how much he wanted you to pay him, and that you had a week to do so.”18 If they didn’t hand over the money, they would lose everything—even a company like ABM, which had been logging in Equatorial Guinea since the 1970s.19
That May, after Teodorin gave ABM four days to pay a retroactive “tax” of $1.5 million, the company balked. They refused the payment. But whatever political capital they thought they’d built up in the country—whatever reputation they thought they’d built in their decades-long efforts to ingratiate themselves with the regime—meant little in the face of the spurned son.20
