SAMPLE CHAPTER

After waiting nearly two hours in a small, nondescript room at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headquarters in Accra, a group of uniformed and plainclothes police officials entered and escorted me and my lawyer to another room, where several dozen more police officers were waiting. One of the investigators informed me that, as part of their inquiry into various activities involving my company’s acquisition of offshore oil exploration rights in Ghana five years earlier, the court had issued search warrants for my home and my office. They were to be served immediately.

Numb and disbelieving, I was escorted across town to my office in a convoy of police cars and a bus filled with armed, uniformed officers and with blue lights flashing and sirens wailing all the way.

As we sped through the sweltering streets, Accra’s perpetual crowds of street beggars peered in through the windows, trying to get a glimpse of the criminal in the back seat.

I was ordered to wait outside while investigators descended en masse into my office to the confused looks of my staff members. My attorney’s objections were ignored as officers confiscated files, computer hard drives, and countless documents.

When they had taken what they wanted from my office, the speeding police convoy took me all the way down the Tema Motorway to my house, where my wife and our young grandson watched, frightened and helpless, as a phalanx of armed, uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives stormed in. Every room was searched, personal items pawed through, more computer drives taken, other documents seized, and every item photographed.

Two of the detectives had interrogated me several times during the past few days—sessions that had driven my blood pressure to deadly levels. They had questioned me over and over, about things I hadn’t done, crimes that had never happened, rumors I knew nothing about, and false accusations having to do with the efforts I had initiated five years earlier that resulted in the largest oil discovery in the history of Ghana. A discovery worth tens of billions of dollars.

Fittingly, as frightening as it was to be ordered in for interrogation by the police in relation to a series of felonies I was being accused of, the start of my career in the oil business had been even more terrifying.

Nearly two decades earlier and thousands of miles away, an explosion ripped through the Atlantic Richfield Company plant in Channelview, Texas. It happened on July 5, 1990, at 11:15 p.m. I was working my shift at the ARCO plant and had stopped to talk to another worker for a few minutes. While we were chatting, I received a call on my walkie-talkie from my supervisor, asking me to check a stuck valve on a tower on the plant grounds. 

The man I had been talking to got in his van and drove away, and I pedaled over to the tower on my bike.

No sooner had I climbed to the top of the tower and put my hand on the valve, when the plant erupted in a violent explosion and a fireball lit up the night sky. The plant looked as if a bomb had been dropped on it. Flames and thick plumes of smoke shot a hundred feet into the dark sky. Warped steel and wreckage was strewn all over the grounds. The explosion was felt several miles away, shattering windows in nearby houses and blowing out street lights. Neighbors a mile away reported a “flash like an atomic bomb.”

The man I had been talking with just moments before the blast had arrived faster at his area because he was driving. As soon as he had gotten there, the explosion occurred. It would take days to find all of his body parts.

I watched from the top of the tower a couple of hundred feet in the air as the horrific scene played out, terrified, not knowing what had happened.

Trembling and stunned at the devastation around me, I somehow made it down the tower and got to the office, where I was warned that the explosion could be followed by a violent chain reaction. So we hunkered down and waited, praying there would be no more blasts before we could be evacuated.

The plant’s fire brigade arrived and began fighting the blaze. Hazardous materials units began arriving from the nearby Shell Oil Refinery. Harris County fire trucks were all over the place. Firefighters, ambulances, and police cars were pouring into the plant.

Four dozen people had been on shift at the plant that night. The initial death toll was reported as 14. The total body count would reach 17, and would include several contract workers, and a tanker truck driver who burned to death in the cab of his vehicle as he tried to flee the scene. Five others were critically injured.

The incident had literally been the explosive start of my new career in the oil business. The start of a nearly two-decades journey that would lead to police investigations thousands of miles away in Ghana, inquiries by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), charges of fraud, multiple interrogations by the CID, and half a decade of fighting for my very life and freedom.

And now, 19 years later, with the police in Accra hauling me in for questioning over and over, the explosive end to my career had begun. My life was about to enter a long and bizarre battle as the new government of Ghana bore down on me, determined to see me behind bars, unfazed by the fact that I was also an American citizen.

I suspected a couple of people who were probably working in tandem with the government’s relentless pursuit of me. People whose motives were not difficult to discern. One hundred and sixty billion dollars worth of premium grade crude oil is a powerful incentive.

But what was surreal about what was happening to me now was that just six months prior to start of the CID interrogations, I had been basking in the euphoric glow of being fêted as a national hero. And the previous year, I was awarded the coveted Order of the Volta (an honor equal to the US Presidential Medal of Honor), bestowed on me by the government of Ghana for outstanding service performed for my country.

As the police investigators pawed through my family’s personal belongings on that fateful June day in 2009, a hopeless feeling of government oppression settled over me at the realization that my own father had experienced something similar when a previous Ghanaian dictator had destroyed his life exactly 50 years ago that very month.