He was a student activist in the 1970's, railing against the corrupt regime of William Tolbert. Then he went to Bentley College in Massachusetts to study economics. He returned to Liberia in 1980, just in time to see a young army sergeant, Samuel Doe, topple Mr. Tolbert's government, murdering the president.

Mr. Taylor immediately insinuated himself into Mr. Doe's clique, and eventually took control of the government's purchasing arm. He fled back to the United States after falling out with Mr. Doe, taking with him $1 million he allegedly embezzled from the government.

He was jailed in Massachusetts, but escaped in 1985 by sawing through the bars of his jail cell. Once back in Africa, he met with Liberian dissidents in Ghana and then made common cause with revolutionaries in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and, most critically, Libya, where Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi was plotting and supporting a continent-wide revolution. In Libya, he trained in camps that also trained men who would later play starring roles in the great African tragedies of the 1990's; they included Sierra Leone's Foday Sankoh, whose rebel movement would become best known for hacking off the arms and legs of civilians, and the Congo's Laurent Kabila, the central figure in a complex civil war that ultimately killed four million people.

With money and arms from Libya and the political and financial backing of Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, he crossed into Liberia in December 1989. He had never been a soldier and had only a small force behind him. Still, he managed to wreak havoc on an almost unprecedented scale and dominate much of the region for more than a decade. How did he do it?

In part, Mr. Taylor was adept at using and even creating the language of his times. He blended a militant pan-Africanism that called for bloody revolutions against neo-colonialism with a muscular vernacular in which might was unapologetically right. The new pose fit well with the region's mood.

"There is a very strong current within West African diplomacy which basically says you make a deal with the strongest actor because if you don't that person will go back to the bush and fight or otherwise destabilize the situation," said Mike McGovern, an anthropologist with the International Crisis Group who has studied West Africa's conflicts.

At the heart of Taylor's horrific genius was an ability to manipulate West Africa's political, social and cultural values, seeming to smash deep taboos while subtly co-opting them for his purposes.