MONROVIA, Oct. 8 -- When officers raided a compound on Cement Road in the VOA Community on July 21, they found 3,971 "plates" of the drug, packed in 157 bags and valued at about US$317 million.

By Rodney D. Sieh

Two foreign men were arrested on the spot. Eleven weeks later, the State has gone much further. A 55-page indictment now names 20 people, among them senior security officers, an aviation official and the woman who was once a heartbeat from the presidency, former Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor.

But a close reading of the document tells a messier story. Dates shift from page to page. Payments grow or appear out of nowhere. The indictment gets Taylor's own term of office wrong, and the court that filed it is not the court that...