The 'blood diamonds' trade, which is at the heart of the war-crimes trial of Charles Taylor, ex-president of Liberia - in which Naomi Campbell has become embroiled - was partly run by his brother-in-law, Cindor Reeves. In this exclusive interview he tells Colin Freeman about his role

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.

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