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Uday's former palace, al-Abit, was on a pond surrounded by pine and eucalyptus trees inside the presidential compound; peacocks and gazelles roamed the grounds. One party pad that neighbors call the China house was decorated entirely in chinoiserie, complete with murals of Chinese women doing the washing and playing the erhu, a two-string instrument. In the upscale Baghdad suburb of Karada, Uday kept a love nest for trysts.
Uday maintained an extensive staff. In the guardhouse at al-Qadasiyah Palace, an old family home that Uday took over and lived in during the days just before the American invasion, TIME found a list signed by Uday dated March 5, 2003, that showed he had no fewer than 68 personal employees, including dozens of sentries and bodyguards, two butlers, seven cooks, 12 drivers, two pastry chefs, one baker, one fisherman, one personal shopper and two trainers for the lions he kept on the grounds of al-Abit. His staff spent hours collecting and counting Uday's possessions. TIME found careful reports on the whereabouts of even mundane items, such as a walking stick, with every receipt checked, approved and signed by Uday himself.
Uday lived at the center of a complex universe of ciphers and rituals that he concocted. He assigned code names for each of the places he frequented: the Boat Club was called 200; the Olympic Committee, 60; al-Abit palace, 111. Those in his employ were assigned numbersthe physiotherapist, 90; the cook, 222. Uday changed these codes every few months, and anyone who forgot the new system was beaten, according to a note written by Uday at the bottom of the most recent code sheet. A family friend says Uday, like his father, had his staff periodically weighed. If someone had gained weight, Uday would assume they were stealing to buy extra food, and he would send them to a "discipline" camp until the pounds were gone.
For all his helpers and his freaky methods of organization, Uday could not control the limitations of his damaged body. According to his medical report, the stroke and trauma he suffered after the 1996 attack left him with "clawing" toes on his left foot, which made walking difficult. A non-Iraqi doctor interviewed by TIME who examined Uday in Baghdad last December says he continues to suffer from seizures and spastic reactions in the muscles of his left leg. His butlers, says one of them, pushed him around his houses in a wheelchair and changed his stainless-steel bedpans when they were full. Uday slept in a twin-size metal-frame hospital bed attended not by fawning women but by a full-time physiotherapist and a butler who says that when he helped him put on his socks each day, Uday screamed in agony.
Uday tried everything to repair himself. In the ruins of the palace in which he last lived are thousands of packets of sterile acupuncture needles, an assortment of Chinese herbal medicines imported from Argentina and drawers full of multivitamins and sleeping pills. In the winter of 2002, says a butler, Uday demanded that his aides bring him a woman who had just had a baby. When the mother, in her 20s, with golden-brown hair and a henna-colored skirt and matching shirt, arrived, Uday sucked her nipples for what he believed would be vitamin-rich milk.