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Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his sadistic tendencies. According to his chief bodyguard, when Uday learned that one of his close comrades, who knew of his many misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq, he invited him to his 37th-birthday party and had him arrested. An eyewitness at the prison where the man was held says members of the Fedayeen grabbed his tongue with pliers and sliced it off with a scalpel so he could not talk. A maid who cleaned one of Uday's houses says she once saw him lop off the ear of one of his guards and then use a welder's torch on his face.
A family friend says the day Uday discovered the Internet was "a black day for Iraqis," because he used it to learn of torture methods from other ages and lands that he decided to try. He would lock victims in coffins for days at a time, says the source, or put them in pillories. According to a family friend, he also liked to have offenders beaten on one side. Then he would order medical tests and have the thrashings continue until the kidney on that side had conclusively failed.
Uday's favorite punishment was the medieval falaqa, a rod with clamps that go around the ankles so that the offender, feet in the air, can be hit on the bare soles with a stick. A top official in radio and TV says he received so many beatings for trivial mistakes like being late for meetings or making grammatical errors on his broadcasts that Uday ordered him to carry a falaqa in his car. Uday also had an iron maiden that he used to torture Iraqi athletes whose performance disappointed him.
The younger brother was not above petty abuses of power either. Once while Qusay was visiting a relative, something amused a maid who broke out in giggles. One of Qusay's bodyguards locked her in a cell for a day, slapped her around and told her never to laugh in the presence of the President's son. "I didn't think I'd ever get out alive," she told TIME.
Uday, however, was much more dangerous. The smallest thing could set him off. He was a stickler for personal hygiene, recalls a butler, and hated the smell of sweat. One summer day Uday stopped the butler and said, "What the hell is that smell?" Uday ordered five falaqa lashes on the butler's right foot and five in his right armpit. On another occasion, the butler says he received 160 falaqa for the sin of serving Uday's food on the wrong type of plate.
Uday was no less demanding at his parties. He was an expert at filling a highball glass to the top, without spilling a drop. Then he would force his mates to down an entire glass of liquor. When Uday was in the hospital after being shot, he called his friends in to cheer him up. Since he couldn't drink, he forced them to consume obscene quantities of alcohol, installing a stomach-pumping station in the next room for emergencies, says a friend. At the Boat Club, Uday kept a monkey named Louisa in a cage in the kitchen. Louisa had a taste for whiskey and was an angry drunk. If one of Uday's friends passed out in the course of an evening or was caught napping, says a butler, Uday would have the friend thrown into the cage with Louisa, who would scratch at the poor inebriate's face.