War Dogs: The True Story of How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History - Softcover

Guy Lawson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241975654 ISBN 13: 9780241975657

Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP, 2016

Synopsis

War Dogs

About this title

About the Author

Guy Lawson is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning investigative journalist whose articles on war, crime, culture, and law have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, GQ, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

War Dogs Chapter One

HELL-BENT

The e-mail confirmed it: the delivery was back on track, after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delays. It was May 24, 2007, and the e-mail said that a cargo plane had just lifted off from a military airstrip in Hungary and was banking east over the Black Sea toward Kyrgyzstan, some three thousand miles away. After stopping to refuel at an air base in Bishkek, the plane would carry on to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Aboard the plane were eighty pallets loaded with 5 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, for the Soviet Bloc weapons preferred by the Afghan National Army.

Reading the e-mail in his tiny office in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. The shipment was part of the $300 million ammunition contract Packouz and his friends Efraim Diveroli and Alex Podrizki were attempting to fulfill for the Department of Defense. Packouz and his buddies were still in their early twenties, but they’d been contracted by the US Army to deliver a huge amount of munitions to the Afghanistan military. Bidding online, on the website where the Pentagon posted defense contracts for public competition, the stoner dudes had beat major corporations to win the Afghan contract. For weeks in the spring of 2007, Packouz had toiled tirelessly trying to obtain flyover permissions for the ammo from the countries between Hungary and Afghanistan—all formerly part of the Soviet Bloc. Working with nothing more than a cell phone, an Internet connection, and a steady supply of high-quality weed, he’d finally succeeded in getting the ammo en route to Kabul. But along the way Packouz had repeatedly encountered mysterious, invisible forces seemingly conspiring to stop him from delivering the ammo—the kind of political complications inherent in gunrunning.

Five thousand miles away, in the Balkan city of Tirana, Albania, Packouz’s friends Efraim Diveroli and Alex Podrizki were also dealing with menacing and mysterious forces as they tried to arrange for 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammo to be transported to Kabul. Alone in a notoriously lawless country, Diveroli and Podrizki were trying to negotiate with an Albanian mafioso taking kickbacks, as well as a Swiss gun dealer running the deal through a Cyprus company seemingly as a way to grease the palms of shadowy operators allegedly associated with the prime minister of Albania. Or so it appeared—knowing the underlying truth was often impossible in international arms dealing. As if those woes weren’t enough, Diveroli and Podrizki were also overseeing an operation to deceive the Pentagon by covertly repacking the AK-47 rounds into cardboard boxes to disguise that they had been manufactured decades earlier in China—a possible violation of American law.

Gunrunning, the three dudes were learning the hard way, was a tough business.

In Miami, David Packouz replied to the e-mail about the Kyrgyz ammo with excitement: the ammo was finally on its way. His workday at an end, he got in his new Audi A4 and drove home through the warm South Florida spring evening, windows open, U2’s “Beautiful Day” blasting on the stereo. What was happening was incredible to Packouz. He had no training as an international arms dealer, other than what he’d learned on the job from his friend, the twenty-one-year-old dynamo Efraim Diveroli. Packouz was only twenty-five years old, and his only postsecondary education was half a bachelor’s degree’s worth of chemistry credits, along with the diploma he’d earned from the Educating Hands School of Massage; until recently, he’d made his living as a masseur advertising his services on Craigslist. Now Packouz was a central player in the delivery of an entire arsenal to Afghanistan, responsible for chartering dozens of flights from all over Eastern Europe, obtaining flyover permissions from countries like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and placating overwhelmed American soldiers on bombed-out tarmacs in Kabul trying to build the Afghan army in the midst of a hot war.

Winning the $300 million Afghan deal was changing Packouz’s life in myriad ways. He’d moved out of his dive studio apartment, into a condo in a flashy seaside building called the Flamingo. According to his calculations, he was about to become a multimillionaire. And that was just the beginning. Soon he was going to have enough money to kick-start his dream of a career as a rock musician. No more fending off the advances of massage clients who assumed he was a prostitute. No more self-doubt. No more existential angst. Soon he was going to be rich—and he was going to be famous.

Arriving home at his condo, Packouz packed the cone of his new Volcano electronic bong, took a deep hit, and felt the pressures of the day drift away into a clean, crisp high. Dinner was at Sushi Samba, a hipster Asian-Latino fusion joint. Packouz was exhausted but exhilarated—the improbable turn his life was taking was thrilling, even if it required extremely hard work. As his miso-marinated Chilean sea bass arrived, his cell phone rang.

The freight-forwarding agent they’d hired was calling from New York and he sounded panicked: “We’ve got a problem. The plane has been seized on the runway in Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz secret service won’t let it take off for Kabul.”

“What are you talking about?” Packouz said, straining to hear over the restaurant’s pounding music.

“Local customs and security personnel—the local KGB—are fucking with us. They won’t explain anything. I need diplomatic intervention from the United States.”

“That’s bullshit!” Packouz shouted. “We worked for weeks to get the permits.”

“The Kyrgyz KGB is blackmailing us. They say you have to pay a three-hundred-thousand-dollar fine for every day the plane sits on the runway.”

Packouz was baffled, stoned, unable to grasp the implications of what he was being told. He had no idea that the ammo he was attempting to ship to Afghanistan was now a bargaining chip in a game of geopolitical brinksmanship between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. The Russian president didn’t like NATO expanding into Eastern Europe, nor did old-school Communist elements inside the Kyrgyz intelligence apparatus. The United States was also being extorted to pay a higher rent for its use of the Bishkek airport as a refueling and staging area—a vital strategic link for the war in Afghanistan. Then there was the recently imposed ban on Russian companies’ selling arms to the US government, denying the Russians the chance to compete for the huge Afghan ammunition contract. The Russians were orchestrating a tit-for-tat reaction, it appeared; it was known in global arms circles that the Afghans were running out of ammunition, so slowing the supply line was a devilish way to hurt American interests.

“It was surreal,” Packouz recalled. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan War—and if our ammo didn’t make it to Kabul the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. But I had to get my shit together. I had to put on my best arms-dealer face.”

Stepping outside the restaurant, Packouz cupped a hand over his cell phone to shut out the noise. “Tell the Kyrgyz KGB that ammo needs to get to Afghanistan right now,” he shouted into the phone. “This contract is part of a vital mission in the global war on terrorism. Tell them that if they fuck with us they’re fucking with the government of the United States!”

Hanging up, panicking, Packouz decided he needed to talk to Efraim Diveroli, the leader of their operation. Diveroli was asleep in his hotel in Tirana when Packouz reached him. Still groggy from a long night of carousing, Diveroli was sleeping next to a prostitute who’d been provided to him by an Albanian businessman hoping to ingratiate himself with the young American gunrunner.

“We have an emergency,” Packouz said.

“Dude, I’m sleeping,” Diveroli replied.

“Our plane got seized in Kyrgyzstan,” Packouz said.

“Our plane was seized?” Diveroli said. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“The Hungarian ammo. Kyrgyz intelligence is saying we don’t have the right paperwork to transit through their country. They say we’ll be fined three hundred grand for every day we’re stuck there.”

Diveroli was now fully awake.

“Three hundred thousand dollars a day?” Diveroli asked, shouting into the phone. “That’s insane. What the fuck is going on? Tell them this is a vital mission in the war on terror. Tell them that if they fuck with us they’re fucking with the United States of America.”

“Yeah, yeah, I said that. I’m going to call the American embassy when it’s morning there.”

“You got to fix this. We can’t afford this kind of shit. This is unfuckingacceptable. Call the State Department, call the Pentagon—call anyone you can think of. Go over to Kyrgyzstan and give those mobsters a fucking blow job if you have to. Do whatever it takes to get this resolved—and I mean whatever it takes.”

“I’m on it,” Packouz said.

“You know I can’t help from here—I got enough troubles dealing with the fucking Albanian mafia.”

“I’ll get to the Kyrgyz.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to fucking this hooker,” Diveroli concluded.

/ / / / /

To observe that these kids from Miami Beach—still in their early twenties—were in over their heads would be an understatement.

Despite their youth, all three of the dudes were highly capable, in their different ways. Efraim Diveroli was little short of a genius when it came to bidding on federal contracts and mastering the intricacies of dealing with the Pentagon’s bureaucracy. David Packouz was inventive and steady under stress. Alex Podrizki, the only one with a college degree and a modicum of military experience, was taciturn, cautious, determined to ensure that none of the ammo they shipped to Afghanistan was substandard.

But they had no real experience, training, or preparation to fulfill a contract as complex and vital as the $300 million Afghanistan deal. Giant international conglomerates had entire departments staffed by military veterans designed to fulfill contracts like the one the dudes were working on. The Pentagon had established the Defense Acquisition University in the 1990s and trained thousands of specialists in the arcane world of military procurements, an industry rife with the perils of fraud and political intrigue. Scores of small companies were also competing for the Army’s contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost all run by men in their forties and fifties with arms-dealing experience and connections inside the military. To their rivals, the kids had been a joke at first, but then they’d become a major threat because of their uncanny ability to win contracts by underbidding the competition.

The story of how the three dudes exploded onto the international arms-dealing scene began three years earlier, in the summer of 2004. At the tender age of eighteen, Efraim Diveroli had resolved improbably—but with true fervor—to turn himself into a gunrunner. Diveroli and his pals David Packouz and Alex Podrizki had met as teenagers at a yeshiva in Miami Beach, where they routinely skipped prayers to smoke dope in a nearby abandoned house. They belonged to a posse of Orthodox Jewish kids who styled themselves as grunge punks. Chasing around the Art Deco hotels of Miami, their gang rejected the strictures of religious life for the pleasures and distractions of modern American youth. Until the youngest of their gang, Efraim Diveroli, stumbled onto the idea of making money from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and drew his friends into the nascent arms business he was going to construct.

“When I started working with Efraim, I knew nothing about war,” David Packouz recalled. “I knew about the so-called global war on terror. But I’m talking about the business of war—because that’s what it was, a business. It turned out that I had a great teacher in Efraim. He was only a kid, but arms dealing came naturally to him. He had an uncle who dealt arms, so the business was kind of in his family, but nothing like the level he took it to. Efraim was born to be a gunrunner.”

At the time, the eighteen-year-old Diveroli was living near the beach in a back-room studio apartment he rented from a Hispanic family. Wake and bake was his daily ritual. The buzz from a couple of hits on the bong he kept on the kitchen table helped him focus as he spent the morning scanning the website Federal Business Opportunities, or FedBizOpps, as it was known in the arms-dealing trade. Here the US government publicly posted contracts for goods and services that were open to online bidding, including billions of dollars’ worth of weapons. At lunchtime, Diveroli would take a walk to smoke a joint, then return to hunt for his first arms deal—one he might actually have a chance of winning. For months he worked deep into the night, searching, smoking, searching, smoking. Once a week or so, he’d meet up with Packouz and Podrizki and their other friends to hit the nightclubs along the beach to blow off steam, downing shots of Grey Goose, snorting lines of coke, hoping to get lucky.

To the outside world, the Miami Beach kids might have looked like any other rabble of layabouts. But Efraim Diveroli wasn’t an ordinary rebellious teenager; he was an incredibly talented businessman. What Diveroli possessed—and what possessed him—was a single-minded ambition. He didn’t regard FedBizOpps as a way to make money, though getting rich was supremely important to him. The website represented a deeper desire. The contracts posted on FedBizOpps were for rivets and forklifts and generators, but also for guns, grenades, and rocket launchers. Contracts were referred to as opportunities, but the term hardly captured their significance for Diveroli. Underneath the tedious-looking technical specifications and bureaucratic boilerplate, he saw the chance to live out his dream to become an international arms dealer.

Like most any teenage dude living on his own, Diveroli’s home was a sty, with dishes piled in the sink, dirty laundry tossed everywhere, and nothing in the fridge apart from beer and leftover take-out food. He dressed like a slob, wearing the cheapest jeans and T-shirts he could find. His shock of brown hair was always messy, framing a face with dark brows, a large nose, peach fuzz on his cheeks and chin, and an expression that combined class-clown humor with punk defiance.

All day every day, Diveroli parsed the Pentagon’s website looking for a way to obtain deals. The bidding on FedBizOpps was winner take all, so there was no consolation for coming close. Diveroli knew winning even one competition would require patience and persistence. But it cost nothing but time to bid on federal solicitations—and he had plenty of time on his hands. To Diveroli, competing on FedBizOpps was like rolling the dice in a vast game of craps.

One morning in the summer of 2004, Diveroli came across a posting for a contract for nine hundred thousand rounds of .223-caliber, fifty-five-gram ball ammunition to supply the Army’s Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Reading the terms of the offer, Diveroli had only a tenuous grasp of the mechanics of defense contracting. Single source, the posting said, which meant there would be only one winner of the contract. The term combined synopsis solicitation indicated that the government had specifically allocated funds for the purchase.

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About this edition

• Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0241975654
• ISBN 13: 9780241975657
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304