Lord of war meets Harold & Kumar: Stoner arm dealers supply the WoT

[The Larch]

The Stoner Arms Dealers
How two American kids became big-time weapons traders — until the Pentagon turned on them

The e-mail confirmed it: everything was finally back on schedule after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delay. A 747 cargo plane had just lifted off from an airport in Hungary and was banking over the Black Sea toward Kyrgyzstan, some 3,000 miles to the east. After stopping to refuel there, the flight would carry on to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Aboard the plane were 80 pallets loaded with nearly 5 million rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, the Soviet-era assault rifle favored by the Afghan National Army.

Reading the e-mail back in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. The shipment was part of a $300 million contract that Packouz and his partner, Efraim Diveroli, had won from the Pentagon to arm America's allies in Afghanistan. It was May 2007, and the war was going badly. After six years of fighting, Al Qaeda remained a menace, the Taliban were resurgent, and NATO casualties were rising sharply. For the Bush administration, the ammunition was part of a desperate, last-ditch push to turn the war around before the U.S. presidential election the following year. To Packouz and Diveroli, the shipment was part of a major arms deal that promised to make them seriously rich.

Reassured by the e-mail, Packouz got into his brand-new blue Audi A4 and headed home for the evening, windows open, the stereo blasting. At 25, he wasn't exactly used to the pressures of being an international arms dealer. Only months earlier, he had been making his living as a massage therapist; his studies at the Educating Hands School of Massage had not included classes in military contracting or geopolitical brinkmanship. But Packouz hadn't been able to resist the temptation when Diveroli, his 21-year-old friend from high school, had offered to cut him in on his burgeoning arms business. Working with nothing but an Internet connection, a couple of cellphones and a steady supply of weed, the two friends — one with a few college credits, the other a high school dropout — had beaten out Fortune 500 giants like General Dynamics to score the huge arms contract. With a single deal, two stoners from Miami Beach had turned themselves into the least likely merchants of death in history.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-dealers-20110316?print=true

[Slargos]

 

Jews.

How fucking surprising.

[Josquius]

My initial thoughts were 'How the hell do people get in on stuff like this? Mad.' but reading further- aha, they're not just normal people who lucked out afterall, they're rich kids with connections.
Still interesting though.
But then this sort of thing isn't just restricted to huge money military dealings, such ramshackle crap is pretty normal in low level government contracting to private orgs.

[DGuller]

I think stories like that are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.  The truly scandalous story is about companies like Blackwater rising up out of nothing, and in a couple of years making billions upon billions of dollars from the government serving as Pentagon's paramilitary force.

[MadImmortalMan]

There's all kinds of ways to make money on FedBizOps. You have to find a minority or disabled veteran to be your business partner in order to win any contracts though. Anybody know any black female disabled vets who want to start a business with me?

[Grey Fox]

Interesting read, almost too crazy to be real.

[The Larch]

If I were a Hollywood producer I'd be ordering a script already. I can see Jesse Eisenberg playing that Diveroli guy.

[Malthus]

Heh, hilarious read. 

Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. "It was surreal," he recalls. "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 delivery 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.

[The Larch]

Heh, hilarious read. 

Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. "It was surreal," he recalls. "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 delivery 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.

You could have been that kid of you had chosen international arms dealing as your career instead of law.