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. 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. Reading the e-mail in his tiny office in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. 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. After stopping to refuel at an air base in Bishkek, the plane would carry on to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. 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.
The e-mail confirmed it: the delivery was back on track, after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delays. This is a story you were never meant to read. Lawson exposes the mysterious and murky world of global arms dealing, showing how the American military came to use private contractors like Diveroli, Packouz, and Podrizki as middlemen to secure weapons from illegal arms dealers-the same men who sell guns to dictators, warlords, and drug traffickers. Lawson’s account includes a shady Swiss gunrunner, Russian arms dealers, Albanian thugs, and a Pentagon investigation that caused ammunition shortages for the Afghanistan military. It’s a trip that goes from a dive apartment in Miami Beach to mountain caves in Albania, the corridors of power in Washington, and the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan. For the first time, journalist Guy Lawson tells the thrilling true tale. The trio then secretly repackaged millions of rounds of shoddy Chinese ammunition and shipped it to Kabul-until they were caught by Pentagon investigators and the scandal turned up on the front page of The New York Times. Instead of fulfilling the order with high-quality arms, Efraim Diveroli, David Packouz, and Alex Podrizki (the dudes) bought cheap Communist-style surplus ammunition from Balkan gunrunners. In January of 2007, three young stoners from Miami Beach were put in charge of a $300 million Department of Defense contract to supply ammunition to the Afghanistan military. Soon to be a major motion picture from the director of The Hangover starring Jonah Hill, the page-turning, behind-closed-doors account of how three kids from Florida became big-time weapons traders for the government and how the Pentagon later turned on them.
0 kommentar(er)
