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...
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