by Guy Lawson
“Everybody says this in Albania,” Pinari replied dismissively. “Trebicka is a nothing person.”
But as the weeks passed and AEY’s shipments from Albania continued apace, Trebicka’s anger was hardening into something more dangerous. Gjakmarrja was the Albanian word for “blood feud.” In the Kanun, the ancient text that codifies Albania’s traditional laws, men have a moral and social obligation to avenge the loss of honor. But Trebicka wasn’t a violent man—not really. He was a lawyer and a businessman. His payback would be calculated. If everyone else was going to play dirty, so would he.
One June afternoon, Trebicka called Diveroli in Miami Beach. Trebicka was secretly recording the call on his Nokia cell phone. His aim was to lure Diveroli into talking about corrupt Albanian officials—then leak the proof of their dishonesty to the press. Diveroli had no idea he was being set up.
“So what’s happening with your pal Pinari?” Trebicka began.
“I don’t know,” Diveroli said. “You tell me. Did you make a deal with him for the boxes?”
“I don’t want to make a deal with him. You know that he’s a crook. You told me before that he’s a Mafia guy, didn’t you?”
“I think he is. Either he’s Mafia or the Mafia is controlling him. Either way, he’s a problem. The problem is, I don’t have a choice. I have to deal with him. The US government is expecting the products. I have no decision to make.”
Diveroli assured Trebicka that he would push hard to broker a deal. “I did not remove you from this job. I had nothing to do with this. Nothing. I have never supported this decision. I’m very, very upset about this. I’m very concerned.”
Diveroli wasn’t telling the truth: Diveroli had done nothing to protect Trebicka, preferring to take a price discount of two-tenths of a penny per round—a fact that would further anger the Albanian if he ever found out.
“Are you still working with Henri Thomet?” Trebicka asked.
“I have to work with Thomet. I’m different from Thomet. I can’t play monkey business with the Mafia—Delijorgji and all those fucking Mafia guys in Albania. I’m a US company. Everyone is watching me. Pinari needs a guy like Thomet in the middle to take care of him and his buddies. It’s none of my business. I don’t want to know about it. I want to know about legitimate businesses.”
“I understand.”
“How is everything with you?” Diveroli asked.
“It’s okay. I’m quiet. I have other businesses to take care of. We had a good reception for your president.”
“I heard it was a good meeting.”
“Probably I will be invited to Washington, DC, from the CIA guys. In one or two weeks, I will come to Florida to shake hands and discuss future deals.”
This was an implicit threat. Trebicka wanted Diveroli to know that he wasn’t going to quietly go away. He wanted Diveroli to know that he was going to talk to the US government—and could talk about the repacking job in Albania.
Diveroli urged Trebicka to try to find an accommodation. “Why don’t you kiss Pinari’s ass one more time? Call him up, beg him, kiss him, send one of your girls to fuck him. Let’s get him happy. Maybe he gives you a chance to do the job. Maybe you give him a little money. He’s not going to get much from this deal. If he gets twenty thousand dollars from you, I’m okay with that.”
“I understand,” Trebicka said, luring Diveroli further into his plot.
“The more it went up higher, to the prime minister, to his son—this Mafia is too strong for me,” Diveroli said. “I can’t fight this Mafia. It got too big. The animals got too out of control.”
Trebicka had what he wanted. In the days that followed, he approached one of the leading Albanian dailies, a newspaper called Shekulli. He told the editor his story of AEY’s contract, the profit margin MEICO was siphoning off, and Defense Minister Fatmir Mediu’s apparent role in the scheme. Then he played the recording of Diveroli. The editor was extremely interested. Trebicka gave him Alex Podrizki’s e-mail address. In a note to Podrizki, the editor from Shekulli wrote:
We have reasons to believe that this is a big corruption scandal and this money of commission are taken by the corrupted politicians that are in head of Ministry of Defense and other officials in a government that is claiming itself to be, “Government who is doing big fight against organized crime.” We need to know your version of this story because we will publish this information in our newspaper very soon. Please contact us as soon as possible, because this is becoming a very sensitive problem in Albania.
Podrizki ignored the e-mail. He knew that it was foolish, perhaps even fatal, to anger those behind the arms deal—including the politicians. Without Podrizki’s cooperation, the Albanian story never ran.
Trebicka realized he had to up the ante. He knew an Albanian-American man in New York City, Gary Kokolari, who would be interested in anything that pointed to corruption in the government of Albania. Kokolari was the child of Albanian parents, though he’d grown up in New Jersey. An investment banker, he was successful, smart, and obsessed with Prime Minister Sali Berisha and the shady men who carried out his orders—though obsession didn’t describe the depth of Kokolari’s hatred for a man he considered “evil.”
Talking to Kokolari in New York through a broken line from Albania, Trebicka poured out his story: ammunition, kickbacks to Albanian politicians, a Swiss arms dealer named Henri Thomet, a company from Miami called AEY repacking AK-47 ammo in Tirana.
Trying to make sense of what Trebicka was saying, Kokolari became convinced he had evidence of an American company bribing Albanians—and that the US Embassy in Tirana was ignoring the corruption. Kokolari was going to ensure the story went public. But if it did, Trebicka would be making many powerful enemies.
“Are you sure you want to proceed?” Kokolari asked. “Once we let the genie out of the bottle, you can’t get it back in.”
“Yes,” Trebicka said. “I am sure.”
Kokolari started to develop a plan. “I know how to harm powerful people,” Kokolari recalled. “I have done it in the past, and I will do it in the future.”
Kokolari’s first call was to Congress, to the House Oversight Committee. Investigators there had subpoena power and could force AEY to disclose what it was doing. Kokolari then tried the Wall Street Journal, where there was some initial interest. But the story was complicated and it was about Albania, a tiny, obscure country. Kokolari turned to the State Department and the Pentagon to alert them to the corruption in Albania and how the American government was being defrauded by radically overpaying for the ammunition it was purchasing from AEY.
As Kokolari continued to research journalists he could pitch, one name kept popping up. C. J. Chivers of the New York Times was one of his generation’s leading war reporters. An ex-Marine, Chivers routinely covered conflict, but he also wrote long investigative articles with an emphasis on military affairs. He sounded perfect.
“I have been somewhat of a gadfly to the current and former Albanian governments with my efforts to help curtail the crime and corruption that are at epidemic proportions in that country,” Kokolari wrote to Chivers. Kokolari laid out Trebicka’s narrative, as he understood it. The main point for Kokolari was to expose corruption in Albania, and US complicity in doing nothing to stop the theft. Was Chivers interested in the story?
The reply from the Times reporter was brief but prompt and exciting: “Why wouldn’t I be interested?”
Kokolari didn’t know it, but he’d tracked down one of the world’s foremost experts on the AK-47. At the time, Chivers was at work on the definitive book on the Russian weapons designer Mikhail Kalashnikov. If anyone would understand the technical aspects of AEY’s contract, it would be Chivers. He also had on-the-ground knowledge about recent ammunition shortages in Afghanistan. He’d been in Kabul in 2006 when the Combined Security Transition Command had decided to supply the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police with a massive amount of ammo. A list of munitions had been drawn up, Chivers
knew, with the hope of creating deep stores that would enable an eventual handoff to the Afghans.
Kokolari followed up with a long e-mail to Chivers. Kokolari didn’t have the facts straight in some instances. He thought Albania was supplying all the ammo for the $300 million contract, whereas the AK rounds were only a small part of the overall dollar amount. Kokolari knew that the repacking was being done because of the Chinese markings. But he didn’t know the real reason AEY was going to such trouble—because it was breaking the Chinese ban.
In his note to Chivers, Kokolari described how a Cyprus company named Evdin was paying the Albanians $22 per carton and then selling the same ammo to AEY for $40—without so much as touching the rounds. Trebicka had told Kokolari about Diveroli’s trip to Albania and how he’d met with Mihail Delijorgji and the prime minister’s son. Kokolari told Chivers that Diveroli had also met with US Embassy officials in Tirana to describe how he was being forced to pay kickbacks.
“I can tell you from my own experience in my dealings with our embassy in Albania,” Kokolari wrote, “that because of Albania’s cooperation with bigger picture issues like the war on terror, the U.S. government has been all too willing to look the other way when it comes to the corrupt practices of Albanian officials.”
Chivers replied that he needed to get clearance from his editor and he’d need the promise of exclusivity. But he was definitely intrigued. Chivers wanted to know why the United States was using an intermediary, AEY, instead of buying the ammunition directly? He also wondered if the American government was overpaying for the ammunition.
To check the veracity of Kokolari’s account, Chivers contacted the Army in Rock Island, Illinois, to see if AEY’s contract was legitimate. It was. Chivers called Kosta Trebicka in Tirana. The Albanian confirmed Kokolari’s allegations about the “Chinese” ammunition, adding details about AEY’s repacking and corruption inside MEICO. Trebicka was eager to talk; he even volunteered to fly to New York. Chivers assured Trebicka that he was going to continue to report the story.
Chivers reached out to an arms researcher named Hugh Griffiths. Since Griffiths had started studying small-arms proliferation as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d tried to interest the Times in covering the way the US government was doing business with arms dealers like Thomet—which amounted to a scandal, in his view. Griffiths’s research had revealed that private contractors like AEY were selling large amounts of substandard weapons with no serial numbers to the US military—and no one was seriously examining what the proliferation of small weapons meant for innocent civilians as thousands upon thousands of AK-47s fell into the hands of warlords and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Griffiths wasn’t surprised by the Albanian story as outlined by Chivers. Griffiths knew about Henri Thomet, the mysterious Swiss broker, and how he used the same methods the CIA had used in Iran-contra in the 1980s: cutout companies like Evdin and offshore banks in financial havens like Cyprus. Griffiths told Chivers that Thomet was also exporting arms to Niger and Chad and Mali—areas with extremist Islamist elements allied to Al Qaeda. In effect, the US government was using AEY as a proxy to deal with Thomet—even as Thomet was arming US enemies. This kind of governmental circumvention was exactly what American and international arms-dealing regimens were designed to avoid, Griffiths said. The Army was enriching and legitimizing gunrunners through a desperate attempt to stand up armies in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as this practice became a major contributor to the proliferation of small arms in war zones around the world.
“I told Chivers that AEY wasn’t an anomaly,” Griffiths recalled. “It was an example of what was going on. AEY’s deal was how the gray market worked. Virtually every arms shipment coming out of Albania was illegal in one way or another. But the Albanians didn’t give a flying fuck about the law. The lack of safety, the way things weren’t done by the book—it was classic. Thomet was using the AEY kids as part of his strategy to do business with the United States. It was all about the money. The AEY kids were fucking idiots.”
* * *
I. Video footage can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKDdF6vfjoo.
II. The name combined Alb for “Albania” with demil for “demilitarization.”
Chapter Nine
22 BUNKERS
The screaming fights were followed by makeup sex, quickly leading to another fight: I love you, I hate you, come here, go away. Efraim Diveroli’s tempestuous relationship with his girlfriend Suzie was doomed. The police had been called once, when Diveroli threw Suzie’s clothes into the hallway at the Flamingo and told her to get out. The police had found the girl crying in the hallway, but she denied she’d been assaulted and no charges were filed. Still, the police recorded the incident, adding it to Diveroli’s increasingly checkered history, including the restraining order a prior girlfriend had taken out. The relationship was obviously out of control—like Diveroli’s consumption of alcohol and cocaine, his lust for money, and his never-ending pursuit of contracts on FedBizOpps.
The affair had to end, and so it did. Newly single, Diveroli did what twentysomethings all over America did at the time when they wanted to meet someone new: he created a profile on Myspace.
“Well of course I’m a super nice guy!!!” Diveroli began. He described himself as easygoing, with a good sense of humor, though he allowed he’d had problems in high school so he’d worked from a young age. “I probably grew up way too fast. I finally got a decent apartment and I’m content for the moment, however I definitely have the desire to be very successful in my business and this does take up a lot of my time.” He concluded, “Who I’d like to meet: a sweet pretty girl with a good attitude and love for life, a woman that will stand by her man because she knows he’d do the same for her, no matter the circumstance.”
Romance aside, Diveroli was prospering, in his manner. The boiler-room model he’d created at AEY was cutthroat, as everyone was paid solely on commission. As usual, Diveroli micromanaged all aspects of the operation, screaming and yelling and flying into rages—only to step outside to smoke a joint and regain his composure. The main quality Diveroli looked for in his staff was greed. The desire for money was a motive he understood and believed he could control. But it meant that there was no loyalty.
As AEY’s “team” tried to beat each other to deals, Diveroli ventured deeper into a dictatorial mode, unwilling to listen to others, overly certain of his own good judgment, and contemptuous of those who weren’t willing to take the kinds of risks he encountered every day as a real-life gunrunner.
After months of dickering, Diveroli had finally reached an arrangement with Henri Thomet and MEICO, and the Afghanistan contract was running smoothly, even in Packouz’s absence. In Bountiful, Utah, the Mormon businessman Ralph Merrill was following Diveroli’s progress with admiration. AEY really was delivering on the $300 million contract. With the profits split fifty-fifty, Merrill stood to make millions. It all depended on Diveroli’s final profit margins, which would be determined by an audit at the end of the contract.
“I thought Diveroli was performing well, all things considered,” Merrill recalled. “He’d gained experience with the Iraq contracts, and he seemed to be in complete control. All of the problems I was aware of appeared to be external, and he was handling them as best as one could, given the circumstances. So I was pleased.”
But Diveroli had other plans for Merrill. From the start, Diveroli had always wanted his “financier” to know as little as possible about his business. When he spoke with Merrill, in an uncharacteristically quiet and reasoned tone, Diveroli would be alone, in his office. But as the Afghanistan contract proceeded, Diveroli’s attitude began to change. Deference was replaced with desperation—or at least that was how Diveroli represented himself to Merrill. The money AEY had been paid by the government was supposed to be reinvested to finance further arms purchases until the Afghan deal was completed. But now Diveroli pretended he was barely breaking even and that AE
Y was in danger of losing the entire contract because he didn’t have adequate funds to finance the various deals. In fact, the opposite was true: Diveroli’s profits and the factoring agreement with Wells Fargo meant that he was no longer dependent on Merrill’s money.
“Diveroli had been lying to Merrill about AEY’s profits for years,” David Packouz recalled. “Diveroli would often complain that Merrill was sitting on his ass in Utah while we were slaving away. He said he refused to be ‘Ralph’s workhorse,’ and that everyone should be rewarded in proportion to the work they put in—not the deal they’d struck with him. That’s how Diveroli justified his sleazy behavior to himself. So he decided he was going to squeeze Merrill’s share down—just like he’d done with mine.”
Diveroli concocted a phantom investor named Danny, a ploy he aimed to use to deceive Merrill and radically reduce his share of the profits. Danny was based on a real dude, Danny Doudnik, who was now Diveroli’s main confidant at AEY. Like many of the people Diveroli worked with, Doudnik had gone to the Hebrew Academy in Miami Beach. The pair hadn’t seen each other again for years, until they were both twenty years old and Diveroli was established as an arms dealer. At the time, Doudnik was working as a paralegal for a real estate company in Aventura, Florida, a dreary job with a modest salary and no real prospect of advancement or fulfillment. But Doudnik had a skill that was useful for Diveroli: born in the former Soviet Union, he was fluent in Russian. When the Kyrgyz intelligence agency had seized AEY’s ammo, Diveroli had asked his old buddy to translate some of the documents. Diveroli had paid him $150 for the job. After that, Doudnik had occasionally done small translation jobs. Diveroli tried to recruit him to work full-time for AEY, saying he was always looking for “good people.” Doudnik had steered clear of Diveroli for a simple reason—he thought he was a psychopath.
Finally, like David Packouz and Alex Podrizki before him, Doudnik had succumbed, however reluctantly, to Diveroli’s inducements—including a salary of $100,000 a year. The experience had proved extremely trying, far more so than Doudnik had anticipated. The temper tantrums and disorganization and substance abuse were hard enough to deal with. So were the hours Diveroli demanded of his staff, with the office doing business in a variety of time zones and the company woefully understaffed. But nothing topped Diveroli’s outrageous behavior on the trip he took with Doudnik to Ukraine. The aim was to negotiate lower prices with the air-cargo company shipping AEY’s munitions to Afghanistan. Doudnik went along to translate. But he’d been horrified when Diveroli approached pretty women on the streets of Kiev as if all of them were prostitutes. Diveroli would simply walk up to a beautiful woman and ask, “How much?”—an inquiry Doudnik had refused to translate.
