Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners From Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History

by Guy Lawson

  But the New York Times had framed the story—and in the middle of that frame were David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli, staring grimly out from their mug shots.

  In the days after their faces appeared in the Times, the arms-dealing dudes became celebrities, in a bad way. Poster boys for the serial incompetence of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they seemed to personify the entire war effort in Afghanistan.

  Despite the story, the Afghans still needed a vast stockpile of ammunition: hundreds of millions of AK-47 rounds, half a million sniper cartridges, 3 million heavy-machine-gun bullets, along with thousands of mortar, howitzer, and rocket-launcher rounds. AEY was the only feasible supplier, and canceling the contract had caused severe shortages in Afghanistan. But none of that mattered in the end.

  On March 29, 2008, a new request for proposals was posted on FedBizOpps.

  The bidding process began anew.

  / / / / /

  On the day the Times story appeared, Kosta Trebicka nervously checked the newspaper’s website every five minutes on his computer in Tirana. Trebicka knew that he had an enormous amount riding on what Chivers wrote—and not just legal jeopardy. Trebicka had taken on the Albanian prime minister and the defense minister—two of the most powerful figures in a country infamous for its lawlessness and violence. Trebicka hoped that the publicity from the Times would provide him some form of protection in Albania. Perhaps the revelation of corruption inside the Albanian government would have consequences, Trebicka hoped, and officials would be held accountable.

  In the weeks that followed, it seemed to Trebicka that the Times story had no impact in Albania. The only person who seemed to care about the article was Michael Mentavlos of the DCIS, who was outraged that Trebicka had disobeyed his direct order and talked to the Times. Soon after the article ran, Mentavlos flew to Tirana and called Trebicka, screaming and demanding a meeting. Afraid, Trebicka lied and said he was out of the country. Three days later, he gave over to the seemingly inevitable and met with Mentavlos. The investigator told Trebicka he had to travel to Florida to testify in the AEY investigation. To Trebicka, it appeared as if Mentavlos would do anything to convict Diveroli.

  “Mentavlos said that when I am in front of the lawyers I have to say that Efraim Diveroli and Alex Podrizki did know that they were illegally selling Chinese ammo to Afghanistan,” Trebicka later recalled. “I answered that I cannot do it, since they never had expressed themselves literally in my presence something like this.”

  Days later, Trebicka received an e-mail from congressional investigators. He called Mentavlos and told him about the House Oversight Committee’s interest in talking to him.

  “Mentavlos told me that in three days I have to be in Florida and not to stop in Washington, DC, or give any documents to the committee,” Trebicka recalled. “Again, I was surprised by him.”

  Trebicka flew to the United States—but at his own expense, to avoid any connection to the DCIS. He first went to Washington to meet with congressional investigators and tell them what he knew about AEY and Gërdec and Mentavlos. Trebicka then flew to Miami, where he was given an odd reception. As he spoke to the prosecutors in Florida, describing the corruption in Albania, it began to dawn on him that their aggressive attitude signaled that he might be a target for indictment. The notion was bizarre to Trebicka: he was a whistle-blower, not a criminal.

  But Trebicka was saying things law enforcement plainly didn’t want to hear. Like Trebicka’s version of his meeting with the American diplomat Robert Newsome in Tirana, in May of 2007, and how Trebicka said he’d told Newsome AEY was shipping “Chinese” ammunition to Afghanistan before a single round had arrived in Kabul.

  “Our special witness Kosta Trebicka is up to new tricks,” an embassy official in Tirana wrote to his colleagues. “He told Special Agent Mentavlos that he is going to testify in front of Congress that he told Robert Newsome about the Chinese ammunition in 2007 and that Rob told him it was legal and to go ahead with the contract.”

  “For the record, this is untrue,” another American official in Tirana wrote to officials inside the embassy. “Trebicka may say it, but it is untrue. Flatly.”

  Newsome wrote, “To be very clear—I never told Trebicka any such thing.”

  Trebicka represented a threat to the entire case against the dudes because the truth was unwieldy and contradictory, and contained elements that might point away from a jury’s reaching a guilty verdict—or, as was the case in 98 percent of federal prosecutions, guilty pleas that make a trial unnecessary. Prosecutors in Florida then told Trebicka that he was required to provide sworn testimony in front of the grand jury in the AEY case. Trebicka began to fear that he was being lured into a perjury trap and that it would be his word against the word of American government officials. It seemed to the bewildered Albanian that the strange and ruthless prosecutors would do whatever they needed to do to win—even put him in prison.

  Unable to stand the pressure, Trebicka finally decided to flee the United States. He didn’t tell anyone he was leaving the country—he simply boarded a plane for France. He stayed in Paris for a few days, lying low. The authorities in Miami tried to force Trebicka’s hand. Assistant US Attorney Eloisa Fernandez e-mailed Trebicka to demand that he confirm his travel plans to return to Miami so she could set a date for his testimony before the grand jury. Mentavlos was copied on the e-mail.

  “From now on we have to communicate through my lawyer,” Trebicka replied. He would no longer voluntarily testify, as he was concerned for his own safety, legally and physically.

  Returning to Albania, Trebicka wrote an e-mail to congressional investigators. The House was supposedly looking into the entire AEY affair—how the Army acquired weapons for Afghanistan, how the dudes from Miami Beach had won the contract, how illegal “Chinese” ammo had been shipped from Albania. But Trebicka suggested a new line of inquiry—the abuse of power by American investigators: “Now I think is time to tell the truth to everybody of how the investigator for the Department of Defense, Mr. Michael Mentavlos, tried (according to my personal opinion) to obstruct the justice.”

  Trebicka described his encounters with Mentavlos, beginning in October, when the Albanian had finally learned from the investigator that selling “Chinese” ammunition was illegal. Trebicka told how Mentavlos had instructed him not to talk to any journalists, most especially the Times. Trebicka said that Mentavlos had also told him not to talk to any lawyers—including lawyers in Albania. “I was surprised,” Trebicka wrote. “I asked him why? He answered that it would harm a very serious investigation he had worked on for three years. I tried to believe, but it was a vague situation.”

  Then there was the matter of Gërdec. The lethal explosion was tied to the same politicians who’d profited from AEY’s contract, Trebicka said. In his letter to congressional investigators, Trebicka asked why Mentavlos had done nothing to investigate Gërdec, after he’d received documents from Trebicka linking the Albanians involved in the AEY case to the disaster? Trebicka was one of the few people who could tie Defense Minister Mediu, Ylli Pinari of MEICO, and Mihail Delijorgji to both the AEY deal and the explosion in Gërdec.

  Which was more important to the American government, Trebicka wanted to know, “nailing Diveroli, or stopping a tragedy?”

  But Trebicka’s letter had no impact—not in Albania and not in Washington. The congressional oversight committee issued a report condemning AEY for supplying faulty munitions, without mentioning critical ammunition shortages in Afghanistan, the explosion in Gërdec, or potential American complicity in corruption in Albania. As far as Trebicka could see, all that mattered to the prosecutors and investigators was putting Efraim Diveroli behind bars.

  By the summer of 2008, Kosta Trebicka just wanted the whole affair to go away. He still had his various successful businesses and his wife and his children. But there were threats—phone calls in the night, hard looks on the streets of Tirana, whispers of warning. Trebicka took precautions, like changing his cell
phone number regularly and using aliases when he stayed in hotels in Albania. He confided to family and friends that he was scared.

  Trebicka was right to worry—the truths he had revealed did indeed threaten many powerful interests. On September 12, 2008, Kosta Trebicka’s body was found in a field along a rural road near the village of Korcë. There appeared to have been a car accident—but it had occurred in the middle of nowhere, on a flat stretch of road with no other vehicles involved. Somehow, for no apparent reason, Trebicka’s Jeep had suddenly flipped over, and his body had been catapulted through the air, landing an improbable fifty yards from the vehicle.

  Casting more doubt on the situation, one of the first people to arrive on the scene was a former bodyguard for the prime minister. The authorities claimed that Trebicka had been on a hunting trip. A rifle and a dead partridge lay on the ground next to his body. But friends said that Trebicka never went hunting alone, and that the area where his body was found wasn’t a good place to hunt.

  Days after Trebicka’s death, an American state trooper from Virginia, Kevin Teeter, was dispatched to Tirana to inspect the location of the incident. Torrential rain had erased tire tracks, so the investigator had to rely on evidence collected by the Albanian police. Inspecting photographs, sketches, and the damaged vehicle, Teeter concluded that Trebicka had indeed been killed in an accident. “The driver made an abrupt turn left, which caused the vehicle’s weight to sharply shift to the right,” he wrote in his report. “The vehicle overturned onto its right side shattering the passenger side door glass and ejecting the driver onto the ground through the open roof area.”

  The investigation Teeter undertook was limited. The investigator apparently didn’t inspect the autopsy report, if one was conducted; as far as Teeter knew, Trebicka could have had a bullet in the back of his head. Still, the report had the stamp of the Virginia State Police on its cover, providing the imprimatur of American authority, a powerful symbol in Albania that effectively closed Trebicka’s case forever.

  “If it was an accident,” said an Albanian activist who’d worked with Trebicka on his anticorruption campaign, “then it was a very strange kind.”

  Alex Podrizki agreed. When he was asked by prosecutors what he thought had happened, he said he didn’t know—and no one would likely ever know, because of Albanian corruption. But he said that he was virtually certain it wasn’t an accident.

  “The prosecutors weren’t happy with my answer,” Podrizki said. “But Kosta’s death was too convenient for too many people—Albanian and American. He had made a lot of enemies.”

  / / / / /

  Despite assurances from Special Agent Mentavlos, after the New York Times story ran both David Packouz and Alex Podrizki were indicted, along with Efraim Diveroli and Ralph Merrill. There were three investigators working the case before the story ran, Packouz was told, but a dozen more were assigned afterward. Despite the Times story, federal prosecutors in Florida never presented any evidence that the ammunition supplied by AEY was faulty or failed to meet the standards described in the contract. The simple reason was that the ammo was of good quality.

  But that didn’t stop the authorities from issuing press releases that wrongly claimed the contrary.

  “When these contractors intentionally cut corners to line their own pockets, they risk the safety and lives of our men and women in uniform,” US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta said. “Such callousness and disregard for the lives of our soldiers and allies will not be tolerated and will be vigorously prosecuted.”

  “In this day, when our soldiers and our coalition partners are fighting to keep us safe, it is reprehensible that greed and disregard for human safety have resulted in such dangerous fraud,” the director of the DCIS said.

  In fact, the opposite was true. The greatest peril to Afghanistan security forces wasn’t AEY, as the government claimed. It was the US government itself.

  The Pentagon had set out to circumvent domestic and international law by creating its own protocols to acquire weapons, to speed getting arms to Afghanistan—and then the Pentagon’s own law-enforcement agency had thwarted that effort. No one responsible for the fiasco would be held accountable—apart from the fall guys.

  The AEY case vividly illustrated the kaleidoscope-like nature of the disaster of the war effort in Afghanistan. Major Ronald Walck, the Army’s logistics person who’d received AEY’s ammo at the airport in Kabul, seemed to recognize this. In the aftermath of the AEY fiasco, he left Afghanistan and returned to school to write a master’s thesis. His subject was failure. The epigraph was taken from Dietrich Dörner’s classic book The Logic of Failure: “Failure does not strike like a bolt from the blue; it develops gradually according to its own logic. When we watch individuals attempt to solve problems, we will see that complicated situations seem to elicit habits of thought that set failure in motion from the beginning.”

  So the saga of AEY ended.

  So the war in Afghanistan was lost—not in any great battle but in the quiet desperation of three dudes and a doomed cause.

  EPILOGUE

  At the time of writing, the Army’s weapons-procurement process remains unchanged. “Notwithstanding any other provision of law,” the statute begins, effectively exempting the Pentagon from all laws, foreign and domestic. There is no requirement for the Army to check watch lists designed to prevent the US government from dealing with brokers suspected of being illegal gunrunners. The United States continues to exploit this legal black hole, supplying arms to allies—however temporary or dubious in nature—with virtually no oversight or legal constraint.

  In August of 2014, news reports appeared saying that the Albanian government had transferred 22 million rounds of surplus AK-47 ammunition to assist Kurdish forces in Iraq. Inevitably, the shipments were mostly—if not entirely—decades-old Chinese-manufactured ammunition. The Albanians were also giving the Kurdish Peshmerga 10,000 Kalashnikov guns, 15,000 hand grenades, and 32,000 artillery shells of different calibers—likely all surplus Chinese munitions, too. Subsequent reports revealed that at least one C-17 US Air Force transport plane, used by American forces to transfer arms, was seen leaving Tirana’s airport—suggesting that the United States was providing the necessary logistical support. With the Chinese embargo still in place, the shipments would technically be in contravention of American law, but that went unreported. The Secretary of Defense was quoted thanking the Albanians for coming to the aid of the Kurds with “urgently needed arms and equipment.” No mention was made of their place of manufacture.

  In the summer of 2014, the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction issued a report on the nearly 750,000 weapons shipped to Afghanistan since 2004. This included 465,000 small arms, like AK-47s, pistols, and machine guns. The arms had been accompanied by a veritable mountain of ammunition—a significant portion provided by AEY. The report found that nearly half of the weapons couldn’t be accounted for by the US military, and the situation was “far more severe” once the arms were transferred to the Afghan military. The possibilities for fraud and theft were mind-bending, as was the likelihood that the weapons wound up in the hands of the Taliban, or fighters in other conflicts throughout the region—proliferation that went uninvestigated and unprosecuted, the implications of which will be understood only in the decades to come.

  According to independent arms researchers, at the time of this writing Henri Thomet was based in the mountains of Montenegro, where he enjoyed political protection at the highest levels and continued to deal in weapons.

  Faced with the threat of long prison terms if they went to trial, Efraim Diveroli, Alex Podrizki, and David Packouz all pleaded guilty to seventy counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy. The Utah businessman Ralph Merrill refused to plead guilty to a crime he believed he hadn’t committed. One of the first issues stipulated by the government prior to the trial was that it would not allege AEY’s rounds were of poor quality. As Merrill and h
is legal team readied for trial, the US Attorney’s Office in Miami deluged them with more than a million documents—everything from take-out food menus to irrelevant printouts. Ruthless prosecutors commonly used this tactic: bury a defendant in paper so that his or her lawyers spend endless time going through irrelevant material. Merrill’s lawyers did the hard work of sorting through the evidence and found a useful document—or at least part of a document. A memorandum from an American officer stationed in Albania described the machinations in Tirana involving AEY. The officer described how embassy officials deliberately misled congressional investigators. The memorandum detailed how the officer and others had known about the AEY contract and “Chinese” ammo for months before the contract was canceled. He also detailed how he’d suspected American officials were taking bribes from Albanians to look the other way while the country’s stockpile of munitions was looted.

  The document was potentially devastating to the prosecution. It pointed to direct knowledge inside the US government of what AEY had done long before the contract had been terminated. If admitted as evidence, it offered a variety of promising defenses to Merrill. But Merrill wouldn’t receive this measure of justice. The case was assigned to Judge Joan Lenard, a former prosecutor. Lenard ruled that the only issue that mattered in Merrill’s case was his specific knowledge regarding the “Chinese” ammo. Did Merrill know the ammo was “Chinese,” and that it was illegal to sell it to the Pentagon under American law? Everything else was irrelevant, she held. Merrill wouldn’t be permitted to present any evidence regarding embassy knowledge that the ammo was “Chinese.” Nor could he give the jury a sense of the many elements in the case that might raise reasonable doubt, based on the government’s actions, like how American officials in Albania knew, or should have known, that AEY was inevitably buying “Chinese” ammo from MEICO. Or how many American officials had seen the repacking at the airport in Tirana and done nothing to stop it. Or how there was no such thing as a “Communist Chinese military company” when the rounds were manufactured in the 1960s, making nonsense of the law under which Merrill was prosecuted. Or how many millions of rounds were gratefully accepted in Kabul, long after the raid on AEY’s offices and after it was widely and specifically known inside the Pentagon that it was allegedly illegal to acquire the ammo.