How 2 Kids Landed a $298M Arms Contract, Skammed the U.S. Military, and Got Really Really High

Rolling Stone magazine has just published a feature story of the astonishing saga of two Miami potheads who convinced the DoD and high-level diplomats to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars to arm the Afghan National Army — with taxpayer dollars.  And it would have been fine if the kids had not tried to secretly inflate their profit by buying decades-old Chinese AK-47 bullets from mafia-tied Albanians.  Emboldened by cocaine and high-grade marijuana, the two boys orchestrated and operated the whole scheme from their apartment, masking their telephone voices like crank-callers as they spoke to officials all over the world. 

Writer Guy Lawson does a fine job of making this unbelievable story believable and cinematic.  It’s just a matter of time before we begin to see trailers for the movie.  FraudBlawg originally reported the story back in May of 2009.  One detail that Lawson failed to mention was the rest of the story: the Chinese ammo supplied by potheads and bought by the taxpayers apparently ultimately wound up in the hands of…. the Taliban.  From the original FraudBlawg post:

This bizarre story piles irony upon irony. Apparently, U.S. ammunition has somehow fallen into the hands of the Taliban, reports the New York Times. But, as luck would have it, the ammunition is nearly fifty-year-old Chinese bullets repackaged in Albania that are prone to misfire. How did we get these bullets in the first place? The United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida has alleged that the ammunition was sold to the Department of the Army by a twenty-two-year-old kid under a questionable near $300 million Government contract. In an earlier article, the Times reported that the shipments actually included “ammunition that NATO and the State Department have determined to be outdated and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed. The Times alludes to an audio recording of the kid who bought and sold the ammunition, Miami-based Efraim Diveroli, discussing the contracts with his Albanian counterpart, Kosta Trebicka. The conversation is purportedly available on this YouTube site, where the two can be heard discussing the CIA, the mafia, and how they might try to bribe the Albanian arms export director, Ylli Pinari, with prostitutes. ”Call him up, beg him, kiss him, whatever…” says Diveroli.

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