Those companies had entire departments dedicated to selling to the Pentagon.
Third, the only requirement in the contract was that the ammunition be “serviceable without qualification.” As Diveroli and Packouz interpreted it, that meant the Pentagon didn’t care if they supplied “shit ammo,” as long as it “went bang and went out of the barrel.”For the two friends, it was a chance to enter a world usually reserved for multinational defense contractors with armies of well-connected lobbyists.
It turned out to be a great place to get high. As they passed a joint back and forth, Diveroli decided it was time for Packouz to step up and take on a larger role.“I don’t really have time to source all these things,” he told Packouz. Read the incredible true story behind the movie ‘War Dogs’
My main motivator was making money, just like it was for General Dynamics. Packouz was shy around girls, but Diveroli cut right to the chase, often hitting on women right in front of their boyfriends.All the partying wasn’t exactly conducive to running a small business, especially one as complicated and perilous as arms dealing. Nobody goes into the arms business for altruistic purposes.”It didn’t take long for AEY to strike cut-rate deals that vastly improved its profit margin. “It was such a deep game, we didn’t know what was really happening.”Of course, if the Pentagon really cared about the Afghan National Army, it could have supplied them with more expensive, and reliable, state-of-the-art weapons. If we didn’t e-mail, we could probably have denied the whole thing. “Efraim called it the Save the King Project, but he didn’t give a shit about the king,” Packouz says. sold Glocks, Colts and Sig Sauers to law enforcement.
“If the Russians made life difficult for us, they would get taken off the American blacklist, so they could get our business for themselves.”Packouz managed to obtain the overflight permission through a Ukrainian airline — but the episode was an ominous reminder of how little he understood about the business he was in. These fat cats in their boardrooms worrying about the stock prices of their companies have no idea what is about to hit them.”“General Dynamics isn’t going to be too happy right now,” Packouz agreed.Despite the celebratory air, they both knew that their work had just begun. But I would have done it differently. He spoke fluent English with a slight German accent, adding “OK” to the beginning and end of every sentence (“OK, so the price on the AKs is firm, OK?”). After all, by doing an end run around Thomet, there would be more money for everyone else. 10 Sergeant Stubby “Then I would tell them the specifics of what I was after — mortar rounds, the size of ammo, the amount. First, the Bush administration had started its small-business initiative at the Pentagon, mandating that a certain percentage of defense contracts go to firms like AEY. There were just 10 minutes left before the application deadline. But when Trebicka met with the Albanian defense minister, his intervention had the opposite effect: The Albanians cut him out of the deal, informing AEY that the repackaging job would be completed instead by a friend of the prime minister’s son. As Packouz spoke, the man kept surveying the pavilion out of the corner of his eye, as if he were checking to see if he was being watched. But then we might be leaving money on the table — God forbid!”Finally, at the last possible moment, Diveroli went for nine percent. Cargo planes filled with ammunition were taking off from airports across Eastern Europe. The man sounded panicked.The arms shipment, it appeared, was being used as a bargaining chip in a high-stakes standoff between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. The two men met at a bar near the Sky Tower in the center of town. Most companies grow by attracting more customers. But Diveroli had his own advantages: low overhead, an appetite for risk and all-devouring ambition.In the beginning, Diveroli specialized in bidding on smaller contracts for items like helmets and ammunition for U.S. Special Forces. He scribbled a number on the form: $298,000,000. Still a teenager, he rented a room in a house owned by a Hispanic family in Miami and went to work on his laptop. The pseudo case wasn’t secret, precisely, but the only place it was publicized was on fbo.gov. Katie Porter Exposes the Dangerous Ignorance of Postmaster General Louis DeJoyLily Cornell Silver’s Eddie Vedder Interview: 10 Things We Learned Then one afternoon in September 2008, Trebicka was killed in a mysterious “accident” when his truck somehow managed to flip over on a flat stretch of land outside Tirana.
The pregnancy and daughter that David Packouz (Miles Teller) has with Iz in the film is based on his daughter Amabelle Jane, born in 2007. Col. David G. Johnson In what would prove to be their fatal flaw, the pair decided to purchase weapons from decades-old Chinese stores. No one from the government has been charged in the case, even though officials in both the Pentagon and the State Department clearly knew that AEY was shipping Chinese-made ammunition to Afghanistan.“We were the Army’s favorite contractors when we got the deal — poster boys for President Bush’s small-business initiative,” Packouz says. Evdin would then resell the rounds to AEY. So Packouz would have to tend to most of the Afghanistan contract by himself — a job that any conventional defense contractor would have assigned to dozens of full-time, experienced employees.In February 2007, saddled with a gargantuan task, Packouz went by himself to the annual International Defense Exhibition in Abu Dhabi to look for suppliers. There was real money in the bank — millions and millions.