How Two American Kids Became Big-time Arms Dealers
rollingstone.comFor every one of these you hear about there are 100 guys driving around in Bentleys that were smart enough to play it just a little bit safer.
There's a relatively small group of people that get to bleed us like leeches because the defense department is run like the dumbest of all big organizations: limitless funds and no consequences for employees when they make bad decisions.
People make fun of the startup founder that sells his nascent company to Google for $20M as if he took advantage of the big dumb company. That guy doesn't hold a candle to even the smallest of the criminals milking the US on a daily basis.
I'll admit, I read the first couple pages' worth then skipped towards the ends. This bothered me:
"An ATF agent posing as an arms dealer spent weeks trying to wheedle Diveroli into selling arms. Diveroli refused, but he couldn't resist bragging about his exploits; as agents recorded his every word, he talked about hunting alligators and hogs in the Everglades with a .50-caliber rifle. Finally, the ATF agent lured Diveroli to a meeting, asking him to bring along a gun so they could go shooting together. Diveroli didn't bring a weapon — he knew that would constitute a felony. But the ATF agent, who had thoughtfully brought along a gun of his own, handed Diveroli a Glock to try out."
Sounds exactly like entrapment to me. Guy didn't want to break the law, but the LEO brought along an extra gun just to incriminate him.
Because of his youthful stupidity and greed, Diveroli thought what he played the system. If we look at the situation from outside : government got cheap ammo, and there was only one problem - it was illegal, so somebody needed to be scape goated. They needed to bury Diveroli. I liked how FBI raided their offices just on the mere basis of factually wrong whistleblow about Chinese AKs - one gets to wonder how that was enough for a raid and who really blown the whistle. The entrapment was a nice professional icing on the cake. The house always wins :)
Indeed.
Diveroli didn't even get bent over - he bent over himself. The article really spells out how clueless these guys were. This image springs to mind (http://www.just-whatever.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/dont...).
Its a minor hobby of mine to learn and reason about military and political history. And you have always keep in mind that everything you see and hear is a lie and a feint, covering another lie and a feint and that truth lies several layers deep. Gears withing gears and feints within feints.
These guys broke all the rules in the book - the government saved their asses by taking them in. Otherwise they would get same treatment as their Albanian partner did. It's not like they were the first to try to one-up their "partners". In this kind of industry one can even gain traction, but one must know that there is always a bigger and meaner fish out there - and that it will come after you.
The article tries to paint the two dealers as "a couple of stoner kids", but in reality Diveroli, the creator of the business, was greatly helped by his family situation:
"Efraim Diveroli, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted to be: an arms dealer. It was the family business. His father brokered Kevlar jackets and other weapons-related paraphernalia to local police forces, and his uncle B.K. sold Glocks, Colts and Sig Sauers to law enforcement. Kicked out of school in the ninth grade, Diveroli was sent to Los Angeles to work for his uncle. As an apprentice arms dealer, he proved to be a quick study. By the time he was 16, he was traveling the country selling weapons."
In this business, which is all about connections, Diveroli was blessed with a network of contacts through his family. Without these, it is doubtful Diveroli would ever have achieved anything close to what he did.
I must admit I was looking for this as soon as I started reading the article - I just knew there would be a family connection in there somewhere.
The article also notes that:
* Diveroli's company was actually a shell company transferred to him by his father
* He got financing from someone who worked for his father
local police != federal government
Where do you think the feds do their recruiting? The college job fair is a drop in the bucket compared to the applications they get from local LEOs.
What impressed me is how they overcame their age and the size of their business to compete with the big players, through meticulous hard work and unscrupulous social engineering.
With better ethics, I would love to have someone like that on my team:
"Diveroli knew how to win them over with a mixture of charm, patriotism and a keen sense of how to play to the military culture; he could yes sir and no sir with the best of them. To get the inside dirt on a deal, he would call the official in charge of the contract and pretend to be a colonel or even a general. "He would be toasted, but you would never know it," says Packouz. "When he was trying to get a deal, he was totally convincing. But if he was about to lose a deal, his voice would start shaking. He would say that he was running a very small business, even though he had millions in the bank. He said that if the deal fell through he was going to be ruined. He was going to lose his house. His wife and kids were going to go hungry. He would literally cry. I didn't know if it was psychosis or acting, but he absolutely believed what he was saying."
what's left when you subtract lack of ethics?
If you ask me, their ethics were an extension of the USG.
What are the benefits of the government outsourcing so many defense contracts like this?
These types of situations with middlemen and lowest bid seem ripe for corruption and substituting poorer goods for the desired ones - seems like the taxpayer is getting ripped off at the expense of the middlemen and defense companies.
IMHO: The printer friendly version isn't particularly easy to read. Go here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-de...
Also, the name of the author isn't anywhere on the printer-friendly version of the page. I had to go to the full version to find it. I wonder if that's intentional? I can't see how it would be, but it seems like a huge oversight.
Really interesting article. This would make for an excellent movie.
Lord of War is a great movie about arms dealers. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399295/.
Talk about hacking the system. It's amazing that everything was legitimate except for the fact that they were reselling Chinese ammunition.
Not that amazing if you account that had they not been dealing in forbidden goods they wouldn't be able to deliver, not to mention earn anything for themselves.
What you said is like saying that Count Victor Lustig's sale of Eiffel Tower was completely legitimate - except for the fact that he was not a government official.
So my question is, where does the money go? If they keep it, that sounds like a pretty interesting deal. Multi-millions for 4 years in jail? I'd assume it was confiscated, but then who ends up in the black?
The people who got paid for the ammo they bought, which was paid for decades ago and probably not in any official books any more anyway.
Anyone else avoid getting into gov contract work simply because it feels like you almost have to break the law to get major contract or deliver on them?
This isn't the first time I'm reading a story and thinking to myself but wait, I thought all successful gov contractors pulled strings like this.
Good article, but Rolling Stone has the most annoying 'print friendly' layouts I have ever seen. Peppering the article with links to other (mostly unrelated) pages really takes you out of the story.
Yes, that is damned annoying. They need to stop doing that immediately.
Then stop posting links to print versions. They need to make money somehow.
I didn't post the link.
Even our wars are outsourced. Obama has continued this trend (as well as declaring war all by himself against non-imminent threats which is specifically against the constitution and illegal).
To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America's military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After Bush took office, private military contracts soared from $145 billion in 2001 to $390 billion in 2008. Federal contracting rules were routinely ignored or skirted...
seven months of house arrest
Crime does pay apparently. Were all financial assets seized or not?
I love stories like this. This would make an excellent movie.
The Rolling Stone ought to stick to music.
Why? They've done some phenomenal reporting on the War on Terror.
Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and GQ have really surprised me with the quality of their reporting over the past few years, in areas like national security where I would not have expected them to cover anything. They may have some liberal bias, but not ezcessively so; especially on a military embed, they are being fee information from "authorities", so if being biased but honest journalists makes them more questioning of statements by the military, I am ok with it. It is almost worse when an unthinkingly unquestioning local reporter shows up and just repeats the press releases.
Michael Yon is a great primary source, along with military personnel blogs, and especially freerangeinternational.com/blog/ but the major publications are doing a better job than tv or newspapers.
Vanity Fair has a very serious team of people doing long-form narrative journalism, having laid claim to much of the best talent from the late '90s-era Atlantic Monthly.
Unfortunately, the magazine itself is an unreadable mess of advertising and perfume samples.
> having laid claim to much of the best talent from the late '90s-era Atlantic Monthly.
Thank you for answering a question I'd had for some years now, as to how VF became a source of serious long-form journalism.
Ah, I wondered why The Atlantic had taken a bit of a hit the last few years, they are still pretty great but back then they were amazing.
This is why god gave us Instapaper.
And to take this to extremes: here's Playboy, with a piece of serious long-format investigative journalism: http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-penta...
[for comparison, here's the NYT version (which I believe is in large part based on Playboy) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?_r...]
I agree that Rolling Stone &c are printing some excellent reporting.
The reason, I suspect, is that they force their writers to be entertaining. Not only does this mean people read and appreciate the long-form articles (and thus build demand for more of them), but it forces the writers to properly get to grips with their subject.
A lot of self-consciously 'serious' investigative journalists put far too little emphasis on turning their research into an engaging story. I was talking to one last week, who seemed almost offended by the idea that he might use 'narrative tricks' to engage readers in his articles. He's won many awards, but little public attention -- and IMO it's precisely because he doesn't consider himself an entertainer.
They've recently started taking some journalistic liberties with the material they get to push an agenda. One that comes to mind is the "kill squads" in Afghanistan. Basically a bunch of psychopaths got together to kill civilians. These guys aren't in the same platoon nor the same company.
RS reports it as some sort of secret hitsquad the government is trying to cover up. http://www.michaelyon-online.com/calling-bullshit-on-rolling...
These are the kinds of useless comments that make Hacker News unpleasant to read.
While I agree with you, keep in mind the replies to that particular trolling comment are actually useful.
I personally have been looking for the name of the writing style used in certain articles posted to HN (from Atlantic Magazine, Vanity Fair and few others) since I really enjoy reading these types of articles and they seem to push certain psychological buttons making an engrossing and interesting (not to mention easy to remember) read.
Now I know this writing style is called "narrative journalism" :)
Don't agree with you there. Rolling Stone seems to be the only credible news agency left that does actual in depth investigative journalism.
IMO, no. You really ought to check out Michael Yon for phenomenal reporting on the war on terror. In other words, I get it. The Rolling Stone thinks conservatives are the devil. The bias is ridiculous. But if you choose to read that kind of thing that's your business.
It's entirely possible to read two (or even more!) sources of news.
You're offended by papers exposing the "War on Terror" for the farce it is?
Site doesn't render in Android.
Really interesting read. Funny that evidence against them was their email.
I was entirely expecting the article date to be April 1.
To follow up, I wasn't expecting the backlash; this was a sincere comment. To believe that two teens could be servicing government defense contracts and shipping arms to Afghanistan seemed far-fetched, and given the timing of the HN submission, I thought at first that the story was a joke.