But Packouz hadn’t been able to resist the temptation when Diveroli, his 21-year-old friend from high school, had offered to cut him in on his burgeoning arms business. Working with nothing but an Internet connection, a couple of cellphones and a steady supply of weed, the two friends - one with a few college credits, the other a high school dropout - had beaten out Fortune 500 giants like General Dynamics to score the huge arms contract. With a single deal, two stoners from Miami Beach had turned themselves into the least likely merchants of death in history.Īrriving home at the Flamingo, his sleek condo with views of the bay, Packouz packed the cone of his Volcano, a smokeless electronic bong. As the balloon inflated with vapors from the high-grade weed, he took a deep toke and felt the pressures of the day drift away into a crisp, clean high.ĭinner was at Sushi Samba, a hipster Asian-Latino fusion joint. He couldn’t believe that he and Diveroli were actually pulling it off: Planes from all over Eastern Europe were now flying into Kabul, laden with millions of dollars worth of grenades and mortars and surface-to-air missiles. But as Packouz’s miso-marinated Chilean sea bass arrived, his cellphone rang. It was the freight forwarder he had employed to make sure the ammunition made it from Hungary to Kabul. “The plane has been seized on the runway in Kyrgyzstan.” “We’ve got a problem,” he told Packouz, shouting to be heard over the restaurant’s thumping music. The arms shipment, it appeared, was being used as a bargaining chip in a high-stakes standoff between George W. The Russian president didn’t like NATO expanding into Kyrgyzstan, and the Kyrgyzs wanted the U.S. government to pay more rent to use their airport as a crucial supply line for the war in Afghanistan. Putin’s allies in the Kyrgyz KGB, it seemed, were holding the plane hostage - and Packouz was going to be charged a $300,000 fine for every day it sat on the runway. Word of the seizure quickly reached Washington, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates himself was soon on his way to Kyrgyzstan to defuse the mounting tensions. Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war - and if our delivery didn’t make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.” There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn’t know what their motives were. Sitting in the restaurant, Packouz tried to clear his head, cupping a hand over his cellphone to shut out the noise. “Tell the Kyrgyz KGB that ammo needs to get to Afghanistan!” he shouted into the phone. Tell them that if they fuck with us, they are fucking with the government of the United States of America!” “This contract is part of a vital mission in the global war on terrorism. Packouz and Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business.
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