
How Two American Kids Became Big-time Arms Dealers - organicgrant
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-dealers-20110316?print=true
======
staunch
For 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.

------
steve-howard
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.

~~~
VladRussian
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 :)

~~~
JanezStupar
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...](http://www.just-whatever.com/wp-
content/uploads/2007/01/dontworry1.jpg)).

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.

------
GeZe
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.

~~~
loc779
local police != federal government

~~~
yardie
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.

------
phugoid
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."

~~~
cheez
If you ask me, their ethics were an extension of the USG.

------
brown9-2
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.

------
forgot_password
IMHO: The printer friendly version isn't particularly easy to read. Go here:
[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-
de...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-
dealers-20110316)

~~~
daydream
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.

------
chrismiller
Really interesting article. This would make for an excellent movie.

~~~
bradgessler
Lord of War is a great movie about arms dealers.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399295/>.

------
sskates
Talk about hacking the system. It's amazing that everything was legitimate
except for the fact that they were reselling Chinese ammunition.

~~~
JanezStupar
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.

------
zheng
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?

~~~
roel_v
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.

------
zaidf
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_.

------
forbes
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.

~~~
wyclif
Yes, that is damned annoying. They need to stop doing that immediately.

~~~
cheez
Then stop posting links to print versions. They need to make money somehow.

~~~
wyclif
I didn't post the link.

------
ck2
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..._

------
georgecmu
dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2375104>

Thanks for reposting.

~~~
organicgrant
Another great mind.

------
ck2
_seven months of house arrest_

Crime does pay apparently. Were all financial assets seized or not?

------
prayag
I love stories like this. This would make an excellent movie.

------
JimmyMiller
The Rolling Stone ought to stick to music.

~~~
ceejayoz
Why? They've done some phenomenal reporting on the War on Terror.

~~~
rdl
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
kwis
> 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.

~~~
bugsy
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.

------
JimmyMiller
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.

~~~
ceejayoz
It's entirely possible to read two (or even more!) sources of news.

------
initself
Site doesn't render in Android.

------
cheez
Really interesting read. Funny that evidence against them was their email.

------
hallmark
I was entirely expecting the article date to be April 1.

~~~
hallmark
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.

