Author tells story of Apple of arms

It's rare that I ever get assigned to cover a movie about a job I've actually done.

That's probably a good thing because I don't know how many people would pay to watch someone clean up his dad's car wash or freelance as a film critic.

With the new movie, War Dogs, the film's real-life anti-heroes, Efraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller), had a brief but colorful career doing what I did for 13 years, working as a defense contractor.

Whereas I made enough to pay the mortgage on my apartment, Diveroli's company AEY handled a $300 million contract to provide ammunition for the American-backed Afghan army. I was in my 30s and 40s. They were stoners in their 20s.

I worked for a large corporation and had to bill all of my hours to specific, authorized projects. I also had to do it sober.

Diveroli and Packouz, who had previously worked as a masseur, had a "wake and bake" regimen, worked a 24-7 unsupervised schedule and acquired and sold "gray market" weapons from shady arms dealers through the internet. For the Afghan contract, they shipped Chinese-made, Albanian bullets to Kabul.

I was paid to help with logistics and other things that didn't explode or kill people.

"Diveroli drew a very sharp distinction between what the people who did what you were doing, logistics and other kinds of equipment and uniforms and things -- which is a whole kind of world in itself -- and people who deal with things that blow up. In his view, all he wanted to be was the guy who does things that blow up," journalist Guy Lawson said.

"Diveroli wanted to be the guy who made sure they got the guns, the bombs and the grenades. Diveroli was the functional opposite of that. It was utter chaos, lack of control, outsized ambition. No oversight and at least as far as Diveroli was concerned, no concern about the moral consequences of what they were doing."

BEHIND THE LAUGHS

Lawson wrote a Rolling Stone article about AEY that he expanded into the book Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History. Director Todd Phillips (The Hangover), Stephen Chin and Jason Smilovic adapted it into the War Dogs screenplay.

Diveroli and Packhouz wound up on the front page of The New York Times and ended up proving that not all publicity is good. Diveroli wound up pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy in 2011 and was sentenced to four years in prison. Packhouz got a suspended sentence.

The initial story about the duo seemed so absurd in part because of the youth of the gunrunners and the fact that Diveroli bore an amusing resemblance to Sean Penn's surfer Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

"But if Spicoli was dumb," Lawson says. "Diveroli was anything but. Or I should say there is a part of him that verges on self-destructive, but he's a very intelligent person to get himself into these situations. Obviously, he overplayed his hand, and there were terrible consequences.

"Ask yourself could you do something like that when you were 21?"

THE APPLE OF ARMS

Lawson says their climb to infamy doesn't seem so absurd considering the government website FedBizOpps enabled small companies like AEY to bid on contracts. What had once been the work of large companies like mine, which employed legions of lobbyists and lawyers, could be potentially handled by organizations involving less than a dozen people.

If the now omnipresent Apple could be started in a garage, why not an arms business?

"It's the quintessential garage story. These guys were in the metaphorical garage in the arms business. There was every indication that AEY could have become what Diveroli imagined it would be -- kind of like the Apple of arms dealing. It would be the innovator, the first mover and the industry leader. That's what he intended to do," Lawson says.

"When you look at it one step at a time, this story makes sense. It makes no sense when you look at it at 35,000 feet. But that's often the case with things that are truly incredible. It's one of those stories where each step along the way was more audacious and risky. When they got embarrassed on the front page of The New York Times -- and it was not correctly reported, in my opinion -- they had to be the fall guys."

Arms and the Dudes points out that while the deals AEY engaged in were far from ethical and the Chinese-made bullets were illegal for such transactions, a more experienced firm might have been able to get past the legal hurdle because the ammo had been in Albanian possession for more than 40 years. While the New York Times' C.J. Chivers described the rounds as faulty, Lawson says they were in usable condition and that AEY provided vital support for the Afghan army when it was needed most.

"You couldn't send a jarhead [U.S. Marine] to Tirana to get this Chinese ammo," Lawson says. "The jarhead wouldn't know what to do. But you could send some clever, wily kids with a mission, and they're going to complete it. And that's what was happening. So the system, in a weird way, was kind of working, at least as conceived by the Pentagon. It was inexpensive. It was arriving on time, and it worked."

THE REEL STORY AND THE REAL STORY

Phillips' movie takes more than a few liberties with the facts. For one thing, Diveroli in real life looked and looks more like Teller than Hill. Nonetheless, Lawson says he's happy with the movie.

"It's fast-paced, but it contains some very important messages I think about the way America conducts its foreign policy and its wars and the proliferation of arms in the 21st century. The movie makes that point very elegantly, I think," he explains.

He does wish the film could have revealed a tragedy that occurred in Albania that he documented in Arms and the Dudes. In the village of Gedec in 2007, the Tirana government disposed of munitions in the hopes of gaining entry into NATO, but they disposed of them improperly. As a result, a series of explosions killed 26 people, mostly women and children.

"I tried and begged them to include that in the movie," Lawson says, "It did not make it. I care about those people in Albania, and I think the public ought to as well. Those were innocent civilians killed in good measure because of American enablement of corruption and cronyism in Albania."

Lawson is currently working on another long-form project, and while he was willing to sit through the movie and interview Packouz and Diveroli, with the arms merchants' attorneys present, he says it will be a while before he reads the memoir Diveroli and Matthew B. Cox wrote, Once a Gun Runner.

"I couldn't bring myself to, to be perfectly honest. You spend so much time in your writing on a subject. I read the first page, and he described himself as 'handsome by anyone's reckoning [actually, "standards"],' and I figured that was enough," he says.

Lawson's books and essays have covered con artists, the phony back story behind the phony literary phenomenon J.T. LeRoy and the fine line between legitimate and illegitimate business. Yet while all his journalism explores a kind of theater, War Dogs is the first movie made from his work.

"I'm not American by birth or upbringing, so I look at this country differently [from] people who are native Americans. I'm a Canadian and an Australian, and I lived in England as well, so I have this kind of ironic closeness to America. I'm interested in characters who are pushing the boundaries of not just what's acceptable but what is real and who are moving in ways that are against -- it doesn't have to be oppositional -- but against the conventional or acceptable way to behave. The dudes were like that."

MovieStyle on 08/19/2016

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