“This contract is part of a vital mission in the global war on terrorism. “Tell the Kyrgyz KGB that ammo needs to get to Afghanistan!” he shouted into the phone. Sitting in the restaurant, Packouz tried to clear his head, cupping a hand over his cellphone to shut out the noise. 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. 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. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. 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. 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. government to pay more rent to use their airport as a crucial supply line for the war in Afghanistan. The Russian president didn’t like NATO expanding into Kyrgyzstan, and the Kyrgyzs wanted the U.S. The arms shipment, it appeared, was being used as a bargaining chip in a high-stakes standoff between George W. “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. It was the freight forwarder he had employed to make sure the ammunition made it from Hungary to Kabul. But as Packouz’s miso-marinated Chilean sea bass arrived, his cellphone rang.
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. 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. To Packouz and Diveroli, the shipment was part of a major arms deal that promised to make them seriously rich.Īrriving home at the Flamingo, his sleek condo with views of the bay, Packouz packed the cone of his Volcano, a smokeless electronic bong. presidential election the following year. For the Bush administration, the ammunition was part of a desperate, last-ditch push to turn the war around before the U.S. After six years of fighting, Al Qaeda remained a menace, the Taliban were resurgent, and NATO casualties were rising sharply. It was May 2007, and the war was going badly. The shipment was part of a $300 million contract that Packouz and his partner, Efraim Diveroli, had won from the Pentagon to arm America’s allies in Afghanistan. Reading the e-mail back in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. Aboard the plane were 80 pallets loaded with nearly 5 million rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, the Soviet-era assault rifle favored by the Afghan National Army. After stopping to refuel there, the flight would carry on to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. A 747 cargo plane had just lifted off from an airport in Hungary and was banking over the Black Sea toward Kyrgyzstan, some 3,000 miles to the east. The e-mail confirmed it: everything was finally back on schedule after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delay.
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