Steve Sailer writes: Back in 2008, this was a nine-days-wonder story about how the Bush Administration had awarded a giant ammunition contract to a couple of Miami Beach stoners, Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz. This was obviously a conspiracy that went all the way to the top! Surely, Diveroli must have been a huge GOP donor. This would be the scandal that would bring down Dick Cheney!
Except the more I thought about the details of the story, the more it reminded me less of some movie thriller and more about something more mundane. As I blogged in 2008:
In the wake of the NYT’s story on 22-year-old high school-dropout Efraim E. Diveroli, who snagged $202,000,000 in U.S. government ammunition contracts in Fiscal Year 2007 to supply bullets to the embattled Afghan government, many people are wondering how the federal government could have handed out such a big contract to some loser who has been arrested twice in his young life: for drunk driving and for beating up a parking valet.
You would think that somebody in our huge federal government might want to do some background checks on the Internet. For example, the only job Diveroli has ever held besides working for his dad Michael Diveroli was working for his uncle Bar-Kochba Botach’s weaponry shop, Botach Tactical, in South Central LA. So, what kind of lessons did young Efraim learn working for Botach?
Here, unedited, is just the first page’s worth of customer reviews of Botach Tactical on Epinions.com:
QUALITY MERCHANDISE/INEPT CUSTOMER SERVICE REPS!
Botach. Great Prices, Horrible Customer Service.
Shop elsewhere. Poor customer service. NOT WORTH THE AGGRAVATION !
One word “Agonizing”
Please investigate this company on the Internet before purchasing anything!
Horriable!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
painfully awful. the WORST customer service you can imagine
Extremely frustrating and disappointing
Worst Customer Sevice Experience EVER.
My order was just forgotten
Cut out the middleman and just flush your money down the toilet.
RUN BY TOTAL MORONS
Worst Shopping Experience Ever!!!
service and trust, I rate them at minus 90
Worst Customer Service Around
A few days later I added a “general theory:”
Have you ever tried to buy a camera from the ads in the back pages of a camera magazine? There are pages and pages in tiny type offering better deals than you could get from any local store. A friend bought a camera from one once, and it turned out to be a horrible experience. The package showed up very late, was missing essential pieces, and when he called to complain the customer service rep acted hostile and tried to sell him more stuff he didn’t want rather than fix his problem. The representatives of the camera shop became highly abusive over the phone.
I asked him what city the shop was located in? Brooklyn.
And what time do they close business on Friday? 2 pm.
Well, there you go …
There are a whole bunch of Hasidic-run photography dealers in New York City. Some of them, such as B&H (which is jokingly said to stand for “Beards & Hats”), are quite honest and have done very well for themselves over the years.
On a bulletin board on Photo.net, customer Steve Levine says:
“Interestingly, B&H was the first “Hasidic” owned camera store that decided to treat customers like human beings. In the pre-B&H days, all of the NYC camera stores were nearly impossible to deal with.”
Many of them still practice bait-and-switch and other simple con techniques. They hook you in with too-good-to-be-true advertised prices, then proceed to make your life a nightmare as you try to get them to live up to their promises and they try to badger you into buying even more junk. …
So, Diveroli was just applying the family/ethnic tradition to federal contracts. You put in a low bid, assisted by Diveroli’s AEY, Inc. certification as owned by a disadvantaged minority (Hasidic, although Diveroli sounds like a Roman Jewish name — i.e., not Ashkenazi, which the Hasidim are — but Diveroli’s celebrity uncle Shmuley Boteach was ordained as a Lubavitcher Hasidic rabbi, although he has since broken with them) for affirmative action purposes. If the feds bite on the bait, well, you hustle like hell to come up with something that will make it so that the feds will be more willing to accept the crap you foist on them than dealing with you and your lawyers.
Here’s Hill in the Cousin Marriage scene from The Wolf of Wall Street (language NSFW):
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* It will be interesting to see how they treat the ethnicity in the film. I get the feeling that there is a growing confidence among the new generation coming up in Hollywood – Judd Apatow and his troupe come to mind – when it comes to speaking plainly about their Jewishness.
Scorsese did a weird thing with WofWS in diminishing the Jewishness of Belfort while – to the point of caricature – exaggerating it in Hill’s character. That feels like his old Hollywood instincts kicking in to me.
It’s always interesting to note the way they treat it though, sometimes it can be just outright hilarious. The lead character in ‘Lord of War’ – though not based on a man I could identify as Jewish in real life – was turned into a crypto-Catholic Jewish convert. Is reverse Marrano a thing? Maybe some did do that to escape the Soviet Union but initially it just seemed a bizarre choice and extremely funny.
There’s a show called Happyish starring the exceptional Brit Steve Coogan as a melancholic ad-executive. Maybe ‘alienated’ is the better word. It’s written by a strongly identified Jewish man named Auslander (I think that’s his name!) and the wife is a ‘yenta’ complete with an overbearing and Shaoh-kvetching addicted mother but they, again, have followed that old Hollywood instinct to cast WASP but write him as Jewish.
Makes for frustrating watching because the outlook of Coogan’s character is very typically Jewish. Not that Coogan doesn’t share some of those traits and isn’t a very competent actor, but the effect is still jarring.
I think it’s time to just forget about the veneer. We know!!! It’s alright, you feel alienated and worry that if you just make it explicitly about you we might pogrom you or something but……
As our progressive friends are always saying, it’s 2015 for pity sake.
* Some of it is just that some directors have their stars and they stick with them even if the roles aren’t ethnically appropriate. Scorsese’s guy is DiCaprio (just as it was formerly De Niro) and there are good reasons for that: watch the reaction shots of DiCaprio as Hill rationalizes. DiCaprio is a movie star.
Similarly, Tom Hanks can’t really play an upper crust New York Irish-American in “Bridge of Spies,” but Spielberg and Hanks have made two fine movies together (and one not so good one in The Terminal).
* Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010) included a shady Iraq war arms deal. I wonder if it was inspired by this.
* I saw WofWS this past year on DVD, and I really enjoyed the movie. While watching the movie, something appeared to be a little off. Jonah Hill’s character was obviously Jewish, but Leonardo di Caprio’s character was much less so. Not being especially familiar with the story apart from the movie, I decided to do a little research afterward to find out more, when I made the troubling discovery that “Jordan Belfort,” di Caprio’s character, was Jewish and his company, “Stratton Oakmont,” had a definite WASP tinge to it. Now Hollywood has no problem turning out movies like the “Godfather,” directed by the Italian-American director Francis Ford Coppola, starring Italian-American actors portraying Italian-American gangsters, or TV shows like “The Sopranos” where a clearly identifiable New Jersey Italian-American mobster is portrayed by the late Italian-American actor James Gandolfini, or a movie like “American Gangster” where black mobster Frank Lucas who made a fortune in dealing drugs (law enforcement in the movie had a hard time believing that a Black drug dealer could outorganize the Italian Mafia when it came to drugs) was portrayed by the black actor Denzel Washington. Thus, Hollywood, which everyone concedes is totally dominated by Jews, has no problem portraying mobsters that are clearly identifiable as Italian-Americans or Black Americans and casting Italian-American or Black-American actors to portray them, but when it comes time to portraying “mobsters” (even though his criminal activity involved pushing worthless stocks) who are in actuality Jewish-Americans, such as Jordan Belfort, the portrayal is clearly smudged to obscure the Jewishness of the wrongdoer. Hence we have the very fine Italian-American actor di Caprio playing the Jewish-in-actuality Jordan Belfort. How can he be Jewish is he doesn’t look Jewish or have a Jewish name? We can’t turn out movies that might tarnish the image, can we?
P.S.—I had an older Italian-American man cutting my hair about 10 years ago, and he refused to watch “The Godfather” because of its portrayal of Italian-Americans, despite my strong recommendation that it was truly one of the greatest movies of all time. I wonder how many moviegoers watched WofWS and came out of the theater thinking Jordan Belfort was Jewish.
* My understanding is that putting in impossibly low bids is a normal tactic in federal contracting – they expect you to go over your estimate in both the time and cost so no eyebrows are raised. Personal contacts are important.
The internet has brought down margins in many industries by increasing transparency, but government contracting is still very opaque. I would expect that it stays that way.
* Packouz and Diveroli
Those two morons in the photograph have their fingers on the triggers – a major violation of safe firearm handling. And I am guessing that the muzzles probably are not being pointed at a safe direction either.
Botach Tactical
Infamous in the firearms industry for bait-and-switch and obnoxiously and aggressively bad after-sale service.
* Occam’s Razor suggests Steve’s explanation for the Wolf of Wall Street casting (DiCaprio is Scorcese’s star) is correct. If there were a Hollywood conspiracy to keep Jews from looking bad, the Jonah Hill character wouldn’t have been in the movie. Also, bear in mind that the Jewish Rob Reiner was cast as Belfort’s father.
As someone who had tangential contact with Stratton Oakmont types in the ’90s, the ethnic mix in the movie rings true. Pretty much any type of white guy you’d find in a New York City outer borough could be found working in one of those places, plus an occasional Asian or NAM. Interestingly, although there were firms with faux-WASP names like Stratton Oakmont or one I worked at (a legitimate company) called Barington Capital, there was also at least one firm with a faux-Jewish name: A.S. Goldmen & Co, founded by one Anthony Marchiano.
* Obviously, The Wolf of Wall Street loses a lot of insight into the Country Club Crisis by casting a Slavic-looking gentile like DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, who emphasized in his memoir how he was driven to cheat and steal by his resentment of gentiles.
On the other hand, holy cow, did DiCaprio ever give an entertaining performance.
