The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Luke Ford

There are some eery Jewish themes in here (hustlers, ethnic networking, chutzpah, in-group vs out-group morality). I remember shortly after 9/11, I asked some friends in shul, “How can we as Jews profit from the war on terrorism?”

Tabletmag.com:

The story of two Jewish twentysomething arms dealers from Miami will hit the big screen this August in a new comedic drug-thriller called War Dogs, produced by Bradley Cooper (swoon) and directed by Todd Phillips (The Hangover).

Based on Guy Lawson’s 2011 viral Rolling Stone article, “The Stoner Arms Dealers,” and his subsequent book Arms and the Dudes, War Dogs tells true story of Efraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill) and David “Mordechai” Packouz (Miles Teller), two former Miami yeshiva students-cum-international arms dealers who land a $300 million U.S. Defense Department contract during the Iraq War. Shrouded in clouds of smoke from their bongs, they, along with a web of international associates, peddled aging weapons and ammunition originally from China and the Soviet Union to American allies fighting in Afghanistan. (A third partner from their Orthodox synagogue, Alexander Podrizki, joined their arms dealing scheme when they needed a Russian speaker, but he does not seem to have a significant role in the film.)

Diverlo and Packouz accomplished all this, naturally, from the comfort of their Miami apartment. “They call guys like us war dogs: bottom-feeders who make money off of war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield,” Teller’s voice says in the trailer. “It was meant to be derogatory, but we kind of liked it.”

Here’s a snippet from Lawson’s piece, which chronicles Diveroli and Packouz’s Jewish heritage:

Packouz and Diveroli met at Beth Israel Congregation, the largest Orthodox synagogue in Miami Beach. Packouz was older by four years, a skinny kid who wore a yarmulke and left his white dress shirts untucked. Diveroli was the class clown, an overweight kid with a big mouth and no sense of fear. After school, the pair would hang out at the beach with their friends, smoking weed, playing guitar, sneaking in to swim in the pools at five-star hotels. When Packouz graduated, his parents were so concerned about his heavy pot use that they sent him to a school in Israel that specialized in handling kids with drug problems. It turned out to be a great place to get high. “I took acid by the Dead Sea,” Packouz says. “I had a transcendental experience.”

The trailer, however, doesn’t seem to note Diveroli or Packouz’s Jewish background much head-on, but there are glimpses. In one scene, Hill’s character Diveroli appears to be wearing a yarmulke (1:00) as he high-fives Teller; in another, a jumpsuit-clad Hill muscles his way through an airport crowd with a gold “chai” dangling around his neck (1:12).

Jewcy’s Gabriela Geselowitz notes:

This film is clearly in the new sub-genre of American Hustle or The Wolf of Wall Street of white guys making tons of money in a reprehensible manner and living hedonistic lifestyles, as some kind of post-recession message about the men we love to hate for near-sociopathically exploiting others for their own material gain. And when these men are Jewish, it just makes it that much more embarrassing.

Still, the story is an undeniably wacky one, involving Eastern European mobsters, gun runners, and major political figures, and it’s sure to make a sensational movie. (I won’t spoil what happens to the two Yeshiva friends.) But fun as the story (and trailer) may be, Packouz and Diveroli are no heroes, and neither Diveroli’s rabbi nor his mother thought so at the time of his trial.

“Efraim needs to go to jail,” a local rabbi told the judge. Even Diveroli’s mother concurred. “I know you hate me for saying this,” she said, addressing her son directly, “but you need to go to jail.” Diveroli’s shoulders slumped.

Rolling Stone:

…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. He loved guns with a passion — selling them, shooting them, talking about them — and he loved the arms industry’s intrigue and ruthless amorality. At 18, after a dispute with his uncle over money, Diveroli returned to Miami to set up his own operation, taking over a shell company his father had incorporated called AEY Inc….

His business plan was simple but brilliant. Most companies grow by attracting more customers. Diveroli realized he could succeed by selling to one customer: the U.S. military. No government agency buys and sells more stuff than the Defense Department — everything from F-16s to paper clips and front-end loaders. By law, every Pentagon purchase order is required to be open to public bidding. And under the Bush administration, small businesses like AEY were guaranteed a share of the arms deals. Diveroli didn’t have to actually make any of the products to bid on the contracts. He could just broker the deals, finding the cheapest prices and underbidding the competition. All he had to do was win even a minuscule fraction of the billions the Pentagon spends on arms every year and he would be a millionaire. But Diveroli wanted more than that: His ambition was to be the biggest arms dealer in the world — a young Adnan Khashoggi, a teenage Victor Bout…

One evening, Diveroli picked Packouz up in his Mercedes, and the two headed to a party at a local rabbi’s house, lured by the promise of free booze and pretty girls. Diveroli was excited about a deal he had just completed, a $15 million contract to sell old Russian-manufactured rifles to the Pentagon to supply the Iraqi army. He regaled Packouz with the tale of how he had won the contract, how much money he was making and how much more there was to be made.

“Dude, I’ve got so much work I need a partner,” Diveroli said. “It’s a great business, but I need a guy to come on board and make money with me.”

Packouz was intrigued. He was doing some online business himself, buying sheets from textile companies in Pakistan and reselling them to distributors that supplied nursing homes in Miami. The sums he made were tiny — a thousand or two at a time — but the experience made him hungry for more.

“How much money are you making, dude?” Packouz asked.

“Serious money,” Diveroli said.

“How much?”

“This is confidential information,” Diveroli said.

“Dude, if you had to leave the country tomorrow, how much would you be able to take?”

“In cash?”

“Cold, hard cash.”

Diveroli pulled the car over and turned to look at Packouz. “Dude, I’m going to tell you,” he said. “But only to inspire you. Not because I’m bragging.” Diveroli paused, as if he were about to disclose his most precious secret. “I have $1.8 million in cash.”

…The Pentagon’s buyers were soldiers with little or no business experience, and 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.”

…Above all, Diveroli cared about the bottom line. “Efraim was a Republican because they started more wars,” Packouz says. “When the United States invaded Iraq, he was thrilled. He said to me, ‘Do I think George Bush did the right thing for the country by invading Iraq? No. But am I happy about it? Absofuckinglutely.’ He hoped we would invade more countries because it was good for business.”

…Diveroli’s aunt — a strong-willed and outspoken woman who fought constantly with her nephew — joined the two friends to provide administrative support. She didn’t approve of their drug use, and she talked openly about them on the phone, as if they weren’t present.

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WP: Pro-Trump, anti-Mexican messages chalked on California campus as ‘chalkening’ movement spreads

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Luke Ford

I find myself reading more stories in the Washington Post these days than in the New York Times (and far more than in the Los Angeles Times).

Washington Post: Racist messages were written alongside campaign slogans for presidential candidate Donald Trump on sidewalks at the University of California at San Diego, as a wave of pro-Trump chalk messages has been spreading on campuses across the country.

After some students at Emory University said they felt unsafe when they saw Trump’s name chalked all over campus, an outcry erupted over whether Trump’s remarks about illegal immigrants, Muslims and other groups make support for him offensive, or whether political correctness has gone so far on college campuses, in particular, that even political speech is endangered and a candidate’s very name can be off-limits.

While some students have countered speech with speech, writing slogans for other candidates and ideas, a backlash against the idea of sheltered, too-easily-offended liberal students is spreading on social media, with Trump supporters and some free-speech advocates urging “chalkening” college campuses.

It’s not just about Trump: The tensions over free speech have boiled over at many colleges this past year, as student protests over race and bias issues in places such as Yale and the University of Missouri have led to heated debates about the First Amendment and what crosses the line into hate speech.

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The case for making Donald Trump king of America

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Luke Ford

Catherine Rampell writes for the Washington Post: Readers, today is your lucky day. I have the perfect idea for how to solve all of our nation’s political problems.

It’s a proposal that could satisfy the fringiest, angriest, most fervent Trumpkins, as well as the most hardheaded, technocratic policy wonks. It would revolutionize the U.S. political economy and pop culture simultaneously.

We should make Donald Trump the king of America.

Now hear me out.

I don’t mean “king” like the all-powerful kind they have in, say, Saudi Arabia. I mean more like the arrangement in Britain.

That is, a largely symbolic political leader, someone who serves as a sort of a soigné celebrity-in-chief, and upon whom the public can project its grandest fantasies and delusions.

This fancy figurehead and his extended royal family would serve primarily to boost national morale; commit gaffes and foibles that would make the public feel better about themselves but would be unlikely to start a nuclear war; host big, glamorous weddings and sail around on big, glamorous yachts; consort with celebrities; provide tabloid fodder; and otherwise absorb the American public’s desire for a political figure who entertains rather than sets policy.

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WP: This white nationalist who shoved a Trump protester may be the next David Duke

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Luke Ford

Washington Post: The day after the rally, Matthew Heimbach, a 25-year-old white nationalist who grew up in an affluent Maryland community and now lives in rural Indiana, acknowledged online that he was the one in the video pushing the woman. The object of his fury, Kashiya Nwanguma, 21, a public health major at the University of Louisville, has joined two others in suing Trump in Jefferson County Circuit Court for inciting a riot. The suit also accuses Heimbach of assaulting Nwanguma.

In his post online, Heimbach described her as a member of the Black Lives Matter movement who had been disrupting the event for the better part of an hour. “White Americans are getting fed up and they’re learning that they must either push back or be pushed down,” he wrote…

Heimbach’s supporters cheered his actions, praising him for standing up to the protesters. But for those who have been tracking his rise, the video raised new worries about Heimbach. Some compare him to David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and the country’s best known white nationalist.

“I think Heimbach should be taken as seriously as David Duke,” says Ryan Lenz, the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog. He describes Heimbach as a media-savvy millennial who has forged relationships with Stormfront, the League of the South, the Aryan Terror Brigade, the National Socialist Movement and other white racist organizations.

“He’s the affable, youthful face of hate in America,” Lenz says, “and, in many ways, he’s the grand connector between all of these groups.”

Heimbach doesn’t hide his extremism. He has had his picture taken at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington holding a sign that reads “6 million? More like 271,301.” In another photo, in front of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave in Atlanta, he unfurled the first flag of the Confederacy. After terrorist attacks in Brussels in March, he tweeted, “Hey Brussels, how’s that multiculturalism working out for you?”

His racial worldview has cost him jobs and led to his excommunication from his Orthodox Christian church. It has created a rift between him and his parents and confounded those who knew him in Maryland: his classmates at Poolesville High School, his teachers and many of his fellow students at Montgomery College and Towson University, where he graduated with a history degree in 2013.

Why, they ask, would someone as smart and educated as Heimbach choose to assert that the Holocaust never happened, that lynchings in the South were mostly deserved, that apartheid in South Africa was not as bad as people have suggested and that if white Americans don’t set off a homeland for themselves then the future of white America is in jeopardy?

…Marilyn Mayo has been tracking Heimbach’s doings for five years. The director of the Anti-Defamation League’s center on extremism, Mayo keeps a watchful eye on individuals and organizations that support racist and anti-Semitic ideologies. Heimbach elicits more worry than most, she says.

“We’ve been concerned about him because he goes beyond just talking,” she says. “He’s created groups. He’s building ties. He’s obviously someone who can write about topics intellectually, and he’s college educated. But he also wants to have very strong ties with hardcore groups like neo-Nazis and racist skinheads.”

Heimbach insists that his movement doesn’t promote violence. For him, inclusion on lists of avowed racists and extremists is more a badge of honor than a sign that he has crossed any line.

His party is still nascent. There are maybe few hundred followers and a dozen or so chapters nationwide. But it will grow, Heimbach says, because whites are being ignored in favor of minorities. And no one has pointed that out more clearly to the rest of the nation, he says, than Donald Trump, who has emerged as the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, in part, by promising to build a wall to keep Mexicans out and to bar Muslims from entering the country.

“Self-radicalized.”

That’s how Heimbach describes his racial awakening. Growing up in Poolesville, Md., a once rural, increasingly diverse community with a median household income of $150,000 a year, Heimbach had no personal encounters that led to his racist ideology. It certainly wasn’t something he learned from his parents: Karl and Margaret Heimbach, who are school teachers and divorced when Matthew was in his early teens.

“His family does not share his beliefs in terms of race or religion,” Margaret Heimbach said in a brief phone interview. His father declined to comment.

The gen­esis of Heimbach’s worldview came from two books he read in high school, “Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” by Samuel Huntington, and Patrick Buchanan’s “The Death of the West.” And everything else, he says, he discovered online.

At Poolesville High, Heimbach tried to start a white student union at the school after a similar group was formed for African American students. He says more than 100 students signed his petition. Deena Levine, the school’s principal, declined to discuss Heimbach.

But Christine Simmons, a former classmate, says he made other students feel very uncomfortable.

“He wouldn’t use the N-word or any slurs, but he would say this is a white community and those people don’t belong here,” Simmons says. “He was always very rude to anyone who wasn’t like him or didn’t think like him.”

At Montgomery College, Heimbach went out of his way to be offensive in a number of Joe Thompson’s history classes, his former teacher says. He once wore a shirt that said, “All I need to know about Islam I learned on 9-11,” and on his laptop he displayed a bumper sticker with a Confederate flag and the words, “If I had known all the trouble they would cause, I would have picked the cotton myself.”

Thompson says that Heimbach was smart, but sifted history to fit his needs. “When he debates history, he leaves out those inconvenient facts that hurt his argument.” What Thompson also thought he saw in Heimbach was someone who was looking for a father figure.

“It makes me sad. It seems to me like he’s wasted his life,” Thompson says. “I did see some goodness in him. But I also did see that he was infected with this hatred.”

Heimbach acknowledges that some of his tactics at Montgomery College were over the top. He says, for instance, that his understanding of Islam and respect for the religion has grown. But he has always employed attention-grabbing stunts.

In 2012, as a student at Towson University north of Baltimore, he founded a white student union to “celebrate European heritage.” The university refused to sanction the group, but Heimbach and his small band of followers weren’t deterred. They would later post on their website that they were there to protect white students from “black predators” and that “White Southern men have long been called to defend their communities when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.”

He knows that provocation generates publicity and that publicity works, even if it comes with costs.

“I guarantee you that I’m going to recruit members out of this article no matter how badly you slant it,” he says. “Thousands of people will look us up online and maybe a dozen will join the party.”

But the costs do cut. His father has not met Heimbach’s son, and Heimbach can’t foresee a way for them to reconcile. His brother and sister haven’t spoken to him in years, he says. Last year, the Orthodox Christian church Heimbach joined in Indiana shunned him for his beliefs.

His work life, too, has been affected. Earlier this year, Heimbach was training to be a family case manager for the Indiana Department of Child Services until, he says, his bosses learned about his views. The department said in a statement that Heimbach was dismissed because his “behavior in training was disruptive of the workplace and incompatible with public service.”

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U.S. Eyes Money Trails of Saudi-Backed Charities

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Luke Ford

60 Minutes Sunday night showed that the King Fahad mosque in Culver City played a key role in 9/11. It made me wonder why it is still standing?

Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian.

Washington Post in 2004: Backed by Saudi money, this presence grew rapidly. King Fahd’s Web site now lists 16 Islamic and cultural centers that the kingdom has helped finance in California, Missouri, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Maryland. The largest is the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles. The mosque, built with $8 million in private donations from the king and his son, Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz, was officially inaugurated in 1998 for 2,000 worshipers. It includes a Koranic school, an Islamic research center and a bookstore.

The Islamic Affairs Department at the Saudi Embassy in Washington spearheaded the campaign. At its height, the department had 35 to 40 diplomats and an annual budget of $8 million, according to a Saudi official…

In the 1990s, a “sharp debate” raged in U.S. mosques over Saudi fundamentalism, said Ihsan Bagby, chief author of the study “The Mosque in America.” Radical “nongovernmental Saudi sheiks” became very active in pushing a far more militant brand of Wahhabism than the government-appointed imams, Bagby said. These radicals cultivated American Muslims, who used Saudi money to build their own mosques, he said.

In May 2003, the State Department refused reentry to the chief imam of the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, Fahad al Thumairy, who also was a Saudi diplomat at the consulate in Los Angeles. The Sept. 11 commission report later said the State Department had determined “he might be connected with terrorist activity.”

The report also said that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, “spent time at the King Fahd mosque and made some acquaintances there.” Al Thumairy, who reportedly led an “extremist faction” at the mosque, denied knowing the two hijackers. While his denial was “somewhat suspect,” the report said there was no evidence connecting him to the hijackers.

Last December, the State Department ended the practice of allowing religious scholars and missionaries to work here on Saudi diplomatic passports, forcing at least 24 out. The best-known deportee was Jaafar Idris, a Sudanese scholar well known in the Islamic world and founder of the American Open University, based in Alexandria, which in 2002 had 540 registered students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in Islamic studies.

Also crippled by the crackdown was the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences. Eleven of its scholars on diplomatic passports were ordered to leave. In early July, dozens of FBI, customs and IRS agents raided the institute’s premises and questioned its six remaining non-Saudi teachers.

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