Overview

Soon to be a major motion picture from the director of The Hangover starring Jonah Hill, the page-turning, behind-closed-doors account of how three kids from Florida became big-time weapons traders for the government and how the Pentagon later turned on them. In January of 2007, three young stoners from Miami Beach were put in charge of a $300 million Department of Defense contract to supply ammunition to the Afghanistan military. Instead of fulfilling the order with high-quality arms, Efraim Diveroli, David Packouz, and Alex Podrizki (the dudes) bought cheap Communist-style surplus ammunition from Balkan gunrunners. The trio then secretly repackaged millions of rounds of shoddy Chinese ammunition and shipped it to Kabul--until they were caught by Pentagon investigators and the scandal turned up on the front page of The New York Times. That's the ""official"" story. The truth is far more explosive. For the first time, journalist Guy Lawson tells the thrilling true tale. It's a trip that goes from a dive apartment in Miami Beach to mountain caves in Albania, the corridors of power in Washington, and the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan. Lawson's account includes a shady Swiss gunrunner, Russian arms dealers, Albanian thugs, and a Pentagon investigation that caused ammunition shortages for the Afghanistan military. Lawson exposes the mysterious and murky world of global arms dealing, showing how the American military came to use private contractors like Diveroli, Packouz, and Podrizki as middlemen to secure weapons from illegal arms dealers--the same men who sell guns to dictators, warlords, and drug traffickers. This is a story you were never meant to read.

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9781451667608

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Reviews

Guy Lawson's Arms and the Dudes is a triumph of investigative reporting and storytelling. This book is a mind-blowing account of how two kids turned themselves into some of the world's biggest weapons dealers in the chaotic years of the Iraq war. I couldn't put it down. If it were on the fiction shelf, the rollicking, riveting tale told within these pages would seem wildly implausible. But it's not. --Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Little America

Author Information

Guy Lawson is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning investigative journalist whose articles on war, crime, culture, and law have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, GQ, Harper's Magazine, and many other publications.

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