Locked In with Ian Bick - Black Market Kingpin: The Rise and Fall of an Arms Dealer | David Packouz’s True Crime Story

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Tune into the gripping true crime saga of David Packouz, the mastermind behind one of the most notorious arms-dealing operations in modern history. From his meteoric rise in the illegal arms trade to his ultimate downfall, Packouz's story is a thrilling tale of ambition, deception, and justice. Famously portrayed by Miles Teller in the hit movie "War Dogs," Packouz's life was a whirlwind of high-stakes deals, covert operations, and an inevitable clash with the law. Discover the true events behind the Hollywood drama and witness how one man’s empire crumbled under the weight of his own ambition. Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Connect with David Packouz: https://www.instagram.com/davidpackouz/?hl=en Powered by: Just Media House : https://www.justmediahouse.com/ Creative direction, design, assets, support by FWRD: https://www.fwrd.co Buy Merch: https://lockedinbrand.com Use code lockedin at checkout to get 20% off your order Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Growing Up as an Orthodox Jew 00:08:01 - Trash Business and Ice Cream 00:15:18 - The Different Sects of Judaism 00:22:57 - Questioning Organized Religion 00:30:40 - Starting a Massage Business and Discovering Wholesale Opportunities 00:38:23 - The Partnership and Shady Characters 00:46:06 - Working with a Sociopath 00:54:05 - Getting Screwed Out of Everything 01:01:56 - Repackaging the Ammunition 01:09:43 - The Repackaging Deal 01:17:25 - Controversial Dealings and Mysterious Circumstances 01:25:02 - The Political Scandal and Worldwide News Coverage 01:32:28 - The Challenges of Casting for a Movie 01:40:05 - Seeing the Movie Adaptation 01:47:43 - Cameo in "War dogs" Movie 01:55:18 - War Dogs Academy: Building a Successful Government Contracting Business 02:03:17 - Unexpectedly Becoming the Subject of a Movie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And he says to me, you know, a lot of the stuff that you're doing is actually that skill set is very applicable to a lot of stuff I'm doing. I'm also, you know, looking for sources overseas, arranging logistics, doing the finances, etc., etc. But I bet I'm making way more money than you. And I could use a guy who, you know, I could trust and smart and motivated. And I need a partner. So why don't we, why don't we like, you know, why don't we start working together? I bet you make a lot more money working with me than you are doing your business now. And I asked him, well, how much money have you made?

Right? And he goes to me, well, I'm going to tell you, but only to inspire you. Not because I'm bragging, okay? And he opens up his computer and he logs into his Bank of America account. And he shows me his account. And he had $1.8 million in his account in cash. And he was 18 years old. And it just blew my mind.

I was like, holy time. David, thank you for coming today, man. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. I appreciate it. Where did you come to us from today? Well, I was staying in New York City. I'm doing a few other podcasts, but based in Miami. Okay.

Yeah. Are you doing Michael Rappaport's podcast? I feel like you'd be... I haven't, but I should. Yeah, you definitely should. He's into all of this type of stuff. And he's in the movie world, so, you know, I feel like that would be a perfect fit. Yeah, maybe you can make an intro.

Yeah, I'll tell him for sure. I love Michael Rappaport. He had me on his podcast. Oh, very cool. back in September and I got to meet him. Awesome. And I went to one of his comedy shows. Oh, very cool.

Yeah. And you were recently on Matt Cox's podcast. Yes, I was. Yeah. Matt did our show back in, I think, October or November. Oh, cool. Yeah, he was supposed to be my first top three on the show when I first started. And then he ended up not coming. So it was like a whole thing.

And then he ended up coming. Well, at least he showed up eventually. Yeah. So did you grow up in Florida? I grew up. So I was born in St. Louis. but then my family moved to Jerusalem when I was a baby and then we moved to Miami when I was eight years old.

So you lived in Jerusalem? Yeah, in Jerusalem, yeah. So I grew up speaking Hebrew. My parents are American though. So my dad was a rabbi. So we went there for his work. Oh, okay. Yeah.

What was that like? You mean Jerusalem? Yeah, living out there. Israel is an interesting place. In the Chinese curse. sense of the word, you know, like interesting times. But it's a lot of history, a lot of different types of people, all very tense and not liking each other very much. So it's a great place to visit. I wouldn't want to live there, though I do have half my family living there.

Still to this day. Yeah, still to this day. Wow. How hard was it to integrate into that social setting coming from America and going out there? Well, I mean, I was a baby when I moved there, so I kind of grew up there, and then it was more of an issue of integrating into American culture when we moved to Miami, yeah, which was very different. It was very different because, I mean, my family are Orthodox Jews, so they're very religious. But even amongst Orthodox Jews, there's different levels of religiosity, and in Israel they're much more intense than in the United States. Yeah, my father's Jewish, and we grew up celebrating. celebrating the holidays, Hanukkah, Passover. We live in a Jewish community up the road that has a synagogue literally across the street. So we grew up around that culture because our parents wanted us to, you know, grow up celebrating both cultures from the mom's side and the dad's side.

Your mom is? She's Catholic. I see. So I know technically I think Jewish comes from the mother, right? Yeah, the Orthodox Jews believe that Judaism is transferred to. the mother, yeah. So you would not be considered Jewish by Orthodox Jews. Okay. Oh, but by non-Orthodox? Reform Jews. I mean, as long as you feel Jewish, you're Jewish.

Okay. All right. I didn't know. I thought it was just vague and it was all Jews. Like you couldn't, it didn't come, if it didn't come from the mother, then it didn't count. There's significant different types of, there's different sects of Jews and they have very different beliefs. Okay. Yeah. Did you guys grow up poor, middle, class with money? I would say we were middle class. I mean, I'm one of nine children. No?

Yeah. Which is common amongst Orthodox families. Wow. We're actually kind of average as far as size. That's average? Yeah, that's average. Wow. Yeah, one of my mother's brothers has 11 children, another one has 10.

So yeah, it's somewhat average, nine amongst Orthodox families. Are you the youngest, middle, oldest? Third from the top. Third from the top. Yeah. Is that good or bad? Well, it was bad in the sense that when I decided that I didn't really want to live the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle anymore, and I was the first of my parents' kids to make that decision, they fought it very hard because they had this idea of, you know, if one goes bad, it'll take the rest with them, you know? It's kind of like the bad influence.

And they were right. of my six younger siblings, five became non-religious. Okay. Yeah. Which I'm very proud of. I led them to freedom. So you're not religious either? No, no.

Okay, so you're one of them out of the group? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't look religious. I'm not. That's true. Yeah, yeah, that's, no Orthodox Jew has a shaved head like me. That's very true. Yeah.

So, were you guys close growing up, or was it all nine of you living together? Yeah. Yeah, no, we're still very close. I feel very fortunate that my family has very close relationships, and we all, you know, we all get along very well. In fact, four of my brothers work in my company, so it's kind of like a family business. That's great. Yeah. Now, if we had one of your siblings here with us, how would they describe you back then, like young teenage David?

Young teenage David, how would they describe me? I think it's like the coolest brother ever, but... I mean, like back then I was I was super into sci-fi. I mean, I still love sci-fi. I loved reading in general because it was kind of my escape. So, you know, I went to a yeshiva, which is an Orthodox Jewish all-boys school, where you pretty much study Talmud all day, which is a very boring, legalistic type of text. And all about like ancient agriarch.

culture law and stuff like that stuff that is not particularly interesting. So my escape from that culture was through sci-fi in general. So I was always reading sci-fi like when my other classmates would go out to like play basketball like during recess. I would just be reading my sci-fi book. Yeah. It got to the point where I would like hide my sci-fi books inside my like Hebrew texts, you know, that we were supposed to be studying like Bible in class.

or Talmud. And the teacher, I think remember this was like in sixth grade, the teacher would like catch me and he would like rip up my library books. And it was like from the libraries. I'd have to pay for that. Yeah, it was very upsetting. Did kids pick on you because of your love for Skyfy? There were a lot of kids in the class who enjoyed watching the teacher rip up my books. And it got to the point where when he would, because this happened several times.

and because it was just so boring and I just couldn't stand just sitting there and just listening to you know if your ox gores your neighbor's ox you know how much do you owe him well how high was the fence what was the fence made out of wood

has this ox gored before you know this is like the kind of stuff you're like it's just like mind numbingly boring and so I'd always like be sneaking sci-fi books into my you know inside the textbook and it got to the point where it happened a few times and then like when the teacher

would catch me like like some of the kids in the class would start chanting, rip it up, rip it up. And that really pissed me off because, you know, they're encouraging them to rip up my library book, which I had to pay for us. So, you know, that was pretty upsetting. Now, what about the entrepreneurial part to you?

Did you have that early on in those days? So my first entrepreneurial venture was actually when I was six years old. And it happened because I was living in Israel at the time. and my um we were living in this apart this old apartment building that didn't have like a garbage shoot and it didn't have a um like an elevator so we'd have to take the trash down the stairs to the ground floor and and take it out to the dumpster on the corner and you know heave it into the dumpster and my mom asked me and my older sisters like a year and a half older than me to take out the trash and we were complaining and we said we don't want to take out the trash we

want to keep on playing with our Legos and she was starting to get a little upset at us. And my dad came by because he heard the commotion. And he's like, oh, you guys are looking at this all wrong. You know, this is not a chore. This is an opportunity. Right. And we're like, what are you talking about? And he says, well, you know, all our neighbors, you know, they all have to take out their trash too.

And I bet you, just like you, they don't like taking out their trash. So you can go to all the neighbors and offer a service. service and say, we'll take out your trash. You know, most people don't take out the trash every day, so you take it out every other day. And you offer that as a service and maybe charge them like a shekel a week, which is about a quarter. And so we're like, oh, that's a great idea. And so we went to all the neighbors when we signed up like eight neighbors. And then we used our mother's big, like, metal wire shopping cart to put the trash bags in so we could like, you know, roll it down the stairs, like go chum, kachon, kachon, you know, down the stairs.

and because we were small I mean we couldn't like you know haul it ourselves without that and then after about a week we went to our dad and we're like this is way too much work this is just so much work and he says well would you

we told him we wanted to quit and he said well would you still want to quit if you were making twice as much money and we're like well twice as much money maybe that's worth it and he's like well then just raise the price and we told him but we can't raise the price. We just said it was a quarter a week, like literally a week ago. And he says, well, but if you

don't raise the price, you're going to quit anyway. So at least give them a chance to pay what you're willing to do the work for. And so we said, okay, that makes sense. We go to all our neighbors, and everyone agreed, except for two neighbors. One neighbor canceled their subscription. And from then on, we saw their daughter take out the trash, which we'd never seen before. And the second neighbor, he agreed to pay, but it was with a lot of complaints. He's like, you can't just double the price. You know, this week you put it up five cents. Next week maybe 10 cents.

Double, this is crazy. Very Israeli, you know, like haggle culture. But we stuck to our guns and he's like, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine. And he paid it. And so we had seven neighbors that we were making 50 cents a week on each. And then about a few weeks after that, my sister was like, I don't even care. I'm not doing this anymore. And so in my mind, I thought, oh, I'm getting double again.

I don't have to split the money. So awesome. I'm getting four times the original amount of money. And so I kept undoing and worked at it for like a few months. And I remember I collected all the shekels in this big like Ziploc bag. And it was starting to really rack up a lot. And then I mostly spent it on ice cream. That's the only thing that really I was interested in buying because the ice cream truck would ever would come every day

You know with its little ice cream tune and and I'd think to myself I've got money. I could buy myself an ice cream And and then it was my seventh birthday and my dad got me a A toy plane where you it was like styrofoam plane and like where you wind up the propeller and it's powered by like a A like a rubber band and my brother, my older brother, who's three years older than me, he wanted to play with it. And I said, you can play with it, but if you break it, you're responsible. You have to pay me back. And he said, yeah, I'll be responsible.

My dad was standing right there. And I said, you know, dad is witness. You're going to be responsible for the plane. And he says, yeah, yeah, I'm responsible. He threw it first throw. It breaks. I mean, it was a really shitty plane because it was made out of, like, styrofoam. But he broke it.

And of course, he had no way to pay me back. And so he took over my garbage business. And it took him like a good two months to make the money to like pay me back. And then after two months, I was getting the money the whole time. I never bought another plane. I just got the plane. I just kept the money and spent it on ice cream. And I was so used to just getting the money and I already had a whole bunch of money in my seven-year-old mind.

It seemed like it would last forever. I was like, I don't really want to go back to the business. So he and my brother didn't want to continue it either. So that's how the business ended. Yeah. What was that like for you, the getting the taste of entrepreneurship because it stuck with you. So it must have had some type of profound impact on you. Well, I really enjoyed being able to buy ice cream whenever I wanted, you know, that really affected me.

In fact, so much so that when an aunt of mine came to visit from the United States and like she hadn't seen me in like maybe six months or a year, she looked at me and she's like, well, you're getting a little heavy there. Yeah, apparently it was catching up with me. That's funny. So do you end up graduating high school or do you stop high school? How does that look? Yeah, I graduated high school. And then I went to Israel for two years to study. I graduated high school in Miami.

Okay. And Hebrew Academy in Miami Beach. Shout out to Hebrew Academy. Miami is probably pretty nice. Yeah, Miami is beautiful. Well, the school itself being in Miami. Yeah. I mean, the school, I mean, it was a private Jewish school. So I grew up going to Yeshiva, which is like a very religious school where it's all boys. And I actually didn't talk to a girl who wasn't related to me until I was like 17 years old. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was very traumatic.

Late bloomer. Oh, super. You know, it was, it was very traumatic. I didn't like know how to talk to girls at all. And Hebrew Academy is an Orthodox school, but it's modern Orthodox. There's like little subsex. amongst the different major Jewish groups. And so amongst Orthodox Jews, there's like, there's the ultra-Orthodox who are, they're the Hasidim, they have the big curls on the side, you know, the weird long black coats. They're like the most extreme. They grow up speaking Yiddish, which isn't like even like English. They, you know, that's why they all speak with like this weird like European accent because they grow up speaking Yiddish, not English.

And they're very, very isolationist. And then there is my family, which is Yeshiva Orthodox, which is kind of in the middle. We wear all the white button-down shirts and the black hat and like fedoras and the black jackets. And then there's the modern Orthodox who dress kind of like more like regular Americans. And they still keep all the rules, but they have a TV in their house, which we did not. They also send their kids to like private Jewish schools, but the schools are co-ed for the secular subjects. So I eventually got kicked out of the yeshiva because they realized I didn't want to be religious. And so my parents sent me to the next best thing, which was Hebrew Academy, the Modern Orthodox School.

And that was the first time I interacted with girls in my life in 11th grade. And so, yeah, so eventually I graduated from Hebrew Academy. And my parents wanted me to go to study in Israel because they realized I was going off the path, as they call it. And they wanted me to become more religious. So I went to Israel to study for two years. The first year, I pretty much partied and had a great time. And the second year, I actually studied Judaism and kind of took it seriously. But then after that, I went to University and University of Florida in Gainesville,

which is like northern Florida, north-central Florida. And I took a general anthropology class, and I realized that there is no way that all the claims that Orthodox Jews make about the truthfulness and the perfection of the Bible of the Old Testament, I should say, is true if we believe in science at all. Because, I mean, just like a really brief example, there's just very large contradictions between the Old Testament and scientific knowledge, like in the Old Testament, the story of Noah, right? That obviously did not happen the way they describe it.

There is no worldwide flood 4,000 years ago that killed everything on Earth and only Noah and all the animals in his art survived. I mean, it just didn't happen. I mean, Chinese history goes back 5,000 years. And the animals in Australia have been separated from like the Asian continent for about 40 million years. And there's just linguistics, the science of linguistics contradicts it. The science of genetics contradicts it. the archaeology and anthropology. And pretty much to believe that story actually happened the way it was written in the Bible,

like word for word, the way the Orthodox claim and it's not just like a general thing, then you would have to pretty much disbelieve almost every branch of science. And I just thought to myself, what's more likely, that all of science is wrong? or maybe Orthodox Judaism is just like every other religion in the world made up by people and, you know, plenty of things that are not factually correct in there. And so that was kind of the nail in the coffin of my religiosity. And since then, I've been a proud atheist. Do you think it represents a specific moment, though, like the whole Noah's Ark thing,

it had to have come from somewhere, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it wasn't, I'm just using Noah's Ark as an example. there are many, many, many other examples, and there's whole websites which lists literally hundreds, if not thousands of contradictions within the Bible. And not only between the Bible and science, but within the Bible and itself. I mean, Genesis contradicts itself many times over. So, but I think Noah's Ark is just a very easy to understand example of how the Old Testament, it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

And I want to be clear here, but that Orthodox Judaism believes that the Old Testament, that is the five books of Moses, were written by God himself, word for word, letter for letter. So everything in it is 100% true and there isn't a single mistake and nothing was ever changed from when God gave it to Moses on Mount Sinai. and that just can't be the case, right? It just can't unless we just misunderstand all of science and I just don't think that's very likely because science gives us airplanes and cell phones and podcasts and all that stuff. And so we know that science is a good way of figuring out the truth

of how the universe works because we make use of that knowledge and use it to our advantage and build our entire, modern life based on that. So we know that science is a good method of figuring out how the universe works. So, you know, when you compare what is more likely to be true when there is a contradiction, I would go with science rather than an ancient book that was written maybe 3,000 years ago or whatever. When did you dive into all this?

Well, I was kind of forced into it because growing up as an Orthodox Jew that I didn't really, the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle is a very repressive lifestyle. So you have to go to synagogue three times a day. You have to read, you know, the prayers out of the prayer book and the exact way they tell you. You could only eat certain things. You know, you have to keep kosher. You could only go to certain restaurants.

You can on the Sabbath. You can't use electricity. You can't flip the light switch on and off. You can't take a drive in the car. You can't use your cell phone or watch TV. So the Orthodox lifestyles, it's very repressive. So there's rules for everything. When you wake up in the morning, before you open your eyes, you're supposed to thank God for waking you up.

And when you go to the bathroom, after you use the restroom, you're supposed to wash your hands. But you can't just wash your hands in a regular way. I have to wash your hands in a ritualistic way. So you have to fill up this big mug, which has these handles on it. And you go like two pores on one hand and then two pores on the other hand. And then when you leave the bathroom, you have to say a prayer to God to thank him for letting you go to the bathroom. And it's a specific prayer. You don't just think in your mind, oh, thank you for letting me go to the bathroom.

It's like you have to like recite it out loud. It's like, you know, takes you a good 30 seconds a minute to recite the prayer every time you go to the bathroom. You need to do this. When you put on your shoes, you put on your right shoe first and then your left shoe and then you tie your left shoe and then you tie your right shoe. And when you eat your breakfast, you have to say a prayer before every food you eat. And it's a different prayer depending on the tight shoe. of food. So it's like one prayer for, you know, when you're drinking your orange juice, it's a different prayer. When you're eating your toast and after you're done eating, you have to say

another prayer to thank God for letting you have that food. And it's also a different prayer for which food you just ate and on and on and on and on and on and on, right? And it's just never ending. And they pretty much ritualize everything in your life. And the idea is that they think that the ritualization brings God into your life. So even the mundane things like putting on your shoes becomes like godly because you're doing it consciously. And maybe that could work for some people and maybe it does work for some people. But in my experience, the vast majority of people, they just become kind of automaton's. And they'll just like, you know, like spew the prayers as fast as they can.

And they don't even like hear their own words they're saying, let alone thinking about what they're saying. They just go blubblblbliblo. And like, you know, they know it all by heart because they've said it like every day for their entire lives. and it just becomes this kind of like habit that, you know, even from a psychological perspective to me seems kind of pointless. Even if you say that religion gives you psychological comfort, which it does to many people. And the value is that rather than any real physical value or real world value, you could say, outside your own mind. the way it's structured, I think people don't get the value out of it because they just become like automaton's doing the rituals robotically. And so, yeah, so it wasn't, it was something that I never really enjoyed and I actively hate it actually because it's just so repressive and kind of boxes you in in life and limits your possibilities of what you can do.

because you want to take a vacation. You have to plan your life around your vacation around like where are you going to get kosher food, where are you going to go to the synagogue, right? You can't do anything on the Sabbath. So you can't do, you know, all your, all weekends of your life. Saturday you can do nothing from that that involves cars or electricity or anything like that. You pretty much have to stay home and read books for every Saturday of your life. So it really limits you. And so that forced me into thinking, well, why are we doing all these things?

things, right? Is there a really good reason for leading such an extreme lifestyle compared to the culture at large? And that forced me into it into thinking about these things and reading sci-fi as a kid really made me question the religion in general because science fiction generally is written by scientifically minded authors, if not actual scientists. And they tend to have a pretty skeptical view of organized religion in general. And so that made me start questioning things. And throughout my teenage years, I would question things. I'd ask my dad.

My dad is a rabbi and I would question, you know, why do we believe this or that? And he would give some answers and which kind of made sense to me at the time. But then I would find something else that wouldn't make sense. And so I kind of went back and forth throughout my teen years. And then when I finally got to college and took that general anthropology course, I realized there was just so much science and so many different types of science and so many different branches of science that all contradict all the things that I've been taught my entire life. That there's no logical reason to think that Orthodox Judaism is true to the,

the degree that they claim it is, right? That it's the one truth in the universe and it's the only religion that's true and everyone else is false and we're the chosen people and and, you know, and anything that contradicts it must be wrong. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. You have to really tie yourself in knots to even like approach thinking that it might in any degree make any sort of sense in reality. Do you think it made you rebellious at all? Like wanting to go down a different path. Absolutely, because I just didn't want to lead that lifestyle and that leading that lifestyle is by far the most important thing in my parents' minds, because in my parents' minds, if I become not religious, I'm like condemning myself to eternal damnation and or, you know, missing out on the

whole point of life, right? The whole point of life was to become close to God. And if I don't believe in God, you know, then I'm missing out on all of life. And it's my life is being wasted. And in my mind, it was the opposite, my life is being wasted if I'm, you know, serving a sky daddy that doesn't exist. Little did they know that you're going to go down an entirely different path. Right, right. So, yeah, when I got in trouble, they were like, you see, we told you, if only you would stayed in yes, of course.

You would have solved everything. Yes, of course. So you go to Israel for college, you come back, and do you get your degree in the states? So I went to University of Florida just for a few semesters, and then I realized that I had to I had to make money because my parents weren't going to support me going to college. In their minds, they didn't, college was a distant second choice for what they wanted me to do with life. They wanted me to stay in yeshiva and study and become a rabbi and all that. So going to college and becoming a professional is a very distant second choice.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, that is the philosophy. The people they think are at the highest level or achieving the most in life are the ones who studied the Talmud all day. Now do rabbis get a salary? I've always been curious about it. So rabbis are supported by charity.

Okay. So the community donates to the synagogue and the synagogue pays for the rabbi's salary and as well as the professional Bible studyers that are housed in the synagogue or the local yeshiva. It's usually paid for by the, the very professionals that they look down on. There's jokes amongst the Yeshiva students about like, you know, there's terms for

for, yeshiva student is someone who studies Bible and Talmud all day. And a bala Bayet, which literally means a master of a house, is someone who is a professional and actually makes money. And so amongst Yeshiva students, there is like kind of like a direct, like when you want to see, like, because a large part of the study is kind of arguing back and forth of like what does this mean in the Talmud and what does that mean. And there's a high value placed on like mental gymnastics that you can do to answer, to ask good questions and to answer to have good answers.

And so when someone wants to say, oh, that's like a, that's like a dumb question. You say, yeah, that's kind of question of Balabayet would ask you. You know, which these are the guys who are paying your salary, you assholes, you know. So, yeah, I mean, I wasn't down with that culture. It was, in my mind, just like a waste of life. And I'm sure people find happiness in it, but I definitely wasn't. Yeah. So what were you thinking career-wise while you were in college?

So I was studying chemistry. I was very fascinated by how drugs worked on the mind. I was, you know, smoking weed and playing guitar and got into guitar because, of course, like every boy, I figured it was a way for girls to like me. And this is why every boy learns guitar, trust me. And so I was playing a lot of guitar because, you know, I got into, got some, because I was playing guitar, I got, became friends with musicians. And of course, they smoke weed. So I started smoking weed.

And so I became very interested in like how drugs affect the mind. And so I wanted, I was studying chemistry. And also it was a good, hard sciences or tend to be more secure career wise, or at least so they say. And so I was studying chemistry and not really sure 100% what I was going to do with that, but I figured it was a good starting point. And then I realized I had to support myself while I was in college. And so I decided to go to massage school because massage school. Yeah.

And the reason I decided to go to massage school was because it was two reasons. The first reason, my first inspiration was while I was in Israel, I um there was this uh really beautiful girl that I really liked which I you know I had zero skills so I nothing ever went anywhere but I really liked this girl and um and we had me and her and my group of friends her group of friends we all went to this like music festival in Israel and um at this music festival there was a like a big tent where the local massage school was giving out free massages like 10 minute massages and uh We were all doing ecstasy.

And so we all go and get massages. And it was amazing, obviously. It was the first professional massage I ever had in my life. And it was incredible. And afterwards, like, we're walking away from the massage tent. And the girl that I really liked was, like, walking in a daze. And she's like, oh, man, any guy I'm with has to know how to give good massages. And right then, I swore to myself, I am going to learn how to give the best massages.

And so it was always in the back of my mind. I really should learn that skill. That sounds like an important skill to have. And then when I was in university studying chemistry, I realized, no, my friends are all working like minimum wage jobs, like while they're in university while they're in college. And they're being waiters or bartenders or flipping burgers or whatever. A massage therapist makes like $75, $100 an hour.

so I could make more money in a single hour doing a massage than my friends were making an entire day of work. And, of course, it has the added benefit that it doesn't hurt with the ladies when they know you're good with your hands. So I decided to go to massage school in Miami. And it took me about six months. You have to get licensed by the state. It's like a medical profession. Yeah, my mom's a massage therapist. Yeah, so you know, exactly.

And then after I graduated massage school, I realized there's not going to be many massage clients in Gainesville, Florida, where University of Florida is based because it's a tiny little college town. And so I decided to stay in Miami and I transferred to Miami-Dade College and continued studying chemistry there. And while I was studying chemistry there, I am doing massages on the side. I bought a digital camera because that was the big thing back then. That was the transition. This is like early 2000s. The transition from film cameras to digital cameras. And I realized that the digital camera didn't come with an SD card.

I had to buy an SD card. And the SD cards were super expensive back then. And so I kept them looking for a better price, a better price. Then I realized I can get a better price if I buy them in bulk from a source in China. I found like a source in China for it. and I can sell all the SD cards I wasn't using on eBay at a profit. So I did that, bought like 100 SD cards, sold the rest of them on eBay, made a decent amount of money. And I was like, I could do this again.

And I just bought another 100 and started selling them regularly on eBay and made a decent amount of money. And then a little bit later, a friend of mine who I knew from Israel contacted me. And we were talking. And I told him about the SD cards. And he's like, oh, that's so cool that you're able to find sources in China for this. stuff. I'm actually, my dad set me up in business because his dad owned like a nursing home and his dad would buy like bed sheets and towels from like distributors and he set him up to become like a wholesaler for nursing homes to his nursing home and his friends nursing homes and that's how he

got him started in business. And so he told me, you know, I'm buying from from US based distributors but I know they're all sourcing this stuff from overseas. If you can find me a better price, I'll be happy to buy from you. So I started searching and I eventually found a supplier for bed sheets and towels from Pakistan and did a deal with him and where it was actually, so in the movie, in the War Dogs movie, they have me. All right, everyone, welcome to Arco Rewards Orientation. I'm Hannah. Whoa. Is everything okay?

That's a code green. Someone just earned at least five cents a gallon in rewards. Wow. Another one? Well, that one's a code gold. The customer just redeemed savings of up to a dollar a gallon. Impressive. What does that one mean? Oh, that's just piggy. He gets excited when we talk about rewards. Savings of up to $1 per gallon redeemable with $20 rewards dollars in your loyalty account. At participating locations, terms and conditions apply. Buying and selling bed sheets.

Yeah, I remember those. Yeah, yeah. And in the movie, they have, like, my apartment filled up with boxes of, like, bedsheets I bought and I couldn't sell. That's not actually how it happened. I never actually took delivery on the bed sheets. I would just get an order from my buyer, get a transferable letter of credit, which is, like, kind of like an escrow thing, and transfer that to the seller and just collect my broker's profit. And when the deal was done, and I never even took delivery on it. It was just transferred directly.

So I started doing that business and started making a nice amount of money. Nothing crazy. But it was pretty consistent money. And then about like a year later, I bumped into my old friend, Ephraim DiVerole, who in the movie is played by Jonah Hill. And I hadn't seen him like, I think maybe for like five or six years by that point because he had been kicked out of his private, he also grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family,

but he didn't go to my yeshiva. He went to a different yeshiva across town. It's the only other yeshiva in town. And he had been kicked out of his yeshiva like when he was like 16 because he got caught smoking weed. And his parents said, well, you know, if you're not going to take your studies seriously, you're going to find out what the real world's about.

So you're going to go and work for your uncle. in L.A. And his uncle owned this big warehouse in a pawn shop, and so his uncle put him to work in the warehouse, moving boxes, and eventually he let him start working in the pawn shop, selling to the customers.

And he was a 16-year-old kid, and he got obsessed. You know, the pawn shop sold many different things, and one of them was guns. And he got obsessed with guns. You know, there's like guys who, teenage boys, you know, they tend to get obsessed with like cars,

guitars, or guns. That's like, or sports, right? That's like the four things that most teenage boys get obsessed with. So he was a gun guy. I was a guitar guy. I was playing guitar. But he became obsessed with guns. And I started selling the guns to the customers.

The local cops would come in. And his uncle loved to schmooze with the local cops. And he would give the cops like special deals. And the cops are like, you know, if you really want to sell to the department, you have to go through the official channels and go through the procurement process. And so his uncle started bidding on contracts to sell to the local police and then to the state police. And the way the government buys things, both local state and federal, is they put it out for open bid by and large. They post what they want on like their website and then they invite bidders to give them the best price.

And whoever gives them the best price usually gets the contract and can deliver and then collect their profit. So his uncle started bidding on these contracts, and then he started helping his uncle to bid on these contracts. And he learned how to do that and worked with his uncle for about two years until he was about 18. Then he had a big falling out with his uncle. He claims his uncle stole $70,000 from him. His uncle claims he stole the money, you know, and they're both scumbags, so I believe him both. But, yeah, his uncle is well known in the industry for being a strong. shady character as his he.

But so he moved back to Miami after he had that falling out with his uncle and started his own company. Well, he took over his dad's, his dad had a company called AEY Inc. AEY, Inc. Unlike what it says in the movie does stand for something. In the movie, Jonah Hill's like, it doesn't stand for anything. It just sounds cool, you know. It actually stood for the initials of his dad's three.

three sons of Ramia from and Yeshaya. So he's the E and AEY. And his dad had incorporated AEY Inc. Like had several years before that to use as like a label printing business, but never really did much with it, never really did much business with it. It was kind of lying dormant. So he took over AEY Inc and registered it with the federal government

so he could bid on federal contracts. He got a federal firearms license. This was all under his dad's name because I think he was actually not even 18 at the time. and worked on the contracts, bidding on contracts. This is like 2004 for about a year and won a whole bunch of them and started making money. And that's when I bumped into him after about a year of him working on his own. And we both were hanging out at a mutual friend's house, a guy named Alex, who got involved in our story later on.

And we were both there to smoke weed and, you know, hang out with Alex. And so he asked me, he's like, hey, what are you doing these days? and I told him about the SD cards, about the bed sheets and the towels and stuff I was importing and wholesaling. And he says to me, you know, a lot of the stuff that you're doing is actually that skill set is very applicable to a lot of stuff I'm doing. I'm also, you know, looking for sources overseas, arranging logistics, doing the finances, etc., etc. But I bet I'm making way more money than you. And I could use a guy who, you know, I could trust and who's smart and motivated. and I need a partner.

So why don't we like, you know, why don't we start working together? I bet you'll make a lot more money working with me than you are doing your business now. And I asked him, well, how much money have you made? Right? And he goes to me, well, I'm going to tell you, but only to inspire you. Not because I'm bragging, okay? And he opens up his computer and he logs into his Bank of America account. And he shows me his account.

And he had $1.8 million in his account in cash. And he was 18 years old. And it just blew my mind. I was like, holy crap. I mean, at that point, I'd been doing my little side businesses for about two years or so. And I had saved up about $100,000, which I was very proud of. And I was like, I thought I was hot shit. I was like 22, 23 years old.

And I had $100,000 to my name, which is way more than most of my friends had. So I thought I was a pretty, you know, smart entrepreneur. and, you know, I thought it was hot shit. So you're older than him? Yeah, I'm four years older than him. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we met in synagogue because our families both went to the same synagogue.

Is the way he's depicted in the movie, is that his personality? No, he's way worse of a person in real life. He was pretty bad in the movie, though. He's not nearly as bad in the movie as. Yeah, he's way worse in real life. Everyone who knows him says this, that they really will, they really, they really, toned him down in the movie. Why do you think they did that?

I know why they did that because the screenwriter told me. He told me that they had to make him more likable because otherwise the audiences wouldn't enjoy the movie as much. They want to be able to root for him. I didn't even think he was that likable though. He was a lot more likable than in real life.

I guess that says a lot. Yeah. Now what about your character who was played by Miles Tyler? Right, right. Well, I would say in real life, I have way better hair. But yeah, other than that, So I think Miles Teller did a decent job portraying me just because, you know, he was kind of like just a likable good guy, which is absolutely true, 100% true.

I am a likable good guy. But I would say that he, the difference between the way he portrayed me in real life is I think he made me a bit more of a loser, you know, kind of like a guy who's kind of like helpless and flailing. And I wasn't that helpless and flailing at the time. As I said, I had made, saved up about 100K to my name at that point. So I thought I was doing pretty well. But I think they needed to have a better arc. So they needed to have a better rags to riches story. So the worst the rags, the better the riches.

And so that's why they wrote it that way. And then they did that on purpose for, you know, story purposes. And, you know, I don't blame them for doing that. Well, I think your character just showed that you were kind of like in over your head. Right. And you didn't, you went into it with good intentions. Right. And it kind of just unraveled from there. That's true. I never went into it with bad intentions. And I definitely got in over my head eventually. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'll give you a little example of like how, how different is some of the differences between like real Ephraim and movie Ephraim were. In the movie, he,

there's a scene where he like hits on this girl in a club you know and he gets punched out by Dan Belzerian. Oh, Dan Belzeron was in that movie? Yeah, he's the one who punches. He always makes the strangest cameos in all these movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he punches Jonah Hill, you know, in the face after like Jonah is trying to pick up this girl and the line is he's like, can we, you know, I'll give you $1,000 to fast forward

to our third date. And she's like, what does that mean? He's like, yeah, it means it. just made the family, you know, had dinner and you're about to blow me in my car, you know. And then like Dan Blasarian comes and he's like, wait, what's up, you know? And Jonah's like, oh, I'm about to head out with my girl. It's like your girl and he punches him, right? So in real life, Ephraim would actually do stuff like walk up to a couple that's like standing at a bar or something, like holding hands.

And he would go up to the, on the other side, to the girl and pick up her hand. her other hand and say come with me baby you're too good for this loser oh yeah just like that and like of course he would start a million fights and he would only do this when he had friends around him that he knew would pull him out of the fight

so he wouldn't do this kind of stuff on his own because then he would get himself in real trouble but um it was very annoying going out with him because he would love to start shit like that uh he would be in like a taxi cab driver and he'd he'd cover the the taxi guy the driver's eyes and say,

I'll give you a hundred bucks to keep on driving, motherfucker. You know, like he was like nuts. And he would get really wasted and just make a big scene and start yelling and screaming in public and just like being a total dick. Was he a big guy too? He wasn't like a big guy, but I would say he was like, you know, average height.

But he was just very, very energetic. And, you know, just like I would say like his personality. was definitely bigger than his body. Gotcha. Yeah. Were you hesitant at all to go into business with him or were you kind of sold off the bat? So I didn't, when I first got into business with him, I didn't realize how insane he had become. Because, I mean, I knew him when he was like 16.

And that was like the last, even or even younger, you know, because I've been in Israel at that point for like, I think a couple years. So I knew when he was like, the last I had really interacted with him was when he was like 14, 15 years old. and back then he was just like a goofy kid he liked to play pranks um he was a funny guy but uh but not like crazy and so i didn't really realize like what a nut job he had turned into and um the the first time i remember uh realizing that there was something different about him like in his brain was we were driving from a um from a uh gun show that we had gone to in Orlando and he was driving the car

we were on this really long highway one of these highways where it's one of these highways where it's like one lane going one way and another lane going the other way and there's just like a dotted line in the middle no real separator

and there's no street lights either so he had his brights on and their cars coming the other way occasionally and I said to him Ephraim you know you're supposed to turn your brights down when there's a oncoming car because you know you might blind the driver

and he's like but what do I give a shit you know like I gotta see the road and I'm like I mean the driver could crash and he's like yeah I know but like who cares like I gotta see the road and I said but idiot

they can crash into us and he's like oh oh yeah oh yeah good point good point and then he turns the brides down it was that like he literally did not care at all like he didn't even make sense to him

that he should care about, you know, not making sure the other guy didn't crash. It only when it affected him that it even, like, crossed his mind. So I realized then I'm like, this guy's like a sociopath or something. You know, I'm not going to make a diagnosis, but that kind of sounds like every definition I've read, someone who's just unable to have empathy for other people. And that made me kind of concerned, to say the least. And then about like a month or so and starting to work with him,

I had another really concerning situation where I was working. So when we first started working together, I was working on fuel contracts because he was focused on guns and ammo. And, you know, the idea was that I would expand the business by going for fuel contracts. In fact, the first federal contract I ever won was for 80,000 gallons of propane, delivered it to an Air Force base in Wyoming. made like eight grand for about three weeks of work that was my 50% of the deal so we were splitting at 50 50 50 and so um and that was the first contract I ever won so while I was working on that stuff um he was he got it good we were working in his apartment like he didn't have an office so we would work in his out of his like at his desk in his living room and um he uh he got a phone call and I was working on my own thing he got a phone call and I was working on my own thing he got a phone uncle that someone was requesting supplies, military supplies, for the king of Nepal. Because the king of Nepal

was having this anti-democracy protest movement going on in Nepal. And the king was looking to buy attack helicopters, riot gear, heavy machine guns, you know, tear gas, all that stuff, right, to suppress this movement. And Ephraim got really excited. And he's like, he's like, oh, yeah.

this is so awesome. I'm going to put together a save the king package. We're going to save the king. And I said to him, I'm like, Ephraim, that's kind of messed up, you know. That's like, are you sure? First of all, I mean, are you sure that's legal? Because I don't think the State Department is going to be happy about you saving the king, you know, especially when it's against pro-democracy protesters. And anyway, even if it is legal, it's really fucked up to do.

I mean, you shouldn't be doing that. And he goes to me, he's like, don't worry about this, bro. You just keep on working on those fuel contracts. You leave this to me, okay? And then I thought to myself, oh, my God, this guy's really willing to do anything. So he can get me. And if I get involved in some of these things he's doing, I can get into some serious trouble. But I told myself, well, you know, I'll just do my own thing.

He'll do his own thing. I won't be involved in anything that I think is super shay. and messed up like that. So, you know, that's what I told myself. And he was also a real pain in the ass to work with because he was always like yelling and screaming and like just constantly stressed all day and had zero interests outside of work.

Like literally he was obsessed with money. Like all day long he would just talk about money. one one one uh just to take a little detour um one example of how obsessed he was with money we were i was hanging out with him with a few of my other friends and um one of we were talking about another friend who wasn't present at the time uh who was really struggling with heroin an addiction. And we were kind of worried about him. And people were wondering, like, we were discussing him.

Like, well, you think he might like overdose? He seems to be in a really bad. He seems to be really depressed. He might do it on purpose. Who knows? And Ephraim goes, I got it. I got it. This is perfect.

We're going to get a life insurance policy against him and then send him the best possible shit. A lot of it. And we're like, what the fuck? I'm like, are you, are you joking? And he's like, uh, I mean, maybe. That's wild. Yeah.

I'm like, I was like, you're such a fucking piece of shit. You know, it's like the first thing you think we're like, we were having like a serious discussion. We're like worried about our good friend, a guy we grew up with about his, you know, his addiction and his mental health and, and, you know, getting him help and, you know, his depression and all that. And that's the first thing he thought of is like, how's he going to make money off? this. That was the first thing he went. And I think, I think he was joking, I think. But I think he was

half serious too. Like he, he definitely was doing the calculations in his mind. As far as I know, he never ended up doing anything about that. But, um, but yeah, that's, that's just an example of, like, just how he thought. So it was extremely unpleasant, like, to work with him. He was just like an asshole in general. And like, when we would go out on the town, he would get himself into fights and always have to be pulling him out of trouble. So I always told myself, I'm like, okay, this guy's an asshole.

I really hate working with him. But he knows how to make millions of dollars. I'm going to just stick it out for like a year or two or three. I don't know how long it's going to take, but I'll stick it. He made him a couple million in a year, so why can't I, right?

And once I make a few million, I'll quit. And I won't work with him anymore. And then I'll be set. So that was always like the plan in the back of my mind. But who knows if that, if it had been successful, if I actually did make millions, I probably would have just wanted to make more millions. When the business was legitimate in the beginning, were you making any money?

So I was making some money. Like, as I said, I made $8,000 for the first contract I did. I'd worked on another contract that I made around 20-something thousand after that and then another one. But the thing was is that he never actually gave me the money. What he did was because by the time we delivered on the first contract, I was already working on the second. By the time we delivered on the second, I was already working on the third. So what he kept on doing was, you know, we're going to need to finance this next contract.

And I'm using my money to finance it. So why don't you use your money? You just made $8,000 on your first contracts. And we need, why don't we use your $8,000 to finance the second one? And so I was like, oh, I mean, I guess that makes sense. I mean, he's using his money to finance it. So he never actually paid me anything. He just kept on rolling my profits into the next one to the next one until eventually

he decided not to pay me anything. And so I got screwed out of everything. So you never got any money from this whole thing. I never got a penny from it. So you're probably the poorest arms dealer at that time. Absolutely. Wow. So you weren't necessarily motivated by the, you were and you weren't by the money aspect

because you weren't physically getting it. and like enriching yourself? Well, I thought I would. You know, I kept on telling myself that I would, that eventually I will get paid out of this. He was very convincing. I mean, I'm, nowadays, I look back and I'm like, I was such a fucking idiot.

You know, like I should have seen that coming, like, a mile away. But, you know, you don't know what you don't know. And I was 23 years old, and we were supposedly friends. And, you know, he's a very, he's a very, I will, I have plenty of bad things to say about him, but I will say that he's very talented. He's very talented at convincing people. He's very talented at negotiating.

He's very charming in a superficial way, as most psychopaths are. You know, like when you meet him, he's very funny. You know, he's very friendly. And then, you know, but he manipulates people to get their guard down. And then he stabs him in the back. And that's what he does over and over and over and over again. I mean, once I had my falling out with him, he replaced me with someone else and ended up screwing that guy.

and then that guy left and he replaced that guy and he screwed the guy after him. And on and on, there's literally like a trail of people in his wake that he's left, that he's screwed over and left destroyed. So when did the business become illegal? When does it go into that territory? So it, so we won, so we went, the, the contract that we got, that we got into trouble for was the, it was the biggest, it was the biggest contract that we had ever won, right? It was a contract to to supply the Afghan National Army and police with munitions. And so the background of that

contract was, this is like 2006, and the Bush administration was still in power, and George Bush was very unpopular as president. And they figured that the next, because he was so unpopular, the next guy was going to the next president was going to be a democrat which they were right about Obama was the next president but they also thought that the Democrats were so anti-war they would pull out of Afghanistan immediately which they were wrong about I mean I think it took Biden until like 2020 or 2021 to um I'll pull out of Afghanistan and uh they figured because the Democrats are going to pull out of Afghanistan we got to arm the Afghans for the next like 20 30 years so that they don't run out of ammo and munitions um because

Because after September 11th, the United States invaded Afghanistan because al-Qaeda had bases there. And so they invaded Afghanistan to get rid of al-Qaeda. But the Taliban, which is a different group, were running Afghanistan. And they were supporting al-Qaeda. So the United States destroyed the Taliban, made them gather them out of Kabul out of all the major cities. And they kind of chase them into the hills of Afghanistan. and they set up, the United States, set up a democratically elected government. The president was Hamid Karzai.

And the idea was that we wanted to support Hamid Karzai's government so that they would continue keeping the Taliban at bay so that all these terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda would be able to establish bases in Afghanistan and carry out attacks against the United States. So that was the national security thought process behind it. But so they decided to arm the Afghan National Army and police with massive amounts of munitions so that they wouldn't run out in case the next administration stopped supporting them. And they put out this bid for this contract.

It was like 30 different items, everything from like pistol ammo all the way up to tank rounds and anti-aircraft rockets. and we ended up winning it. And it was worth $300 million. It was one of the biggest small arms contracts in history. And we beat like general dynamics and ATK systems. These are multi-billion dollar public companies who were also bidding on the contract. It was just me and Ephraim working out of his apartment. We ended up winning the contract.

And one of the items on the 30 different items of the list was ammo for, for the AK-47-762 by 39. And we sourced it from Albania. We got it through a Swiss arms dealer named Henry Tomey. And he, Henry had a really good connection with the Albanian government. I think he was friends with the Albanian prime minister's son. And that's how he like put that deal together. Now at the time when we finally won the contract in like early two years,

2007, there was a massive spike in oil prices. And we realized because we had, quote, all the delivery of all the ammo by air freight into Afghanistan, because Afghanistan is a landlocked country, surrounded by unstable countries. So it's not really safe to do land transportation of massive amounts of munitions into Afghanistan. So we quoted air freight delivery. And air freight, like 80%, 90% of the price is the few. fuel. So when the oil price spiked, suddenly our air freight got a lot more expensive, and we realized there's no way we can deliver this ammo out of profit, particularly the AK-47 ammo, because it was the highest volume and the lowest margin. And so we can only fit like maybe about $300,000, worth of AK-47 ammo on a plane, and the plane cost us like $130,000 to fly. and so when the price is spiked,

that pretty much ate up our entire margin. Grenades, we can fit like a million dollars worth of grenades on a plane. So when the price spiked, it didn't really matter for the grenades. We still had plenty of profits for the grenades. But we realized there's no way we're going to make money on, or in fact we're going to lose money if we tried to deliver the AK-47 ammo. And so the idea, I told Ephraim, because we had gotten pictures of the ammo from Albania. And I told Ephraim, you know, this ammo is packaged in these, they're sealed in these metal tins, in these vacuum-sealed metal tins.

And the metal tins are placed in these big, bulky wooden crates. Those wooden crates look really heavy. If we just take the metal tins out and strap them to the palate and ship it like that, then we can save a whole bunch of money on the weight. And maybe we'll get back into profitability. And Ephraim says, oh, that's a great idea, you know. you know, and I told him, I'm like, okay, I'll ask the Albanians to send to tell us what those wooden crates way. And he says, no, no, no, we can't trust the Albanians. There are a bunch of scumbags. We got to get someone on the ground there to make sure that we're getting the right

numbers. And he's like, but, you know, but I need you here because you're dealing with, you know, with the contract. I was dealing with managing most of the contract. I was, we had a whole bunch like maybe like six, seven different sources. I was dealing with the government and arranging logistics and blah, blah, blah. And so he says, we need to get someone else to go do this Albanian thing. So we call up Alex, who is, you know, our mutual friend. It's one of my best friends that I'd known him since like third grade when I moved to the United States. I was actually in class with him.

That's how we met. We were in class together in third grade. And Alex is a dual citizen with France and he had just done a stint in the French military. So he had some military experience. He also had a master's degree in international relations. So he was well versed in the international political situation. And he's like trilingual. And so he's a very smart, capable guy.

And so we call up Alex and we're like, hey, do you want this? And he was looking for a job at the time. So we were like, you want this job to go to Albania and take care of our situation there. And he said, yeah, sure, that sounds like an interesting experience. And so he little did he know how interesting it was going to get. and so he goes over to Albania and he calls me up and he says hey I weighed the crate it's this amount of you know pounds and but you do know that this is all Chinese ammo right and I said to him what are you talking about why it's Albanian ammo and he says no no no there's Chinese markings all over

these crates and I'm like are you sure about that is it just like maybe just military markings He's like, dude, I know Chinese when I see it. This is Chinese markings. And I tell Ephraim and Ephraim's like, fuck. He's like, we got to confirm this. Tell Alex to email us some pictures. That's a big mistake. So Alex takes some pictures of the crates and he emails it to Ephraim and me.

It's admissible evidence, right? And we see, clear as day, there's Chinese markings all over the crates and on the sardine cans too, on the metal tins. and so we knew this was a big problem because our contract specifically said that we could not deliver Chinese ammunition. It said no Chinese ammunition, no Chinese munitions may be delivered under this contract either directly or indirectly. That was the exact words they used. And the reason they put that in there is because there is an arms embargo against China that was placed by the United States in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square map.

So in 1989, Tiananananan Square is like the main central square in Beijing. And there was a big pro-democracy protest there in 1989 by like thousands of university students. And the Chinese government brought in the military and they pretty much killed many, many of them with like tanks and machine guns and soldiers. And there was a very famous picture from that time with like a man standing in front of a line of tanks called Tankman. It became like an international scandal, international image that was broadcast all over the world. And because of that, the United States placed China on an arms embargo, which meant it was illegal for U.S. citizens or companies to buy or sell military equipment with the Chinese. So our contract said no Chinese ammunition can be delivered directly or indirectly. and however the ammo that was in Albania had been given to Albania in the 1970s right before there was an embargo which meant that it didn't violate the terms of the embargo because if you had bought ammunition from China in 1988 and imported into the United States legally you could still sell it in 1990 to another American citizen right or to someone else because it was bought legally and it's not it's not it's not

not benefiting the Chinese in any way. Yeah, made it in already. Exactly. Because it was bought from, it was exported from China legally. So it remains legal even after the embargoes put in place. So that ammunition in Albania was not, did not violate the terms of the embargo. However, our contract with the army, with the U.S. Army said, did not mention the embargo at all. It just said, no Chinese ammunition, period.

So we realized this ammunition violates the terms of our contract. may not violate the terms of the embargo, but it does violate the terms of our contract. And so we thought, well, we have two choices, right? We could either go and tell the Army about it and ask for a waiver, right, and say, hey, guys, you know, we know that you meant to, you put this clause in here because of the embargo, but this stuff doesn't violate the embargo. So can you give us a waiver? Can you sign this letter saying that we can deliver this ammunition?

And in retrospect, they probably would have given us that waiver because it turns out that they knew about the Chinese ammo the whole time and they were totally fine with it until the New York Times published a front page article about it. But that's, I'm getting ahead of myself. But we thought at the time that if we did that, there was a possibility that the Army would say something along the lines of, you know, your competitors could have bid this ammunition because that was the terms of the solicitation. That was the term of bidding this contract that no Chinese ammunition could be bid on this.

And so they weren't allowed to bid on that. So it's not really fair to them that you're going to be able to deliver this ammunition. So why don't we cancel this contract and put it out for open bid so everyone could bid on it equally and we'll remove that clause. And you guys are welcome to bid on it again.

And we thought, do we want to really risk losing a $300 million contract? And we thought, well, maybe we just don't tell them about it, right? What they don't know won't hurt them, right? So we decided to repackage the ammunition so that they wouldn't find out that it was Chinese ammunition. And that's the famous scene in the movie? Yes, exactly. And I think Jonah Hill uses the towel as an example. It's like, is this made in Turkey?

What, rips the tag off? Well, now it's an Albanian towel, right? And Ephraim never used that example, but more or less is what he was, is what he said. And so he told Alex, go find a box manufacturer because we're going to need a whole bunch of cardboard boxes, which we were planning on doing anyway for the weight savings. Because it turned out those wooden crates were very heavy. and just getting rid of the wooden crates put us back into profitability. But now that we found out

that there was Chinese markings on the metal tins, we had to get rid of those two. And there was papers inside the metal tins with Chinese markings and like a paperwork inside there. So we had to get rid of that. And so we hired this guy who, a guy named Costa Tribischka,

who was an Albanian owner of a box manufacturing company. we hired him to provide the boxes and to provide the workers to do the whole repackaging operation. And I think we paid him like 100 grand and we ended up saving like 3 million in shipping costs. It was a great deal for us. And he started repackaging it. But before we did that, we asked the receipt, we sent an email to the receiving officer in Kabul, who's a U.S. Army officer who was in charge on signing off on the deliveries.

And we told them, you know, this ammunition is from the 70s, so we really want to inspect it and make sure it's good. And so we're going to have to take it out of the original packaging and put it into this new packaging. Is that okay? And he said, oh, yeah, that's a good idea, guys. You really should be inspecting that. And I'm glad that you're going the extra mile. Thank you so much. We really appreciate that.

Yeah, approved. And so he signed off on that. And then we hired the box guy to do the repackaging, and he started doing the repackaging. We started delivering to Afghanistan to. And the army got the ammo. They inspected it. They were thrilled. It was all good quality.

They sent it off to our allies. We started landing aircraft on a regular basis. And of course, Ephraim, as soon as anything goes well, he has to start kind of like rocking the boat to see how much more money he could squeeze out of the situation, right? So he asked the box guy, Costa, he asked him, he's like, you know, do you have any friends in the

Ministry of Defense in the Albanian Ministry of Defense? And Costa says, yeah, I actually have a cousin who works there. And he's like, hey, can you find out from your cousin what the Albanian government is paying for our ammo, right? Can you just find out what that price is? And so Costa a few days later comes. He's like, yeah, he asked around. It turns out you're paying around two cents.

They're paying around two cents. They're getting, I should say. the Albanian government is getting around two cents around. And we were paying Henry, the Swiss arms dealer, who was played by Bradley Cooper in the movie, we were paying him four cents around. So he was taking two cents. He was making a 50% profit margin.

And that pissed Ephraim off to no end. Now, we were making around a cent and a half profit margin. So it wasn't like we were making about what Henry was making. But in retrospect, Henry probably was paying some of that money as like kickbacks to the politicians he was friendly with. That's how he locked down the deal. Of course, we didn't know that at the time. But, you know, Ephraim, all he saw was that Henry was making double his money and that really, really pissed him off. So Henry, so Ephraim says, I'm going to go to Albanian. I'm going to cut this motherfucker out of the deal, right? I'm going to make a deal directly with the Albanians. And I told him like Ephraim, that's probably a bad. idea we're delivering you know we're like we have like three aircraft loads going every week we're making money and anyway this is the least profitable part of the contract we're making way

more money on the grenades and the anti-aircraft rockets and the mortar rounds just leave it alone it's going we're how everyone's making money we're happy you know and he's like fuck that all every fucking penny counts henry's not going to fuck us like that i know what it's like to get fucked i don't get fucked i do the fucking you know and uh so he's He goes, he's like, this is what you're going to do. He tells me, he's like, you're going to take all those quotes that you got from all those other suppliers. And you're going to doctor those quotes. You're going to change the prices on them.

So it looks like they're getting, they offered us a much better price than what the Albanians are offering us. And so I'm like, okay, fine. You know, I use some PDF editing software. I change the prices on it. I print it out. I give it to him. He goes to Albania. He has a meeting with Yili Panari, who's the head of their export company, the Albanian, the government-owned export company.

company. And Pinari looks at the documents. He takes one look at it and he's like, this is all fake. Don't show me your fake documents. He knew right away. I mean, the guy is in the industry. He knows those prices aren't real. He knows what people are selling things in the industry for. And he knew it was all doctored. And Ephraim, you know, just wouldn't leave him alone. He's like, come on, come on, I need a better price. I'm going to go bankrupt. I'll tell you, I'm going to give you more business later. I've got all these other deals coming. We'll do all these other deals later. and he just wouldn't leave him alone. So finally, after a few days of this,

Pinari says, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what. I'll set up this meeting with a guy who could make this decision. All right? And so he sets up a meeting with Alex went with him to meet the decision maker. And they go to this high-rise building that's under construction. They go inside the construction site, walk up these stairs and open up a door

and they walk into a fully furnished, beautiful like office like at a Wall Street. And at the end of this long table is this, is this tough looking guy. And Alex told me that Ephraim was always talking shit, constantly yammering away, you know. A second he walked into that room, he shut his mouth. He knew he couldn't mess with this guy.

And he was very, very quiet and respectful. Because he just knew that this guy would not take his bullet. shit. And the guy's name was Deliorgi. That was his last name. I forgot. Maybe Mikhail. Deliore. I forgot his first name. Turned out this guy was one of the leaders of the Albanian mob. And next to him was another guy that Alex said he later recognized from pictures that the guy with Deliorgi was the Albanian prime minister's son. And that part made it into the book, the war dog's book. And because of that, the Albanian prime minister's son sued Simon and Schuster, who was

the publisher of the book for defamation. He also sued me and Alex and Devoroli and Gleason, the writer of the book. It ended up getting thrown out of court because it was a meritless lawsuit. You can't sue journalists for reporting facts, you know, from. from eyewitnesses. Yeah. But so, yeah, so the, in DeLiorgi tells De Viroli, that he tells him he's like, look, I know you want a better price on the ammo, okay? And I know that you're repackaging this ammunition and you're paying this guy, Costa Tribeska, to do the repackaging.

So why don't you give me the contract to do the repackaging? I'll make money on that and because I'm making money on the repackaging I can give you a little discount on the ammunition and DeVrily said oh that's a great idea he's fired, you're hired, let's do this and then he flies back to the United States

Costa calls me up because I was dealing with him and he says hey you know I know you guys got a new person to do the repackaging I understand it's just business it's fine but I do have $20,000 worth of cardboard boxes that I had manufactured just for you guys for this, you know,

contract, and, you know, can you at least buy those from me? So I'm not left with these boxes. They have nothing to do it. And I said, sure, that makes sense. We're going to need them anyway. Let me, let me, you know, talk to Ephraim. I'm like, hey, can you just buy these boxes from Costa, you know? And Ephraim's like, yeah, yeah, sure, no problem. I'll do it. Of course, he never does it, right? A week later, I got another call from Costa. He's like, hey, listen, I still haven't been paid for the boxes, can you pay me for the boxes? And I said, let me talk to Efferman. I talked to Effermann's like, eh,

fuck them, who cares, you know? The other guys, they already got their boxes from somewhere else. They don't want to buy his boxes. Who cares? Just let him go. He's nothing, you know? And I told Efferm, like, just fucking pay the guy for his 20 grand, you know? We have a $300 million dollar contract.

Just pay him the $20 grand. He knows everything. You know, don't fucking make an enemy here. And Efferm's like, eh, what's he gonna do he's not gonna do shit don't worry about him forget about him so apparently he uh did not let it go because he called costa called up the new york times holy shit and told them everything that he knew and he also called up the fbi i and told them everything you knew and his biggest mistake is that he called up the uh the local albanian press and he told them about the whole deal and he also told them

that the local Albanian politicians were getting kickbacks from this. And then about a few weeks later after that, after those articles were published in Albania, he ended up dead in very mysterious circumstances. He got killed? He got killed.

So, well, the official cause of death was a car accident, but it was a very strange car accident because he was like in an empty field all by himself and his car had run him over. And they found him like 30 feet. from his car and like so yeah very very strange if it was an accident it was a very very strange one

but it sure didn't look like an accident how long to take for the government the feds and whatnot to pick you guys up for this so after the after the afram came back from albania he pretty much informed me that he didn't want to pay me because he just didn't feel like i was like i deserved the money and uh i told him to go fuck himself and i'd sue that i would see him in court and um so I quit, and about two months after I quit, I got a call from one of the secretaries telling me that the feds had just raided the office. And they were taking up all the boxes, all the paperwork, all the computers. And so I called up Alex, you know, who's my best friend? And I'm like, hey, Alex, I just wanted to let you know.

Fed's just raided the office. And he's like, what and why? You know, because he thought it wasn't illegal. He thought it was just like a commercial breach of contract. And so he calls up Danny, who's the guy who Ephraim replaced me with after I quit. And he asked Danny, he says, hey, Danny, I need, you know, I've got an aircraft landing this afternoon. I need these documents to do the expert permit because he knew that the documents were in the office. And so Alex told me, he hears Danny cover the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered Ephraim.

He's like, hey, Ephraim, Alex is on the phone. He wants those documents for the export permit. What should I tell him? And he hears Ephraim whisper back, oh, we can't get those documents. So tell him there was like a bomb threat. Yeah, yeah. Tell them there was a bomb threat. So we can't.

They made everyone leave the building until they investigated. But we'll get them the documents later. And Danny gets back on the phone. Oh, there was a bomb threat. So we can't, you know. And Alex is thinking, why is he lying to me, right? You know, is it maybe he's going to try to pin everything on me? You know, maybe he's going to say something like, oh, I had no idea this was going on.

This was all Alex Padritsky's fault because he wanted to, you know, keep his cushy job in Albania. And so he did all this without my knowledge, right? So Alex was like, I'm not going down for this piece of shit. And he's on the next flight back to Miami. Our lawyers, we both hire attorneys. And our attorneys tell us, well, first thing you should do is look in your emails and see what kind of evidence the government might have against you. And so we search for Chinese ammunition and repack. and stuff like that, and we found a massive amount of evidence.

And the pictures that Alex sent over from Albania, there was, uh, we have had an investor named Ralph, uh, in the movie he's played by like a Jewish laundromat owner. And in real life, he was a Mormon machine gun owner who lived in Utah. But his name was Ralph. That part was true. And he was our investor. And we had also emails from Ralph with like, uh, instructions on how to use like, um, uh, wood sanders to remove like the markings from the crates, like an, and he,

I even had step-by-step pictures of like, step one, you take the wood sander and you hold it, and this is what it looks like after you, you know, and like, so he had literal step-by-step instructions on how to get rid of the Chinese markings on the crates. So there was a lot, a lot of evidence against us, and we knew we were screwed. So our lawyer said, look, if there's super strong evidence against you, you know, you just want to cooperate because otherwise you're going to lose anyway. So we were both interviewed by the federal agents. and the way they do it, as I'm sure you know, they're like, they say, oh, you know, if you're going to cooperate, you're 100% in, right?

Like if you omit anything or if you change anything, you get zero credit for cooperation. We'll go hard against you. So, so you better tell us everything. So, of course, I mean, I'm scared shitless and I don't owe F from anything. That asshole just fucked me out of all the money I'd been working for for the last two years. I'd been slowly dwindling my savings to work. You know, I've been living off my savings. And my 100 grand had turned into like between 20 and 30 grand at that point.

And I was running out of money fast. So I couldn't even afford to pay my lawyers for very long. And so I told them everything I knew, of course. And they told me at the end of the, they took their notes, et cetera. And they told me at the end of the interview, you know, I know you're wondering what we know. I just wanted to let you know that after we did the raid on the office, we found this to-do list on Ephraim's desk in his handwriting. And one of the items in the to-do list was repackaged Chinese ammunition.

Oh, man. So, yeah, he's like, yeah, we knew about that. But, yeah. And so then after that, we didn't hear from them for like six months. And like we thought, well, maybe they're going to just go away. You know, maybe they're not going to pursue this case. And they told Alex and me that we weren't targets of the investigation. They're not going to charge us with anything as long as because we cooperated, et cetera.

And that Ephraim was the real target. And we're like, fine, great. You know, fuck that guy. And after about six months, but then we didn't hear anything from them for like six months. And after about six months in like, I think it was like in March of March 28th, 2018, 2008. Yeah, March 28th, 2008, a date that should live in. infamy in my life. There was a front page article published by the New York Times with mine and

Ephraim's mugshots on the front page next to a picture of rusty looking disgusting ammunition. And the ammunition, and the New York Times said that all the ammo we were delivering was defective and it's all garbage and putting our allies in danger. It wasn't actually true. The ammunition they had a picture of wasn't even the Chinese. ammo. It was Bulgarian ammo that Ephraim had bought like sight unseen because we were getting our grenades out of Bulgaria and there was some extra room on the aircraft and he had gotten an offer

for really, really cheap, like 30,000 rounds in the scheme of things, very small amount. 30,000 rounds at like a very, very low price. But it wasn't even worth flying out there to inspect it because it was such a small quantity and the price was really low. And so he figured, well, you know, if it gets, if it's, if the quality is good and it gets accepted by the government, we're going to make an enormous margin on that ammo. If it doesn't, not a big deal. I'm paying very little for it anyway. So he didn't, he just shipped it along with the grenades and never even looked at it.

Turned out it was total garbage. Corroated. It was really, it was really bad. And the receiving officer took one look at it and says, I'm not accepting this. And he rejected it. And we didn't get paid for it. But Afghanistan doesn't have ammunition recycling facility. So they just stuck the ammunition on the side of the airport and where it just sat there.

So when the New York Times went to investigate and started asking around to see ammunition that AEY had delivered, someone pointed them at that. And so they got pictures of the rusty ammunition that had been sitting outdoors for months. And they got pictures of that. And they kind of, I guess, either they assumed or they wanted to imply that all the ammunition we were delivering was of that quality. And so that's what ended up on the front page. Wow. Yeah.

And so two days after, so that became a worldwide scandal because we were so young. And we had been arrested, like I think it was for Ephraim's 21st birthday. He had gotten in a fight with the valet guy in his building. And him and I had been arrested and, like, spend the night in jail for that. So that's where they got our mugshots from. And also they found some weed on him. So that was in the record. And so in the media, we were called the stoner arms dealers.

And so because, you know, we're like a couple of crazy kids and entrusted with this $300 million contract, it became this big political scandal. And there were hearings on the floor of Congress with our pictures on the floor of Congress where some senator is like, and here we have, you know, a 24-year-old arms dealer that the Bush administration has entrusted with the vital component of the war on terror. You know, and like then a picture of the rusty, I mean, and this is the stuff that they're delivering. And so it was a big political thing. They wanted actually, they subpoenaed us to testify in front of Congress, but our lawyers told them that we would just plead the fifth the whole time because we were under criminal investigation. And so they ended up canceling the subpoena because I guess they didn't want to waste the time.

And then like two days after that article comes out, that article was like republished by the Associated Press. So it got republished in pretty much every major newspaper in the world. I had a Google alert on my name and it popped up in like every major city around the world like London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Mumbai, you know, like everywhere. Like every major city around the world that had a big newspaper, part of the Associated Press Network,

was republished this article. So it was worldwide news. And then two days later, the Army put out a statement saying, the U.S. Army put out a statement saying that we had no idea any of this was happening and were shocked and appalled and we're canceling this contract. And like three days after that, the Justice Department called up my lawyer and said, hey, you know, we're really sorry.

We know we told David and Alex that they're not the targets of this investigation. But due to the, you know, the political nature and all the pressure that's on everybody, we got to move this case along. And because they were so involved, we can't charge Effron without charging them to. We're so sorry, right? We're so sorry. And so, and the way they charged us was they said, you know, because the thing is that the government actually got the, like, ammunition. It wasn't they were, they didn't like lose out.

They didn't get defrauded. Well, so they charged us with fraud, but the fraud that they charged us, they didn't get defrauded in the sense. They didn't get defrauded out of any money. They got defrauded off their misconsumption or misconception of goods. Right. They got the, they got defrauded out of what they wanted. which was non-Chinese ammunition. That's the part they got defrauded out.

They didn't get what they were paying for. Exactly, though they didn't lose any money. So the way they charged it was they said, you know, with every aircraft load of this ammunition, you provided a document, a certificate of conformance. It's called where you list the type of ammunition, you list the quantity, the year was manufactured, and most importantly, place of origin, right? And you put on place of origin Albania, you knew it was just. China and not only did you know but you had a whole operation to hide the fact that it was

originally from China so each document that you submitted is an act of fraud and there were 71 aircraft loads so there's 71 acts of fraud and you can get up to five years in prison for each one right and that's if you fight us but if you plead guilty we'll combine all those 71 into one so it's a single act of fraud so the most you'll get if the judges have to really bad day is five years. And we'll go to bat for you because you're going to plead guilty. And so maybe you'll get one year, maybe just probation. So what do you want to do, right? You want to get 355 years or maybe nothing? And so, of course, it wasn't really. And if you fight us, you need to hire a good lawyer, which, you know, you need, I don't know, maybe like 300K for that. Do you have that?

No, you don't have that? Okay. Well, what are you going to do? So I very much did not have that. I had like maybe 20K left on my name at that point. And it was dwindling fast because at that point my daughter was, she was like a year and a half old at that time. Oh, you had a daughter at that point too. Yeah. Yeah, my daughter was born like two weeks after we won the contract. Wow.

Yeah. You were young. Yeah, I was 25 years old. Are you still with a daughter's mother now? No, no. We got divorced 11, 12 years ago when my daughter was 5. but yeah my daughter's 17 now it's crazy wow did she see the movie

just recently actually what does she think about the movie so it's so funny so she's super into like anime and so she wasn't she was like yeah this doesn't look like my kind of movie you know it's like it doesn't look like my kind of movie not something I'd be injured it's like you know guns gritty you know blah and I told her I'm like

you're not curious about a movie that was made about your father. And she's like, eh, you know. And because like she's like, you know, I saw like a preview for War Dogs on YouTube and where like this guy is like, I'm David Packhouse and I'm an international arms dealer. And I thought, you're not David Packhouse. You're not my dad. She's like, it just destroyed my suspension of disbelief.

I just, I don't think I'll be able to enjoy this movie because, you know, it's just, I know it's not you. That's funny. Yeah. And I'm like, well, aren't you just curious about it? And so eventually she was very resistant to watching it for actually, because she didn't even know about it until like maybe a year, year and a half ago. And then she seemed to have no interest in watching it until like just a couple months ago.

And then her big tech, when she finally saw it, her big takeaway from the movie was that they whitewashed her. Because in the movie, so my daughter is mixed race. Her mom is half African. Her mom is mixed race as well. So her mom looks a lot more like Haley Berry than Anna Darmus. So my daughter is a little dark. And in the movie, of course, Anadamus is super white. And the baby that plays my daughter in the movie is also very white.

And she's like, they made me a white baby. Hollywood made me a white baby. That's funny. And then she started wondering if baby actors get residuals. She's looking for a payday. Exactly. So how much time do you guys end up getting? What was the completion?

So we ended up pleading guilty. Me, Alex, and Ephraim eventually as well ended up pleading guilty. Ralph and decided to take it all the way to trial. Oh, Ralph went to trial. Yeah, Ralph went to trial against everyone's advice. And he ended up losing. There were two trials, actually, because the first one was a hung jury. One juror refused to convict them.

So they did the whole thing again. and eventually they convicted him in the second trial. And because of that, the entire process took three years. So from when they charged us to when I was finally sentenced, it was three years. And so Ralph got four years in prison. I got seven months of house arrest and seven months probation. And Alex got five months of house arrest and five months probation. And Ephraim probably would have gotten in the low, like one, two, you know, maximum two years.

I would think because he did plead guilty. Maybe he even would have gotten like some sort of, you know, just more house arrest or something. But of course, he just couldn't stop doing the business and he committed a second crime before he got sentenced. So they told me, you know, oh, you can't do this business anymore, right? Because after I left Ephraim, I was like, oh, I can start my own business. And so I did. And I was actually about to win a multimillion dollar contract the day that the new, the new. York Times came out, the story came out, I was going into the final stages of like due diligence

on the government side for a contract that would have made me like a million dollars for my first big contract. And of course, that whole thing fell apart after the New York Times article came out, the bank canceled, you know, the finance agreement I needed to complete this contract. And so, Ephraim, of course, so I was scared shitless, right? I mean, I I stopped my business. I went back to school. I actually went back to doing massage therapy because I was desperate for money. I mean, I was, you know, I got a job at a food bank because my lawyer told me that would make me look good to the judge. And I was scared shitless, of course. I mean, I was looking at years in prison. You know, I was thinking, man, I might miss like a good chunk of my kid's childhood if this goes badly. So I was very, very terrified. And I did everything I could to to make sure that. that I had the best chance of getting a low sentence from the judge. But Ephraim doesn't roll like that, right? You know, they told him you can't do this business while you're awaiting sentencing.

And so what he does is he gets his newest lackey, right? I think it was like his fifth or six one by the time, you know, after me. Because he kept on screwing over his lackeys, you know, his people, they would quit. I mean, they'd work for like maybe like six months to a year and then he'd screw them over and they quit and you get a new one. And so his latest guy, he had him start a company under his name, and he started doing business under that company because his name wasn't on that company. But the problem was that he was a control freak. So any time it came down to actually negotiating, he just couldn't let his front man be the front man. He had to get on the phone himself and do the negotiating himself.

So he was trying to do this deal with, I think it was with Knight Industries, a company based in Central Florida. and the deal was they were going to import these like high capacity magazines from Korea and bring them into the United States and put Knight's logo on it to make it like look more like high quality and legitimate and then sell it. And they were going to make a lot amount like a decent amount of money from this. But while he was negotiating with Knight, the guy he was talking to realized who he was. And he admitted, you know, eventually he admitted. He's like, yeah, I'm from Debril. Don't worry.

I can do this business, you know, nothing to worry about. The guy he's talking to was not so sure. So he calls up the ATF. And the ATF says, you know what? Why don't you introduce one of our undercover agents to this Diveroli guy as your business partner? And so he does that. The undercover agent tells Diveroli's like, hey, you know, I'm the kind of guy who only does, you only, you know, I need to look you in the eye and shake your hand to complete this deal. Right? That's just how I roll, right?

So why don't you come up to Central Florida and we'll shake on it? And then we'll sign the papers and do this deal. And Ephraim's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm the same kind of guy. You're real mad, you know? You know, like bravado. It's just like spewing shit. So Ephraim drives up to Central Florida, which he was not allowed to do because he was supposed to the terms of his bond was that he stays in the Southern District of Florida. And Central Florida was out of the Southern District.

And so he drives up to Central Florida, meets with the undercover agent. Undercover agent opens up his trunk. He knows Ephraim's a gun not, right? So he's like, hey, check this out. I got the latest HK on the market. This is the coolest handgun. And Ephraim's like, oh, yeah, I heard about that thing. That thing's so cool.

Let me see that. And he reaches it. He's like, he picks up the gun. He's like, what can I say? Once a gun runner, always a gun runner. Am I right? and the agent slaps a cuffs on him. And he's like, you're a felon in possession of a firearm.

You're under arrest. And so he, yeah, so he arrested him for possession of a firearm, which you can get up to 10 years in prison for. And, of course, because he had violated the terms of his original bond in Southern District, they didn't give him a new one. So he spent like a year in county lockup, which is no fun. And eventually he got sentenced to, He could have gotten like 15 years, like five for the fraud charge because since he committed a second crime, the prosecutors are not obligated to tell the judge to go easy on him.

And he could have gotten another 10 years for the gun charge. But he hired the best lawyers in Miami. He spent literally millions of dollars on his law firm. And they negotiated it down to four years. Looking to start 2026 with an unforgettable getaway. Fiji Airway sale is on now. Fly nonstop round trip to Fiji from just 748. Or enjoy a sunny Fiji stopover on your way to Australia with round trip fairs starting from 839.

As a one world alliance member and American Airlines Advantage program partner, your miles go further across the South Pacific. Book now at Fiji Airways.com or contact your local travel agent. Conditions apply. So he got four years? So he got four years. And I think he got out in like a year, like three and a half years because he did a drug program or something. Did he participate in the movie at all? He didn't.

So the movie happened. So Rolling Stone published this really long article in 2011 about the story. Because they contacted me in 2008 when the New York Times article came out. And I had like every journalist in the world calling me up at that point. And my lawyer told me, don't talk to any journalist. You're going to get in trouble. And so then Rolling Stone left me a voicemail. And I was like, I'm a musician.

I would love to talk to Rolling Stone. And so I call the guy back up Geyloss, and he's a writer for Rolling Stone. And I told him, like, you know, as a musician, I've always dreamed about being written in Rolling Stone, just not necessarily for this. He's like, hey, you know, maybe we can make something happen. And I told him, my lawyer says, I can't talk to journalists.

He's like, let me talk to your lawyer. And he made a deal with my lawyer that he wouldn't publish the article until all legal jeopardy has passed. and so he had to wait three years to publish that article. Oh, yeah. So during that three years while like Ralph was going to trial, he kept on digging and he kept on like he interviewed like people, like the contracting officers on the government side.

A lot of documents came out from Ralph's two trials because there's a lot of discovery. So it came out like one thing, one interesting thing that came out during discovery is that after the raid on the office, the Justice Department sent an email to the U.S. Army and said, this ammunition you're getting delivered to is Chinese origin. So you may want to stop taking delivery on it. And the Army responded saying this ammunition is critical to the mission. So if you want us to stop taking delivery on it, we're going to need a letter from the Attorney General of the United States requesting us to do so.

And that letter never arrived. So that's why they kept on taking delivery on it for six months. after they were informed that it was Chinese ammunition. So they knew the entire time. And, yeah, they didn't care. They were just happy to get the ammo at a very low price. That's what they really cared about. But so, yeah, so when the Rolling Stone article was published in 2011 after we were all sentenced,

Todd Phillips, the director of the hangover movies, read the article and he loved it. He was like, I can make a good movie out of this. And so he optioned the rights to the article. And he also optioned my life rights. That's what they call it. Oh, so he got your life rights? So he got my life rights, yeah, which he didn't have to. You know, you can make them because my name appeared in the public record.

You know, it's been written about in the newspaper. Legally, he could have made the movie without paying me a penny. And he could have said anything. It could have made up any story using my real name and everything. But he wanted it to be a little bit more. authentic, so he bought my life rights. Ephraim was in prison at the time, and they knew that Ephraim was like a nightmare to deal with, and so they didn't want to have anything to do with him, so they didn't buy his life rights.

While he was in prison, Ephraim was writing his own memoir, a book he called Once a Gun Runner, always a Gun Runner, right? It's a good title. Matt Cox wrote that book because Matt Cox was in prison with him. Oh, they were in prison together? Yeah, they were in prison together. Holy fuck. Yeah, that's how they met.

I'm sure they got along great. Matt hates Ephraim. I mean, Ephraim ended up screwing Matt, of course. Really? He does everyone. Yeah, because they made a deal for the proceeds of the book. And Ephraim tried to screw Matt out of everything. Did the book get published?

So he self-published it. And the interesting thing about it is that I didn't know this, but Matt wrote another book called Dude Weed. Where's my hand grenade? It's a very small book, but it's about the process of writing Ephraim's memoir and what happened after he wrote it. Because it turns out that Ephraim's memoir, like half of the book, is pieces of a novel that Matt was writing previously. I forgot the name of the novel he was writing, but he had never published that novel. And he was writing Ephraim's memoir, and Ephraim's literary agent kept on pressing him to finish, finish, finish.

because they wanted to get the memoir out before the movie came out. And Matt was like, I can't finish that fast. And you can't just write that fast. And he's like, it doesn't matter what you put in there. Just take that other book that you wrote before and put some of the, just change the name so it fits in with this story. Just stick it in there, right? So like literally half of Ephraim's memoir is like taken from,

uh, from another work of fiction that that Matt wrote. And, and the rest of it is Ephraim's blatherings and which is like 95% false anyway. So it's, parts of it are boring, but some of it is pretty entertaining. Like, I think my favorite part in Ephraim's book is how he starts it where he's talking about himself. And it's, he describes himself as, it's like, Ephraim DeVroly, handsome by anyone's standards. That's my favorite, handsome by anyone's standards.

You just couldn't be like he couldn't like keep it in any sort of realistic language. It just had to be the best. That's funny. Yeah, yeah. And so the reason they were in such a rush to get that book out is because they wanted to sue Warner Brothers for stealing his story. So they were in a real rush to get it out. And they ended up suing Warner Brothers and Matt wrote a whole book about it. It's actually pretty good.

It's interesting called Dude Where's My Hand grenade? Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And one thing that Matt told me while he was in prison is he asked, he asked Ephraim, you know, why did you screw over Packhouse? You know, why, you know, he seemed like he did his part of the deal. And Ephraim said, well, because, you know, after, at first I thought it was, it was, you know, a good deal because, like, he's working on contingency only. So if we don't make money, then he gets, I owe him nothing. And if we do make money, well, great, I'm making money.

But then when we won the contract, I realized, man, I could hire someone for like 100K a year to do everything he's doing. And I owe him millions of dollars for this. It's way cheaper to just like screw him over. And maybe, you know, if he sues me, so what? I'll get a lawyer, you know, that'll still be cheaper than paying him the millions of dollars I own. So he knew exactly what he was doing. He planned it all out. And, yeah, so he ended up suing Warner.

brothers and that whole thing, they settled, I think, for a small amount at the end, out of court. But yeah, he didn't have anything to do with the movie. And I think he was, I actually talked to someone who saw the movie with him in the theater. A guy named Ron who he used to work with us. He actually was in the office with us. And so Ron maintained relatively, you know, friendly relationship with that from because Ron was always a salaried employee so he never got screwed over like ever like all his partners did right because he just got a paycheck every week and uh so Ron was his

he Ron told me that he invited him to go to see the movie with with him and all his lawyers he had a team of lawyers because he doesn't doesn't have any friends yeah um so he went with his team of lawyers and Ron to see the movie in the theater when it came out and at first for him was like, you know, really excited. He was like, oh, and he was laughing and he was like got really at, you know, he was really enjoying the movie. But then as the movie kind of went on and you kind of see what a piece of shit he is, he kind of got quieter and quieter and quieter until at the end of the movie, you know,

he was like, because in the beginning he told Ron, he's, Ron told me this. He's like, he's like, we're going to see the movie. We're going to go for drinks afterwards. We're going to celebrate. He's like, at the end of the movie, he's like, yeah, I'm going home. So he was not happy about. the movie. He was not happy about it. It must have been cool to work on set and everything and be a part of that. Yeah, that was pretty cool. So yeah, I have a little cameo in the movie. Yeah, I was reading that. Yeah, yeah. I have like three seconds of screen time. My claim to fame. I'm playing guitar and singing in it. So I thought that's pretty cool. I'm singing, don't fear the Reaper to a group of like 90-year-old people. So that's the big joke. Does Miles Teller ever stay in touch with you? No, no, he doesn't care about me. Really? They just move on that one? They do a million movies. They don't care about me. The only person I stayed in touch with was Stephen Chin, the screenwriter.

He's a really sweet guy. He was really nice. And he's actually the guy who the triangle of death scene actually happened to. So we never actually went through the triangle of death because we weren't idiots. But Stephen Chin was brave and an idiot because he wanted to write another screenplay about these guys who were in Iraq and he couldn't fly directly into Iraq. So he flew to Jordan and hired a Jordanian driver to drive him to Baghdad. and his driver brilliantly stopped in Fallujah to get gas because there's no one manning the gas stations. And so he got shot at by insurgents and got saved by the U.S. Army.

That whole scene is actually true. But it happened to Stephen Chin, the screenwriter of Wardogs, not to us. So, yeah, so Stephen Shin is a great guy, and he's the only one I've stayed in contact with. But, yeah, I mean, I still have, you know, Todd Phillips's phone number, but he doesn't answer my text. Oh, you text him? Very, every few years. Like when I see something cool. How long has it been? What, 2017?

The movie came out in 2016. 2016, wow, eight years ago. Yeah, it's been a while. It's still a popular movie. I know. Like, you still see a pop up. I think it's more popular now than it was when it came out in the theaters. So, I mean, it did okay in the theaters.

It did like $100 million in the box office. But I think it got a lot more exposure once it hit Netflix. I think a lot more people have seen it. Yeah, and then COVID happened and that pushed it back out. Yeah. So what do you do now? What's your life like now? So I first started, so the way I got into my current business is while I was,

while I was under house arrest, I was playing a lot of guitar and I really missed playing with a drummer. And so I bought a drum machine, this is an electronic device that you could make beats with. But every time you want the beat to change, like to go from like verse to chorus, you have to stop playing your guitar and press a button on the machine. And it was really annoying. It was interrupting the flow of the music. music so I realized I need a drum machine that's hands free like in a pedal format and I couldn't find it anywhere and all my musician friends thought it was an amazing idea they all wanted one too so I designed it and I eventually built it took me about three years but came out with it it's

called the beat buddy like your buddy that plays the beats the world's first drum machine in a guitar pedal format you can do drum fills transitions a whole bunch of things pretty device. And that, uh, that went really, really well. I did a crowdfunding campaign because I was broke as hell and had no money to build this, but, uh, the crowdfunding campaign went really well. I raised $350,000 in a month, uh, just musicians buying in it, buying it in advance. I won a whole bunch of awards from the music industry for this thing. I've had famous musicians use it. Some of my, like, musical idols have, I've used it, which is super, super cool. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah. One of my favorite bands is Allison Chains and the bass player Mike Inez came up to me at a trade show and he's like,

oh, you make the beat buddy. I just bought one two months ago. I'm writing my new music with it. And I'm like, dude, I learned to play guitar listening to your music. So how cool is that? That's super cool. So that launched my company's Singular Sound, which we've made several other musical products, the world's most advanced looper pedal for musicians who care, which is a small percentage of the population, you can check out singular sound.com. And a few years ago, my brother and I had an idea, because we kept them like inventing musical products, and my brother helped me build up singular sound. We were like, we need to come up with a product that is, you know, that anyone could use,

not just musicians, right? Because musicians are at most 10% of the population. So the market is pretty small. and we were smoking weed at my place and we got the munchies and so we ate some mango and got like the fibers stuck in our teeth and so we were flossing to like get rid of the fibers

and I was complaining to him I was like you know if we could invent a machine that flosses your teeth for you that's going to make so much money everyone everyone has to floss and everyone hates flossing there's no one who likes flossing so we started spitballing ideas

eventually we came up with with a device called Instafloss. You can check it out. Instafloss.com. It uses 12 water jets. All you have to do is slide the thing across your teeth and it gives you a full mouth floss in about 10 seconds. Wow.

Yeah. So that's my next company. And just recently I started a third venture that I'm really excited about. It's called War Dogs Academy. I saw that on your Instagram bio. Yeah. Yeah.

So ever since the movie came out, I've had people contacting me on Instagram and other social media, begging me to teach them how to do government contracting. Because it's a massive amount of money that is being spent by the government. It's an enormous industry. And people for years have been asking me to teach them how to do government contracting. But I'd been banned from doing government contracting. I couldn't do it since like 2008. Just recently, actually, I think just last year I got off the band list so I can do it again.

But I hadn't done it for like a decade and a half. And I realized, well, my knowledge might be a little bit out of date. But then about a year ago, I got an email from a guy named Logan. And he wrote me, he said, you know, when about six, seven years ago, my partner, James and we watched war dogs and we were 21 years old at the time and we thought to ourselves, man, if these guys could do it when they're our age, why can't we do it? And so they threw themselves into it and they taught themselves the entire system how to register your company with the government, how to look at the solicitations, how to find

suppliers, how to create proposals, et cetera, et cetera. And they, you know, there was a lot of blood, sweat and tears and they bid on a whole bunch of contracts they lost. But eventually they started, they won a contract and then they won more. And now they have a multimillion dollar government contracting business. And so he said, I just wanted to reach out and say thank you because, you know, if it wasn't for war dogs, we probably wouldn't be where we are today. And I thought that's so fucking cool because that's, first of all, super impressive that they taught themselves how to do this because I didn't teach myself how to do it. Ephraim taught me. And Ephraim had his uncle teach him. So it's not easy to,

It's not an easy thing to learn on your own. It's pretty complex. But so I told them like, guys, I have all these people who want to learn how to do this. Why don't we start something where we can teach people how to do government contracting? And so that's why we created War Dogs Academy and people could check it out at wardogsacademy.com where we created an entire course step by step on how to get into the government contracting business and build a successful business. legally, absolutely, legitimately. And we have a, we just launched literally last week and it's doing really, really well.

That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. And we have a forum on the website where people who have gotten the course can build connections and ask questions. So if there's anything they don't understand, you know, the community or we can jump in and answer. We also have questions, live questions and answer Q&A sessions with the founders, me and my two partners as well as a retired contracting officer who worked for the government for a few decades. So people can get like the government's perspective on things for so people who have any questions, you know, they can talk to us every two weeks on, well, with the contracting officer

every week. And what we're most excited about is we have, we're building up a network of investors who to invest in our students' contracts. So one of the big chat. challenges in government contracting, even when you win a contract, is that you need to finance it often, right? If the government wants to buy 10,000 handguns from you, right? And they say, deliver it to, you know, this base at this time. You have to pay the manufacturer usually in advance before they ship. And then you need to pay the shipping company. And then once you deliver, you have to wait 30 days for the government to pay you.

They give you net 30 terms, they call it. So you need to have that money to float the contract to finance it. And most people don't. So we have a network of investors who are going to invest in our students' contracts. Because from an investor's point of view, it's actually a very safe investment. The government is never going to go bankrupt. The government won't screw you for the money because it's not their money, right? So as long as you fulfill the terms of the contract, you're going to get paid 100% of the time.

And so it's a very safe investment from an investor's perspective. So we have a network of investors to invest in our students' contracts. So we're going to make, we plan on making more money off of the financing of the contracts than off the course itself. So we're building a government contracting incubator of sorts, right? where anyone who wants to get into this business can learn step by step, figure out their specialty, and build a viable long-term business.

Very entrepreneurial. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Well, it feels good because I feel so bad for everyone who contacts me, begging me to teach them. And, you know, it's awesome to be able to create something that fulfills that need and helps people actually make something of their lives, right? Because look at my partners, Logan and James, right?

They had nothing going on when they were 21 years old. They were like going broke. They were like, they traveled around Thailand for a bit. They ran out of money. They didn't know what to do with their lives. They got a job doing like produce picking in Australia, doing literally manual labor. And before they, and I think while they were doing,

that manual labor, they saw war dogs and that's what inspired them. So being able to be a part of changing the course of other entrepreneurs' lives and helping them build their own entrepreneurial success stories, it just feels amazing. I mean, don't get me wrong. I do plan on making a lot of money from this as an entrepreneur myself, but it's super cool to make your money in a way that helps other people make money as well. I think it's, and to me, that's the exact opposite of the way Ephraim does business, right? And that's what feels the best about it. Ephraim, everything is transactional, right?

Every person he does business with, he feels like if you're winning, I'm losing. If I'm winning, you better be losing, right? It's a zero-sum game. There is no win-win for him, right? That's why when he was negotiating with people, he would keep on negotiating until the other person got furious, right? Right? Because if the other person was happy, in his mind, there's still money on the table, right? It's only when the other person threatens to walk away. That's when you stop. That's how he did things.

One thing he told Matt, Matt told me, you know, while they were in prison together, Matt said to him, you know, after Ephraim was telling him, oh, you know, I screwed this guy and then I screwed that guy in that way. And he was like very proud of it. And Matt told him, you know, Ephraim, you can't just keep on burning all your bridges, right? And Ephraim looked at him and he said, there's a lot of bridges out there, Matt. And so that outlook on the world, I mean, he may make a lot of money and he, you know, in the short term for sure. But it's a poisonous way to look at the world. and it just destroys everyone around you and destroys all the relationships you have and then what's the point of all that money?

You know, you leave a trail of enemies, a trail of broken lives, and, you know, to me it's not worth it. Like all the money in the world is not worth always having to look over your shoulder because you're worried about someone who's going to whack you because, you know, you screwed them over

because you tried to get an extra 3% on the deal. It's no way to live. And so for me, Building Wardogs Academy is really fulfilling because I get to lift people up as I lift myself up. And that's, I think, the most productive and inspiring way to create a business, something where everybody wins, not just one person. If you go back in time to the day you met Ephraim, what would you say to yourself? That, you know, young, early 20-year-old self that was about to do this, you know, because on one end, you know, it did land you in trouble, but at the other end, you are where you are today.

That is true. Because of that. That is true. It's the butterfly effect, right? You don't know what one little change will turn into, and it could be something good, and it could be something terrible. So I wouldn't, I'm glad that I can't go back in time because definitely I would have lots of temptations. It's a dangerous thing, dangerous thought. I would tell myself, bye.

That's what I would tell me. myself, start mining Bitcoin, you know. But then on the other end, you think on the Bitcoin aspect, okay, you bought it, you might have sold the second it hit X amount. You wouldn't have held it all the way until it got to the highest. That's true. So it really depends at what point in time you go back in time, right? Because if, okay, let's say if I go back in time today, I will tell myself buy Bitcoin

and sell at least half of it when it hits $70,000, right? I don't know what it's going to do after that, but at least you, cashed out half of it when it was at the peak. That's what I would tell myself. So yeah, I mean, there's definitely going back in time is a great exercise and imagination. And it's a nice thing to fantasize about. But definitely a good thing for, I think, all of us, that it's not possible, at least as far as we know. Absolutely.

Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a great conversation. Thank you. And I was glad to hear the story from you, straight from you. I saw the movie years ago and I never expected to be sitting here with the subject it's based on. And it's funny where the podcasting world takes individuals. Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

I appreciate you having me.