War Dogs by Guy Lawson

Author:Guy Lawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. “A New Direction for China’s Defense Industry” (Rand, 2005).

Chapter Seven

GEGH

In early May of 2007, Alex Podrizki met the Albanian businessman Kosta Trebicka at the Illy Caffe in Tirana, a slick new place on Rruga Pandi Dardha. Trebicka was in his late forties, a former lawyer who’d turned himself into a prosperous entrepreneur. Years earlier, he’d lived in the United States, in Syracuse in upstate New York, with his first wife and their daughter. He spoke fluent English and considered himself knowledgeable about Americans. He’d also served in the Albanian military, rising to the rank of major and accumulating a significant fortune from the sale of state-owned assets after the collapse of Communism.

Trebicka listened intently as Podrizki told him he needed eighty thousand boxes to repack 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammo. Podrizki explained that the wooden pallets holding the ammo were too heavy to ship by plane. Fuel prices had made airfreight prohibitively expensive. Using reinforced cardboard and lighter pallets would save a significant amount of money on transportation. The US Army had approved the plan, Podrizki said.

Podrizki asked if Trebicka might be interested in doing the repacking job as well as supplying the boxes. Trebicka was indeed: he had access to a pool of workers and ambition to burn. Podrizki was excited and relieved: finding someone in Albania to do such an odd job had looked as if it would be extremely difficult, but Trebicka promised to solve both of AEY’s problems at once.

The next day, Podrizki and Trebicka went to the military section of Tirana’s airport, where 2 million rounds of ammo were stored in an open-air hangar. To begin, Trebicka brought along forty workers, drawn from the people who worked at his cardboard factory. Half of the ammo was Albanian-made, half had Chinese markings on the boxes. Podrizki told Trebicka to have the workers divide the crates into two piles—one Albanian, the other Chinese. Podrizki said to start with the Albanian rounds. Following Podrizki’s instructions, Trebicka showed his crew how to remove the metal cans from the crates. Each can contained 640 rounds of ammo, with batches of twenty cartridges wrapped in stencil paper that indicated the place of manufacture, age, and caliber. For the Albanian rounds, the ammo could be put in the cardboard boxes still wrapped in paper, making the task relatively easy. The workers were instructed to inspect the ammunition to make sure it wasn’t rusted, discolored, or obviously faulty; any rounds that were flawed were to be put aside.

Trebicka had his workers repack one pallet of ammo in order to assess the difficulty so he could come up with a quote. Trebicka then had an extended phone conversation about the cost with Diveroli in Miami. After the inevitable dickering they agreed on $240,000.

As Trebicka’s team worked away, the supply of Albanian ammo quickly ran dry. A million rounds of Albanian ammo had been palletized and was ready to be shipped—as soon as AEY could get the logistics of the flight to Kabul organized.

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