The Youngest Arms Dealer?

Efraim Diveroli was only 19 when he became president of AEY, Inc., a company to whom we citizens have paid hundreds of millions of dollars since 2004. The company supplies ammunition to Afghan police and military. Mr. Diveroli got his break because the Afghan forces use old Russian weapons for which our government does not supply ammunition. So, Mr. Diveroli went to places where this ammunition was available - Albania and Czechoslovakia. And, he was successful at obtaining ammunition.

The problem was that the ammunition was old, in most cases forty or more years old. Ammunition is like people; it starts failing after a certain age. A good deal of the ammunition was useless. Yet, we continued to pay AEY. Although AEY is suspended from any new contracts, the Army will allow it to fill current orders and will naturally pay for it.

Okay, it's bad enough that the ammunition was useless. But read this article in the NY Times for more weirdness. Here are some examples:

Millions of machine-gun cartridges were made in China, some back in 1966; buying them may have violated U.S. law.
The source of much of this ammunition are stockpiles that NATO has spent lots of money to destroy.
AEY is now being investigated by DOD's IG and ICE.
Mr. Diveroli's industry experience was a short stay with his uncle's company which supplied police and army here.
Mr. Diveroli has problems with women as he has been charged with some form of abuse toward women at least three times.
He was arrested for using a forged driver's license.
What really gets me is that a week after a relative bailed him out of jail for $1,000, Banc (note the 'c', not 'k' as in the real bank) of America Investment Services claimed that the company had over $5,000,000 in an account with them.

How in the Lord's name did this guy get any sort of contract from us for anything? Who was paid off? Oh, that we lived in Japan and someone could fall on his sword.