

Years after selling the Army bum ammunition, a Florida company run by a 20-something and a licensed masseur has finally been formally banned from receiving future contracts. Yes, years. And only temporarily.

Sure, AEY Inc. has been suspended from doing business with the Army since 2008. But even after the fratty dudes who ran AEY got convicted for fraud in federal court, it took until last week for the Army Procurement Fraud Branch to issue "the final debarment" for the company, according to a statement the U.S. military command in Afghanistan issued on Monday. Even now, AEY's youthful executives will be eligible for new federal contracts after ten to 14 years.

From 2005 to 2008, AEY Inc. held over 29 task orders with the Army to provide "non-standard ammunition" from Soviet bloc countries to the Afghan army. Those orders represented $300 million for the fledgling company.

Only there was a little problem with the supply chain. To maximize profits, AEY illegally procured bullets from China and cheap rounds from Albania, telling the Army that the 7.62 mm bullets were really from Hungary. Often, those rounds arrived in rotting cardboard boxes and performed so poorly they had to be destroyed. "Too much of it is junk," an Afghan lieutenant colonel told the New York Times.

And that led to further discoveries. AEY was run by a 22-year old, Efraim Diveroli, who had a charge sheet filled with bro-related infractions. (Battery in a domestic incident; possession of a fake ID.) The company's listed vice president, David Packouz, was a 25-year old masseur. And AEY was even on the State Department's Arms Trafficking Watchlist.

In January, a federal judge sentenced Diveroli to four years in prison for his role in the fraud after a jury found him guilty last year. "No way it could ever be worth the suffering I have endured and my family has endured because of my actions," he said at his sentencing.

But even before his sentencing, Diveroli tried to move more illicit guns – alas, to an undercover agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "Once a gun runner, always a gun runner," he reportedly said.

And Diveroli might even get another shot. Three years after discovering the ammo fraud, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan said in a statement issued Monday that Diveroli and AEY "will be debarred for a period of 14 years, ending on March 25, 2025." The masseur, Packouz, "will be debarred for a period of 11 years, ending on September 28, 2022." Unnamed affiliates have a ten-year ban.

Welcome to government contracting law. In practice, very little stands in the way of offending companies winning big wartime deals, even after companies rip off the government and commit mission-jeopardizing infractions. Diveroli is part of a rich tradition, if not a storied one.

Still, a consolation prize to Diveroli: as Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post notes, he was the partial inspiration for Joey, a character in Jonathan Franzen's (excellent) 2010 novel Freedom whose youthful greed leads him to sell faulty armor for vehicles slated for Iraq. The prison library might have the book soon.

Photo: Facebook/Efraim Diveroli

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