Join the party, get while the gettin's good.

This is Efraim E. Diveroli.

His company was awarded a contract with the Pentagon worth $300 million dollars. In exchange he was to supply ammunition to Afghans fighting the Taliban and al Queda in Afghanistan. He claims to have been making $200 million a year on such government contracts.

He's 22 years old. His vice-president is a 25 year old masseuse. He's appears to party a lot and tends to get in trouble harassing girlfriends in Miami.

And just as in countless other such cases, Efraim (and the shysters behind his company) were not only given hundreds of millions of your tax dollars with next to no questions asked, but of course they were also providing near useless junk to the soldiers in the field.

Once in Afghanistan, when the ammo spilled out of their crumbling cardboard boxes, it was revealed that much of it was 42 years old, having been made in China in 1966!

And the contract was accepted and approved at the Rock Island Arsenal, and was allowed to continue despite ... well, here's a tidbit from the very interesting story in the New York Times.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY’s performance by The Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.

...

In January, American officers in Kabul, concerned about munitions from AEY, had contacted the Army’s Rock Island Arsenal, in Illinois, and raised the possibility of terminating the contract. And officials at the Army Sustainment Command, the contracting authority at the arsenal, after meeting with AEY in late February, said they were tightening the packaging standards for munitions shipped to the war.

And yet after that meeting, AEY sent another shipment of nearly one million cartridges to Afghanistan that the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan regarded as substandard. Lt. Col. David G. Johnson, the command spokesman, said that while there were no reports of ammunition misfiring, some of it was in such poor condition that the military had decided not to issue it. “Our honest answer is that the ammunition is of a quality that is less than desirable; the munitions do not appear to meet the standards that many of us are used to,” Colonel Johnson said. “We are not pleased with the way it was delivered.”

Several officials said the problems would have been avoided if the Army had written contracts and examined bidders more carefully.

Public records show that AEY’s contracts since 2004 have potentially been worth more than a third of a billion dollars. Mr. Diveroli set the value higher: he claimed to do $200 million in business each year.

Several military officers and government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the investigations, questioned how Mr. Diveroli, and a small group of men principally in their 20s and without extensive military or procurement experiences, landed so much vital government work.

Read the article. This is what happens when a Republican government starts handing out literally billions of dollars with little or no oversight. They threw open the doors to the treasury and said come and get it.

And the details of how the company was established as well as more background on this enterprising 22 year old makes the tale even more bizarre.

Their only idea of economic stimulus is to start a war and make the rich far more rich.

In addition to a previous case in which a few people were convicted of fraud due to their dealings and fraudulent contracts with the Arsenal, this case is likely only the very tip of an enormous iceberg of billions upon billions of those same precious tax dollars Republicans don't want to pay which has been utterly squandered and stolen by anyone plugged in and bold enough to grab it.

Yet another great reason to keep this all up for as long as we possibly can. Vote McCain!