laststandonzombieisland

The New York Times reported that a US arms contractor with nearly a billion dollars in contracts over the past several years is led from an unmarked strip mall office in Miami Beach by a 22-year old  whose vice president is a massage therapist.

The article goes on in great detail to describe how the company, AEY, shopped from stocks in the old Eastern bloc, including Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania and Slovakia to buy surplus com-bloc ammo of 50 different types to be resold to the US government who in turn used it for aid to Afghan and Iraqi police, military and security forces.

These stockpiles range from temperature-controlled bunkers to unheated warehouses packed with exposed, decaying ammunition. Some arsenals contain ammunition regarded in munitions circles as high quality. Others are scrap heaps of abandoned Soviet arms. An army of illegal and questionable arms merchants bought cheap (as low as $22 per 1000 rounds of 7.62x39mm) and sold to the US-Company, who resold to the US at wildly inflated prices. The fact that most was made in the 1960s and had been stored under poor conditions for at least the past 20 years was a moot subject. To save on air freight charges the rounds were removed from their sealed metal cases (which also told how old and what country of origin it was from) and flown loose in cardboard boxes to Afghanistan. This lead to 42-year-old Chinese ammunition from AEY that arrived in crumbling boxes at Afghan police posts.

One of their main sources was Albanian stockpiles which we reported on back in April

The full article can be read here.