Based on a story from
Seattle Post Intelligencer Mia Culpa (Blog) spins what sounds like a yarn......
(She can tell me a bedtime story and tuck me in and...)
Ahhh, but I digress.
Quote:
Desi
I used to enjoy a good murder mystery.
On Dec. 8, 2004, a blue BMW station wagon riddled with blood and bullet holes was found on the side of a one-lane road used as a shortcut from the Taji military base, just past the point where it makes a hard right along the Tigris River.
The occupants were missing.
Stoffel had been in the passenger seat. Driving was American engineer Joseph Wemple, an expert carpenter who worked for Disney World and knew little about living in the kind of shadow world Stoffel embraced.
They had left Taji earlier that day, accompanied by an Iraqi worker, and were headed to their fortified compound outside Baghdad, a 15-minute drive. They never arrived.
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So begins a story that includes the misappropriation of funds assigned to Iraqs Military and Infrastructure rebuild. The mystery winds through DC and Rick Santorums office. Not shortage of "characters" in this one (Desi's is the only pretty face on this story)
The original story:
Quote:
Mystery surrounds dead U.S. contractor
Seattle Post Intelligencer
By DEBORAH HASTINGS
AP NATIONAL WRITER
There are fortunes to be made in Iraq, where seemingly everything is broken or looted or blown up. The fortunes come from fixing those things; there is no shortage of cash to hire the fixers.
Often they are characters writ large with bravado and cunning and greed, sprouting like weeds amid the rubble.
Dale Stoffel was all of that. He devised elaborate schemes to get Iraqi government contracts to repair an unending list of things that no longer worked. He posed for photographs in the desert wearing a flak vest and toting an M5 submachine gun. He clinched a cigar between his teeth.
He pushed those schemes until they became reality. He signed huge contracts with the interim Iraqi Defense Ministry - the biggest of which was to repair the country's broken-down arsenal of tanks, helicopters and jets.
Yet Stoffel had expectations that seemed naively arrogant for a man of the world.
He was an arms dealer with a mysterious past, a swashbuckling, larger-than-life character who'd been around the block of international intrigue more than once. But in all the chaos, in a place overrun with mercenaries, privateers and shady government officials, he nonetheless expected everyone in Iraq to play by his rules.
Much more....
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Jan 29, 2006, 04:39 pm
