The Line - Snap Classic

It’s 1972 and Singer Nobuko “JoAnne” Miyamoto and her partner Chris Ijima get “the call.” It’s Yoko Ono and John Lennon inviting them to sing on national TV. What happens next is musical history. And a young massage therapist in Miami Beach gets the business offer of a lifetime. So he shakes hands with the devil and hopes for the best. STORIES We Are Not Yellow Pearl It’s 1972 and Singer Nobuko “JoAnne” Miyamoto and her partner Chris Ijima get “the call.” It’s Yoko Ono and John Lennon inviting them to sing on national TV. What happens next is musical history. This story contains strong language and references to Japanese Internment and racism against Asians and Asian Americans. Sensitive listeners, please be advised. Thank you, Nobuko, for sharing your story with Snap! After their first and last TV performance, Nobuko and Chris recorded “Yellow Pearl,” “We Are The Children,” and other songs on their 1973 album A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America https://folkways.si.edu/chris-kando-iijima-joanne-nobuko-miyamoto-charlie-chin/a-grain-of-sand-music-for-the-struggle-by-asians-in-america/american-folk-protest/music/album/smithsonian. And while Chris, unfortunately, passed away in 2005, Nobuko is still making music to this day. For more, check out Noboku’s recently released memoir: Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520380653/not-yo-butterfly. And go to Noboku’s website https://www.nobukomiyamoto.org/ to see what she’s working on next! Produced by David Exumé, original score by Daniel Riera The Accidental Arms Dealer A young massage therapist in Miami Beach gets the business offer of a lifetime. So he shakes hands with the devil and hopes for the best. Big thanks to David Packouz for sharing your story. If you want to find out the dirty, dirty, gritty, gritty behind this piece, check out the book written by Guy Lawson; it’s called “Arms and the Dudes. https://www.amazon.com/Arms-Dudes-Stoners-Unlikely-Gunrunners/dp/B01B99A5VO” Produced by Anna Sussman & Julia DeWitt in collaboration with Guy Lawson. Original score by Renzo Gorrio. Artwork by Teo Ducot. Snap Classic - Season 16 - Episode 1 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 2:13Glynn Washington?

  You see it on the playground. You see it in business, in politics, in romance, in war. You see it between groups and you see it between individuals. From those that have known each other for decades and others that maybe just met. And this dynamic, one side, for whatever reason, confuses flexibility for weakness. And they push, and they push, and they push, and they push, until they push that one step too far, and that one step changes everything.

• 2:57Glynn Washington?

  Today, on Snap Judgment, we proudly present The Line.

• 3:04Glynn Washington?

  My name is Glynn Washington. Assume nothing when you're listening.

• 3:11Glynn Washington?

  The Snap Judgment.

• 3:24Glynn Washington?

  Now, we begin in the 1970s. Nobuko Miyamoto was Joanne Miyamoto. She and Chris Ijima put out one of the first folk records focused entirely on Asian-American identity. But today, we're taking you to a time before all that. When a surprise call from an international superstar turns into a fight for Nobuko's right to sing her own song. And since our listeners should know, this story does contain strong language and does reference incidents of racial violence. The year is 1972, and I'll let Nobuko take it from here.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  One day, I get this phone call, out of the blue. And this woman, voice, says, Hello, this is Yoko. I didn't know any Yoko's that came to my mind. And I said, "Well, Yoko who?" And she said, Oh, no. And I went, "John and Yoko." Then she went on, she said, John and I are doing this, The Mike Douglas Show, and we'd like to know if you and Yellow Pearl would like to come on and sing something. I didn't know whether to say yes or not. And I didn't give her an answer. I said, "Let me call you back," and I hung up.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  It was around 1972. Chris and I had been singing a lot, everywhere. East Coast, West Coast, in universities, and rallies, in churches, and prisons, everywhere. We were everywhere. There were very few Asian-American performers in those days that did political music, music of Asian-American consciousness. So we were, I think, pretty rare, especially on the East Coast.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  I'm a third-generation Japanese-American. My grandparents came to this country. Chris Ichiima is one of the young leaders of Asian-Americans for Action. A really smart guy. I really met Chris in Chicago in 1970. This is a few months after Fred Hampton had been murdered.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the international revolutionary and populist struggle. And I hope that each one of you will be able to die in the international populist and revolutionary struggle, even be believing. And I think that struggle is going to come. Why don't you live for the people? Why don't you struggle for the people? Why don't you die for the people?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  We wanted to convince the Japanese-American Citizens League to take a stand against the Vietnam War. So we went back to the church, the Japanese church, that we were sleeping on the floors. We had dinner there. People were cleaning up. And Chris brings out a guitar. Now, I didn't know he played music. And he starts doodling around, and he starts singing. And I'm going like, oh shit. This guy can sing. And he was starting to get into a groove. And he was using the phrase that Fred Hampton often said, "The people's beat." "Every day, I can hear it.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Like a heart that beats. It's the people's spirit every day." And I just started singing with him, and it felt good. And before the night was over, we had a song. So at the big convention that we were addressing, we sing this song. And the young people start clapping. And somehow, the whole place started rocking with us. To see people that look like us, see us reflected in this audience. It was a moment. A song does something to your body. It does something to your spirit. And we knew that we hit on something powerful

• 7:41Speaker 01

  that you couldn't do in a speech, that you couldn't do in a book. We had a song. Yeah, it was the song of the moment. And there were more songs to come. But this song was really waiting to come, in a sense. We didn't have our own song. We had helped to build this country. We had not had our own song. We have been here. People looked at us as foreigners. We have not had our own song. Now we had it.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  For the American housewife and people that watch television in the middle of the day, Mike Douglas was the bread that they ate every afternoon. You know, that was the cup of coffee. John and Yoko were going to be a host for the entire week. I think we were a little bit wary of whether we would want to do something like this. You know, we were against this kind of major media thing.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  We weren't just open, "Hey, this is a great opportunity. Hey." We weren't like that. We were going into it thinking, "All right, let's see what this is going to be about. Let's keep our eyes open. Let's be aware what has happened before to people like us on television." Most of the things, if we saw an Asian on television, it was the enemy, it was the waiter or the houseboy, it was the spy, you know, the guy, the people who wanted to kill. For Asian women, you know, the hula hands, the South Islander, or the geisha. But those are actually roles that I had played when I was in show business, and I wasn't going to repeat myself.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I think, you know, one thing that helped convince us that it was safe to do this was that they were going to have Bobby Seale on there, that they were going to have Jerry Rubin. These were characters in the movement who were very strong, who were very clear about who they were, and we were representing another element of that radical left. And so we said yes.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  We go to their apartment in the village. Their bed was on a platform, and there was a TV hanging from the ceiling. It was like walking into a movie in a sense. "They're here, John. Yellow Pearl's here." Every time Yoko referred to us in their house, they kept calling us Yellow Pearl, and we kept saying, "No, no, we're not Yellow Pearl. We're Chris and Joanne." And we were very clear about that, but it was like she wasn't listening.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Media used to call us "The Yellow Pearl" and made caricatures of Asian people as these sort of monstrous invaders.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  So Chris took that phrase and turned it into "The Yellow Pearl", making the imagery of thinking about this little irritant in the muscle or whatever it is, a clamp, and layers and layers of oppression, etc., and building up until you create this beautiful pearl. So it was a way of turning a negative into a positive.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  In her mind, she thought "Yellow Pearl" was a good title for us, even though we weren't "Yellow Pearl", we were Chris and Joanne.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  When we walked in the room, John Lennon was talking on the phone to the Mike Douglas people. And he was arguing like hell to have us on the show, and saying, "I don't care, blah, blah, blah", and then he said, "Fuck you", and slammed down the phone. And Yoko said, "Oh, don't worry, John. They can't do the show without us. They'll call back." And we're like, looking at each other like, "What's going on?" And they were going to have to push a black singer off in order to make space for us to come on.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  We said to them, "No, you don't have to do that. It's okay. We don't have to do the show." We clearly said that, because we felt bad that somebody who would get national exposure, who really wanted it, would get bumped because of us. But it wasn't about us.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  It was about John and Yoko getting their say and getting their way. And finally, yes, they did call back. The network called back. And they said, "Okay." We couldn't get out of it at that point. There was no pulling out for us.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  We load up into this limousine with John and Yoko. And they're in the front with Bobby Seal and Jerry Rubin. And we're sitting in the back of the limo, looking at this scene in front of us, looking at each other like, "Nobody's going to believe this. This is like a movie." We're driving to Philadelphia. And we're already late. And Chris and I are looking at each other like, "What are we going to sing?" If we have one song to sing, one chance, three and a half minutes, how do we want to present ourselves? What is the song we want to sing?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  And they said, "Well, if we only get to sing one song, we're going to sing 'We Are The Children.'" It wasn't one of our favorite songs, but we just felt it was emblematic of who we were.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  We are the children of the migrant worker.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  We are the offspring of the concentration camp. Sons and daughters of the railroad builder who leave their stamp on America.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  We are the children of the Chinese waiter, born and raised in the laundry room.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  We are the offspring of the Japanese gardener, that's me, who leave their stamp on America.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I was about two years old when my whole family was uprooted and forcefully relocated in a concentration camp.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  We were considered a threat to US internal security since we were on the Pacific Ocean. And before they put us into the normal concentration camp, they put us in a racetrack. San Anita Racetrack was a place that had horse stalls and barracks. You have to understand, most of these places were dirty, windy, sandy places. Also, there was this sort of hum of people's voices, English and Japanese, people who were worried and mumbling. And when we went to mess hall, it was a clatter of dishes of tin because we were eating on what soldiers ate on, these tin platters.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  It was horrible food, and there wasn't food that was normal to us. There was no sour sauce, there was no rice. This was, you know, what white people ate.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So the car, the limousine, pulls up at the television station in Philadelphia. Everybody's waiting, and there's a huge crowd of fans in front of the studio, locking the doors, waiting for the car to arrive. And so Yoko and John were used to this routine. Yoko turns to John and said, "John, are you ready?" And so, "It's ready, get set, okay, let's go." And they go out, and you know, as much as possible, they're pushing through, and people are trying to protect them to get them through the door. And we're sort of in their shadow, sort of pushing ourselves through as well, you know? "Okay, you got your guitar, okay, we're getting through." And we get in the studio, and of course, when the door closes,

• 16:58Speaker 01

  ooh, it's another world.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  If you've ever been in a TV station, there's nothing more unreal. It's not even like a real stage. Because the lights are really loud. They're really bright. Everything is made for the camera. You, as a person up there, really don't have that much power once you're on there and the cameras are rolling. And this is live television. So they're rushing us up because we're the unknown. Chris and I are the unknown. They want to hear the song that we're going to sing. They were anxious about it. And they have two seats up there and the lights on us. And as gracefully as possible, after all that fuss, he pulls out his guitar

• 17:45Speaker 01

  and he starts playing. And we go into the song. We are the children of the migrant worker. We are the offspring of the concentration camp. And we get to this line. Watching war movies with the next-door neighbor. We're secretly rooting for the other side.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  And the director is coming up very nervously saying, "What else do you have to sing? Well, how many songs do we get to sing? Just one." So Chris and I look at each other and that's when I said, "If we're only singing one song, we're going to sing this one." Well, you know, there's the Housewives of the Midwest, you know. They might think this, "Watching war movies, rooting for the other side," they might think it's, you know, subversive. And I'm thinking, "Subversive? They've got Jerry Rubin up there. They've got Bobby Seale over there. They're worried about us being the subversive? That was crazy."

• 19:02Speaker 01

  And so we stood our ground and, "No, we want to sing this song." And then it didn't stop. He kept pressing us. "Well, what else do you have to sing?" "Well, the..." you know. And it was getting very uncomfortable.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And then John Lennon comes up. Can't you just fudge the words a bit?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Wait a minute. John Lennon is asking us to change our words?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Would he change his words from revolution to evolution or strawberry to raspberry? Because somebody wanted him to? You know, I think he would have said, "Screw you, and I don't need to do this." And then the director again comes at us. "What else can you sing? Pushing, pushing, pushing." And all of a sudden,

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I just, I just felt red. Red, like, like, you know, a thermometer just filled me up. And something took over me and, and, and I, I heard this voice saying, "You, you put us in concentration camps and you're saying we can't sing with songs."

• 20:21Speaker 01

  And I see my finger pointing out in front of me. And I'm looking around and I see Chris looking at me like in shock. And I went, "Oh, my God. That was me. John and Yoko were frozen too. Who are these people that we brought here?" They didn't know what to do, but they knew. They had to know that I was right. I was gonna cry. I didn't want them to see me cry. That's the last thing I wanted them to see.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And I, I just turned around and started walking for the door. Finger still pointed in the air, still wondering what I was gonna do. And before I could reach the door, the director's coming at me from behind. "No, no, it's okay, it's okay. You can sing anything you want. I didn't do it. I didn't put you in a concentration camp. You can sing anything you want. It's okay."

• 21:14Speaker 01

  I never lose my temper like that, never. I don't even know if I lost my temper, I just lost it. We have heard, "You can't sing that song, you can't be here, we don't want you, you have to be quiet, you are the good quiet Americans." All of those things, we have been stuffed down our throat for a century. So, everything melted down and came back into real time. And then John Lennon. After, you know, this whole incident with the director happened, he was very tentative about how he introduced us.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  These are two young people that they call themselves Yellow Pearl. Their grandparents were Japanese, I guess, and they're young singers called Chris and Joanna. And beautiful singers, and they have a story to tell. They're gonna come on now and do it. Here they are, Yellow Pearl.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  But we were affected, however, by that moment. How could I not think about what had happened before? That's why I grabbed the microphone, to make it my microphone. Usually, people know very little about Asians. And this is a song about our movement, about our people's plight in America.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  We are the children of the migrant worker.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  We are the offspring of the concentration camp. Sons and daughters of the railroad builder.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  That's why I felt the ability to say, "We're singing this song, you know, about us whom you don't know anything about."

• 23:32Speaker 01

  I just recently saw the whole

• 23:36Speaker 01

  day when we sang, "And we will stamp on America." Oh, my God.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And we will stamp and stamp and stamp and we will stamp and stamp and stamp. Yes, we will stamp on America. Oh, my God. I was like, oh. I was even embarrassed watching it myself. After that, John and Mike Douglas come forward and they're just... There's no other word for it but patronizing.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  Some of the lines I picked up on was, "Foster children of the Pepsi generation," which is a classic line, "and watching the war movies and secretly rooting for the other side." Now, John, you said that their grandfather was Japanese, but you're third generation. You're American, American-born. Where in this country? L.A. L.A.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  It must be a strange thing. Mustn't it be neither Japanese or German or even Indian here? And all the time watching them war movies, they don't know which side to identify with.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Oh, what a great song, you know. Especially those words, "watching war movies and rooting for the other side." You know, I don't know. They showed my mouth, you know, open like, are they kidding? Did he really say that? In a sense, the whole situation was a confirmation of what we already knew. We knew that we were representing young Asian Americans who wanted to revolt against this whole system that had kept us subservient, that had kept us silent. So breaking that silence was important to us. I'm here to be myself. I'm not here to be on your stage. We're making our own statement on our own stage in our own terms.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  That's why we wanted to do this show. After that incident, I can't remember ever being asked to do another TV, big TV show. And strangely enough, we never, ever heard of any letters from the Midwest housewives, you know? I think they sort of absorbed it without much trouble at all.

• 26:18Glynn Washington?

  Nobuko, thank you so very much for sharing your story. After their first and last TV performance, Nobuko and Chris recorded "Yellow Pearl", "We Are the Children," and other songs on their 1973 album, "A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America." And while Chris unfortunately passed away in 2005, Nobuko is still making music to this day. For more, check out her recently released memoir, "Not Yo Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution." And check out what she's working on next on her website, nobukomiyamoto.org. The story featured the music of Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Ijima, as well as recording from

• 27:01Glynn Washington?

  an episode of "The Mike Douglas Show" that aired February 15, 1972. The original score was by Daniel Riera, it was produced by David Exame.

• 27:28Glynn Washington?

  Now, after the break, massage therapist in Miami Beach gets the business offer of a lifetime and shakes hands with the devil. Stay tuned.

• 27:47Speaker 05

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  But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing, or-

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  Politics.

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  Sex of bugs.

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  Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

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  And hopefully, make you see the world anew.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

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  Wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 30:28Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. And today, on the line episode, we're featuring stories from people who had or thought they had a very specific point at which they knew they would go no further. With some folk, that line, it gets a little fuzzy. And before you know it, you're wondering exactly how you got where you got. Snap Judgment.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  It was Friday night, and Ephraim asked me if I wanted to go to a rabbi's house for dinner. We were just going for the free food and free drinks and to meet good-looking girls. David Pakus and Ephraim Deveroli were old friends from synagogue. They had actually left the Jewish faith, but free food was free food. So they got into Ephraim's old black Mercedes and drove through the streets of Miami Beach. And while on the way, he was talking about his business. He said that he could introduce me to a business that would be much, much more lucrative than what I would.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  was doing now and that he could prove that he was making a huge amount of money and he could teach me how to make it. And so I asked him, well, how much money are you making? And he said, well, this is top secret information. And I said, well, you'd expect me to join you in business and you won't even tell me how much money you're making. I need to know what the potential is. And right then, we had arrived at the rabbi's house and he turned off the car and he looked at me and he's like, I'm only telling you this to inspire you, not because I'm bragging. I have 1.8 million dollars in the bank. And he was 18 years old.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  David was a part-time massage therapist, putting himself through college. So almost $2 million in the bank was both totally alien and completely captivating. Their group of friends passed their time sneaking into hotel pools. To David, Ephraim was an unlikely owner of a multimillion dollar business.

• 32:52Speaker 05

  He just seemed like a total clown and, you know, just like another stoner. He was constantly scheming about different ways of making money. So I knew he was making money. I mean, he said he was making money, but I had no idea how much. Well, when he told me he had 1.8 million dollars in the bank, I said, holy [BLEEP]. I couldn't believe it.

• 33:19Speaker 06

  When Ephraim told David about how much money he made, David had only one question.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  So what is it exactly? What is it that you do? And he said, well, the government is always looking to buy things. For example, handguns or various common ammunition. They don't really care who they get it from as long as they get the best price and from someone who's reliable, who will actually deliver it. So they put it out for open bid.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Most of the contracts Ephraim won were military contracts. Basically, he was an arms dealer.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  You know, my mind was...

• 33:57Speaker 07

  Was swimming. I couldn't believe that he actually had made that much money. He definitely didn't live like a millionaire. And we had some drinks and pretty much I was quiet the whole time, just thinking about it. And by the end, I told him, you know, I'll give it a shot. My plan was to make a few million dollars and then get out and do what I like doing in order to live the life I always wanted. Ephraim took David to his office, which was actually just his apartment, opened up his laptop and said, Let me show you how it works.

• 34:36Speaker 07

  Ephraim was getting contracts to sell arms and ammo from a website, fedbizops.gov. On fedbizops, he would scan the listings for contracts he thought he could win. The listings read almost like a Craigslist ad. Except, instead of asking for help mowing the lawn, these ads ask for large quantities of military supplies.

• 34:59Speaker 07

  You can find ads for everything, from guided missiles to Black Hawk helicopter landing gear to, strangely, corn cob grounds.

• 35:11Speaker 07

  My first contract that I actually won was for 50,000 gallons of propane. Well, I would have no idea where to find that much propane. I mean, how did you know where to go? Google. That's it. Really. Okay, but can I Google where to find like 50,000 grenades or AK-47s? Absolutely. Of course you can. Who makes grenades? Who makes AK-47s? A range of companies do it. And those companies are looking to sell as long as they think you will buy and that you're legally allowed to do so. Most companies dealing with government contracts are large companies. You have your Lockheed Martins, your Boeings, General Dynamics.

• 35:53Speaker 07

  These are Fortune 500 companies with tens of thousands of employees. And we were just two guys in a living room, smoking weed and bidding on contracts. It's kind of like the local lemonade stand going against Tropicana. We actually won a fair amount. And we started winning more and more as we kind of learned how to work the system. We were working at his desk. He had a big desk in his living room that we had two laptops on, old laptops, and piles of paper everywhere. This was 2005, 2006. There was these two huge wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, raging.

• 36:37Speaker 07

  And the government was looking to buy massive quantities of things. They were looking to buy huge amounts of bed sheets and body armor and bullets and air conditioners and trucks and pretty much anything you could think of, they were looking to buy. But because he had a lot of experience in military equipment, he focused on that. Eighty to ninety percent of the business was weapons and ammunition. On a typical day, we would work around eighteen hours. And that's pretty much from when we would wake up until when we would fall asleep. And we would order delivery so we wouldn't have to leave to get food so we could eat while we worked. I'd never worked so hard in my life.

• 37:21Speaker 06

  So they'd be eating Chinese noodles from a carton and sleeping on the floor and delivering weapons to Colombia and Germany. They'd been on contracts for Nepal, Niger, and Chad.

• 37:34Speaker 07

  But most of the business was in Iraq and later in Afghanistan.

• 37:39Speaker 06

  As they bade on these contracts, David saw the promise of really big money flash on the screen before him. If everything went well, he could be making millions.

• 37:49Speaker 07

  There were many moments I considered backing out, but then I would see the money, you know, coming in. I just told myself, I could put up with it for a little bit longer. I just need to make some money and then I'll quit. So I was planning on retiring after that and traveling the world and buying a yacht and living the good life. That was the plan.

• 38:15Speaker 07

  Who was it? I forgot who it was. It was some, one of the robber barons, the guy who cornered the silver market in the 1800s. A reporter asked him, "How much money would be enough?" And he said, "More."

• 38:32Speaker 06

  Then David got a call that promised all the money he wanted and then some. It was the call to step up into the high stakes arena of the big time arms dealers.

• 38:45Speaker 07

  I was driving to see my girlfriend and have dinner with her. And Ephraim called me and he said, "I just saw one of the biggest solicitations, requests for quotation, I've ever seen on Fed Biz Ops, which is bigger than anything I've ever seen. And you have to come to the office right now. We gotta discuss it." And I told him, "I'm on the way to dinner with my girlfriend." And he said, he's like, "Well, bleep that. You wanna like hang out with your girl? You wanna get rich?"

• 39:18Speaker 06

  David and Ephraim pored over the contract. It was a deal to supply all the munitions for the new Afghan Army and Police Force. So they got to work.

• 39:30Speaker 07

  We looked at the request for quote, and it was huge. I mean, it was like 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammo, 100,000 grenades, anti-aircraft rockets. It was enormous.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  David spent two months working around the clock. He called every contact in the world he thought might be able to supply the stuff for the contract, scouring the planet for lots and lots of bullets.

• 40:01Speaker 07

  I was calling Russia, I was calling Ukraine, I was calling Bulgaria, I was calling Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Korea.

• 40:11Speaker 07

  Calling most of these countries, they usually don't speak English very well. So I would just say, "English, English, English. I want to buy. I want to buy." We would say, "Oh yeah, I'll get my, uh, my sales team working on that." Or, "I'll have my, uh, my accountant to contact you." "We'll get our procurement division on that right away, sir." We would act like we had like a whole staff. But of course, it was just us two. We lied all the time.

• 40:46Speaker 06

  David and Ephraim put in a bid for the Afghan ammo at $300 million. And they won. They were the lowest bidder by far. Partly because two guys in an apartment have a lot less overhead than a company with tens of thousands of employees.

• 41:02Speaker 07

  It was...

• 41:05Speaker 07

  It was, uh, how do I put it? It was surreal. It was very odd. I was [BLEEP] myself on a constant basis.

• 41:16Speaker 07

  It was a constant state of panic. Without us, the Afghan army had no ammunition. And they wouldn't be able to fight the Taliban.

• 41:30Glynn Washington?

  Oh, it doesn't stop there. Don't go anywhere, the stunning conclusion in just a moment. When Snap Judgment continues. Stay tuned.

• 41:55Glynn Washington?

  Yes, it's that time of the year. Where everywhere you turn, everybody's got goodies to share. Cookies, cakes, dinners, second helpings, cuz it'd be wrong to say no, right?

• 42:07Glynn Washington?

  And the other morning, I thought, wait. In addition to the holiday cheer, let's do something good. So I reached for two scoops of my Kachava 3-in-1 digestive boost. Give my belly the protein, the greens it needs, and so much more like prebiotic fiber to feed the good bacteria, probiotics to add more of that beneficial bacteria and clinically studied postbiotics. Feel good about your mornings because man cannot live on eggnog alone. Did I mention that Kachava's got flavors, including chocolate mint, vanilla, chai, matcha, strawberry, coffee, and my favorite, cinnamon French toast.

• 42:50Glynn Washington?

  Try Kachava's new 3-in-1 digestive boost at kachava.com and use code JUDGMENT for 15% off your first order. That's kachava, K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com, code judgment. Today's episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Americans United has spent the last 80 years defending your right to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Through film screenings, speaking engagements, and valuable resources like the Know Your Rights and Public School Guides, AU empowers people nationwide to recommit to the separation

• 43:33Glynn Washington?

  of church and state, protecting individual freedoms and strengthening our democracy for all. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more at au.org/ T E N C. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. You're listening to the line episode. My name is Glynn Washington, and when last we left, Davis Pakus and his partner Ephraim were in quite a fix. And David, he's got a habit of going from the frying pan into the fire.

• 44:11Speaker 07

  Without us, the Afghan army had no ammunition, and they wouldn't be able to fight the Taliban.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  The hard part now was that David and Efrem actually had to find the ammo and the weapons to fulfill the contract.

• 44:27Speaker 07

  In Abu Dhabi, every year, there is one of the biggest arms exhibitions in the world. I went there by myself to try to source ammunition for the Afghan contract.

• 44:40Speaker 07

  It was like the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Pretty much every degenerate in the world was there, or at least in my mind. You'd see generals in full military gear, sleazy-looking businessmen, government officials. Pretty much every single country was represented. Chinese generals, Africans, Europeans. Everyone was just having cocktails together. And it was just incredible to me because I knew some of these people are mortal enemies, and they're fighting each other, and here they are, and they're just schmoozing over cocktails.

• 45:16Speaker 07

  Rumors were flying around of who was going to go to war next, where the best countries were to get the best prostitutes.

• 45:26Speaker 07

  During the day, you're in the exhibition halls. They had very expensive bottles of wine and champagne and caviar and hors d'oeuvres and really good-looking women to serve it all. They spared no expense.

• 45:42Speaker 07

  Outside, they had live-fire weapons drills, where they would have tanks jumping sand dunes and blowing things up, and helicopter gunships. And it was like live military drills that you could watch. There were bleachers where everyone would stand and drinks and hors d'oeuvres being passed around. And it was like being at a big football game, where the sport was military maneuvers.

• 46:11Speaker 07

  I was by far the youngest person there, of course, because everyone in this business is military or ex-military. So they're all like men in their middle ages. And they just looked at me as if I was, you know, some kid and they were wondering what I was doing there, which is why I always had copies of our contract in my briefcase to prove that, you know, I was the real deal and actually had real, real business deals to do.

• 46:35Speaker 06

  Was the arms business, in your experience, kind of more morally dubious than other industries? Was it shadier?

• 46:44Speaker 07

  The arms business, by its nature, is definitely shadier and more dubious because arms could be used for great evil. And the people that you're dealing with sometimes sell to people who use them for great evil. But at the time, did it stop me? No, it didn't.

• 47:10Speaker 06

  David kept working to get the guns and the bullets, but as they worked, these wayward kids from Miami Beach that snuck into the halls of power started to get some unwanted attention.

• 47:22Speaker 07

  Because we were winning so many contracts, we were upsetting a lot of our competitors. They worked real hard on these contracts and they kept on losing them to us. They started slandering us to various people in Iraq. They started telling people that we were coke dealers and that's how we got the money to fund the contract.

• 47:42Speaker 06

  David was sending plane loads of ammo all over the globe for the Afghan arms contract. At one point, he had over 5,000 tons of bullets waiting to be loaded into cargo planes in Albania. And it was there that the two-man operation began to crumble against the powerful tectonic plates of the international arms trade.

• 48:03Speaker 07

  Albania is famous for, how do you put it? Let's put it this way. The State Department guy told us, you know, most third-world countries are third-world, but Albania is kind of like the fifth world. They need to be supervised.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  He sent a friend over to Albania to check on the deal, make sure the ammo wasn't faulty, and to repackage it so it would cost less in air freight. But when their friend walked into the underground Albanian bunker and saw the piles of bullets, he immediately called David.

• 48:41Speaker 07

  When he went over there, he told us, "Hey, you know, there's Chinese letters all over the boxes." And we had no idea. We were like, "Oh, well, uh-oh. This could be a problem."

• 48:55Speaker 06

  Here's the thing about Chinese ammo: it was illegal. Their contract said it explicitly. And while technically, this ammo hadn't been bought directly from the Chinese, they knew this mountain of Chinese ammo was a really big problem.

• 49:10Speaker 07

  We discovered that it was Chinese ammunition, and then we figured, "Well, it's better not to tell the army about this. What they don't know won't hurt them. The ammunition is excellent quality, and that's all that really matters. It's not enriching the Chinese government in any way, and that's all that the anti-Chinese ban was meant to be about. It'll be fine." So we took the ammunition out of the wooden crates that they were packed in and out of the metal sardine cans, and we packaged it in plastic bags and in cardboard boxes. We were very careful not to include any papers that had Chinese letters in the boxes,

• 49:54Speaker 07

  so there was no more Chinese words on the packaging once we had repackage it. And so we started delivering, and we delivered, I think, by the end, close to 70 aircraft loads of ammunition, each holding around 45 tons.

• 50:12Speaker 06

  He says anybody would have done that. He says shenanigans like this happen every day in the arms trade. The big boys don't get caught. But David and Efrem were not the big boys. A rival competitor, an Albanian businessman who had been cut out of a deal, started this whisper campaign against David and Efrem. He told a Pentagon official to check them out, and soon David and Efrem's office was raided by the feds.

• 50:41Speaker 07

  And the government eventually decided that that constituted fraud. As they say, it was a conspiracy to defraud the United States of America. Well, I felt like my life was over. Because they said, okay, you have 71 aircraft loads that you delivered to Afghanistan, each one with a certificate saying that the point of origin is Albania, and you signed off on that, and really the origin was China, and therefore each aircraft load delivery, each document you signed, is one count of fraud. And each count of fraud has a maximum of five years in prison.

• 51:23Speaker 07

  So 71 counts of fraud for 71 aircraft loads is around 350 years in prison.

• 51:33Speaker 06

  And did you ever, I don't know, I mean, I feel like all of us in our dark moments of shame feel like, I don't know, there's some kind of celestial checks and balances. Did you ever feel like you were caught because of greed? Because you had been being greedy?

• 51:49Speaker 07

  I did think that. When I got caught and I realized that I was facing possibly a lifetime in prison, a lot of things go through your head. And you evaluate your entire life and how you got up to this point, and how you could be so stupid and all the mistakes that you've made. And one of the big ones I was constantly thinking about was getting involved in the business in the first place. And I wondered why I did it. Of course, I knew, but I thought that it was certain, yeah, it was almost like a punishment

• 52:32Speaker 07

  for kind of turning a blind eye towards certain things. And I wish I had never gotten involved in it in the first place, that's for sure.

• 52:47Speaker 06

  In fact, David never saw any of the money he dreamed of. So now he was broke and a federal criminal.

• 52:55Speaker 07

  Like any sane person caught up in the system, I pled guilty and they reduced my charges down to, you know, from 71 counts of fraud to one count of fraud. Eventually, the judge had mercy on me and gave me just seven months of house arrest and seven months probation.

• 53:15Speaker 06

  He had to reset. There would be no more drinking cocktails and watching rocket lunches with African warlords. Instead, after serving his house arrest, David walked Adra's apartment armed with a backpack full of scented candles and soothing music.

• 53:35Speaker 07

  Well, I went back to doing massage, you know, to make ends meet. I would have my massage table on a cart and, you know, a little bag with all my equipment, such as essential oils and massage oil and, you know, music. But it was, it was strange. It was definitely strange. After I went back into massage, I, you know, informed all of my former clients that I was doing massage again. And the vast majority of them were very thrilled to hear that. And they asked me, so, um, what have you been doing the last year or year or two?

• 54:18Speaker 07

  And I would say, yeah, it's a, it's a long story. It's been interesting.

• 54:39Glynn Washington?

  Big thanks to David Pakus for sharing your story. If you want to find out the dirty, dirty, gritty, gritty behind this piece, check out the book written by Guy Lawson. Out in stores right now, it's called Arms and the Dudes. Find the link on our website, snapjudgment.org. The piece was produced by Anna Sussman and Julia DeWitt in collaboration with Guy Lawson. The original score and sound design by our own Renzo Goryo.

• 55:12Glynn Washington?

  Ooh, a lot just happened. So much. And that was but one episode. If you dig it, more. So many more stories await your listening pleasure and understand. Stories are sexy. Subscribe to the Snap Judgment Podcast and instantly become the sexiest person you know at snapjudgment.org. Snap is brought to you by the team that never crosses the line. Except, of course, for the Uber producer Mark Ristich. When you heard about that two-for-one donut special, he crossed the line quick. There's Anna Sussman, Nancy Lopez, Pat McEvee Miller, Renzo Goryo, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley,

• 55:55Glynn Washington?

  John Facile, Marissa Dodge, Regina Berriaco, David Exame, Bo Walsh, and Annie Nguyen. And while this is not the news, no way is this the news. In fact, you could draw a line in the sand and dare your little buddies not to cross it. And when they do cross it, you could draw another line, and you would still, still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.