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Cuck Hustmyre is a freelance journalist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Before embarking upon a career as a writer, he spent twenty-two years in law enforcement and retired as a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). This story is based on his book Killer with a Badge (Penguin, 2004). His articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Washington
Post, the Baton Rouge Advocate, Law & Order magazine, Homeland Security Today, and Court TV's CrimeLibrary.com. He is at work on another true crime book for Penguin.
Despite being jaded by more than twenty years in law enforcement, I'm still shocked by this crime. Cops are human. I know it all too well. They sometimes do stupid things. They sometimes get in trouble.They sometimes end up in jail. But a police officer pla
Devin Friedman : Operation Stealing Saddam's Money
from GQ
B y A ugust, everyone at Fort Stewart knew we were headed to war. It's one thing to go to the UN and pretend that it's all up to the weapons inspectors. But you can't play semantics with the people who order the bombs. Because preparing for war means buying stuff. And not just Javelin missiles, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and the rest of the photogenic, lethal combat materiel.To shock to life the plodding, war-making golem of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division, you need toothpaste and shoelaces and sunscreen. As a supply sergeant, Matt Novak's mission was to procure enough toilet paper for five hundred soldiers to wipe their asses for a month. He bought video cameras, flight suits, reams of paper, heaters, computers, crates of a luminescent liquid soldiers paint on vehicles so other soldiers wearing nightscopes don't mistakenly aerate them with.50-caliber ca
[While this story is told from Matt Novak's perspective, italics indicate actual words spoken by Matt during a series of interviews last November while we drove around northern Wisconsin in his ex-wife's white Dodge Durango. There's constant background noise on the Novak tapes that gives them a wandering feeling.You can hear stuff rattling around in the backseat-his nine-millimeter, his medical records and written confession, a bottle of Celexa, an antidepressant he's just started taking again. At night he rolls the Durango down into the woods behind his parents' house because he doesn't want it to get repossessed, though he knows it's only a matter of time.]
The system only got more perverted once they got to Kuwait. Matt's unit was stationed at an assembly area-Camp New York or Camp Pe
The Third Infantry Division was the first to blow the gates at the Kuwait-Iraq border; the front prong of the longest, fastest combat maneuver ever attempted; the heroic conquerors of Baghdad. There's a book, Thunder Run, about their daring assault. Matt wasn't part of that, though. He was attached to a battalion of combat engineers who drove into Baghdad a few days after the initial assault in a convoy of historic proportions that stretched backward to Kuwait, a huge snake in the desert stretching as far as the eye could see. Matt's unit reported directly to the palace complex, what would later become known as the Green Zone.They were sent to an outbuilding near Uday Hussein's house that had been gutted by American ordnance and were told to stay put for the night because the area was not yet secure. Get some rest. Do you really think we were going to sleep? Come on. Let's get realistic.
Matt's job was to find useful stuff, and that night alone he broke into fifty, maybe a hundred buildings in the palace complex. It was his first foray into the place that over the ensuing weeks would come to be his domain: from the bulrushes on the Tigris to the four-headed palace, from the zoo to the recreation center, from Uday's love shack to the lavish bungalows of the former Baath courtesans. I had no restrictions; just hopped in a gun truck, grabbed some guys, and went and took the stuff the army needed.
[This is as good a time as any to introduce you to Specialist Jamal Ma