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In the month or two they were in Baghdad, Jamal and Matt acquainted themselves with hundreds of buildings in the city's tonier districts. They used crowbars, C4 explosive, and a big set of bolt cutters referred to as the master key to gain entry into the palace storehouses and the former homes of Saddam's i
The palace complex was a monument to excess, a repository for the glut of stuff Saddam and his minions had stolen from the Kuwaitis, his own people, what he'd hoarded under the auspices of the oil-for-food program. Cash, cellophane bags filled with heroin and hashish, Kuwaiti royal china. Matt drove around in Saddam's armored Mercedes. Climbed aboard Uday's yacht. He requisitioned gold toilet seats. Bidets. Gilt mirrors.Joh
Jamal had an acronym for their mission in Iraq: STAR-steal, trade, acquisition, requisition. One of the medics told Matt,"Man, when you get back to the States, they're going to have to send you to stealers anonymous or something. You're go
The Iraqis called us Ali Baba. We protected the oil ministry while the city was looted. We took what we wanted.
On April 18, Matt's platoon sergeant, Ke
After chow that day, Matt and Jamal go find Sergeant Buff at headquarters and pump him for information. They feel a certain proprietorship for the contraband of the Green Zone. It was Jamal's idea to seek out Buff, and he just conceded to get him to shut up about it. Jamal wasn't looking to steal money; he just wanted to find some so he could get on TV. [Jamal was given an honorable discharge and now works installing cable for Cablevision. "I didn't give a shit about being on the news," he says. "That was a story we worked out.We should have just took the money and left." Jamal and Matt like each other immensely and speak highly of each other, but they still don't have their stories straight.] Buff gets in their truck, and the three of them drive over to see where he found the money.The building looks like a maintenance shack for the municipal water company-squat, cinder block, just a few feet off the road, windows bricked over. While they are driving through the area, they see several other buildings that look the same and that appear to be untouched.
It's hard to pinpoint the first stupid move the Novak Eight made, because it's hard to pinpoint a single not-stupid move they made. Maybe it's after Matt and Jamal had gone to look at the buildings with Buff and decided to ditch their truck and ask a specialist named Emanuel to drive them in his Humvee. Because then Lieutenant Greenley and Private Moyer walk over, asking if they could come along, too (sure, pile in). That initial widening of the cast: not good. ["Shoulda just been me and Sergeant Matt, late at night," Jamal says. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."] Or maybe it's a beat later, as they're driving out of the parking lot and someone asks where they're going and someone says,"To look for some money." The first rule of stealing twelve million dollars is not:Tell everyone what you're doing.
When the five of them get to the building, Matt takes a tanker's bar (like a crowbar, only bigger), climbs on the roof, and starts working on the bricked-over door, only to lose his grip, fall off the building, and land on his back. Jamal and Moyer finish the job, and the whole wall comes down in one piece onto the roadway, sounding like C4 charges going off.Which doesn't attract a whole lot of attention, since you hear stuff like that every twenty minutes in Baghdad. Behind the brick is a door, sealed with a lock and dated in Arabic, just like the door on Buff 's building. Matt breaks the glass, starts pulling out shards, and slices his hand open. It is like his body is forcibly trying to keep him out of that building and keeps sabotaging itself, throwing itself off roofs and trying to cut off appendages.
Matt had been a medic, and he knows by looking: This was a bleeder. Maybe this was the first mistake.A liter of DNA: not recommended for crime scenes. He wraps his hand in a mop head he finds under a sink, and they break through another door. Lieutenant Greenley is outside shouting orders, behaving as if being outside the building gives him plausible deniability. Like you go to jail only if you're in the same room as the crime. He is the ranking officer, after all, and he is in charge simply by being present. [This is how Greenley would play things, with only one foot in. He never decided whether he was a disapproving observer or a conspirator. So for the thirty-six hours before the entire thing unraveled, he tried to be both.]