The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

ISBN: 0593655087

Author: Harp, Seth

Condition: Used

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA New Yorker Best Book of 2025A Forbes Best True Crime Book of 2025Probably the most gripping, memorable, eye-opening book Ive read in months. -David Wallace-Wells, The New York TimesPropulsive. -The Washington PostEngrossing. . . . Truly shocking. -The New RepublicThe most mind-blowing piece of investigative journalism Ive read since Chaos. -Spike Carter, Air MailA groundbreaking investigation into a string of unsolved murders at Americas premier special operations base, and what the crimes reveal about drug trafficking and impunity among elite soldiers in todays militaryIn December 2020, a deer hunter discovered two dead bodies that had been riddled with bullets and dumped in a forested corner of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of the dead men, Master Sergeant William Billy Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force, the most secretive black ops unit in the military. A deeply traumatized veteran of Americas classified assassination program, Lavigne had done more than a dozen deployments in his lengthy career, was addicted to crack cocaine, dealt drugs on base, and had committed a series of violent crimes before he was mysteriously killed. The other victim, Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas, was a quartermaster attached to the Special Forces who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad, and had written a blackmail letter threatening to expose criminality in the special operations task force in Afghanistan.As soon as Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and investigative reporter, begins looking into the double murder, he learns that there have been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg recently, other murders connected to drug trafficking in elite units, and dozens of fatal overdoses. Drawing on declassified documents, trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of interviews, Harp tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, blatant military cover-ups, American complicity in the Afghan heroin trade, and the pernicious consequences of continuous war.