The One That Got Away, Part 1.

A True Story

The best piece of journalism I ever wrote, by far, was never published. It’s difficult to explain why. For reasons both complicated and banal, the editor who commissioned it, and whose magazine paid for it all, couldn’t bring himself to read it. We put it through an exigent bout of fact-checking (I had thousand of pages of documents, and maybe 15 hours of interviews), and then I waited. It languished on his desk. After months of broken promises, I unilaterally pulled it, and tried to sell it elsewhere. Three editors at three other magazines were interested: two couldn’t convince their bosses, and one proved to be so obnoxious that I couldn’t work with him.  Along the way, it was fact-checked two more times.    Finally, I gave up. I suppose every writer and artist has a story like this: a project that was both perfect and cursed. It happens: you move on.

But now, more than 20 years later, I have a way to publish it on my own. Nothing here has been changed: all the names, dates, and facts are real. While going over it again I decided that my notes were an interesting supplement to the story: they appear in between sections, in italics, with a few names and phone numbers redacted.

So the title is two-fold. It refers to things that happen in the story, but also to the story itself.   Substack has a space limit, so I’m posting it in two parts. A long weekend read for you all. Enjoy.

---

                            

               I

[Jacksonville a shithole, even other Marines descr. it as ‘backwater’.  second time here in a year.  same little hampton inn.  fast food, titty bars, 2ndhand military surplus.  pawn shops, loan offices, tattoo parlors.  steve earle on the rental car tape player.

Crawford trial begins June 8th at Camp LeJeune.

Teflon Tim.  Sgt. Timothy Witham got five years.

Captain Mike Richardson is prosecutor.

Crawford’s lawyer.

REDACTED fax: 910 XXX-XXXX

REDACTED: Sgt. Hill.  6 July. Charges disposing property, stealing property.  “When you’re looking at triple digits years, you’ll hand over your mother.”

Gerich got a special court martial, minor involvement.  Reduced from E-9 to E-7.

Strong possibility I can talk to his client.

REDACTED: Witham — convicted of conspiracy to commit larceny of mil property and explosives.

“The first case of this magnitude that I’ve ever seen.

They all started around Branch Davidians.  The Brady Bill.”

----------

910 XXX-XXXX.

REDACTED in parris island 9 am

---------------

Naval Criminal Investigative Services:  (910) 451 8255

special agent -  REDACTED -

marine corps, dc.-- 703 545 6700    public affairs office: (703) 614 1492  public affairs officer lejeune (910) 451 5655 or 5782  ask for media officer --

lieutenant james will be my escort

            If the crimes can properly be said to have their origins anywhere, they can be traced back to 1991, with the Marine Corps’ presence in Desert Storm. Captain Tom Crawford was there, working as an officer in Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the Marine Corps' own bomb squad.  Sergeant Doug Tetrick was there as well; he and Crawford had met a few months earlier, back at Camp LeJeune on the North Carolina Coast.  They were acquaintances, in Saudi Arabia they became friends; and that's where Crawford stole the Humvee.

               Almost from the get-go Crawford had employed Tetrick as a kind of unofficial scrounge, begging and borrowing supplies for the unit. They made a somewhat strange pair: Tetrick was gregarious and glib, in his mid-20’s and already a little bit slick. He was a trickster, and famous for it. "We could never keep track of him,” says a Marine named Reineinger, who served as Tetrick's platoon sergeant on maneuvers in the Mediterranean a few years later.  “He was a liar.  In Barcelona he went out on liberty and surrounded himself with women, and then he's downstairs on the ship crying in his beer about cheating on his wife.  One day he's beating the bible, and the next day he's back on the bottle.”  There was a period, too, when he took to sig heil-ing younger Marines instead of saluting, and he once bragged, apparently falsely, of committing war crimes — executing locals — in Somalia.  He thought that was pretty funny; he thought everything was pretty funny, everything was fodder for another mind game, another joke with another twist.

               Crawford was six years older, more sober and committed, an intense and somewhat awkward man.  At 5 foot 9 inches and 170 pounds, he was small for a Marine; but he was a scrapper, a bantam rooster, and he lived and breathed the Corps.  His father had been a drill instructor, and Crawford himself was born on Parris Island: in ’68 the old man shipped out for Vietnam.  At the airport to see him off, Crawford got what he describes as “a ten year talk in two hours.  I think he had a premonition.” In fact, Crawford, Sr., was killed in action later that year; Tom Crawford signed himself up as soon as he turned seventeen.

               Since then he’d become a kind of super-Marine, even a zealot, a student of Corps history, a collector of Corps memorabilia.  He’d dragged himself up through the ranks of enlisted men to become an officer, and he had that odd combination of unworldliness, fierceness and single-mindedness that you sometimes find in military men. Imagine a more lumpen version of the Great Santini: the people who liked him thought Crawford was a hell of a guy; the people who didn’t hated his guts.

               In any case, he was fiercely loyal to his unit.  He wanted whatever he could get for them, though he wasn’t always patient enough to get it through the proper channels.  And so it was that he snatched the Humvee.

               Coming back through the Saudi desert from an operation, Crawford saw the vehicle abandoned by the side of the road; it belonged to the Army, and it was out of gas.  So he filled it with some extra fuel of his own, jumped in, started it up, and drove it back to base, where he and his crew stripped it down for parts; then they buried what was left of the Army's in the sand.  It didn’t seem like that big a deal at the time.  That kind of ad hoc appropriation is a grey area legally, and it happens fairly frequently; there are rumors that the Marines came back from Desert Storm with 200 more vehicles then they'd left with.

               Still, it’s not the sort of thing you want to get caught at.  As it happens, Crawford wasn’t, and the precedent was set.  “We made Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves look like stinking amateurs,” he boasted, and the impulse, the brazenness, the sense of being above the rules, seems to have followed them when the war was over and they came home to LeJeune.

[fbi - handled the civilians - charlotte fbi -- 704 377 9200

Western District of NC in Charlotte, clerk of court.  Searches in Boone, NC.  Ask for affidavits, search warrants and indictments.  704 350 7400.  Nope, they're in Statesville:  1 704 873 7112.

Indictments out of Western District, Eastern District in Raleigh, 919 856 4407 one in Middle District.  910 332 6000

$28.50 -- Clerk US District Court

Clerk PO Box 466 Statesville, NC 28687

US vs. Pruess

maybe 12 civilians involved

Storage locker in Boone --

SEARCH WARRANTS INDEXED BY PROPERTY - Boone South Storage on Highway 321, in Boone

Pruess lawyer Court Appointed -- REDACTED. -- in Charlotte. -- 704 XXX-XXXX

Trial date is July 13th -- they should know by July 1 if they plea or go to trial.  If plea, they'll talk -- if not, maybe after trial.

.

Here's how it works:  1st EOD is assigned to the 1st division, 2nd to the second, and third to the third.  Each has about 75 members.  Then every base and air station has a team, some little EOD units, about 6 each, for a total of around 300 EOD guys total.

                II

                There are 42,000 Marines stationed at Camp LeJeune, and all of them have to be combat ready.  So they need time on the range, time practicing with their rifles and their artillery.  In peacetime, EOD techs like Crawford and Tetrick were the ones who went in afterwards, swept the ranges and took care of everything that didn’t go off properly: rounds that remained unfired, tear gas canisters that got lodged in faulty launchers, dud grenades that were left behind.  Some of it they de-fused; a lot of it they just blew up.  So they had constant and untrammeled access to the full range of military artillery: both the stuff they were meant to destroy, and the stuff they destroyed it with.

               It made sense, then, that the men in EOD were aficionados of ordnance, obsessive scholars and devotees of everything that burns or blows up, everything that goes off or goes bang.  Many of them had private, and perfectly legal, arsenals at home.  Several of them moonlighted as arms dealers along the southeast gun show circuit — vast weekend flea markets of weapons and paraphernalia, which took place in towns like Charlotte and Raleigh and Hickory and Knob Creek — selling surplus and small arms to civilians, and that was perfectly legal, too.  What’s more, it was a good way to pick up some extra cash.  Captain Crawford worked the gun shows; and so did Sergeant Tetrick, along with a few other EOD techs, among them a young Sergeant named Ronald Moerbe, and another named Tim Witham.

               Moerbe transferred into EOD in 1992, and right away he realized that he’d walked into a racket.  “As soon as I got there, I saw illegal activities,” he says.  “The guys would be taking small arms ammo and stuff.  I thought, Wow! All these people, sergeants and everything, and they were just like, ‘Woo-hoo! Let's take this stuff.’  And they would say to me, 'Here's a little bit for you.'  They would say it was for personal use, but everybody knew they were selling it.”  As he describes it, the practice was as common as civilians swiping pens and paper clips from the office.  “Everyone was doing it,” he says.  “Everyone.  From the lowest man to the highest man.  I mean, everyone takes the ammo.  People were only particular about who they did it in front of."

               Nobody can explain how things escalated from there.  It was just ammo, no big deal: and then suddenly it was more than ammo. One day in March of 1984, Doug Tetrick got hold of 80 High Explosive Dual Purpose grenades, buried them on site, and drove back later in a Humvee to pick them up.  That same year, according to Moerbe, he and Witham were assigned a range sweep at Fort Bragg. "We checked out some C-4 [a plastic explosive],” he says, “and then we took two bags of it and stashed it in the tires that were used as field markers.  The next day we went back and picked it up.  I was scared, because I knew I was in the big time."

               But nothing happened: no one noticed, no one came after them, and soon they had an entire operation going.  "We would go to the armories with empty, used magazines and trade them out for new ones," says Moerbe.  "Or guys on the range would throw us some expended shells for a few bucks.  The armory guys wanted to shoot, and we were EOD so we could set it up for them.  We'd promise them they could come out to the range and shoot off a cannon or something.  So they'd slip us M16 magazines.  We got 6 cases, with 100 magazines per case, and we sold the magazines for $22.50 each.  So there were thousands of dollars involved."  It was just one of those things, a slippery slope, and soon enough all manner of stolen military materiel — machine gun barrels, ammunition, small arms parts — was making its way onto — or, more accurately, underneath — the tables at the southeastern gun shows.

               Sometime in the midst of all this a civilian named Greg Pruess started showing up.  An odd little roly-poly fellow who lived out in Boone, NC., Pruess was a licensed arms dealer, a pack rat, and the proprietor of a “munitions museum”.  He was a wannabe who’d made himself into a player; he had storage rooms full of guns and explosives, spread over the northwestern part of the state, and he seemed to be connected to everybody: militia men, rogue cops, drug dealers, international arms merchants.  Whatever you wanted to buy, he could get: whatever you wanted to sell, he would buy.  He was a very good customer, Pruess, and he began picking up things from the men in EOD on a regular basis: Russian anti-tank mines, Egyptian hand grenades, a Soviet Draganov rifle.

               Those were good times: the weapons were going out, and the money was coming in, and nobody in any position to stop them seems to have noticed.  By then, Crawford was Officer in Charge; but if he knew what was going on — some say he did, some say he didn’t — he did nothing to stop it.  For the others, there were thousands of dollars to be made, nice hotels to stay at whenever they made a gun show, lobster dinners, fine wine.  A sergeant in the Marine Corps makes about $2300 a month; the prospect of supplementing that with another few thousand was too good to resist.  Besides, according to Doug Tetrick, it was fun, at first: “There’s a great thrill in travelling around the state, stealing ammunition, selling it, in going through police roadblocks — which I once did — and not getting caught.”  And then somewhere along the line Tetrick had a kind of conversion, and his own motivation became less about kicks and cash, and more about the End of the World as We Know It.

FBI in Jacksonville: 910 577 0334.

Look on the Web for a magazine called The Resister, put out by the Special Forces Underground.  Crawford was seen reading this -- a quasi-militia thing put out by Army guys.

[Jesus this is scary shit.]

Moerbe: “In EOD there are a few blacks, but really it's the White Man's Club."

MOERBE IN BRIG, JUNE 10, 1998:

big guy, six foot two, maybe 240 pounds. early thirties, a slightly doughy face.  amoral, likeable.  Very open, matter of fact, slightly wry. He's got a twelve year sentence.

his lawyer and I on plastic chairs in very narrow hallway on the third floor of the brig, outside a cell in Special Quarters.  Moerbe on the other side of the bars, in the cell, very small, dark, about 8 feet by six. Looking at each other through the bars. Very hot and humid. M in orange jumpsuit.

M born in Colorado 9/25/67.  Joined up 12/86, went to boot camp 1/87.  Dad was in army.

Witham: His slogan was, if he was caught, "Lie, deny, demand proof, make counter-accusations."  [The NCIS guys told me the same thing.] 

M: "Witham said he brought 7 AK-47's and a bunch of Soviet SVD Draganofs back from Desert Storm in a shipping container with a false ceiling.  I saw two of the SVD's.”

M: “It was the cash money express.  You could make the fast nickel or the slow dime.”  [It depended on how far into it you wanted to get.]

REDACTED. OUTSIDE THE BRIG

Tetrick's platoon Sergeant.  "Tetrick was a piece of shit. He was a liar. No amount of time will convince me that Tetrick was in this investigation for anything but Tetrick's ass and Tetrick's wallet."

TIM WITHAM, JUNE 12, 1998.

Runners from the brig brought him into a conference room at the PAO, cuffed.  They take off handcuffs and put on leg shackles.  Big motherfucker, well over six feet and maybe 240 pounds, his neck is just about as wide as his head.  regular features.  speaks slowly.

Born in 1964 in Albany, Kentucky, pop. 2000.  Father dug oil wells for Occidental — worked a lot — mother was a hairdresser.

Played basketball on a championship team, Clinton County High School, graduated in 1982 and enlisted in 1985.  Wanted to join Army — dad was Army — but recruiting guy was out to lunch when he went in, and the Marine guy next door let him wait there.  "The rest is history."   Within a few hours he joined the Marines instead.

'choir boy'.  bullshit.

    III

                Training with the elite Force Recon in ‘92, Sergeant Tetrick had been introduced to a whole new way of thinking, and he took a turn for the fringe.  The government was going to hell, his buddies there told him: the didn’t trust the Feds, they didn’t much like the Jews, and they definitely hated and feared blacks.  Looking around and talking to his buddies, he estimated that 20 out of 26 of the men in his Force Recon platoon belonged to some sort of underground, paramilitary organization called X-RAY. Any day now, they told him, the blacks were going to rise up and take over the country, and the Feds were all ready to help them, jackbooted thugs from the ATF just waiting for the right moment to kick down their doors, confiscate their guns and leave them helpless. Later Tetrick would say, “A sense of urgency kind of overtook me…that it was definitely time to start buying weapons and ammunition, not in quantities necessary for a reasonable self-defense, but in large quantities.  Because of the perception that the government of the United States was corrupt and was looking to ‘sell the United States down the river’, make us part of the international government or whatnot, we felt that it was possible to stop this kind of thing from happening....by actual armed resistance.”

            Whether he’s exaggerating the numbers is hard to say.  It’s against regulations for military personnel to belong to groups that “espouse supremacist causes…advocate the use of force or violence; or otherwise engage in efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights”, and military officials deny that it’s a major problem. The armed forces, they say, are simply a microcosm of society, and there are bound to be some bad apples here and there; command does its best to prevent that sort of thing from flourishing — and nobody has been able to confirm the existence of X-RAY.  But other, similar sorts of problems have been exposed: in 1976 a very large Ku Klux Klan organization was uncovered at Camp Pendleton; and there was a time in the mid-eighties when the White Patriot Party in North Carolina was recruiting from the Corps.  And it’s well known that there’s a quasi-secret, anti-government organization out of Fort Bragg called the Special Forces Underground that puts out a paper called The Resister: Tetrick used to sell it at gun shows.

               Still, when it came time for him to buy fully into fringe politics, Tetrick did it all by himself.  He just went off: and he admits that he began to stockpile munitions for his own paramilitary purposes — a defense, he thought, for the day the government came for him, the way they’d come for the Davidians in Waco and Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge. To prepare for resistance, Tetrick needed a cache of arms; to buy arms, he needed money; to make money, he stole from EOD.  “There’s Tetrick, walking around with $10,000 in cash,” says Moerbe.  “Tetrick was weird, he was out there.  He had crazy views about the military, about the government’s abuse of power.”

               He probably could have kept his operation going indefinitely, waiting and planning for the end of democracy in America.  But in June of 1994, things started to fall apart.  One of Pruess’ buyers turned out to be an ATF informant, and Pruess was arrested; so everybody’s best customer was out of business.  Then the Feds discovered that some of the items in Pruess’ possession had ‘EOD’ stenciled on them.  In the course of their investigation, Sergeant Tetrick’s name came up, along with Sergeant Witham’s; the ATF went to Naval Criminal Investigative Services, and NCIS opened an investigation on the two sergeants.  In time, Pruess was convicted and sentenced to a year and a day — a felony conviction that made it illegal for him to possess or sell firearms.  And NCIS continued their investigation of Tetrick and Witham.

                But something had happened to Tetrick while the Pruess affair was playing out: In October of 1994 he had his second conversion, this time to Christianity.  Staying in a hotel in South Carolina with his family while attending yet another gun show, he woke in the middle of the night; he felt desolate and he couldn’t shake it; he went into the bathroom to be alone, and he sat there and read the Bible.  When he came out a few hours later he was a true believer.  He was never one for small measures, Tetrick; when he went right-wing he went as far as he could.  When he came to Christianity he was born again, and he gave himself no quarter.

It was about this time, for example, that Tetrick started confessing, trying to cleanse his soul.  He went to his wife and told her that he’d committed adultery; but more than that, he told her how many times, and with whom, and when and where — a disclosure so full that some of his friends found it needlessly cruel.  He went to Tom Crawford and told him that he’d sold C-4 to Pruess, that the charges NCIS were investigating were true. Crawford hit the ceiling: It was one thing, he said, to pilfer ammunition and fire it off in your back yard.  It was another to steal explosives and sell them to an arms dealer: C-4 is very dangerous stuff, illegal for civilians to possess; and, because it’s plastic, moldable, and hard to detect, it’s much sought after by terrorists.

              Crawford promised he’d cover up for Tetrick, but he insisted that nothing like that could happen again.  That was alright by Tetrick: although NCIS had never come up with enough evidence against him to mount an indictment, they had revoked his security clearances, effectively ending his days in EOD.  The only way to get reinstated was to try to lie his way through, but he believed that lying was a sin.  Instead he began making plans to leave the Corps altogether.

Phone number for the brig:   451 1308 or 1039.

Crawford on the stand: small, thin-featured guy with glasses.  like the runt of the litter who had spent his life trying to overcome it.  Testifying, telling his story at last, talking very fast —his lawyer had to ask him to slow down.  Just falling all over himself to get his story out, gesticulating.

C. started crying here.  "I wouldn't do that [sell stuff for criminal use in the US].  I spent my whole life protecting people.  His voice was cracking, his face red. He wouldn't sell to the IRA, because "The IRA are Communists."

Later, again, his voice cracking, near tears: "The hardest thing I've ever done is to listen to people who've never worn a uniform tell me that I'm a traitor.  I'd sell my soul to the Devil for 15 more minutes for this country."

Where did the stuff in Crawford's attic come from?  When?

July 8, 97 - Moerbe and Jackson meet at Ruby Tuesday's in Jacksonville.  Moerbe explains how to steal arms.  They go to strip joint with Moerbe's hooker girlfriend, REDACTED.

REDACTED, lawyer: “Crawford is a fine human being.”  — With a basement full of arms?  “Yeah, you know, what the hey.”

SPECIAL AGENT (REDACTED), [AND SPECIAL AGENT (REDACTED)-- JUNE 11, 1998 -- IN (REDACTED)'S OFFICE AT LEJEUNE:

"I don't know if 'paranoid' is a real good word to describe him [Crawford].  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  That's how I'd describe him.  If you’re so afraid that the government is going to disarm the public that you choose to store guns and explosives, then yeah, the government is going to come and disarm you."

CRAWFORD, JUNE 12.

"I was 21 before I realized that damnyankee was two words."

a broken man, and there's something kind of sad about it.  He didn't seem to understand quite why everyone thought he was an SOB.  He just didn't get it — didn't see why everyone didn't think as he did.  he works against himself every minute of his life, without his ever quite seeing that he does.  Under cross-examin. he answered the prosecutor as if he really thought he was going to change the guy’s mind.  As if he couldn't quite understand why prosecutor was so pissed off at him.

                 IV

                Still, Tetrick continued working the gun shows, and in time he and Crawford began to grow tighter.  They had a lot in common: conservative politics, for starter’s, and while Tetrick’s were still very much on the extremist side, it wasn’t anything Crawford wouldn’t listen to.  They went to church together, and they talked each other through family problems; Crawford made Tetrick a present of Bill Cosby’s two books on parenting, but the difficulties went a little deeper than that.  Tetrick was facing down his past infidelities to his wife in the light of his recent conversion, and from time to time he was possessed by guilt about his cheating.  “I held that man's head in my lap while he cried,” says Crawford.

               Crawford, too, was having hard times at home: widowed by his first marriage, his second was ending in an ugly divorce, and his 7 year old son had been diagnosed with epilepsy and liver problems. He was becoming frustrated with the way the Marine Corps had treated him: sending him halfway around the world on assignments, reneging on their promise to cover his moving expenses, changing the rules so that the years he’d put in as a Warrant Officer didn’t count towards his retirement.  He had bought a house in Jacksonville, the small, military town that lies outside LeJeune’s gates; but before he’d had a chance to insure it, it had been damaged in a hurricane, and he’d gone deep into debt to fix it up again.

               Tetrick was a sympathetic soul, and for Crawford, it became an unusually close relationship; he wasn’t the sort to make friends easily. Tetrick could be loud, and abrasive, and a little fatuous, but he was also gratifyingly attentive, and he went out of his way to draw the older man out, calling to chat or just to crack jokes, to share complaints about the Corps.  According to Crawford’s daughter Jessica, “Tetrick just wanted to be involved in every aspect of my dad’s life, I mean everything.  I found that a little weird.  It was almost like when you have a very controlling friend, and they want to control everything: who you date, where you’re going, what you’re doing.  My dad was happy to have someone interested: he didn’t have that many hang-out buddies.” Now he had a best friend: according to Crawford himself, he and Tetrick became like brothers.

               At the same time, Crawford started to change.  He’d always been an intense man, but you could have written that off to gung-ho.  Now he began to break down a little, to reveal a dormant, dark side; his impatience and his anger started getting the better of him, and he was drifting away from his faith in Semper Fi.

               He began to complain.  "I got no loyalty to any of these guys," he said of the Corps.  "My father....was killed.  We got nothing out of it.  I've got two brothers serving [in the armed services].  They got nothing.  The law, I tried to everything by law.  My divorce, I got taken to the cleaners."  He would talk about putting a bomb under the Officer’s Club — jokingly, he claims: not so jokingly, others thought. He began to talk tough, spewing elaborate revenge fantasies about his ex-wife:  "I'm going to hire seven Mexican winos to gang rape her," he said, "and then....do her arms and knees with a Black and Decker cordless electric drill, and stuff Drano crystals in it and then set her on fire, I'll have 'em piss on her.  And when she begs forgiveness I will fucking strangle her with her own intestines."

               Some of the men he worked with have said that Captain Crawford was a truly dangerous man, that he was wound up tight and ready to blow.  Crawford says he was just talking trash, trying to keep up with Tetrick, and there are others who say the same. “So Crawford believes in militia." says Sergeant Moerbe, "but my perspective was that, you know, he would talk about blowing up the Officer’s Club, I thought that was bullshit.” 

Change hotels to Wilmington, down the road c. 60 miles.  Sitting by pool reading classified docs, transcripts, etc. about 4 big boxes that REDACTED gave me.  ‘Copy what you need, return the rest”.

Mar, 94 Tet. steals 80 High Explosive Dual Purpose grenades, burying on site and coming back in a Humvee to pick up. Also acts as middleman for sale of C-4 (three times) and other materials to Pruess.  and God knows what else.  It goes on and on.  (NCIS summary of Tetrick interviews.)  (See also Tetrick statement 1/13/98) (See also first Tetrick debrief)

Spring 1997, - Tetrick leaves the Corps (Stipulation of Fact)

May 9, 1997 -- Tetrick discusses selling a Black Widow with Moerbe.

May 14, 97 -- Moerbe sells machine gun barrels to Tetrick, and offers C-4. (FBI briefing 14MAY97)

May 20, 1997 -    Moerbe and Tetrick on way to gun show in Kentucky.  Tetrick: "Tell you what, thieves that have no honor don’t last."

at crawford’s trial:

ATF guy testifies:  C-4 has no commercial uses, it’s designed to cut or shatter steel.  Illegal outside military: it's explosive velocity is too fast for it to move earth or rock or anything like that.  It doesn't shove.  One stick is 1.25 (1.4?) pounds, goes for about 100 on the black market.  Less than one pound of something like C-4 brought down the Lockerbie flight.  "Terrorist groups love C-4.  Militia groups want to get their hands on it.  It’s very concealable.  Other things stolen: blasting caps strong enough to set off C-4, and devices good for booby traps.

Headquarters chose undercover name Jackson.  His real name is REDACTED

They used a new kind of digital recorder, something that holds 5.5 hours of sound on a chip. 

Tennyson is in DC

Witham, in leg irons: "Pruess was a Capitalist with a capital C.  He caters to doctors, lawyers, who want odd weapons.  Like a 105mm howitzer.  He was extremely knowledgeable about weaponry."

on Crawford: "He had a band of thieves working for him."

on Moerbe.  "He had a weak mind and a strong back.  a simple person; a robot; he would do what he was told.  He needed adult supervision; he needed a leader."

               V

               ‘T.J. Jackson’ came to town in January of 1997.  He was a big, barrel-chested guy, 6’1”, 225 pounds.  He had a beard and a ponytail and a thousand yard stare; he had a fifth degree black belt; he carried a government issue Sig 228.  To listen to him talk, you’d think “fucking” was the only adjective he knew.  Sergeant Moerbe, who met T.J. at around this time, was deeply impressed. "T.J. dressed like an outlaw biker," he says.  "He talked tough.  I'd be with him and he'd get a phone call on his cell phone, and I'd hear him say, ‘You give me the money or I'll fuck you up.’  I studied martial arts, but here was this guy teaching me moves.  And he’s carrying a gun.  So now I know this dude's bad.”

             Jackson never did say exactly where he'd come from — "I have no family," he said.  "I have no wife.  I have no kids that I care to speak of" — or what he'd done, but he gave little hints.  He said he'd been a "foot soldier" or "triggerman" for an “organization” — not much to go on, but it was good enough to give him underworld credentials.

               Anyway, he was friends with Tetrick — no one quite knew how— and soon they were in business together, trading guns and ammunition under the aegis of a company called ICC.  Tetrick had already spread the word that he was looking to buy whatever anybody had to sell; to his surprise, one of the first to pony up was Captain Tom Crawford.

            As far as Tetrick knew, Crawford had always been clean — a scrounge, to be sure, and maybe a fanatic, a thorn in the side of his superiors, but not a crook.  And yet there he was, trafficking in stolen materiel without a second thought.  The old Crawford, the one who’d chewed out Tetrick when he confessed to stealing explosives, was gone.  In his place was a man more than willing to commit those kinds of crimes himself.

               In the beginning, it was just a few crates of MRE's — Meals Ready-to-Eat, field rations, fluff — that Crawford had brought to a gun show in Raleigh.  A few weeks later it was a set of Motorola field radios that Crawford had somehow scrounged for his unit, and then learned he could not use.  He was ordered to ‘shit can them’: instead, he’d taken them home, and he sold them to Tetrick.  The next day it was some rounds of ammo and a few CS canisters -— tear gas grenades — which Crawford had stashed in his wall locker at the EOD shop. “Dude, this is going to be awesome,” Tetrick said to Crawford; he was ready to put Crawford and T.J. together, and when he did, the three of them were going to have a nice operation going.

               On February 22, 1997, Tetrick introduced Crawford to T.J. Jackson at the Charlotte gun show; the three of them hung out for a little while.  Then Jackson had a brief parlay with another man, who gave him the keys to a Ford Yukon.  The Yukon was loaded up in back with computer boxes, and T.J. asked Tetrick and Crawford — who was with his 7 year old son Patrick — to follow him across town to the Marriott and then give him a lift back.  All along the way T.J. dropped cryptic remarks about his ‘organization’; at the hotel, he passed the Yukon on to another man.  Obviously, the SUV was hot, and so were the computers; obviously, Jackson was well connected.

               Within a few weeks, Crawford was in all the way.  He set up another sale, this time to T.J. and Tetrick together. On the night of March 12th, 1997, Crawford and Tetrick drove over to the EOD shop on base in Crawford’s Dodge pick-up.  There they loaded the truck up with 40 pounds of C-4, blasting caps, detonation cord, time fuses, ammo, booby trap devices, smoke cartridges, an M-203 grenade launcher and various grenades — a considerable collection of ordnance, which then they took it back to Crawford’s house and transferred to Tetrick’s Suburban.

               That night — it was St. Patrick’s Day — the three of them had a few beers together at Crawford’s house.  They started talking about guns, then about loyalty, then about politics, and at some point Crawford gave a little speech. "I take the American way of life, and the government our founding fathers did," he said to Tetrick and T.J.. "That's where I come from.  The original Americans were nothing more than a bunch of vagabonds, thrown-out cast-off.  They stayed together, they ran guns, they did everything else.  They were making fucking bombs and blowing up gentlemen, all the rest, to include women and children. It doesn't matter sometimes: collateral damage for the bigger purpose. What's a purpose? I don't know....There’s scum that’s like a cancer that should be eradicated.  You know....  you got accept casualties."

               A few days later, T.J. paid him $8950 along with the promise of a laptop computer for Crawford's new fiancée, and an extra $2100 for 18 more grenades.  A month later Crawford came up with more C-4, more blasting caps, more grenades — "enough shit,” he pointed out to T.J., “to cause mayhem for several years".  Another month, and Crawford revealed that he had a secret cache of weapons that he was storing for his own personal use: this, too, he shared with Tetrick: more C-4, more grenades, more blasting caps, more detonating fuse. 

Shortly afterwards, Crawford was transferred out of EOD; he was re-marrying and moving to Boston, and he’d gotten himself re-assigned to the Marine Reserves Supply Depot in Worcester.  He was as happy as he’d ever been in his life: he was in love, and he’d moved Mills, Massachusetts, a pretty little town in the Boston suburbs.  "I had acceptance, and comfort, and peace,” he says.  With his twenty years completed, he was starting to think about retiring from the Marines. Soon after that, Tetrick's own papers came through and he himself left the Corps.  Crawford threw the party to celebrate.

Jackson interview: Once they met at a motel, and the cleaning woman saw them toting in a rifle they had purchased.  She called the police, and the police came for them.  But luckily the cops called from the lobby and asked, Are you guys cops?

Later, Jackson was busted.  driving through West Va. to a gun show, someone dialed 911 on him.  At least, that's what the cops said.  They pulled him over and found $50,000 in cash, and a lot of concealed weapons which were obviously government property.  took him in, he told them he was working undercover.  He called REDACTED, who called the FBI in Charlotte, and the Fed in Charlotte called the cops and had them call back to the Bureau in Charlotte have them route the call back to his house so they'd know he was real.

Moerbe in the brig: "So in October of 1997, I hear talk that Clinton's coming to town.  I get a message, come to NCIS for a briefing on it.  So I go over, I go into this office.  I see right away that something's not right.  As soon as I walk in this agent, Worth, says, You're under arrest for theft of government property.  put my hands on wall, and suddenly there are 8 agents on me, tackle me; face down on the floor with someone's foot on my neck.  They strip off all my clothes and search me, and then they let me put on my pants and shirt, and they cuff me."

"I'm thinking, I'm really in a world of shit, now."

"They started to question me.  I'm giving them the no hablo line.  Then Special Agent Worth says, we know everything, we have tapes, videos.  And he says, See?  And he pulls out credentials for Tetrick and Jackson.  And now I know I'm truly fucked."

                        VI

   And the sales went on.  In April, Crawford turned over more C-4 and grenades to Tetrick and T.J.; and then, in July of ‘97, he helped the two of them back a pair of Suburbans up to a side door of his new post and load them with crates full of surplus ammunition — a total of 48,000 rounds — that he’d stashed inside.  For this he received $1500.

               It was around this time, too, that Ronald Moerbe came back on the scene.  Midway through May of '97, Sergeant Moerbe sold a few machine gun barrels to Tetrick; a few days later he showed up in Jacksonville — driving a green Dodge Ram with a personalized plate on the front that said "Love Machine" — and sold him a bomb disposal suit and some blasting caps.  In June he rendezvoused with T.J. behind a fast food restaurant and turned over a plastic soda cup with 12 more blasting caps stashed inside.  Finally, he came up with some more C-4 for T.J. and his organization.  "Tetrick said, ‘Can you get [he holds out his hands at about the distance of a block of C-4]?’”, Moerbe explains.  “He asked me to get him blasting caps.  I got the C-4 and hid it, and then I went back to the range when I knew everyone was gone; I was allowed on there because I was in EOD.  And I put the stuff in a truck and drove right off the base, and sold it to T.J..”  The brazenness is startling: Moerbe was still in uniform when he went to sell the explosives to T.J., and he was riding in a government vehicle; they met behind a nightclub called Silver and Gold.  Some time later, again with extraordinary cockiness, he offered to steal a Humvee off the base and sell it to T.J.; the two of them took a ride over to the vehicle pool to see how it could be done, and only when it seemed a little too risky did they abandon the idea.

               Suddenly, too, Pruess showed up again, newly released from jail and almost immediately back to his old tricks.  In September of 1997, Pruess bought and sold from Tetrick and T.J., bought and sold, and bought and sold some more: C-4, some AT-4 rocket warheads, an M2 machine gun, some grenades. Because he was built round and wore a mustache, the two of them called him “the Walrus”, and over the weeks they paid him more than $40,000 for the stuff.

                And then one day in October of 1997, it all came to a permanent end.  On the 16th of that month, Ronald Moerbe was called into the Naval Criminal Investigative Services office at Camp LeJeune, ostensibly to go over EOD plans for an upcoming visit by the President.  He could tell as soon as he walked in the door that something wasn’t right; a moment later he sat down, and the agent across from the desk told him he was under arrest for theft of government property.   He stood up to put his hands on the wall, and at once 8 more agents appeared out of nowhere; they tackled him and strip searched him; then they let him put on his pants and shirt, and they handcuffed him.  “I'm thinking, I'm really in a world of shit now,” says Moerbe.  He would wind up with a twelve year sentence.

               That same day, Tim Witham was arrested at the Marine base at Cherry Point, NC.  He denied everything, admitting only that he knew Crawford and Tetrick were stealing ammo.  Two hours into the questioning, Witham ended it and asked for a lawyer.  At his trial he pleaded not guilty, but the jury convicted him and sentenced him to five years.

               Pruess was picked up at his home in Boone, NC.  In his statement to the FBI he immediately gave up everybody he could think of: not just Sergeants Witham and Moerbe, and Captain Crawford, but a police officer in Detroit who sold him explosive ammunition; a fireworks and ammunition dealer from St. Louis who sold him grenade rounds; a Czech arms dealer with connections to the Russian mob who offered him a range of illegal armaments; an American arms dealer living in Thailand; another American who claimed to have ties to Colombian and Mexican drug dealers; various members of the Boone Police Department; and a marijuana grower in Atlanta with connections in Jamaica and Cuba.  It took seven U-hauls to clear Pruess’ warehouse.  As of this writing, he has yet to stand trial; his lawyer says he’ll be pleading not guilty.

               Crawford was picked up at Marine Corps Reserve Center in Worcester, Mass. on October 16, 1997.  He walked in the door and was immediately jumped by eight or nine NCIS agents.  “I was scared shitless,” he says, “more scared than I ever was in combat. My brain was working like a Rolodex with a motor on it.”  He was flown back to Camp LeJeune that night.  He would eventually plead guilty to 34 counts — the charge sheet is ten pages long — including larceny, unlawful transport of explosives, and wrongful disposition of stolen ammunition.  On the stand at his sentencing trial, he said he’d taken the money because he was broke, and he didn’t know what else to do; he said he stole and sold weapons as a favor to his friend Tetrick; he insisted that he thought T.J. was a Black Ops agent; and he pled patriotism: "I'd sell my soul to the Devil for 15 more minutes for this country," he said.  The jury at his sentencing trial seems to have believed that he did just that. There are few things the Corps views more harshly than betrayal of trust by one of its officers.  They probably would have hung him outside the PX if they could; instead, they gave him thirty years.  Because of a pre-trial agreement, he’ll serve twenty.

               And Doug Tetrick, and T.J. Jackson: they just walked away.