Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [130]
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 gonna need help, dude!” In Baghdad, Matt earned a reputation as the best supply sergeant in the battalion, possibly in the entire Third ID. He was the go-to guy.
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, Kenneth Buff, is out with another sergeant, rooting around the Green Zone for saws to trim some trees when he comes across a small building with bricked-over windows and doors. Inside he finds ninety galvanized-steel boxes, and in each box there is four million dollars in American currency. Then one day he was shootin’ at some food, and up from the ground came a-bubbling crude. They notify command and, as far as anyone knows, they turn in every dollar they found. [Which physically hurts almost every enlisted man who hears about it. Are you fucking kidding me? You dumb-ass! ] Buff doesn’t get any money, but he was interviewed by Fox News that very afternoon. It is, to say the least, an unexpected event. Saddam was not supposed to have American currency. The Third ID was expecting to find mobile chemical-weapons labs, not buildings stuffed to the rafters with $100 bills.
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