The Best American Crime Writing 2006

by Mark Bowden

  [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 Pennsylvania or whatever they named the colonies of tents they’d thrown up in the middle of the desert. The unit didn’t have a lot of the equipment it needed: bullets, M-16 magazines, fluorescent lights, VCRs (the tactical purpose of a VCR was unclear to Matt, but his was not to reason why). They needed a generator and light sets, so Matt and some other guys drove into another unit’s compound at two in the morning, backed up to a generator unit with light sets, fastened them to their trailer, and just drove right by the guards and out into the middle of the desert.

  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 out-building 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 Mann, a twenty-two-year-old black kid from the projects of Newark, New Jersey, with too many teeth and a crooked smile and a permeating innocence that would somehow cling to him even if he murdered someone. He was Matt’s subordinate in Kuwait and Iraq. The first time they met, Matt said, “What’s your name?” and he said, “My name is Specialist Mann, Sergeant.” Matt said, “No. What’s your name?” “Jamal.” “I’m Matt, and you can call me Matt.” He wanted to create a tiny, two-man culture outside the system. Matt’s pretty sensitive to feeling crushed by the system, and he likes to find ways to pull power off the grid, unbeknownst. Slipping the command structure was one of the ways Matt could create some self-worth in a culture that he believes institutionally denied him that. That’s what drew him out into the postapocalyptic playground that first night in Baghdad, what made being a supply sergeant such a natural fit, and it’s likely this instinct played a part in the decision he made a few weeks later, which is what this story is about. But more on that later.]

  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 inner circle. They obtained what was needed—water, mattresses, mops, hedge clippers, air conditioners, light switches, wiring, lamps. The commander wanted computers; Matt found computers. Not crap computers, either. Sony flatscreen monitors, Intel Pentium 4 processors, and DVD drives. The rule was: Whatever you can use, you can take. And that is a rule that can be applied liberally.

  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. Johnnie Walker Red, Black, Blue, Gold, every label they make. There were crates of it. Matt and Jamal dried off with monogrammed towels and slept on Uday’s satin sheets. Matt carried a sweet chrome nine-millimeter in the small of his back; Jamal was partial to a long-nosed .357 that looked like something Dirty Harry might consider too ostentatious. There was so much stuff to be had that people didn’t really get greedy. First come, first served. [Given what happens later, it’s likely Matt is playing up the moral vacuum that existed then. Most of the stuff he acquired in Baghdad and in the months leading up to the war had legitimate purposes and was procured through proper channels. But he’s not lying about this shadier stuff. “Yes, that kind of thing was being done,” says Major Kent Rideout, the man who would investigate Matt Novak. “It was considered war booty, and there were no regulations put forth on what could and could not be taken home.” Officially, the Pentagon has since produced a document that dictates the rules and procedures for the procurement of acceptable war trophies—uniforms, insignia, patches, rucksacks, load-bearing equipment, flags, photos. But the lines get pretty blurry on the ground. Soldiers helping themselves to spoils is a phenomenon roughly as old as people fighting each other. There was a time commanders didn’t pay their armies except with the promise of fruitful pillaging. See Conan the Barbarian for reference. Or, in effect, the Civil War. Isn’t the basic rule of military action that once you beat someone, their shit is your shit? Isn’t that how we got, say, Montana? Isn’t part of the reason colonialism is considered impolite is that it’s an extension of the war-trophy rule to the nation-state level? Isn’t that a large part of what pisses some people off, rightly or wrongly, about our Iraqi adventure? Isn’t there a serious debate about whether we’re after democracy or cheap oil—or, more likely, don’t we believe in the convenient truth that we get both for the same low, though seriously rising, price?]

  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. Th
ey 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.]

  They find another door, and Jamal, Matt, and Moyer work on it. As soon as it opened, it was stale air, like a closet you hadn’t been in for a long time. There were two sheets coming down at real weird angles, covering the windows. And it looked like the floor was tiled with metal boxes. There is a total of $200 million in $100 bills in fifty galvanized-steel crates, riveted shut, with blue nylon bands around them. And then it just, one box began to—we had to know what it was—one box began to be opened. [This is how Matt says it. You can tell on the Novak tapes when he’s getting close to the money—his vocal cords tighten, he searches for words. The actions become disembodied. The box is opened. Like there is a ghost in the room, a spirit brought to life by the Novak Eight, made up of the shadowy parts of themselves none of them want to own, and this spook does the dirty work.] The top comes off awkwardly, and money spills to the floor in a great avalanche. Jamal can hear his heart beating in his ears. Is surreal the word? Just fantasy, you know what I mean? When the first box was opened I was like, There’s no way this shit is real. I think I said, “Holy fuck.”

  At almost the same time, a vehicle pulls up, and in walks First Sergeant Wilson and, depending on whom you ask, First Sergeant Burns. [While first sergeant is a pretty high rank, it’s not higher than lieutenant, which means that Greenley still has de facto responsibility. But Wilson has about twenty years’ experience on Greenley, which leads to a bit of confusion about who, exactly, is in charge. Right here, you see the notion of rank and the circumstances at that moment in Baghdad, undoing the normal sense of right and wrong. This is a common occurrence in war. Because what war does is turn what we accept as the unimpeachable rules of morality on their head: We can say that incinerating people is right, that exploding skulls with .50-cals can be an average event after which one eats an MRE and watches Happy Gilmore. And what we use as synthetic filler for that internal, hardwired moral structure is military discipline. It’s right because your superior officer tells you it’s right. And Matt’s crime was rejecting the synthetic filler, choosing himself over the system, being an individual. Saying, if it’s okay for you to blow people up, it’s okay for me to take a few million bucks that doesn’t really belong to anyone. War invites nihilism, after all, and Matt Novak simply opened the door when it came knocking.]

  Matt throws a stack of hundreds to First Sergeant Wilson. Say, First Sergeant, aren’t you getting ready to retire? Everyone’s passing money around the room now. Don’t you have kids going to college? Maybe you need this for a new vehicle. Some gets shoved at Greenley. Hey, Lieutenant, this isn’t right. You’re senior here! They’re just testing it out. They don’t know themselves if they’re serious about it yet.

  “If you’re going to do this,” First Sergeant Wilson says, “do it smartly.” [Keep in mind, this is the way Matt tells the story. But his version of events is almost exactly the same as the lead investigator’s.] “Take only the used bills. The new ones are traceable.”

  But there aren’t enough used bills in that first box. Most of them are crisp, untouched, wrapped in plastic. So, and here comes the ghost again, the second box gets opened. At that point, the whole room got fucking evil. Everything just going through my head. I won’t have to live like a dirt-poor soldier. Saw my wife with a new wedding ring on. Lieutenant Greenley leaves with Jamal to hide one of the boxes a hundred feet from where they slept and alert headquarters to the find, faking to the chain of command that all is right and honorable under the watch of First Lieutenant Greenley. Wilson disappears into the night with an unknown quantity of cash. [Wilson has never admitted to stealing money.] This chaos is all the result, as Matt sees it, of the vital error in the plan: opening the second box. Listening to dumb-ass First Sergeant Wilson when he said the old bills weren’t traceable. Like he knew what he was talking about.

  [But really, the fundamental failure wasn’t one of strategy; it was a failure of imagination. The money was like a blinding light to these guys—drawing them toward it, but way too powerful to actually look at and contemplate. It’s not even going to be there, they thought as they drove over to the building earlier that night, not wanting to jinx it. It’s not really going to be in those boxes, they thought when they saw the boxes. And once it was there, spilling out onto the floor and soaking up the blood from Matt’s hand wound, Matt thought, There’s no way that’s real, it’s impossible, it looks like Monopoly money, though logically he knew perfectly well that it was real. And so they found themselves in a situation they hadn’t planned for, hadn’t even allowed themselves to think about. And this, essentially, was the downfall of the Novak Eight. They lacked both the restraint to be unmoved by $200 million and the ability to imagine, and plan for, coming to possess it.]

  Without even speaking to each other, Matt and Moyer take a box and drop it into a canal across the street. The plan is to report to command that they found forty-eight boxes instead of fifty, come back later with scuba equipment Mat
t had taken from Uday’s house, and retrieve the money. Then Jamal comes back in the Humvee and drops another box in the canal, bringing the grand total of reappropriated money to $12 million. Before the curtain falls on the second act, there is about ten minutes of real happiness in the hot Baghdad night. This moment is as close as they would ever come to possessing that money, as close as they would ever come to free and clear. Jamal is drunk with the idea. He literally swoons and falls in the street. Does like the Nestea plunge. And Matt jumps on top of him. Who even remembers what they said to each other.

  Lieutenant Greenley calls in the money and at that minute Lieutenant Colonel deCamp and Major Rideout are already in their vehicles and headed for the scene. There is still loose money flying around, and Matt finds a nice pocket in the top of a short palm tree and stashes $200,000 in it. Moyer and Jamal have $400,000 they don’t know what to do with. It goes up into the tree, too; only now the stack is too high. You can see it from the road. This is so fucking stupid. They’re walking back toward the building, and Moyer keeps pulling out more money—a handful of hundreds stuffed in his boots, a stack stuffed in his underwear. What the fuck? He’s stashing money under rocks, in bushes, the Easter Bunny of $100 bills. This is totally fucking gay. And then Jamal decides there’s no way he is leaving this place without at least a hundred bucks. So Moyer produces three $100 bills, and they each take one as a souvenir. Oh, this is so fucking fucked—we’re fucked fucked fucked.