The Cowboys of Kabul-How A Pair Of TX Grandparents Cashed In On Afghanistan's Contracting Bonanza

The Cowboys of Kabul
How a pair of bankrupt Texas grandparents cashed in on Afghanistan's contracting bonanza.
—By Daniel Schulman

Jul 27, 2009

It was March 2002, and Del and Barbara Spier were flat broke. The Texas couple, grandparents of five and owners of a small, Houston-based private investigations firm, were more than $260,000 in debt. They carried balances as high as $18,600 on more than a dozen credit cards and were saddled with $80,000 in outstanding bank loans and a $95,000 mortgage. In their bankruptcy filing, the Spiers' company, which they founded in 1987 and named the Agency for Investigation and Protective Services, was deemed of "no marketable value."

Although their circumstances looked dire, the Spiers were about to become millionaires. By May, Barbara Spier had filed the paperwork to form a new corporation called US Protection and Investigations. Soon, thanks to the contracting sweepstakes that was the war in Afghanistan, she was signing an $8.4 million deal with the Louis Berger Group. The multinational construction and engineering company had landed a $214 million contract to rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure—roads, water and sanitation, power and dams—from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USPI's job was to provide security for contractors repairing a 300-mile road stretching from Kabul to Kandahar.

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The former USPI security coordinator told me, "I remember at one point seeing boxes of cash that they were bringing in. I thought, 'Wow, that's really fucking weird.'"

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Accounts Deceivable: "They Were Double and Triple Billing"

On August 28, 2007, Afghan police, FBI and USAID agents, and Blackwater contractors descended on USPI's Kabul offices, weapons drawn. "Have you ever seen a dynamic entry, where people are clearing rooms out with guns locked and loaded and shoving a gun in your face? That's the way Blackwater did their entry into the house," says a former USPI supervisor. Agents seized computers and contraband weapons and carted off bags full of company records. Meanwhile, federal authorities were executing a search warrant at USPI's Texas headquarters. Since 2005, federal investigators had quietly been amassing evidence that USPI had defrauded the US government in connection with its USAID subcontracts. Now they were making their move.

much more:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/cowboys-of-kabul

None of us here could have predicted that, could we have?