The Fort Bragg Cartel

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
A Forbes Best True Crime Book of 2025

“Probably the most gripping, memorable, eye-opening book I’ve read in months.” —David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times

“Propulsive.” —The Washington Post

“Engrossing. . . . Truly shocking.” —The New Republic

“The Fort Bragg Cartel opens like a nonfiction thriller and never lets up. A page-turning investigation into the dark side of our forever wars.”
—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S

A groundbreaking investigation into a string of unsolved murders at America’s premier special operations base, and what the crimes reveal about drug trafficking and impunity among elite soldiers in today’s military

In 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 America’s 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.Praise for The Fort Bragg Cartel

“Probably the most gripping, memorable, eye-opening book I’ve read in months is Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. It’s gripping because it’s a nonfiction narrative written with the energy of a pulpy thriller — full of guns, drugs, murders and coverups. It’s memorable because it documents an almost hard-to-believe scandal — two dead bodies found on a U.S. military base, one an elite Special Forces soldier and the other an Army quartermaster, and their connection to a large-scale weapons-smuggling and narcotics ring.”
—David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times

“A propulsive and deeply troubling account of military involvement in the drug trade, both domestically and abroad.”
—The Washington Post

“Astounding. . . . Nonfiction that reads like a novel.”
—Will Menaker, Chapo Trap House

“Propulsive. . . . Harp opens his story with the killing of one strung-out super-soldier at the hands of a Delta Force operator. Soon, Harp’s aperture widens to a field of death and drug dealing, and to a conspiracy that seems to link the poppy fields of wartime Afghanistan to the U.S. military’s most dangerous fighters.”
—The New Yorker

“Engrossing. . . . Harp chronicles some of the more troubling goings-on in this haunted region and the secretive, self-destructive warrior culture that has defined it for decades. . . . Truly shocking . . . Harp digs into the region’s thrumming undercut of plunder and violence, tracing a bloody trail that includes bullet-riddled bodies, sexual assault, a suspicious drowning, and a severed head. In July 2022, one man even fell from the sky.”
—Jasper Craven, The New Republic

“The Fort Bragg Cartel focuses on the sleazy world of a couple of U.S. Army special operators who got heavily into dealing drugs and using them in vast quantities. . . . It seems that we all are doomed to continue finding new ways to pay the bills—physical, emotional, financial, moral—of wars that never seem to end.”
—Thomas E. Ricks, The New York Times Book Review

“[An] explosive investigation into drug dealing, murder, and suicide within America’s special operations forces groups, notably superelite Delta Force. . . . A book to be taken seriously by the country’s political class and military establishment.”
—Jeff Calder, The Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Unlike most of what passes for military affairs journalism, Harp’s book refuses to abide by the worshipful clichés or even the occasional ‘bad apple’ explanations. To the contrary, Harp paints a picture of Fort Bragg—and with it, the entire military-industrial-carceral complex—that, in keeping with his opening vignette, shows it to be not only pernicious or criminal but downright fratricidal. And this fratricide, far from being contained within the darkest corners of the warfare state, is actively reinforcing an ever more war-addled United States.”
—Lyle Jeremy Rubin, The Nation

“The Fort Bragg Cartel opens like a nonfiction thriller and never lets up. A page-turning investigation into the dark side of our forever wars.”
—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S

“The characters in his book are middle-class American men, often fathers and usually white, massacring families while high on drugs they bought with money they stole while defending a regime of pedophile warlords, who were themselves extorting a country in which about one-third of people knew how to read. . . . The most affecting parts of The Fort Bragg Cartel are the vignettes Harp collects showing the devastation soldiers inflict on their families.”
—Grayson Scott, The Baffler

“Throughout the early 2020s, there was a wave of disturbing crimes related to the shadowy Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Harp demonstrates that government officials turned a blind eye as JSOC operators stole, killed, raped, and smuggled, shielding them from both military and civilian justice. . . . The wild story of [Freddie Wayne] Huff's rise and fall by itself makes the book worth reading. . . . What all the characters involved in this bizarre saga had in common was a total lack of accountability. As long as America treats JSOC as a warrior caste above the law, some of these warriors will abuse their privileges.”
—Matthew Petti, Reason

“A searing and absolutely essential exposé about the toll that decades of war has taken on our soldiers, our military, and our government. Harp has produced a stunning, masterful work of reporting that every American should read. Riveting and unforgettable.”
—Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of Kochland and The Lords of Easy Money

“By turns informative, explosive, and provocative, The Fort Bragg Cartel reveals in gritty detail how drugs have corrupted the U.S. Army’s most elite units from the inside out.”
—Sean Naylor, New York Times bestselling author of Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command

“A deeply reported, terrifyingly vivid plunge into the drug-fueled underbelly of life in the U.S. military’s elite special forces. The psychic cost of killing in the name of America haunts every page. This is an anti-war book for our time.”
—Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

“With The Fort Bragg Cartel, Seth Harp offers a chilling glimpse inside the rotten core of American empire. This book lays bare the secretive cult of U.S. special forces and follows a trail of murder, drug-smuggling, and corruption, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the pine forests of North Carolina. The Fort Bragg Cartel is at once a meticulous investigation of rampant criminality and impunity within Delta Force, a tragic study of young people chewed up and spat out, and a dire warning of the devastation wrought at home and abroad by forever war.”
—Noah Hurowitz, author of El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord

“A fantastic book, the best I have seen on the global war on terrorism and the wreckage it left behind. The depth of Harp’s reporting is awesome.”
—Andrew Cockburn, author of The Spoils of War: Profit, Power, and the American War Machine

“A page-turning true crime story that tracks the downward spiral of drug-addled lunatics trained by an immoral government to kill innocent people for political reasons. The implications of this book are more important than ever as the U.S. moves towards fascism in the age of Trump.”
—Christopher Ketcham, author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“A blistering exposé of criminality within the U.S. Army’s Special Forces. . . . Harp’s investigative rigor and visceral storytelling make this a disturbing must-read for anyone seeking to understand the full cost of America’s overseas conflicts.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In 2020, two bodies were found near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Harp’s chronicle of a group of soldiers, all of whom were damaged by their experiences in the Middle East, is a tale of drugs and murder and illustrates how such emotional damage can lead to tragic consequences. Harp, an Iraq War veteran and investigative reporter, also shows how colleagues seeking to protect their ‘brothers in arms’ only made matters worse.”
—Booklist

“An unsettling read, the book will nevertheless enlighten anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and the role of the military in it. A scathing exposé of drug trafficking, homicide, and suicide in the U.S. military.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[Harp] knows the law and the military and brings a muckraker’s sensibility to his subject. His revelations keep coming, page after page.”
—The Shepherd ExpressSeth Harp is an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, he has reported from countries including Iraq, Syria, Mexico, and Ukraine for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, and The Texas Observer. His work has been supported by residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo, and he is a 2025 ASU Future Security Fellow at New America. Before becoming a journalist, Harp practiced law for five years, and was an Assistant Attorney General for the state of Texas. During college and law school, he served in the United States Army Reserve and did one tour of duty in Iraq.Chapter One
I Kill People for a Living


Two veteran Special Forces soldiers, still drunk from the night before, their brains fried from a days-long binge on cocaine, MDMA, prescription pills, and a grab bag of mind-altering chemicals commonly sold in smoke shops as “bath salts,” were driving home from Walt Disney World the morning of March 21, 2018, when Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar, riding in the passenger seat, devel­oped an unshakable conviction that their car was being followed. Le­shikar’s hard blue eyes, cracked with bloodshot veins from lack of sleep, studied the side-view mirror. He could have sworn that he saw shadowy pursuers on their tail, flitting in and out of the hazy lanes of traffic be­hind them on the Dixie Highway.

The driver of the car, Master Sergeant William Lavigne II, a mem­ber of the U.S. Army’s top- secret Delta Force who had been trained in evasive driving and countersurveillance, told Leshikar that he was hal­lucinating. They were northbound on Interstate 95, headed for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where both men were stationed. Lavigne, the older and more highly ranking of the two, had been keeping a close watch on the rearview mirror for miles. There was no one on their six o’clock, he insisted. But Leshikar wouldn’t listen.

Two little girls, Lavigne’s daughter and Leshikar’s, were in the back of the car, tired and sunburned after days of exploring the theme parks in and around Orlando, Florida. They were too young to understand what the tense bickering in the front seats was about. All they knew was that their daddies were starting to scare them.

According to Leshikar’s mother, sister, and wife, he had been acting strangely for the last six months. The trouble began, they said, in late 2017, as a result of an ambiguous mishap that he sustained while on de­ployment to Tajikistan, a remote and mountainous narco-state that the United States used for many years as a staging ground for the war in Afghanistan. What exactly happened to Leshikar in Tajikistan, a global hub of international heroin trafficking, is a mystery. An anodyne Penta­gon press release states that he and his Green Beret teammates were there to train the Tajik military on standard infantry tactics like target practice, rock drills, and first aid. Everyone in the accompanying photo­graph looks pretty bored. But upon Leshikar’s return to the United States, he didn’t seem like the same person. His appearance had changed, too. “When he came home,” said his mother, Tammy Mabey, “notably, you could see a droopiness in his eye.”

Leshikar told her and his wife, Laura, that he and his team had come under attack in an ambush and that a roadside bomb had rocked the truck he was in, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury. But a spokes­man for the United States Army Special Operations Command, known as USASOC, said that no American soldier has ever been killed or wounded in Tajikistan. Nor do Leshikar’s personnel records reflect that he was awarded a Purple Heart, a decoration given to soldiers wounded as a result of enemy action.

Whatever the cause of Leshikar’s injury, a military doctor had pre­scribed him tramadol, an opioid painkiller that was freely distributed to elite troops during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and became a popular drug of abuse among special operations soldiers. Leshikar also came back from Tajikistan with a steady supply of the benzodiazepine Xanax, which he took along with tramadol to treat anxiety associated with his supposed PTSD, another claimed effect of the fictitious am­bush. On top of this volatile pharmaceutical cocktail, which, in addition to suppressing the central nervous system, can cause bizarre episodes of uninhibited behavior, Leshikar had taken up snorting cocaine. He tried to rationalize it, telling Tammy that he and his fellow Green Berets reg­ularly used the stuff to stay awake during night operations. “It’s just like taking an antidepressant,” he’d said.

Tammy, a single mother who had worked for a succession of small-town police departments in the Pacific Northwest, first as a jailer and dispatcher, later as a patrolwoman, wasn’t convinced. Cocaine is illegal, not something prescribed by a doctor, she reasoned. But it was her son’s alcohol consumption that concerned her the most. “Marky always acted perfectly fine when doing cocaine,” she said. “When Marky would spiral was if he drank too much.”

In the past, Leshikar had been a proud, stoic, taciturn man, not given to displays of incontinent emotion. Now, after no more than two or three alcoholic beverages, which combined poorly with the medica­tions he was on, a maudlin gloominess would overtake him, a sullen and wounded sort of machismo. He would turn to his wife and say things like “You know I’m a bad person, right? I kill people for a living.”


In a photo taken at an American base in Afghanistan, where he served six months in combat from 2015 to 2016, Leshikar wears wrap­around Oakley sunglasses, a thick beard, and a pleased grin while getting pinned with a Bronze Star medal and a Combat Infantry Badge. In other photos, he sports a custom skull patch on the front of his body armor, a Confederate battle flag on his left shoulder, and an oversize belt buckle shaped like a fanged demon with ram’s horns.

“Such a pigheaded, egotistical man,” was the first impression that he made on Laura, a paralegal originally from Hawaii whose dad was a marine. She initially scoffed at his swaggering boastfulness and the ridiculous lies he told. He was rather tall and handsome, though: six feet four, with light blue eyes and a jawline as well defined as a carpen­ter’s square. “Over time,” said Laura, “he grew on me.”

Leshikar was born in 1984 in rural Idaho and joined the active-duty Air Force at age eighteen. He served in the Air Force Honor Guard, a ceremonial unit in which he felt left out of the real action entailed in America’s escalating wars. In 2010, after an aimless period in civilian employ, he secured a Special Forces slot in Washington state’s Army National Guard and was sent to Fort Bragg for Green Beret training.

Assigned to the 19th Special Forces Group, a National Guard for­mation that has teams of part-time Green Berets stationed all over the country, Leshikar went on to patch together a career as a so‑called guard bum, a reservist with no other regular source of employment who jumps from orders to orders, picking up deployments, temporary duty assignments, and paid training gigs as often as possible. He de­ployed for a year to the Philippines, worked for a time as a SWAT trainer and private security guard, then did his tours in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

“His deployments were pretty kinetic,” said Jordan Terrell, a para­trooper in Fort Bragg’s 82nd Airborne Division, originally from Chi­cago, who was friends with Leshikar. “I know he threw a bunch of incendiary grenades on a villager’s hut and burned a couple of people alive,” Terrell said. “He showed me videos. It was pretty fucked up.”

Shortly after returning from Tajikistan in 2017, Leshikar suffered a severe clonic-tonic seizure, resulting in his hospitalization. A computed tomography scan of his brain, as well as magnetic resonance imaging, failed to disclose any physical trauma. There was no clear etiology for the seizure, but the doctor who examined him surmised that it had something to do with his heavy use of prescription drugs, as well as chronic insomnia.

In February 2018, about a month before the ill-fated trip to Disney World, Leshikar’s little sister Nicole Rick and her husband, a Navy sub­mariner, stayed with Mark and Laura for two weeks while closing on a house in Chesapeake, Virginia. Whenever a babysitter could be found to look after their children, the group of four young parents, all in their mid-thirties, went out on the town together, invariably joined by Leshikar’s best friend, Billy Lavigne, the Delta Force soldier. “Full disclo­sure,” Nicole said, “me and Billy and Mark all did coke together.”

Before hitting a bar or club, they would stop at Lavigne’s house, a cookie-cutter tract home at the end of a cul‑de‑sac in a newly con­structed subdivision of Fayetteville, the moody military town, a low- slung sprawl of suburbs and strip malls, studded with billboards, that surrounds Fort Bragg on three sides. Lavigne had recently divorced, and now that his wife and daughter had moved out, the three-bedroom house was often full of his fellow operators from Delta Force, a highly classified unit a cut above the ordinary Special Forces.

No less secretive than the Central Intelligence Agency, Delta Force exists to carry out covert actions, defined under federal law as overseas operations “in which it is intended that the role of the United States government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” Wearing civilian clothes or operating in disguise under false identities, soldiers from Delta Force infiltrate foreign countries and commit clandestine acts of sabotage, espionage, and assassination, often on direct orders from the White House. Behind a heavy curtain of government secrecy, twenty-plus years at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Syria, the Philippines, and elsewhere has given rise in this ultra- lite unit to a toxic culture of addiction, criminality, madness, violence, and impunity.

“The unit guys kind of separate themselves into two groups,” said Terrell, who, like Leshikar, aspired to join Delta Force but failed to meet the rigorous and often arbitrary selection criteria. “You have the teetotalers, the guys who are super Christian, warriors for God. No drugs, no alcohol, super goody-goody, by the book. Then you have the guys who are just complete fucking derelicts, constantly doing nefarious shit.”

Lavigne definitely belonged to the latter category, as did his buddies who congregated at his house. Laura and Nicole described his core group of friends from the unit as half a dozen tall white men, grizzled and bearded and heavily tattooed, ranging in age from their late twen­ties to early forties. In between shots of liquor and lines of cocaine, they joked about the operations they had been on and boasted of their exploits in combat, indefatigable in their attempts to one‑up each other. “You got 42 confirmed kills?” said Laura, imitating a man’s deep voice. “Well, I got 120.”

Laura, Nicole, and Terrell, who himself sold marijuana and psilocy­bin mushrooms on Fort Bragg, all attested to the flagrant and continu­ous use of cocaine as well as MDMA and other drugs by a regular procession of active-duty Delta Force operators at Billy Lavigne’s resi­dence. “They’ve done coke in front of me,” said Laura. “Other operators that were there. Sometimes when I would walk into Billy’s house, it was just everywhere.”

Lavigne was the one who dealt the cocaine. He collected the cash, went off someplace to meet with somebody, and when he came back, doled out the coke to those who partook. “Billy coordinated it,” said Nicole. “All the money that was pulled together was given to Billy.”

“Drugs are just the culture there,” Terrell said of Delta Force. “Everybody knows it, everybody is complicit in it, and nobody does anything about it.”