The comic biopic War Dogs starring Jonah Hill as Efraim Diveroli, the 22-year-old Miami Beach international arms dealer whose scandal was a nine days’ wonder in 2008, serves as a fun test of my instincts about how the world actually works.
Eight years ago, I went out on a limb to predict that the stoner bro who won a $300 million Pentagon contract to supply AK-47 ammunition to the Afghan army wasn’t going to be the Bush administration’s Watergate or even its Iran-Contra. The more I looked into it, the less it smelled like a vast conspiracy implicating the entire military-industrial complex all the way up to Dick Cheney…and the more it seemed like a Jonah Hill movie.
In my initial blog post, “More Amazing Adventures of Men With Gold Chains,” I pointed out that young Diveroli’s relatives weren’t exactly Texas oilmen.
Diveroli’s grandfather Yoav Botach is one of the richest landlords in Los Angeles. His uncle Shmuley Boteach, author of the best-selling advice book Kosher Sex and star of the reality TV show Shalom in the Home, was known as Michael Jackson’s rabbi.
Another uncle, BarKochba Botach, Diveroli’s former boss, runs a controversial gun shop in South Central L.A. His Botach Tactical is famous for its low prices and notorious for its antagonistic customer service. “War Dogs’ closest comparison is to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. But Scorsese didn’t have the courage to make the ethnic angle explicit.”
“Overall, it just sounds like a whole family full of self-starters,” I observed.
A couple of days after the news broke in The New York Times, I offered “A General Theory of the Afghan Ammo Swindle”:
Have you ever tried to buy a camera from the ads in the back pages of a camera magazine?... A friend bought a camera from one once, and it turned out to be a horrible experience. The package showed up very late, was missing essential pieces, and when he called to complain the customer service rep acted hostile and tried to sell him more stuff he didn’t want rather than fix his problem….
I asked him…what time do they close business on Friday?
2 p.m.
A satisfied customer named Steve Levine once wrote in praise of the famous photography store B&H (which is jokingly referred to as “Beards & Hats”):
Interestingly, B&H was the first “Hasidic”-owned camera store that decided to treat customers like human beings. In the pre–B&H days, all of the NYC camera stores were nearly impossible to deal with.
The old business model was bait and switch. Greedy, foolish goyishe kops didn’t deserve honest dealing. It’s an easy way to make money if you just don’t care when your rightfully angry customers scream at you over the phone. Most people don’t like being confronted when they’re guilty of breaking promises, but if it doesn’t bother you, then you’ve got a bright future in this kind of business.
Diveroli was simply applying the I-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale lessons he’d learned in retailing to international arms dealing. His career sounded like every funny story anybody had ever heard about Jewish business practices going back to Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?
Eventually, magazine reporters delved deep into the tale and confirmed my hunch. Ironically, the Pentagon’s online procurement system that Diveroli exploited was set up in response to complaints that Cheney’s old company Halliburton was getting too much business in Iraq.
Amusingly, Diveroli’s firm was listed as qualifying for affirmative-action privileges for being “minority-owned” and “disadvantaged.” Why? Because he checked the box as “Hasidic,” even though he never grew his beard longer than Don Johnson had on Miami Vice. (In 1984, the Reagan administration had declared the Hasidim an oppressed minority for purposes of government contracting.)
In 2011, actor Jonah Hill tried to buy the rights to Guy Lawson’s Rolling Stone article about Diveroli because, he said, he wanted to star in a movie about “hustler Jews from Miami.”
But The Hangover director Todd Phillips, born Todd Bunzl in Brooklyn, turned out to be “richer and faster.” (Speaking of men with gold chains, Phillips always does an Alfred Hitchcock-style cameo in each of his films, such as Old School, as “Barry,” a velour-tracksuit-wearing sleaze with a necklace sporting a Hebrew symbol.)
Ultimately, the two rivals for the rights teamed up to make War Dogs with Hill as the sociopathic Diveroli and Miles Teller (of Whiplash) as his dweeby partner David Packouz.
War Dogs is a solid mid-budget movie of the kind Hollywood doesn’t make enough of anymore. The rising arc of the first two-thirds of the film as the friends make their big score in Albanian ammunition is an exhilarating buddy business comedy.
The screenplay is fairly factual, although the action highlight—smuggling 5,000 pistols through Iraq’s Triangle of Death—is lifted from the lives of two other American salesmen.
On the other hand, the last third of War Dogs is a bit of a downer as the dudes get in legal trouble for not telling the Pentagon their Albanian ammo was actually made in China, which was still embargoed because of Tiananmen Square. Fittingly, they got ratted out by the only honest businessman in the movie, the “box guy” in Tirana whom Diveroli stiffed on his modest fee for repacking the banned Chinese bullets in Albanian cardboard.
War Dogs borrows from various genres that have emerged in the 21st century:
—Frequent Flyer films about complex legitimate businesses, such as Moneyball (in which Hill played Brad Pitt’s assistant), The Big Short, The Social Network, and Steve Jobs.
—Arms-dealer dramas like Nicolas Cage’s Lord of War.
—Miami goofball comedies like Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain and Dave Barry’s overlooked Big Trouble.
—And con-man movies like The Wolf of Wall Street (in which Hill played Leonardo DiCaprio’s assistant), Boiler Room, American Hustle, and Casino Jack.
War Dogs’ closest comparison is to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. But Scorsese didn’t have the courage to make the ethnic angle explicit. In his memoir, embezzler Jordan Belfort had explained the animus that motivated him:
I came to realize that the WASPs were yesterday’s news, a seriously endangered species no different than the dodo bird or spotted owl. And while it was true that they still had their little golf clubs and hunting lodges as last bastions against the invading shtetl hordes, they were nothing more than twentieth-century Little Big Horns on the verge of being overrun by savage Jews like myself…
Still, you can’t blame Scorsese. First, he is in the business of making big-budget movies with the vaguely Slavic Leonardo DiCaprio as his star. While a tremendous leading man, DiCaprio, unlike Scorsese’s former main man Robert De Niro, can’t play Jewish.
Second, although Scorsese is a living legend, he’s Italian, not Jewish. So does he really need the risk? How’s Mel Gibson’s career doing?
The Wolf’s lack of courage left an opening for Hill to move up to the alpha role in War Dogs, in which Phillips is explicit about where its antiheroes are coming from: Miami Beach. (The film even changes Diveroli’s financial backer from the Mormon he was in real life to Kevin Pollak in a yarmulke.) Unlike in The Social Network, where Aaron Sorkin rationalized Mark Zuckerberg’s chicanery by painting an implausible portrait of a 21st-century Harvard where Jews are on the outside looking in, War Dogs doesn’t offer any excuses. Jonah Hill’s Efraim Diveroli isn’t a victim of stereotypes; he is a stereotype.
Critics, however, have mostly been baffled by War Dogs, wondering why isn’t this movie an exposé of Dick Cheney? And since it’s not, what in the world is this movie about anyway?
Well, War Dogs is, as Jonah Hill said, about “hustler Jews from Miami.” That’s a topic that Phillips and Hill obviously find amusing. Jewish entertainers satirizing Jewish machers has been a staple at least since The Producers.
But to most journalists these days, the concept of making fun of Jewish business ethics is not even a thought that can be put into words, rather like how in 1984 the Declaration of Independence can only be described as “crimethink.”
A lot of people give the movies a hard time for their political biases (for example, the surplus of black computer geniuses). And yet films like War Dogs often are more frank in showing human realities than the critics who claim to summarize their lessons for us.