Freddie Wayne Huff, a North Carolina K9 police officer turned DEA task force officer, built his reputation on traffic stops that strip millions in cash from drug couriers along I-85. While working with the DEA, a dying analyst named Karl Culberson reveals to him that the government could stop the drug flow but will not. Huff, Culberson says, is just a “pawn” (165), and everything he is doing is in vain. Huff returns to Lexington police in 2010 and keeps seizing money from motorists—most of them people of color—for minor violations, then joins the state patrol. He is fired in 2014 after ticketing a well-connected donor to the governor, which he takes as proof that the system protects its own. Running an appliance export hustle to survive, he learns that a Laredo refurbisher, Aguilar Appliance Repair, sits inside the Treviño Morales family orbit of the “most feared” (167) Mexican cartel, Los Zetas. He cultivates trust, conceals his law enforcement past, and meets Ruben Treviño Morales in a McAllen parking lot, securing a wholesale pipeline.

From 2016 to 2021, Huff becomes Los Zetas’ primary distributor in the Carolinas, hiding kilos in appliance shipments and a High Point warehouse, moving 50 to 100 every week or so, and teaching smugglers how to counter K9 units with ammonia-soaked shop towels, multilayer vacuum seals, and a lead-lined hollow axle to defeat X-rays. He outfits a redbrick house in Lexington with motorized compartments, sells wholesale to local gangs, and carries twin subcompact .380 Glocks while surrounding himself with “trained wingmen” (171) who are current or former police officers, Marines, and soldiers. When FBI agents visit about an employee, Robert Seward, who once joined and then fled ISIS, the contact chain leads to Timothy Dumas, a former Fort Bragg quartermaster who looks clean cut and disciplined and quickly becomes Huff’s closest partner. Dumas can liquidate product at remarkable speed through a quiet network at Fort Bragg, which he describes as an unspoken, self-policing group of Special Forces soldiers who turned to organized crime during Afghanistan deployments. They are men who settle disputes like cartel members and who also move grenades and automatic weapons stolen from armories, while Dumas keeps the property books from showing losses.

Dumas introduces Huff to his longtime Army friend David Garcia and to Orlando Fitzhugh, a former paratrooper once investigated for on-post dealing and later convicted of federal cocaine trafficking. Both refuse to talk about the military drug groups, which Huff reads as fear rather than ignorance. In late 2019 Dumas hands Huff a thumb drive and asks him to hold it as an insurance policy, a “kind of dead man’s switch” (175) addressed to a general. According to Huff the drive holds the names of soldiers who bring Afghan opiates into the United States and distribute them on Fort Bragg. Huff hides the drive but reads the file, calling it deeply incriminating. Years later, he can recall only one name with certainty, a white Army dealer he and Dumas know as Will Lavigne, who supplies methamphetamine and cocaine on post and around Fayetteville. The portrait that emerges matches the pattern authorities kept out of the papers, a trafficking and weapons diversion ecosystem that mirrors national cases in which service members feed a clandestine river of guns and drugs, and that in Huff’s telling turns the base into “its own little cartel” (176).

On February 5, 2019, a woman overdoses on heroin in Billy Lavigne’s living room. Deputies revive her with naloxone and leave without pressing charges. He enters Army rehab at Fort Gordon and immediately refuses to participate, then screens positive for cocaine at Womack on March 28. He is marked nondeployable for “an unspecified psychiatric illness” (177) despite otherwise passable health. On August 28, he sells his house at a loss, moves into a one-bedroom near a Dollar General and a Taco Bell, and the same day drives the support truck for Coast x Coast’s Ride for the Fallen while Cris Vallejo rides point. By late 2019, he is with Amanda Tostado, an exotic dancer with a long arrest history. Lavigne drifts deeper into a circle that includes her cousin Britton Ray Whittington and ex-boyfriend Bobby Lee Anderson, both violent offenders. Whittington, a prolific trafficker later jailed for human trafficking, describes meeting Lavigne through “dealing dope” (180). Multiple sources, including two CID agents, identify Timothy Dumas as the crew’s wholesale supplier; locals recognize Dumas as “Chief” and say the clique buys cartel cocaine. Lavigne acts as enforcer, escorts loads, collects debts, and is never without guns, while constantly jotting notes for a book he wants to write about Delta Force.

On February 7, 2020, an administrative board spares Lavigne a general discharge and preserves his pension, which briefly lifts his mood. Ten days later, just after midnight, he commits a hit and run and, for once, the charge sticks. As COVID shuts down North Carolina, Lavigne tells his first wife by text that he is writing a book and that he shot his best friend during a domestic incident. He adds that charges were dropped and it is his turn to “hit back” (183). CID’s Jeremy Speer twice tries to question him after drug tests; Lavigne stays silent, looks agitated, and appears to be unraveling. On July 22, he allegedly fires at a petty dealer outside a crack house, is detained as a suspect for assault with a deadly weapon, and again avoids charges. On October 30, he is finally booked on the hit and run. He brings Tostado to Thanksgiving at his mother’s house; that weekend, a tall, bald Black man, later identified by Dumas’s son as his father, picks Lavigne up from Judy’s house. He tells his dad he will retire in February and build a cabin in Michigan. On November 30, he arrives at a trailer park in a ski mask with a crossbow to kill a woman’s abusive boyfriend, breaks down sobbing that he is a “monster” (187) who killed his best friend, agrees to enter detox, and is described by the same woman as working cartel loads with Dumas. Eleven months later, she is murdered by Javeeno Resimo, a protégé of Whittington, and sentenced to life.

Cocaine sales surge through early COVID. Freddie Huff and Timothy Dumas split shipments between Fort Bragg and civilian markets. Meanwhile, rumors surround Will Lavigne: He owes money on fronted meth and may be cooperating with the FBI. Huff looks like a police officer but proves otherwise to Puerto Rican connector Jaime Rosado, who sees gang members lining up at Huff’s Lexington stash house and realizes that Huff is a “crazy, crazy dude” (190). The crew’s muscle includes Joey “Bananas” Green, a gold-toothed hit man who brawls with Dumas, while Dumas himself moves everywhere armed, flaunts machine guns, .50-cal rifles, and Fort Bragg grenades. Dumas boasts that his background in special operations means that he can burn labs, steal product, and fly kilos home on military planes. By 2020, both bosses are unraveling: Huff consumes an ounce of cocaine a day and drives around in a filthy Lamborghini; Dumas stays up for days and becomes “obsessed with skulls” (191). On March 28, a 9mm round is fired through a family’s apartment wall near Cross Creek. Police name Dumas as the suspect, but no charges follow.

Just after midnight on April 11, Huff and Dumas kick in a Walkertown apartment door yelling “Police—search warrant,” get boxed in by deputies, and land in jail. Dumas is charged with burglary, threats, and impersonating an officer, but Huff walks thanks to his friendly relationship with local lawmen. He spends large sums of money on escorts and gambling. In an Orlando safehouse, $100,000 vanishes, poisoning the partnership until Dumas tells Huff that Joey Green has disappeared. Huff later claims Dumas snapped Green’s neck, dismembered him with Robert Seward, and buried the parts in cases beneath Dumas’s son T.J.’s house, though a later FBI search finds nothing. Dumas arrives at Huff’s basement looking sick and certain that Lavigne is an informant, a belief that fits Lavigne’s string of dropped felony charges and pointed questions about Huff. Huff says he urges him to stand down as he packs for a Los Zetas trip to Texas. Instead, Dumas takes four kilos, calls Lavigne with “a mission” (197), and sets a Fayetteville meet for that night. He drives south while Huff boards a private plane to San Antonio en route to McAllen.

Eric Haney describes Fort Bragg as “about as drab and unappealing a spot as you can find in North America” (198). Near sunset on December 2, 2020, an off-duty soldier hunting deer follows a firebreak toward McArthur Lake and finds a gray Chevrolet Colorado stuck in a rut. A heavyset Black man lies face down nearby, and the hunter calls 911 to Army CID. While he waits, he notices a second body in the truck bed, a white man wrapped in “a blood-soaked painter’s tarp” (199). The next morning, Special Agent Jeremy Speer learns that the Black man is Timothy Dumas, a former 95th Civil Affairs chief warrant officer, and the white man is William Lavigne II, a recently expelled Delta operator. At the scene, investigators note that Lavigne was stripped to running shorts and had gunshot wounds to his chest, groin, and leg. He had a chest tattoo memorializing March 21, 2018. Dumas appears to be shot in the forehead at close range, consistent with an execution using a small-caliber pistol.

CID assembles a working theory based on text messages and the absence of drugs, guns, or cash. Dumas was moving kilos of cocaine on Fort Bragg, and Lavigne was wholesaling while using heavily and owed money to a Fayetteville supplier. Agents infer that Dumas and an unidentified third participant tracked and killed Lavigne, wrapped him in the tarp, and tried to dump him in McArthur Lake, but got stuck. The third man shot Dumas to eliminate any witnesses. Dumas’s truck later turns up in Laurinburg, burned and stripped of plates. T. J. Dumas, the son of Timothy Dumas, rejects talk of gangs or cartels on base. He asserts that “professionals” (203) are responsible, suggesting as a motive his father’s blackmail letter about drug pipelines from Afghanistan. News reports note both men were under drug investigation, and for the first time, officials confirm that Lavigne killed Mark Leshikar in 2018 and was cleared. Lavigne’s obituary hails him as a hero and asks for donations to Coast x Coast. The funeral at Fort Bragg’s JFK Chapel draws unit friends but not his girlfriend, Amanda Tostado, whom family members distrust. The same week, the Army discloses that Specialist Enrique Roman-Martinez was murdered and decapitated months earlier. CID pursues leads into early 2021, seizing Lavigne’s rifles and finding his storage units packed with gear. The FBI asserts jurisdiction on February 1, removes CID’s files and digital records, and later blocks release under FOIA. Lavigne is buried at the Sandhills State Veterans Cemetery as family and friends describe a damaged soldier failed by the system.

Days after the Fort Bragg double homicide, the FBI informs Homeland Security Investigations that ex-trooper and former DEA task force officer Freddie Huff is sourcing “large quantities of illegal narcotics from Mexico” (211), prompting an HSI-led task force with local and state partners. In the underworld, Huff is suspected because he and Timothy Dumas had recently fallen out, though he persuades some of Dumas’s circle that he is clean while others vanish or cut ties. A confidential informant tells agents that Huff is moving 50 to 100 kilos of cocaine every week or so, keeping exotic cars and multiple houses. Huff replaces Dumas with Marine sergeant Rahain Deriggs, a supply specialist who becomes his bodyguard and aide. Deriggs is stopped in Texas in March 2021 with $210,021, pushing Huff to rely on a Puerto Rican source in Orlando who fronts cocaine under threat of violence. When Winston-Salem dealer Hundred K refuses to pay for $150,000 in product, Huff, Deriggs, and liaison Jaime Rosado abduct Hundred K’s lieutenant, Rise, extort 80,000 dollars and jewelry from him, then foolishly front more kilos only to be taunted again. A buyer points them to Michael Sosa as the stash holder and, at dawn on May 28, two masked men in US Marshals gear invade Sosa’s compound, zip tie family members, and strip the house of cash, diamonds, guns, and drugs. They place a 911 call on a burner phone that investigators tie to Huff.

By late May, the task force has controlled buys, surveillance, and the Sosa robbery, so arrests cascade. Agents grab Huff at a convenience store and Rosado with eleven kilos in his car, then round up eight more, including Deriggs and Huff’s son. Searches recover two kilos of heroin, five pounds of marijuana, 60 kilos of meth in Huff’s basement, 300,000 dollars in cash, tools for sealing and counting, and eight guns, among them a Glock 42 in Huff’s Lamborghini. They also seize a thumb drive that Huff says contains Dumas’s blackmail letter naming a Fort Bragg pipeline though “none of the cops read what was on the thumb drive” (218).