The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

On May 29, 2020, a wildlife biologist finds a severed human head on the beach on Shackleford Banks, soon identified as belonging to Enrique Roman-Martinez. The autopsy confirms homicide, noting multiple chop injuries and a neck transection caused by a sharp, heavy tool. The cause of death is ruled as “homicide” (234). As news reaches Fort Bragg, CID is already interrogating Private Annamarie Cochell, and over the next days, investigators interview all seven campers who were with Roman on Cape Lookout. Many waive counsel, surrender phones, take polygraphs, and deny wrongdoing. Agents focus on the group due to delayed reporting, a covert attempt to hide Cochell’s presence, and a break-in at Roman’s barracks that may have removed his journal, yet they cannot establish a motive. CID builds exhaustive profiles, clones devices, subpoenas records, interviews hundreds of witnesses, and returns repeatedly to the islands with dogs, divers, and drones, but finds no blood, no matching tool marks, and no physical trace linking the campers to the killing.

Despite two autopsies and outside experts rejecting the possibility that Roman-Martinez’s head was severed by a boat-propeller, CID keeps circling back to suicide or accident, floating a scenario in which Roman, in a psychedelic crisis, enters the ocean and is later decapitated by a vessel. A third examination at Dover and a fourth review in North Carolina again affirm homicide, noting an intact skull and vertebrae inconsistent with propeller trauma, yet CID’s public statement on August 2021 still invites tips from boaters and pushes “the theory that he had been accidentally decapitated by a boat propeller” (239). With no evidence to charge murder, the Army prosecutes the seven for lesser offenses: violating the COVID travel order, making false statements about Cochell, and, for some, illegal drug use. Each pleads guilty to some charges, takes rank reductions, forfeits pay, and is separated, but none implicates another in Roman’s death. CID closes the file as a cold case while Fort Bragg reels from an “unprecedented wave” (242) of suicides, overdoses, and homicides. Within weeks, another murder surfaces involving a traumatized special operations soldier from the 98th Civil Affairs Battalion, the same brigade where Timothy Dumas once served.

Keith Lewis grows from a “Sweet, animal-loving kid” (243) into a combat veteran traumatized by an IED blast and grim scenes in Afghanistan. After transferring to Fort Bragg, he trains as a special operations medic with the 8th Psychological Operations Group and later the 98th Civil Affairs Battalion, begins using anabolic steroids, and develops rages that spill into domestic violence. In 2016, he assaults his wife, Air Force veteran Sarah Lewis, during a gun standoff that ends without prosecution. Despite nonjudicial punishment, he is promoted and continues drinking, injecting steroids, and abusing his wife through 2020 as she nears term with their second child. Family members say Sarah warns his unit in December that he is intoxicated, armed, and threatening to kill her, but nothing changes. On December 22, 2020, she flees to a neighbor while Lewis holds their three-year-old daughter and fires armor-piercing rounds, killing Sarah and the full-term infant. He calls 911 to say that she is dead and adds that “steroids and alcohol don’t mix” (246) before turning the gun on himself.

In the aftermath, uniformed Army officers remove electronics and effects from the home and car. Sarah’s phone never returns to her family. When Sarah’s parents lawfully enter weeks later, they find a trove of syringes and vials including trenbolone acetate and testosterone propionate, suggesting that drug distribution is taking place on base. Harp describes a broad culture of tolerance for performance-enhancing drugs within Army special operations, noting cases like IT specialist David Rankine’s steroid importation and subsequent violence, as well as a spate of sudden cardiac deaths among exceptionally fit operators and officers at Fort Bragg: Captain Robert Sean Latham, Sergeant Calvin Thomas Rockward, and Delta Force troop commander Major Eric Adam Ewoldsen. Families are met with stonewalling on records and autopsies, while the command maintains silence about pervasive substance use and its toll. Lynda Lewis keeps her son’s body in storage, seeking proof of brain injury and treatment history. She calls daily for answers, only to be told that she should “get a lawyer” (250).

By the end of 2020, Fort Bragg records 54 soldier deaths, with another 54 following in 2021, a total of 109 fatalities in two years, nearly all stateside. Most are suicides, overdoses, or homicides. Families are met with silence and evasions from Army officials. Heather Baker, whose 19-year-old son, Private Caleb Smither, is found in an “advanced state of decomposition” (251) in his bunk, describes bruises and neglect; officials call it meningitis, but her questions go unanswered. Army JAG’s Colonel Adam Kazin dismisses the crisis as coincidence, comparing Fort Bragg’s mortality rate to that of a civilian city. Yet no other US base in modern times has recorded 50 or more deaths in one year, Harp notes. Fort Hood’s 2020 scandal draws national outrage and congressional action, while Fort Bragg is barely mentioned even though deaths average one per week. In February 2020, a captain kills himself in a “rare multiple-gunshot suicide” (253) involving both a shotgun and a pistol, the first of 21 suicides that year. The suicide rate at Fort Bragg approaches 40 per 100,000, three times the national average. Overdoses are the second leading cause of death, with fentanyl, alcohol, and other substances claiming dozens of soldiers, including Specialist Christopher Jenkins, Special Forces candidate Jamie Boger, Specialist Cristhiam Gonzalez Pineda, and Green Beret trainee Zachary Bracken. Families receive little information. Andrea Bracken claims to have “many unanswered questions, but nobody seems to give a shit” (254). Fentanyl becomes the leading killer among Americans aged 18-45, and Fort Bragg’s overdose rate of 36 per 100,000 surpasses even the US average as well that of as most other bases, rivaled only by Fort Campbell.

This wave unfolds amid a broader “meltdown” (255) of discipline within special operations. Under President Donald Trump, military pardons, war crimes controversies, and a string of criminal cases deepen chaos. Green Berets Dan Gould and Henry Royer are caught smuggling forty kilos of cocaine from Colombia; a former Ranger commits a contract killing; Marine Raiders and SEALs are involved in violent crimes, drug use, and sexual assault. Trump pardons Major Mathew Golsteyn for the confessed murder of a detainee in Afghanistan, and ex-Green Berets attempt a failed coup in Venezuela. After Biden’s election and the Fort Bragg murders, commanders attempt a crackdown on drug trafficking but achieve little. New policies in 2021 expand drug testing and surveillance, yet corruption persists. Master Sergeant Martin Acevedo of the 82nd Airborne is caught receiving two kilos of cocaine by mail but serves only seven months before returning to duty. Around the same time, federal agents arrest trafficker Freddie Huff and his partners Jaime Rosado and Rahain Deriggs. Huff, withdrawing in jail, considers suicide before cooperating, telling investigators that—despite his animosity toward Dumas—Dumas “was [his] truest friend” (258).

As Fort Bragg leadership faces mounting deaths and crime, internal reviews reveal soaring offenses and shoddy policing. General Erik Kurilla orders CID to “fix it before [they] get investigated” (259). Undercover agent Maegan Malloy targets soldiers and military police dealing drugs. Even Military Police officers are implicated, such as an officer named Jacob Dickerson who sells oxycodone and Percocet from his patrol car. CID’s cases collapse, however, when prosecutors drop trafficking charges, issuing only light punishment. By year’s end, 265 paratroopers are expelled and 209 soldiers court-martialed for narcotics offenses, yet overdoses continue. Specialists Joshua Diamond and Matthew Disney die from counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl, followed by more soldiers across ranks and units. Nineteen others die by suicide in 2021. Murders persist, from jealous lovers to mental breakdowns, as drug deaths and despair define life on base. Only one Fort Bragg soldier, Staff Sergeant Ryan Knauss, dies in combat that year: he is killed in the chaotic Kabul airport bombing during America’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan. The year closes with veterans mourning at Mac’s Speed Shop in Fayetteville, even as the toll of addiction, violence, and secrecy keeps climbing.

In 2022, as the Taliban reestablish control over Afghanistan, they ban the cultivation and trade of opium, alcohol, hashish, and methamphetamine, reinstating the same prohibitions that they had enforced before the US invasion. The regime launches a large-scale eradication campaign that destroys nearly a quarter million acres of poppy crops in one growing season, described by observers as “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history” (269). The Taliban also crack down on bacha bazi and other forms of child sex trafficking, issues that the United States had quietly documented in a belated report before withdrawing. Millions of Afghans remain addicted to heroin after years of foreign occupation, and the Taliban respond with mass roundups of addicts, forcing them into concrete detox centers where they undergo cold-turkey rehabilitation without medication. Western governments and organizations react critically, arguing that the poppy ban harms the Afghan economy and poor farmers, though the United Nations reports that most opium profits had gone to “international drug cartels” (270) rather than to Afghans themselves.

At Fort Bragg, deaths among soldiers continue at the same alarming rate that followed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. On January 6, 2022, Sergeant Layne Coleman Jones of the 82nd Airborne Division dies of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, the year’s first suicide. His mother and sister, both unconvinced he killed himself, uncover widespread drug use in his regiment and allege that cocaine circulates freely among paratroopers and Special Forces units. Three weeks later, Sergeant First Class Christopher Calascione of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade dies from acute cocaine and fentanyl toxicity. His wife describes him as haunted by the Iraq War and his later deployments to Eastern Europe and Ukraine, where he conducted covert operations before losing his security clearance and turning to drugs. The Army rules his death “willful misconduct” (273), denying his family insurance benefits.

The following day, as Russia invades Ukraine, Seth Harp reports from Poland and learns that American special operators are already on the ground conducting covert missions. He describes seeing paratroopers from Fort Bragg deployed near the border and learning that Delta Force and SEAL Team Six units are engaged in “operational preparation of the environment” (274). Over the next year, covert strikes and sabotage spread across Eastern Europe, while at home Fort Bragg endures record suicides, overdoses, and killings. Among them, a military policewoman murders a civilian woman in South Carolina, several soldiers die in shootings across North Carolina, and veteran Delta Force operator David Jensen kills his wife and himself after years of alcohol abuse and paranoia. In September 2022, Freddie Wayne Huff is indicted on cocaine trafficking charges, but not for the Lavigne and Dumas murders, revealing federal disinterest in the deeper criminal network he describes. To Huff, the authorities seem determined to “push it under the rug” (278). Two months earlier, another mystery unfolds when a man falls from the sky over the Raeford Drop Zone, long known as a Delta Force training site and a hub of rumored drug activity.

In July 2022, homeowner Emily Osborn discovers the body of Charles Crooks, a young Rampart Aviation copilot, who fell without a parachute from a CASA C-212 departing Fort Bragg’s Raeford Drop Zone. According to the reports, “no parachute was found anywhere near his body” (279) and he was dressed in his street clothes. The Raeford Drop Zone is an airfield long used by USASOC and, historically, by Special Forces pilot-smuggler Gene Paul Thacker and later his son Tim, who runs large-scale meth trafficking. The site doubles as a HAHO training ground, where Delta operator Billy Lavigne once taught other recruits “amid his descent into severe meth and crack addiction” (282). The NTSB’s 2023 report deems Crooks’s death an accident, but offers only the surviving pilot’s account and no clear motive.

Around Fort Bragg—renamed Fort Liberty in June 2023—unresolved “strange things” (284) continue. A December 2022 rifle attack destroys Moore County power stations; a January 2023 gate raid targets alleged drug and human trafficking in USASOC but yields no courts-martial; and early 2023 brings multiple soldier-linked homicides. Public scrutiny grows as SOCOM leaders promise reform, Congress mandates overdose reporting, and a new Office of Special Trial Counsel assumes serious felony charging, though commanders retain broad discretion in drug cases. Through 2024, fresh prosecutions reinforce the pattern: a medic, Gordon Custis, traffics ketamine from West Africa; Major Kojo Dartey moves guns to Ghana; and Sergeant Major Jorge Garcia is caught importing meth and tied to a criminal gang.

In August 2023, prosecutors unsealed an indictment naming Kenneth Maurice Quick, Jr. as the alleged “Third Man” (291) in the Dumas/Lavigne double homicide, charging him with murdering the two men, trafficking cocaine, and obstructing justice by attempting to dump Lavigne’s body in McArthur Lake and firebombing Dumas’s truck. Quick is a Laurinburg native with prior violent and drug offenses, including a 2016 party shooting, a 2021 trailer-park shootout that led to a separate murder charge, a high-speed chase, and a federal cocaine/fentanyl case. He was already serving 57 months for possession of firearms as a convicted felon when the new counts arrived. The government has disclosed voluminous discovery (about 68,000 records and 1 terabyte of data), but no public evidentiary narrative; the indictment itself uses victim initials and sparse detail. Families and associates voiced skepticism: Lavigne’s mother questioned how a “scrawny” 20-year-old could overpower her son; friends and Dumas’s son doubted Quick’s presence with older Special Forces veterans and pointed to the sophisticated cleanup and arson. Harp notes that Delta Force has spent two decades “as a high-tech death squad dedicated to covertly liquidating the male population base of recalcitrant ethnic and tribal groups that resist US military occupation” (294). The idea that the unit might kill one of their own “does not overly strain the imagination” (294).

Federal counts differ by venue: Dumas’s killing on Fort Bragg fits federal murder statute; Lavigne’s alleged off-post killing is charged as causing death with a firearm during drug trafficking. Observers also note the odd choice of Fort Bragg as a disposal site. From prison, Freddie Huff (later sentenced to 21 years for cocaine trafficking) theorized that Dumas suspected Lavigne of informing, recruited Quick, then was himself killed after a dispute, though Quick’s usual 9mm/AR-style weapons do not match the small-caliber gun used on Dumas. Parallel to these disputes, multiple sources described a Dumas “blackmail letter” (297) about a cartel-like network at Fort Bragg; the thumb drive where it was said to reside was recovered by police, but when copied in 2024, it was reportedly blank. As of early 2025, Quick’s case remains in pretrial motions, and community doubts persist. No other copy of Dumas’s letter “is known to exist” (299).

The epilogue traces a post-GWOT reckoning in which the once-celebrated image of US special operations dims amid public disillusionment, institutional strain, and persistent violence linked to Fort Bragg/Liberty. Harp contrasts Admiral McRaven’s 2014 “golden age of special operations” (300) framing with veterans’ later disillusionment, noting falling public confidence in the military, recruiting shortfalls despite relaxed standards and large bonuses, and statistics showing that Fort Bragg has the highest absolute and per-capita rates of drug overdose in the entire Department of Defense. Amid wider foreign-policy criticism of the Biden era, the SOCOM war-crimes review ordered in 2021 yields only administrative recommendations. Locally, at least 24 murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers occur from 2020-2024, many unsolved.

Harp highlights several flashpoints: In May 2024, Special Forces Lt. Col. Galen Huss fatally shoots an unarmed utility worker on his property; on January 1, 2025, ex-Bragg paratrooper Shamsud-Din Jabbar kills 14 in a New Orleans vehicle attack; hours later, 10th Group Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger dies by suicide in a Las Vegas car bombing. Harp’s political coda records Donald Trump’s return to office, whereupon he named former Green Beret Michael Waltz as national security adviser and former National Guard officer Pete Hegseth as defense secretary. On February 10, 2025, Hegseth orders Fort Liberty renamed back to Fort Bragg, claiming that “Bragg is back” (304).