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

The Fort Bragg Cartel is a 2025 investigative nonfiction exposé by Seth Harp that interrogates the intersection of elite military culture, covert narco-trafficking, and institutional impunity. It frames the shocking double murder of two soldiers at Fort Bragg as an entry point into a deeper systemic portrait of corruption, secrecy, and moral erosion within US Special Forces. 

This guide is written using the 2025 Viking edition of The Fort Bragg Cartel. 

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, death, substance use, addiction, death by suicide, sexual violence and harassment, rape, mental illness, and cursing.

Summary

Part One introduces Fort Bragg as the center of the US Army’s special operations world, a massive base in North Carolina that embodies the secrecy, violence, and moral disarray of America’s post-9/11 wars. Harp begins by recounting the 2018 murder of Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar following a trip to Walt Disney World with his friend, Master Sergeant William “Billy” Lavigne. Each man had a young daughter, and the two girls went along on the trip. Both men were known drug users, and while driving home with their daughters in the car, Leshikar began to exhibit signs of drug-induced paranoia. The men had been consuming drugs throughout their time at the theme park, and as they returned home, Leshikar seemed to grow increasingly paranoid and accusatory. At home, as Lavigne tried to contact friends, colleagues, and family members, he got into an altercation with Leshikar. Both men were trained to kill, and Lavigne who worked for Delta Force while Leshikar was rejected, killed Leshikar. As authorities descended on the scene of Leshikar’s death, Lavigne’s story was not straight. The authorities seemed keen to sweep the matter under the rug, an example of a pattern of strange, criminal incidents which Harp connects to Fort Brag and the operator culture which is found on the base. He describes a broader culture of corruption, narcotics, and violence that thrives inside the most secretive arm of the US military. From the start, Fort Bragg appears less as a base than as the nerve center of a hidden criminal world operating behind the shield of the special operations community.

Part Two traces the origins, structure, and evolution of Delta Force, the elite Special Forces unit headquartered at Fort Bragg. The story begins with Colonel Charles Beckwith, whose experience training with the British Special Air Service in Malaysia convinced him that the United States required a comparable commando force capable of deep reconnaissance, sabotage, and precision strikes. Delta Force becomes operational in 1977. Its first mission, Operation Eagle Claw, ends in catastrophe, killing eight men and discrediting President Carter. After Ronald Reagan’s election, the Pentagon establishes the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, incorporating Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and a covert intelligence branch known as the Activity. Harp describes how JSOC evolves into a “secret military within the military,” largely exempt from congressional oversight after post-Vietnam reforms curtailed the CIA. During the 1980s and 1990s, Delta takes part in covert operations in Panama, the Persian Gulf, and Somalia, while keeping a domestic presence during incidents like the Waco siege. By the post-9/11 wars, JSOC expands into a global assassination network, running night raids in Iraq and Afghanistan through small, disguised teams operating independently of conventional forces. Harp depicts the organization’s hierarchy, internal culture, and near-total secrecy as it transitions from counterterrorism to a permanent arm of American warfare headquartered at Fort Bragg.

Part Three shifts from the global expansion of Delta Force to its internal decay at home. As the unit grows into a permanent strike arm of US foreign policy, Fort Bragg becomes the headquarters of a force whose methods and mentality blur the line between combat and criminality. Harp recounts how the Joint Special Operations Command’s extraordinary autonomy allows its soldiers to act without oversight. Returning from wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa, many operators bring home substance use disorders, injuries, and habits formed in a world of secrecy and violence. Within Fort Bragg’s walls, Harp describes a pattern of misconduct largely ignored by command structures. Through personnel records and interviews, Harp shows that Delta’s veterans often cycle into USASOC and other units, spreading a culture of impunity. Administrative reclassifications obscure accountability; even when operators—the term for soldiers who work in Special Operations—face discipline or prosecution, most return to service. Investigations into domestic crimes, including homicides and overdoses, are slow, secretive, or abandoned. The same tactics once used overseas—concealment, compartmentalization, and manipulation of information—become tools for managing scandals. As an example, Harp recounts the case of Erin Scanlon, a military employee who was raped by Cristobal Lopez Vallejo, a thirty-four-year-old sergeant first class on Delta Force. Though she reported the rape, military authorities intervened to help cover up the matter. Vallejo continued to serve, while Scanlon was forced to leave the military.

Part Four turns to the violent unraveling of the Fort Bragg community between 2016 and 2021, centering on the intertwined fates of several Special Forces soldiers. He recounts the troubled lives of William Lavigne and Timothy Dumas, whose service careers descend into addiction and criminality. Both men are found dead on Fort Bragg in December 2020—two years after Lavigne’s killing of Leshikar—their bodies left near McArthur Lake in an apparent double homicide. Harp reconstructs their overlapping histories of drug trafficking, mental breakdown, and military neglect. He describes Lavigne’s involvement with narcotics networks stretching from North Carolina to Texas and Florida and his suspected cooperation with the FBI shortly before his death. The book traces connections between Fort Bragg and broader criminal economies. Harp reveals how Mexican cartel training once conducted by US Special Forces helped form Los Zetas and how a network of current and former soldiers, including dealers like Freddie Wayne Huff and suppliers like Tim Thacker, sustained methamphetamine pipelines running through the Fort Bragg-adjacent town of Fayetteville, North Carolina. These chapters also follow the escalating violence and paranoia within Huff’s circle, culminating in abductions, armed robberies, and federal raids that expose military participation in drug distribution. Part Four closes with the discovery of Dumas’s alleged “thumb drive,” said to contain names of Special Forces soldiers engaged in trafficking. Though seized as evidence, it vanishes inside a police evidence room, symbolizing the opacity surrounding the murders.

Part Five documents the full collapse of order at Fort Bragg. Harp recounts the 2020 disappearance and decapitation of paratrooper Enrique Roman-Martinez, the stalled investigation by Army CID, and the Army’s eventual reclassification of his homicide as a possible boating accident. As the base reels from scandal, new cases emerge: the murder-suicide of Staff Sergeant Keith Lewis, who kills his pregnant wife and then himself; an epidemic of overdoses tied to fentanyl and steroids; and a string of soldier suicides that make Fort Bragg the deadliest military installation in the United States. Despite repeated raids and arrests, including those of senior noncommissioned officers and medics, the base continues to produce fatalities at a rate far above the national average. Harp connects this internal crisis to the military’s broader moral exhaustion after decades of covert wars. He follows new outbreaks of soldier-involved murders and trafficking, including scandals linking Green Berets to cocaine, methamphetamine, and arms smuggling operations. The epilogue depicts the erosion of public faith in the armed forces and the renaming of the base to Fort Liberty, only to be changed back to Fort Bragg in 2025 under the returning Trump administration, ending the story where it began.