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

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

Two dead bodies were discovered in a forested area of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2020. One, William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force, the most secretive “black ops” unit in the military. A long-serving veteran of America’s classified assassination program, Lavigne had done more than a dozen deployments, was addicted to crack cocaine, dealt drugs on base, and had committed a series of violent crimes before he was mysteriously killed. The other, Timothy Dumas, was a supply officer 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, all with some apparent connection to drug-trafficking, as well as dozens of fatal overdoses. Drawing on 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.