In 2015, former SEAL James Matthews got pulled over in New Jersey towing a trailer loaded with $1.4 million worth of marijuana. Three unnamed Navy SEALs told CBS in 2017 that various teammates of theirs had tested positive for cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA, and heroin, and that the substance-abuse problem was “growing.” In 2014, a Navy SEAL named Angel Martinez-Ramos pleaded guilty after being arrested at Miami’s airport with 10 kilos of cocaine in his carry-on. In recent years, whistleblowers have alleged that the use of hard drugs is widespread among special operators. “Almost every time I saw Billy, he was strung out on something.”Ī day after the bodies were found, an unnamed Army official leaked to CBS that both Lavigne and Dumas, at the time of their deaths, were under investigation for trafficking narcotics on Fort Bragg, and that investigators suspected “a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong.” “It was out of control,” says his best friend’s wife, Laura Leshikar. Multiple people who knew Lavigne tell me that he regularly snorted cocaine, took MDMA, popped pills, and drank heavily. No narcotics were reported recovered, but for the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which is headquartered at Fort Bragg, it had all the makings of yet another drug scandal, the latest in a string of them to hit the special-operations community. He had been shot multiple times in the chest, wrapped in a type of nylon blanket that soldiers call a “woobie,” and placed in the back of his own truck, the gray Chevrolet. A pair of skimpy running shorts known in the Army as ranger panties were all that he was wearing. Yet it looked as if he had been killed in his sleep. On top of the sort of training that all Rangers, Green Berets, and Navy SEALs have to go through, he had been schooled in sabotage, demolition, hostage rescue, tactical driving, lockpicking, and spy-trade craft such as how to shadow people, use dead drops, and live under a cover identity. At age 37, William “Billy” Lavigne II was a true Tier 1 operator, a master sergeant on the Army’s most selective and clandestine task force. Not only was he a decorated Green Beret with dozens of badges and patches and medals from 14 different deployments, he was also a member of Delta Force, the most elite military unit in the United States. The man in the bed of the truck, by contrast, didn’t have to inflate his military credentials. He had served 19 years in the Army, including time in the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, but as a property book officer, a glorified supply sergeant. People who knew him tell me that in life, he fit a certain kind of American archetype: the wannabe special-forces guy, a fake operator who, in order to impress people or intimidate them, passed himself off as an ex-commando. The man on the ground, who had been dropped by a single bullet to the right temple, was 44-year-old Timothy Dumas. Yet there were no firearms to be found at the scene, and no trace of the third man, the surviving shooter. Both had been killed by gunshots, and according to news reports, shell casings were scattered on the ground. In the bed of the truck and on the ground beside it were two dead men. A tricked-out Chevy Colorado with matte-black wheels and racing tires was stuck in a rut on a dirt road near Lake MacArthur. Three weeks before Christmas, in the piney woods outside of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a deer hunter came across the fallout from a firefight that, to date, no one has been able to explain.
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