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Ryan Manelick climbs behind the wheel of his white 4x4. He's got a 9mm pistol and an MP5 automatic submachine gun in the car, $17,000 in a Jordanian bank account and a plane ticket home. It is December 14th, 2003 -- his thirty-first birthday -- and in less than a week he'll be headed to Pennsylvania to visit his mother and spend Christmas with his kids. Then he'll fly to Russia to see his father and relax. It will be the first time he has left Iraq in months.
It's late morning as Manelick pulls out of Camp Anaconda, a U.S. Army base in Balad, forty-five miles northwest of Baghdad. He's come to check on some trailers that his contracting company, Ultra Services, has sold to the American military to use as living quarters and office space. Business has been booming since May, when Paul Bremer, the man sent by President Bush to run the Coalition Provisional Authority, gave foreign investors the right to take 100 percent of their profits out of Iraq, tax-free. "Iraq," Bremer declared, "is open for business." The country became an enormous piggy bank busted wide open. Small-time contractors like Ultra Services began to flood into Iraq, but unlike Halliburton and other corporate competitors, they had no security convoys to protect them -- they were on their own. It was about as open a season as seasons get; the cash was just there to be carted off, palletfuls of fresh $100 bills airlifted in from the United States. "I've never seen a more corrupt environment than Iraq was under Bremer and the CPA," says one private contractor with decades of experience in war zones. "They had no idea what they were doing. The system was just about as perfectly set up for bribery and kickbacks as it possibly could be."
Manelick is right in the thick of this lawless environment. Ultra Services supplies the Army with everything from shower heads to cartons of Coca-Cola, but the trailers are its main business: simple containers, only twenty feet by ten, trucked over the Turkish border at up to $5,400 a pop. A single shipment can bring in $1 million, cash. "Since I am in at the ground floor, I should do pretty well for myself over here," Manelick e-mailed his friends and family from Turkey, shortly before heading off to Iraq. "To give you a feeling for why I say that, we just sent a contract out to the U.S. Army. We are pretty confident that they will sign it. If they do, it is a $22,500,000.00 contract. That is right, 22 million." His colleague at Ultra Services, Charles Phillips, put it even more bluntly. "We see the gold," Phillips e-mailed a co-worker. "We just need the shovels."
On this morning, as Manelick checks out the trailers at Anaconda, he jokes around with Phillips and Bora Tuncay, another colleague from Turkey. They laugh about girls, about getting the hell out of Iraq. Then they split up. Phillips and Tuncay head north, beginning the long trip back to the company's headquarters in Istanbul. Manelick, accompanied by two Iraqi employees of Ultra Services, heads south, taking the dangerous road through the Sunni Triangle to Baghdad. His bodyguard and fixer, a former Iraqi Army colonel named Majid Kadom, has failed to show up this morning, and although Manelick doesn't like to travel without Kadom, he isn't worried. Half a year of making his way across Iraq, outside the Green Zone, has left him feeling almost invincible. He thinks he knows everything he needs to about staying alive in the midst of a war.
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Leaving the base, Manelick hits it hard, pushing his Hyundai Galloper fast out of the gate. He pulls away from Phillips and Tuncay -- 50 yards, 100 yards. They can see him ahead, pausing for an instant where the road outside Anaconda splits north and south. And then he's gone.
Five minutes later, a click or two up the road, Phillips' satellite phone rings. Tuncay answers. All he can hear is hysterical yelling on the other end, someone shouting in Arabic. Tuncay doesn't understand the language, so he hands the phone to the driver, Aydin, who listens for a moment and then begins screaming. "They shoot Ryan!" he says. "Ryan is gone, Ryan is dead! Ryan is dead, Ryan is dead! Ryan is dead!"
Ultra services was founded not long after the invasion of Iraq by John Dawkins, a thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur from California looking for a big score. Dawkins, who was based in Moscow at the time, had come to Russia a few years after college, trying his hand at everything from fish hatcheries to the oil industry. But eleven years in, he was broke and discouraged. A telecom business he had started had drained every last cent, and he was desperate. "I had $80,000 in debt at that time," he says. "I had $20 in my pocket, all my credit cards maxed out, and I said, 'Whoa, where do I go from here?' "
Dawkins is a powerful and charismatic personality. His friends call him J-Dom, or John the Dominator. A chaser of the big life, an addict to the dramatic and grand, he rode into his own wedding, to a Kazakh woman he had met in Russia, on a white horse, wearing a magician's cape for the ceremony. "Travel with John and you were immediately cast in the role of Marlow to his Kurtz," his friend Franz Wisner recalled. "He's the type who, given the choice of two paths, would choose a machete."
Despite his mounting debts, Dawkins wasn't about to scurry home to California in failure. In March 2003, a week after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, he sent out a group e-mail to family and friends announcing that he was relocating to Turkey, along with his wife and daughter, to start a new business. Ultra Services would take advantage of the hellish heat and sandstorms of Iraq by providing containerized housing units for the troops, many of whom were sleeping in tents or under any shelter they could find. The trailers would be supplied by Turkish vendors, trucked into Iraq and sold to the military at a substantial markup.
In April, as Baghdad and Mosul and Tikrit fell, Dawkins made his first visit to Iraq in a rented van, with a fake press pass, to lay the groundwork for Ultra Services. "You got to understand," he says now, "things didn't get radical until much later -- it felt safe. I walked around the streets of Fallujah in April." He hired Charles Phillips, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate of Harvard and Stanford, to oversee the financial side of the company in Turkey. But he needed someone to take charge of day-to-day operations in Iraq -- a foreman who could supervise installation of the company's trailers in some of the country's deadliest war zones.
He found that someone through one of his closest friends: Greg Manelick, a career Air Force officer on inactive duty. The two men got to know each other in Russia in 1997 while working on a huge oil project for ExxonMobil; Dawkins handled public relations, and Manelick oversaw logistics. The two men hung out together, exercised together, saw each other through marriages and divorces. When Manelick heard that Dawkins was setting up shop in Iraq, he steered his son Ryan to Ultra Services.
The elder Manelick had been a young father; he was only seventeen when Ryan was born. Things weren't always easy between them: Greg was away for long stretches in the military, and he and Ryan's mother divorced when Ryan was nine. "The pent-up anger Ryan had toward his father was very apparent," Dawkins would later write. "Ryan feared his dad and had that 'Dad can always kick my ass and win' attitude."
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Now, at thirty, Ryan seemed to be trying to repeat a version of his father's life. He had three kids of his own, two with his ex-wife and another with an ex-girlfriend, and had already been in and out of the Air Force, where he had studied Arabic, Chinese and Spanish with military intelligence. But he had trouble sticking with anything for long. After leaving the service, he worked as a bartender, a clerk at a comic-book store and a manager at a computer company in Texas. He wanted to be a writer, or maybe design video games -- but he couldn't quite figure out how to get started. He was desperate to find some direction in life, and Iraq seemed like the perfect opportunity. When he heard about Ultra Services from his father, he wrote to Dawkins, who quickly hired him as logistics and services manager.
Manelick arrived in Iraq in late June brimming with idealism. He was excited about being part of something bigger than himself, about making his mark on the world. "My job is to find Iraqi people to help us build stuff in Iraq," he wrote to his friends and family. "When I find them, we build, and don't stop until there are no more jobs. So I am basically the King of the Grunts!" The work, he added, "is going to be exciting. We get to assist in building up a Third World economy."
What Manelick discovered in Iraq, however, was something new in the history of warfare: a privatized crusade. Thirteen years earlier, during the first Gulf campaign, there had been 100 military personnel for every civilian contractor in the field. This time, there are almost as many contractors as troops. Of the first $87 billion allocated for the war in 2003, the U.S. Army estimates that fully one-third was spent on contracts to private companies like Ultra Services. By the time Manelick arrived, the place was already crawling with all manner of idealists and patriots, cowboy operators and canny profit mongers, eager for a piece of the action.
The action wasn't hard to find. The U.S. military was handing out contracts as fast as it could, tens of millions of dollars with barely any oversight. Procurement for the 4th Infantry Division -- the Army outfit that became a major source of business for Ultra Services -- was handled by a single contracting office in Tikrit. There were just two officers in charge of the allocations, and they were responsible for covering the needs of 20,000 soldiers. That meant finding private contractors who could supply housing units, latrines, weapon slings, floodlights, lumber, video games, office furniture, the works. In the six months that Ryan Manelick was in Iraq, the two officers handed out somewhere between $60 million and $80 million in contracts.
Manelick slept in the company's office in Baghdad or at a room at the Al Majalis, a hotel that cost him six dollars a night. He found a group of expats to get drunk with. He water-skied the Tigris and got to know some Iraqi families; he joked about marrying an Iraqi girl and settling down there. But as far as business went, Manelick considered Ultra Services a complete disaster. Dawkins, he told friends, treated him like a dog from the start. After weeks on the road, going from military base to military base outside the Green Zone, Manelick had yet to be paid.
"Life royally sucks here," Ryan wrote to his father, who was also being courted by Dawkins to join the company. "My advice is that John is full of shit for the most part. He needs to become better organized before you go out on a limb doing business with him. I am basically 'trapped' here. I have been hit in the head with a crane and knocked unconscious, am in the middle of a royal cluster-fuck of a contract that has been ass end up since the beginning (John), and have had my computer stolen with everything important to me on it. I fucking give up. Get me out of here. NOW!"
He was lonely and overworked, and he blamed it on Dawkins. "I do the dirty work," Manelick wrote in an August e-mail to Amanda Sprang, his father's girlfriend, who was also considering coming to Iraq to work for Ultra Services. "Listen to me. Keep your dealings with him to a minimum. He is a liar. Plain and simple. He hides the facts, and I don't want a business partner or boss that is so slippery and unethical."
Manelick had been in Iraq for less than two months, but he was already plotting to break away from Dawkins and start his own company. He talked less about idealistic notions of helping Iraqis -- now he wanted to make the big money, and he began dreaming up grand, unrealistic schemes. "Ryan had all these plans," says Richard Galustian, a contractor who befriended Manelick in Iraq, "and he could talk about them forever -- he was a wonderful talker. But he had no idea how to make them work, or how far out of his league they were." Manelick wrote to his father about the two of them starting their own security outfit, assuring him that if they acted fast there was a $100 million contract for force protection and security training he was sure they could get. The plans were far removed from reality -- he wanted to build a company from nothing and compete with giant corporations like Bechtel or Halliburton in a matter of months -- but what was real was his intense desire to break away from Dawkins and start something new.
Dawkins, for his part, had his own problems with Manelick. He thought Ryan played it far too fast and loose, driving an SUV with untinted windows, wearing Ray-Bans and a goatee, doing nothing to fit in. Dawkins himself was a stickler about personal security. Without the protection of U.S. forces, private contractors were on their own, and Dawkins was particularly adept at slipping into the shadows. In Iraq, he wore tinted contact lenses to make his light-blue eyes look brown, dyed his skin darker, grew an Iraqi-style mustache, wore kaffiyehs and robes. He drove an armored BMW with tinted windows that he claimed had once been a vehicle in Saddam's personal fleet, and he slept in the homes of Iraqi families. He trusted no one, except for his bodyguard, Omar Taleb, an official in the Iraqi police and a former helicopter pilot in the Iraqi Air Force.
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Just as Ryan wrote to his father to complain about Dawkins, Dawkins wrote to his old buddy to gripe about Ryan. "Your son has made it a habit of yanking my chain," he e-mailed Greg Manelick in August. "I am getting tired of it." Dawkins said that Ryan had threatened to harm him, threatened to quit, threatened to start his own company and destroy Ultra Services. "I don't take this stuff so seriously," Dawkins wrote. "I think it is a fucked up way of pushing my buttons and getting my attention. I am not worried about his competition since he is, in my opinion, not mature enough, not stable enough, not experienced enough and he lacks the patience and resolve needed to run a company in Iraq -- there are many aspects that he simply does not understand. . . . BUT if he ever does follow through, he could cause many troubles for me trying to spoil my name, using my contacts, etc."
Caught between his son and his friend, Greg Manelick wrote to both Ryan and Dawkins, urging them to get along: The e-mail was signed, "Group Hug. Daddy Ghandi." In a separate e-mail to his son, Greg promised his full support. "I didn't want to be in the middle," he assured Ryan, "but if forced to choose sides, it would be yours." But writing privately to Dawkins, he pledged to back his old friend. Manelick had sent his son to Dawkins, in part, to toughen him up, to teach him the way things work. As far as Greg was concerned, John the Dominator was in charge. "You be the man," he e-mailed Dawkins, "and I will remind anyone who needs to hear it that J_DOM rules."
Ryan Manelick wasn't the only one fed up with Dawkins. Charles Phillips, the Harvard grad in charge of finances back in Istanbul, was scrambling to fulfill all the contracts that Dawkins was bringing in. Some of the deals were simply too big for Ultra Services to handle; others translated into losses for the company. There never seemed to be enough money, and Phillips was sometimes unable to pay vendors and meet the company's growing obligations. When several partners who had invested in the company began to complain, Dawkins abruptly cut them off, refusing to talk to them. To those who pressed, he gave vague and muddled accounts of what he had done with the millions of dollars in cash he was routinely driving into Turkey from Baghdad. "John had gone renegade, from my point of view," says Geoff Nordloh, an engineer and former Air Force officer who served as a consultant to Ultra Services. The company was only five months old, but it stood to make huge amounts of cash, and the atmosphere had already turned poisonous.
Phillips was smart and confident and full of his own ambitions; the son of a career military officer, he had served on the board of the black students association at Harvard. Now, as the summer ended, he took $1.4 million from a joint account he held with Dawkins and deposited all of it in his own name, saying that he feared Dawkins would just take the money and disappear. Dawkins saw the move as a blunt power grab: In his view, Phillips was simply holding him hostage with the money, trying to assume control of the company by commandeering the funds.
Phillips, in fact, was planning to split from Dawkins and form an operation of his own. Quietly, behind closed doors, he was spearheading a mutiny, winning over several of his fellow employees. In October, after weeks of increasing tension, he approached Dawkins and proposed splitting the company: Half of the money would go to Dawkins, and the other half would go to Phillips, who would use the funds to start a new firm called Irex, which would do the same work for military bases as Ultra Services had. At Irex, the role Dawkins had played -- drumming up business, bringing in big contracts -- would be filled by Kirk von Ackermann, a former Air Force captain recruited by Phillips for his extensive experience in intelligence and counterterrorism.
It was an audacious proposal: Phillips and von Ackermann were essentially proposing to take half of the company from Dawkins and set up shop to compete with him. But to the surprise of all involved, Dawkins seemed to go along with the plan. "John didn't dispute it, didn't have a big problem with this idea," says Bora Tuncay, who worked for Ultra Services in Istanbul. "He said he was helping Kirk." If Dawkins was upset about being jettisoned from the company he had created, he doesn't admit it to this day. "This is what was so sick," he says now. "There was so much work in Iraq that for us to be infighting was ridiculous."
But the tensions that had been simmering for months within the company were about to explode. On October 9th, not long after he and Phillips tried to take half of Ultra Services from Dawkins and create a rival company, Kirk von Ackermann visited FOB McKenzie, a U.S. forward operating base near Samarra. After meeting with a Turkish subcontractor, he left the base behind the wheel of his Nissan Patrol SUV. He was alone.
A short time after leaving the base, von Ackermann called Safa Shukir, an Iraqi employee of Ultra Services, to say he had a flat tire and needed help. Shukir drove out to meet him at the mountain pass where he had pulled over. It was a dangerous place -- von Ackermann had warned his co-workers that it was an ideal site for an ambush. When Shukir arrived, forty-five minutes after von Ackermann called, he found the SUV on the side of the road, abandoned. There was no sign of struggle. Von Ackermann's laptop, his satellite phone and $40,000 in cash he had been carrying were still in the car. But there was no sign of von Ackermann.
The Ultra Services team was stunned. Their first notion was that von Ackermann had been kidnapped and presumably would be kept alive for ransom. Dawkins leapt into action. "I tried to leave right away to go find him, but the military wouldn't let me leave the base because it was dark," he recalls. "Which is probably smart. It was my emotions running me. I'm like that -- I'll put it on the line if I can go and try to save somebody." Dawkins called in his team of Iraqi employees to make inquiries, begged the Army to send out helicopters, searched every inch of the spot where Kirk had disappeared. The State Department and the Army began their own investigation, but came up empty. Days passed, with no ransom demand and no trace of von Ackermann.
The atmosphere surrounding the Ultra Services team had been contentious from the start, full of backbiting and scheming. Now it became intensely paranoid. Not long after von Ackermann disappeared, the Army's Criminal Investigative Division opened a fraud investigation into Ultra Services. CID wanted to know if one of the contracting officers at Tikrit, Maj. Rich Hall, had been accepting bribes from John Dawkins in return for government contracts. And the man on the Ultra Services team who first began to suspect Dawkins was none other than Kirk von Ackermann.
"Kirk realized something," says Egemen Cakmak, a twenty-nine-year-old Turk who worked for Ultra Services in Istanbul. "Kirk said John had been bribing this Major Hall. He told me that John was going to buy a BMW for Major Hall in the States."
For Ryan Manelick, that was evidence enough. Von Ackermann had been a main player in the plan to take Ultra Services away from Dawkins -- and Manelick thought he had been ready to blow the whistle on the alleged corruption. Manelick became convinced that Dawkins had taken von Ackermann out, to prevent the truth from surfacing. He already believed that Dawkins was capable of murder -- and feared for his own life. "If you don't hear back from me in the next three days, something bad has happened to me," Ryan had written to his father toward the end of the summer. "I have effectively pissed John off. . . . If something bad does happen, it was John or one of his agents."
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With von Ackermann gone, the plan to wrest Ultra Services away from Dawkins took a new turn. Charles Phillips needed someone to take over the role that von Ackermann was going to play in the new company -- someone to replace Dawkins and drum up contracts in Iraq. Ryan Manelick agreed to take the job. On November 16th, he wrote to his father that Dawkins was being blacklisted from the theater of operations. "Charles and I have officially broken with him," Manelick wrote, "and I have taken the steps to lock him out of the office, and information loop. All of his former contacts and employees, are coming with me and Charles." Manelick was exuberant: His father had sent him to Iraq, and now he had triumphed over his father's friend. "I told him I would take his company from him if he wasn't careful," he boasted, "and I have."
It was an exciting time for Manelick: He was taking on a new job, one that held the promise of the big money he had been chasing since he arrived in Iraq, and he was getting ready to go home for the first time in months. On December 8th, he met Charles Phillips and Bora Tuncay, from the Istanbul office, at the Turkish border and spent the next few days taking them to Army bases around Iraq. Then, on December 12th, the three co-workers went to Saddam's former palace in Tikrit, where CID was headquartered. According to Tuncay, Manelick told CID investigators that he was convinced von Ackermann had discovered that Dawkins was bribing Hall, and that Dawkins had ordered von Ackermann killed before he could talk. Manelick also told the investigators that he feared he might be next.
As Manelick and the others were leaving the base, Dawkins arrived. The meeting was unplanned, but Phillips took advantage of it to confront Dawkins, all but calling him a murderer to his face. "You are one shady motherfucker," Phillips said. "I hate breathing the same air as you."
Dawkins was silent. "I had never seen a guy humiliated like this," says Tuncay. "Charles was talking and Ryan was grinning. And that day I saw the hatred in John's eyes. This is a character who would never accept this. He took it, but he would never let that go. And Charles said to Ryan, 'Never tell him where we are, never tell him what we are doing, never tell him what we are going to do.' Because Charles was very scared John was going to try to get rid of them."
The split was almost complete, but there was still one last matter to be resolved. The 4th Infantry Division still owed $2 million to Ultra Services on a completed contract, but the collection had become complicated. Tyr Brenner, an Air Force captain who now worked at the contracting office in Tikrit, was voicing clear misgivings about handing the money over to Dawkins. "Brenner felt John Dawkins had something to do with Kirk's disappearing," says Tuncay. "He told us that John Dawkins will not get any money from the Army or this office anymore unless Charles or Ryan came for it." Brenner proposed that Manelick and Dawkins come see him together and collect the $2 million on Monday, December 15th.
Monday never came for Manelick. "I'm in fear for my life, you know," he told a group of friends on Saturday, December 13th. "It's not Iraqis I'm worried about, either."
The next day, when Phillips and Tuncay received the call that Ryan had been shot, they were too frightened to rush to his aid. "If we go back there, they will hunt us," they told their driver. They raced to an American checkpoint instead, but the soldiers there wouldn't help -- they couldn't leave without orders, and all internal communication had been halted because Saddam had been caught earlier that day. "So we went all the way to Tikrit," Tuncay says -- a drive of sixty miles. When they arrived, according to Tuncay, they found Tyr Brenner, the new contracting officer, standing at the gate. "What's going on?" Brenner demanded.
"They shot Ryan," Phillips replied. "They killed Ryan."
Brenner's reaction was immediate. "John Dawkins," he said, "has gone too far."
The Army recovered Ryan Manelick's body later that day. Gunmen had sprayed his vehicle with automatic fire, putting three bullets in him: one in his leg, another in his chest and a kill shot in the back of the neck. One of the Iraqi employees in the SUV with Manelick was also killed, and the other was wounded. CID launched an investigation, but whoever had pulled the trigger had simply vanished into the desert.
Ten days after Ryan was killed, John Dawkins crossed the border into Turkey and boarded a plane to Washington, D.C. Greg Manelick met him on a cold December morning in a room at a Holiday Inn just north of the Beltway. Manelick had sent his son to Dawkins, asked him to teach and protect Ryan. But all that had changed. Now Manelick had come to ask Dawkins if he had killed his son.
Alone in the room together, Manelick confronted his old friend. "John -- are you sick?" he asked. "Was it some sort of Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now sort of deal? Because if you're sick, maybe I can understand what happened, how things could have gotten twisted, confused, out of hand."
Manelick stared into his friend's eyes. "John, I'm extremely overwrought about this," he continued. "So I'm going to ask you once. And this is your one chance to be honest with me. And if you're honest with me, I'll help you. And if you're not honest, I will hound you. And it will never end."
They were standing a few feet apart. Dawkins waited for Manelick to ask the question.
"John," said Manelick, "did you have anything to do with this?"
"I had nothing to do with it," Dawkins said.
And Manelick let him go.
"I had some soul-searching -- whether I was going to kill him or not," he tells me. We are sitting in lawn chairs in a small clearing surrounded by miles of deep forest in Akeley, a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. It's land Manelick bought not long after his son was born, land where he buried his son's ashes. "I would never do anything like that without 100-percent certainty," he says. "Though 100-percent certainty might involve my foot in their neck and my gun at their head. . . . And John -- well, he's either my best friend or my worst enemy."
Manelick pauses and rubs his buzz cut. His hair has gone completely gray over the last three years, but at fifty-one he is still built like a pit bull, big and broad. "I was a military marksman, I've been a professional guide," he says. "I've got a gun and scope in the closet I've killed with from a thousand yards. I know how to use a shotgun with buckshot at close range they can never trace. And John knows this."
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Manelick had good reason to suspect Dawkins. In the days following his son's death, he received e-mails from two different CID investigators in Iraq. "I am not totally satisfied with him or what he had to say," wrote the agent who interviewed Dawkins the day after Ryan's death. "My personal opinion is he has something to do with this." Another CID investigator e-mailed Manelick with similar suspicions: "I don't trust Mr. Dawkins. He's always appeared evasive in his answers during interviews with me about our other investigation and he is too interested on what leads are being pursued."
But as the months passed without results, Manelick grew increasingly frustrated with the Army's investigation. "Both you and I know that Ryan Manelick's case has been poorly handled by CID," he wrote an Army investigator in March. "This is too easy. You have all the facts and the testimony. The crime = greed, $$$, corruption. You have the guilty in your grasp. . . . Why isn't something concrete being done?" Five days later, he fired off an even angrier e-mail. "Are all you CID amateurs?" he demanded. "I mistakenly once thought that we were on the same side. Now I am 100% convinced you don't give a hoot either way and are just going through the motions or are actually part of a military corruption coverup. . . . It was my mistake to not come to Iraq immediately after Ryan's death and lead you by the hand." Four months after Ryan's death, Manelick actually went to Turkey with a team of Russians, ex-special-forces commandos he had assembled through old contacts, intending to enter Iraq. But the insurgency was kicking up, and he decided against trying to cross the border.
Dawkins, infuriated by the accusations, insisted that he was innocent. "I want to end any lingering doubt about my involvement in murder of Ryan and/or Kirk," he wrote Manelick. "I want this craziness to end. I want our friendship back." But in a long e-mail to CID in early 2004, Dawkins took a swipe at his old friend, suggesting that Manelick had done a lousy job of raising Ryan. "I get the feeling that his dad was not there much for him," Dawkins wrote. "Ryan was a whiner. Ryan complained. Ryan loved to play the victim role and created those situations. . . . Ryan was like a woman and responded to things like a woman/girl typically responds. It was clear that he was raised by women without enough father or male influence." The accusations went on and on: Ryan was vengeful, Ryan was a pessimist, Ryan was incompetent, and he, John Dawkins, had merely hoped to show Ryan the way to optimism and success.
Dawkins proposed a series of theories. Maybe Charles Phillips and Ryan had invented the bribery allegations as part of the scheme to seize Ultra Services for themselves. Phillips "made bold threats to me stating that it is easy to frame someone and that Ryan had been trying to frame me for bribery and that his aim was to land me in jail," Dawkins wrote to Greg Manelick. Or maybe Ryan was skimming money from the company along with his Iraqi bodyguard, Majid Kadom, and Majid had killed Ryan to get the whole score for himself. Maybe Kirk von Ackermann had discovered Ryan's skimming and had been silenced by Ryan or Majid. Or maybe the real explanation was the simplest one: Perhaps von Ackermann and Ryan had been among the war's first victims of Iraqi insurgents. Since the war began, nearly 400 private contractors have been killed in Iraq.
In March 2004, Dawkins went to CID in Tikrit for a polygraph test. He was still traveling between Turkey and Iraq, hoping vainly that he could rebuild his business, but his contracts had vanished in the cloud of suspicion around him. He says he wanted to clear his name -- and prove his innocence to Manelick. "Greg was the reason why I demanded the polygraph," he says. The interrogation lasted seven and a half hours. According to Dawkins, the test showed he had nothing to do with the deaths of Ryan Manelick and Kirk von Ackermann.
An army spokesman confirms that the case of Ryan Manelick remains open, but CID refuses to discuss the investigation. Last August, however, two CID agents went to visit Kirk von Ackermann's widow, Megan. They told her they had received intelligence that Kirk was killed on October 9th, the day he disappeared, the victim of a kidnapping attempt that went wrong. His death, they said, had nothing to do with the bribery allegations against John Dawkins or with Manelick's murder. The suspects were Iraqi nationals, who had long ago disappeared. They had a reward out, mostly in hopes of recovering Kirk's body, but they didn't expect to succeed.
But that explanation didn't satisfy everyone. In the spring of 2004, John Dawkins met with Bora Tuncay and Egemen Cakmak, the two young Turkish employees of Ultra Services in Istanbul. He told them that he had had nothing to do with von Ackermann's disappearance or Manelick's death. He cried; he told them he was a good father to his two children, a good person who would never do such terrible things. And he made a pitch for them to work for him again. After some deliberation, they agreed. Tuncay and Cakmak, both unemployed, signed on to the new company Dawkins was creating, Mesopotamia Group, based on the same business plan as Ultra Services.
Soon enough, however, they began to grow suspicious. "I started to see another side of John Dawkins, which can be very brutal, very harsh, merciless," Tuncay says. "The way he treats people, the way he laughs at people. He uses everybody as much as he can, and then gets rid of them."
Then, while Cakmak was traveling with Dawkins in Afghanistan that fall, trying to drum up new contracts, he stumbled across something that stopped him in his tracks. There, among Dawkins' possessions, was the Ultra Services badge that had belonged to Kirk von Ackermann, the official Defense Department identification that allowed him to be in Iraq. For Cakmak, it was a stunning discovery: Dawkins had previously said that the badge had never been recovered.
Cakmak confronted Dawkins. "Nobody found his passport or his badge?" Cakmak asked. Dawkins said no -- they hadn't ever found Kirk's passport, badge or gun.
Cakmak turned to Tuncay. "He's lying," he said in Turkish. "Because I have the badge." Then, turning to Dawkins: "I found Kirk's Ultra Services badge in the office, while we were moving."
"Ah, the badge!" Dawkins said. "It wasn't missing. It came with the stuff CID gave me."
Cakmak didn't believe him. Dawkins had told him that CID had not returned von Ackermann's possessions until months after his disappearance. But Cakmak had discovered a scan of Kirk's badge on a laptop computer belonging to Dawkins. The scan was dated October 10th, 2003 -- the day after Kirk had disappeared.
"How does he have the badge that was around Kirk's neck to scan onto his computer the day after Kirk disappeared?" Cakmak says. "He has it because the men he hired to kill Kirk brought it to him as proof."
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I meet John Dawkins at a restaurant at San Francisco International Airport in November. He is on his way to Dubai, and then to Afghanistan, where he now spends much of his time. A pleasant-looking man in a blue sweatshirt and chinos, he is hardly the picture of a murderous psychopath. "Do I seem like a murderer?" he says. "I never gave a bribe. Never. I guarantee you." The allegations of murder, he says, are "crazy."
He brings up the badge issue almost as soon as we sit down. Cakmak and Tuncay, he says, are just angry ex-employees with axes to grind. "When I picked up a few things that Kirk had left behind," he tells me, "one of the things CID handed back to me was the little badge that had been given to him. I kept it for sentimental reasons." At first he says he was given the badge in February; asked about the scan on his computer, he later says he might have received the badge a few days after van Ackermann disappeared. "I am frankly not sure," he says. "The date was not significant at the time, as no one, including me, could have imagined me being a killer at that time."
His main sin, Dawkins says, was that he had been too trusting: Charles Phillips had screwed him, making off with a chunk of the company's profits; Majid Kadom, Ryan's right-hand man, was skimming money from Ultra Services; and von Ackermann had been killed because he was going to put a stop to it. "That's the motivation," Dawkins says. "All of sudden you've got a guy who's going to cut the flow of money."
He was with his bodyguard in the Green Zone, Dawkins says, when he got the call that Ryan had been killed. "I mean, no matter what Ryan did, he's still a good guy, he had a great heart," he says, his voice breaking. He looks away for a moment, and begins to tear up. "He didn't deserve to die. If I'd been who I am now, I would have never have had this conflict with Ryan. He would have backed me up, he was the kind of guy who backed his people up. He hated me, so he didn't do that for me. But if you had Ryan's loyalty, you had it." His voice has become thin, reedy, and he looks away, biting his lip, and then back at me, his eyes still filled with tears. "I just wish I had been who I am today. He wouldn't be dead."
No charges have been brought in the case, and even those who continue to suspect Dawkins can point to no direct evidence that he played a role in either von Ackermann's or Manelick's death. But Dawkins has done little to ease the suspicion and paranoia among those who have worked closely with him. "He has two different personalities," says Tuncay. "And when he's in the bad personality, he can be very dangerous. When he is like that, everything he says is a lie." Even Geoff Nordloh, who still works with Dawkins and believes that he is innocent, calls him "significantly more ethically flexible than I am. He's a salesman. He really stretches the truth a lot."
Greg Manelick has his own doubts. "The thing about John is, he believes his own shit," Manelick tells me. "John is wily, like a wolf, he steps in his own tracks. He's very clever. He's got that survivor instinct." Manelick has come to believe that he will never know with absolute certainty what happened to his son. But what he does know is that his child went to a war zone and came back dead, and nobody seems to care. We are standing by a little trout pond on his Pennsylvania property; he is casting a line to fish for little sunnies.
"Ryan said his whole life to me, 'I want to do this, I want to do that' -- and I would say to him, 'Go do it!' " Manelick says. "And he would say he wanted to die saving someone in a fire, die saving someone drowning. He always said stuff like that. A glorious death. He didn't have that survive-at-all-costs instinct. The fact that he got killed over there is not what essentially upsets me. That side of him -- he was out for adventure. And whatever befell him befell him. 'I might come back a millionaire, I might come back in a box.' That was his attitude. And Dawkins -- Dawkins, who was my close personal friend, my friend -- I talked to him before Ryan went, and I said, 'Take my kid in and protect him.' And he failed. He left my son in Iraq."
Greg pauses, rubs his face, his head, looks out over his pond. For three years now it has been easier for Manelick to think about the murderer than to think about the murdered, perhaps. Easier to look at the place in his mind where he sees a killer than at the place where his son used to be. But he knows how hard he drove Ryan, understands in his gut that his son was trying to live up to the example he set. Once, when Ryan was seven or eight, Greg brought some roosters home. "They could peck through metal, these things," he says. "After a while there were no roosters left except one -- this one rooster, he had killed all the others. He was a monster, a great big, huge red thing, and Ryan would go out into the yard to play, and that rooster would go after him. He told me, 'That thing's trying to kill me.' So one day, it had gotten so bad that he wouldn't go outside, he was too scared. So I took a broomstick and broke it off, and I said, 'You take this and go out and play and if that rooster comes after you, you start whacking him about the head and neck. If you kill him we'll pot him and we'll eat him. I'm tired of hearing about this rooster.'
"So then I hear all kind of commotion, and I look out, and there Ryan is just going sick on the rooster -- it's full-on mortal combat. That thing would come after him, and he'd whack it, and feathers would go up, and then the rooster would go for him again. He'd whack it to the ground, and it'd come up after him again. Thinking about it now, I never should have done it, it could have pecked his eyes out. But I thought, Well, let him learn to be a man. And after he whacked him and whacked him, the rooster finally got up as if to say, 'OK, that's good -- you're tough.' It never bothered him again."
Manelick pauses again. Heading into the war zone, he knows, was Ryan's way of trying to kill the rooster. "When Ryan went off to Iraq, I told him to go out there and survive," Manelick says. He looks out over the pond, recalling the advice he gave his son. "You're going to rebuild a country," Manelick told him. "Go out and become a man."
[From Issue 1021 — March 8, 2007]