EXCLUSIVE: Inside the saga of a former paratrooper and 'pathological liar' who allegedly scammed upward of $10 million, threatened, kidnapped, and became the second American EVER indicted for torture.
Born in December 1968 in Spokane, Washington, as Ross Gothman Brogan, Roggio grew up in California, and later New Jersey, following his parents’ separation. His mother, Soon, had emigrated from Korea, and today, he has a tattoo of the Korean flag on his left bicep, in honor of his mom. He barely knew his biological father, and the family relocated regularly.
When Roggio was a high school senior, the family moved across the Delaware River from New Jersey, to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, a historic town in the Pocono Mountains, where he graduated and attended his first year of college. He was a soccer player, but at times, he found it hard to fit in. Stroudsburg is the type of small city where strings of American flags hang from colonial buildings and everyone knows one another. “There was a lot of racism and bullying,” Roggio said.
Roggio, of course, disagrees with his critics. He’s not shocked many people perceive him as a con man, but says it was a natural consequence of business deals gone bad. “The business world is weird,” he says. And he points out that many people have an ax to grind against him personally, professionally, and legally. “People hear what they want to hear,” Roggio says.Take, for example, Roggio’s purported MIT civil-engineering degree.
Then there’s Roggio’s military career. After high school, he became a paratrooper in an armor company in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. Through his lawyer, in court, Roggio claimed to have served in the Army for four years. Merring says Roggio told her he was a Green Beret who participated in the 1989 airborne assault of Panama. “He said he was shot in the ass,” Merring adds. Today, Merring isn’t sure which of Roggio’s stories, including the Panamanian ass injury, were real.
“He likes to fight,” Merring says, recalling a road-rage incident when he came home with a swollen fist.A special-forces mecca located near Fort Bragg, Fayetteville is filled with rifle-manufacturing companies, and it seemed like Roggio, with his military background, might fit in well. He joined a church frequented by special-forces operators and married a 19-year-old woman, Amanda Mecomber, who would become another ex-wife and the mother of his two daughters.
Next, Roggio went to Haiti. On his résumé, he styled himself as the CEO and president of a Fayetteville-based military contractor, Raidon Tactics, that provided security fora medical television show produced by Dr. Phil, which was filming in Haiti after the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. In a deposition, Roggio claimed Raidon was a CIA contractor. His church in Fayetteville shipped huge pallets of clothing for him to hand out to earthquake victims.
ROGGIO MET A SPECIAL-FORCES contact at church who introduced him to Polad Talabani, a powerful Kurdish military officer. Talabani would become a key facilitator in Roggio’s transformation into an international arms dealer. Roggio believed the Kurdish factory would be his golden goose. He said there was an opportunity to make $20 million, according to businessman Tom Patti, who crossed Roggio’s path in 2012 when Patti and Bill Pote were founding their rifle startup, Rebel Arms. A former member of youth Olympic rifle teams, Patti grew up around guns and was skeptical of Roggio. “He was never safe with a weapon,” Patti says. “I avoided going to the range with him.
Yet Roggio’s connection to Talabani remained intact. “I have sold many units to this customer,” he wrote seemingly about Talabani in a July 2013 email to Gene Carino, the CEO of United Defense Manufacturing Corp., a gunmaker in the Philippines. Roggio wanted Carino to help him source 5,000 rifles for the Kurdish commander. “I was selling them M4s,” he wrote. Beyond allegedly running guns for Talabani, Roggio’s résumé also highlights selling weapons systems to the Philippines military.
In public, Talabani’s political and military roles and the business empire of Faruk Holding Group, Zarya’s parent company, seemed to be ostensibly separate. Zarya officials did not respond to requests for comment, and documents from the Roggio investigation don’t clarify the exact relationship between them. But a source says the two parties were close.
Roggio with ex-wife Kristy Merring. She says he once told her, “I could never work at a bank, because I would rob it.”In this case, at least in the beginning and despite allegedly breaking federal laws against arms dealing, Roggio was earning his pay. Roggio’s problem was that this money, allocated for building the factory but kept in his account, wasn’t his money. “See, when I make a million dollars, like this year, $4 million came into my account, right?” Roggio told an employee, who, according to court documents, provided a secret recording of their conversation to federal investigators. For most companies, this extra money wouldn’t be a big deal. For Roggio, it created a tax issue.
Roggio blamed the issues on Faruk. He said they hadn’t built his warehouse quickly enough. “I had no part of the building and its construction,” he wrote in an email to his partners. “How is this my fault?” But finances were clearly also an issue, and Roggio was asking for more money. “I gave you a budget to completion with the clear understanding that it was best guess,” he wrote.
Roggio’s threats weren’t a joke. According to Department of Justice filings, in 2015, another of the factory’s employees, an unnamed Estonian, raised concerns about the company’s finances with Roggio, who perceived it as a blackmail attempt. Later in the recordings, Roggio acknowledged he couldn’t look the victim in the eye, “because of what I did to him.”
Roggio in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he allegedly built a weapons factory to manufacture rifles for Talabani. He emptied out the bank account of his then-wife, Merring. “Sir, I am willing to sell everything,” Roggio told Talabani. The package, the agent said, contained specialized drill bits used to manufacture the bullet chambers in guns. Roggio had ordered them from a tool shop in Connecticut, Drill Masters Eldorado, and asked Merring to forward the package on to him.
By the time Roggio escaped from his Kurdish apartment and returned to the United States, federal agents were ready, and told Merring not to let him back in their house. State police were on standby to protect her if he showed up.
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