An exclusive excerpt from Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Harp’s new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, reveals new details about a violent drug ring embedded in the U.S. Army Special Forces and the Airborne Corps
July 28, 2025
It has been more than four years since a pair of elite special operations soldiers were found murdered in the woods on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and no one has been convicted of the crime. Master Sgt. William “Billy” Lavigne II, an active-duty Delta Force operator, and Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas Sr., a logistics and supply soldier attached to the elite Joint Special Operations Command, had no shortage of potential enemies. Both men were deeply disillusioned with their military service, dealt drugs on base, worked with Mexican drug cartels to traffic cocaine by the kilo, and were heavy users in their own right. Both had killed people in the past, on American soil, and gotten away with it. And both were said to be writing tell-all books about their time in service and what they knew about organized crime in the Special Forces. So when their bodies turned up riddled with bullets and dumped on a remote training range of Fort Bragg on Dec. 2, 2020, the victims of an apparently professional hit by skilled assassins, few were very surprised that they had been murdered. But all these years later, the identity of the perpetrator or perpetrators remains a mystery.
In a surprise twist in a story that I have covered for the better part of five years, the Department of Justice in 2023 accused an unexpected person of orchestrating the hits on the 37-year-old Lavigne and 44-year-old Dumas. He has pleaded not guilty and his trial is expected to begin in early 2026. Meanwhile, there is another man, a profoundly corrupt police officer, who admits that he had a motive to kill Lavigne and Dumas and that, in the immediate aftermath of the murders, most of his underworld associates suspected him of the double homicide. His name is Freddie Wayne Huff II.
Freddie Wayne Huff, a North Carolina lawman born in 1980, never served in the military. All the same, his story of early promise, high achievement, subsequent disillusionment, loss of faith, turning against his former employer, and descent into addiction, drug trafficking, and violent crime closely paralleled the downward trajectories of Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas. Although the bare bones of his criminal exploits were reported in a few North Carolina publications, authorities kept his connection to events at Fort Bragg under wraps
Freddie Huff joined the Lexington police force not long after high school. A self-described “obsessive perfectionist” who worked tirelessly to improve himself during the mania phases of his bipolar disorder, he quickly distinguished himself as a highly motivated young K9 officer with a preternatural ability to find drug money at traffic stops. Many a cartel courier, passing through North Carolina, lost a five- or six-figure sum to Officer Huff, a tall, solidly built, pink-skinned white man with hooded eyes and a high-and-tight haircut.
In 2009, Huff was deputized as a DEA task force officer and assigned to the El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, the agency’s main source of intelligence on Mexican drug cartels. There, he became friends with a terminally ill DEA analyst, a bespectacled Black man named Karl Culberson, whose long and varied career working for the federal government included a self-reported stint with the CIA. Nearing death from pancreatic cancer, Culberson confessed something that changed the course of Huff’s life.
“What you think you’re doing is noble,” Culberson told Huff. “But they want it here. You’re a pawn. Everything you’re doing is in vain.”
Huff was quietly troubled by Culberson’s words, which he took to mean that the American government could stop the flow of drugs into the United States at any time but chooses not to. Nevertheless, he continued to work as a narcotics agent.
In 2010, Huff returned to the police force in Lexington, which lies about two hours north of Fort Bragg, and went back to doing what he did best: correctly guessing which passing motorists were carrying drug money, pulling them over, and confiscating the cash. A partial but revealing set of police records show that between 2010 and 2013, Huff seized $1.3 million from 25 motorists whom he detained for traffic infractions. All of the stops took place on the stretch of Interstate 85 between Charlotte and Greensboro, and every one of the suspects was a nonwhite man whom Huff pulled over for failing to signal, following too closely, going slightly over the speed limit, having obstructed state tags or a broken taillight, or some other minor offense.
