Mystery surrounds dead U.S. contractor

By DEBORAH HASTINGS
AP NATIONAL WRITER

There are fortunes to be made in Iraq, where seemingly everything is broken or looted or blown up. The fortunes come from fixing those things; there is no shortage of cash to hire the fixers.

Often they are characters writ large with bravado and cunning and greed, sprouting like weeds amid the rubble.

Dale Stoffel was all of that. He devised elaborate schemes to get Iraqi government contracts to repair an unending list of things that no longer worked. He posed for photographs in the desert wearing a flak vest and toting an M5 submachine gun. He clinched a cigar between his teeth.