Untold: Opus Dei FT long read: The Broker
10 snips
Feb 17, 2026 A fallen stockbroker turns into a pivotal arms middleman, navigating covert Pentagon supply chains. He revives Cold War factories in the Balkans to mass-produce artillery. The story follows risky contracts, legal disputes, deadly accidents and the relentless grind behind privatized warfare.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
From Baseball Dreams To Cold Call Finance
- Will Somerendijk reinvented himself from a failed baseball hopeful into a Merrill Lynch broker, using cold-calling grit to launch a finance career.
- His sports obsession shows in his relentlessness: 300 cold calls a day and chasing a baseball franchise move.
Privatised Supply Chains Shape Modern War
- Modern US power projection increasingly relies on covert, privatized supply chains instead of direct troop deployments.
- Entrepreneurs like Somerendijk become crucial by sourcing Soviet-era weapons for proxy conflicts from Eastern Europe.
Small Warehouse To Million Dollar Defence Broker
- Somerendijk founded Regulus Global with a $35 business licence and a 20,000 sq ft warehouse to trade surplus defence gear.
- Early sales were holsters, night-vision and gun-show deals that scaled to $1m revenue in year one.