"Fat Leonard
By Craig Whitlock
Simon & Schuster, 480 pages, $32.50
Many Americans have heard the name Fat Leonard. That's the sobriquet of Leonard Francis, an obese Malaysian defense contractor who, in the 2000s, fleeced the U.S. Navy and compromised some of its Pacific officers, plying them with parties, prostitutes and expensive gifts. The scandal doesn't lack color.
Mr. Francis threw lavish dinners and parties for naval personnel at Asian luxury hotels. On one occasion a naval officer dumped a glass of Dom Perignon off a skyscraper balcony so he could get a pour from a better bottle coming around. On another, Mr. Leonard shocked his guests by seeming to eat a wineglass. Such details appear throughout Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's highly readable account of the scandal, "Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy." Mr. Whitlock weaves his story from more than 150 on-the-record interviews and "a bonanza of documents" he obtained through various sources, including law-enforcement notes, invoices, court filings, military files and even Mr. Francis' own trove of records.
Yet the story of Mr. Francis and the U.S. Navy is more complex than the public might appreciate.
In a port in Yemen in 2000, terrorists drove a small boat up to a U.S. Navy destroyer and detonated explosives, killing 17 sailors and wounding more. The attack on the USS Cole changed how the Navy handled pulling into ports around the world. Mr. Francis, who serviced ships in Pacific ports with his company Glenn Defense Marine Asia, soon became "one of a handful of contractors" who could meet the Navy's strengthened requirements for protecting ships.
Mr. Francis offered an amalgam of barges known as the Ring of Steel to preclude nefarious actors from coming too close to U.S. naval assets in port. "Few ship captains were willing to risk a port visit without the Ring of Steel, no matter the expense," Mr. Whitlock writes. And who could blame them?
Mr. Francis developed a reputation as "a bend-over backwards type guy." He helped the Navy dock at otherwise inaccessible ports. His company showed up all over Asia to resupply ships and drain their sewage, among other unglamorous tasks. He claimed to be a patriot abroad, billing himself as America's man in the Pacific who could help check communist China's machinations.
As Mr. Whitlock relates, Mr. Francis would pad his bills, and he could exploit byzantine contracting processes: "Ship supply officers weren't contracting experts." In one instance, an invoice arrived written in Thai. In another, Mr. Francis billed a ship that was rushing to head out to help with a tsunami relief effort.
Mr. Francis' business model was, to use Mr. Whitlock's term, as a "world-class recruiter" of partners who would steer him more contracts. He persuaded officers to leak ship schedules, which tend to be classified until a few weeks before ships pull in. Some of these officers used phony email addresses -- Mr. Whitlock highlights aliases such as dingo11@cooltoad.com -- to sneak Mr. Francis information.
As astonishing: The Navy's law-enforcement enterprise, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, failed to do anything for years. "NCIS field offices in Singapore and Japan frequently received fraud and overbilling complaints about Glenn Defense," Mr. Whitlock says. Starting in 2006, NCIS "opened twenty-seven criminal investigations into the company." Each case was closed. Mr. Francis even managed to corrupt an NCIS officer. The agent, in exchange for prostitutes and cash, leaked investigation details to Mr. Francis so he could stay ahead of the rap.
Mr. Francis glad-handed hundreds of naval officers, and many who knew him, including some who attended his dinners, weren't greedy criminals, as Mr. Whitlock sometimes implies. Mr. Francis was hard to avoid. "When he comes through a receiving line in Manila, three people behind the president of the Philippines," one officer asked, "what are you going to do? Cause a scene?" It's a fair question. Some officers attended events with Mr. Francis only after asking permission from the lawyers, known as judge advocates, on their staff.
Mr. Whitlock chalks up the scandal to "the stench of entitlement" that the Navy developed after public acclaim during the war on terror. A dubious theory, in my view. The accolades went to special forces and fighter pilots, not supply officers and sailors chipping paint on destroyers.
Mr. Francis preyed on weakness -- he sought out officers who had substance-abuse problems, rocky marriages or both. The more interesting question of the U.S. Navy's culture is whether the demands of constant deployments and the pressures of a life at sea are producing officers prone to spectacularly bad judgment.
The investigation into the Fat Leonard mess may have inflicted more damage to the Navy than the corruption did, and here Mr. Whitlock is incurious. The Navy held up officers for promotion as it scoured the record to determine if each one had ever so much as encountered Mr. Francis. Officers often didn't know if they were under the microscope.
"Right now, as far as anyone knows," a retired flag officer told Sam LaGrone of U.S. Naval Institute News in 2019, "if you ever went west of Hawaii, you're being looked at." Mr. Whitlock tallies criminal charges against 33 defendants in federal court by 2019, including service members and contracting personnel. But the Navy used censure to litigate other offenses in the court of public opinion. The sea service blasted officers with allegations they couldn't properly refute. Watch out, some might reasonably have concluded, the Navy might some day throw you overboard.
Worst of all, as investigative holds dragged on, some accomplished officers elected to retire instead of taking a new post. The Navy lost promising officers with extensive Pacific knowledge -- precisely as the military threat from China arrived. Will the U.S. have the experienced hands it needs if missiles start flying in the Pacific? Alas, that could well end up being the more lasting damage from the Fat Leonard affair.
---
Mrs. Odell is a member of the Journal's editorial board." [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Beware of False Friends. Kate Bachelder Odell. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 May 2024: C.9.
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą