Paying the Price: The Hidden Cost of the ‘Fat Leonard’ Investigation
By: Sam LaGrone
January 24, 2019 6:14 PM • Updated: January 25, 2019 12:04 PM
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The investigation into the web of corruption spun by contractor Leonard Francis has wreaked havoc on the Navy’s ability to fill senior leadership roles, unintentionally stalled hundreds of officers’ careers and thinned out the service’s flag ranks, USNI News has learned.
The six-year-long Department of Justice-led probe into the “Fat Leonard” scandal has resulted in 33 federal indictments, 22 guilty pleas and Francis admitting to authorities that his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, had overbilled the Navy by $35 million to support port visits by U.S. warships.
But to get to that total, hundreds of personnel that served in the Pacific who had not committed any crimes had to be investigated and then cleared. That process placed a countless number of officers on hold with no information on their status and no timeline for being freed from suspicion – a process that sometimes took years – former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told USNI News in an interview last year.
“If Leonard Francis mentioned somebody’s name, or it seemed to us that if somebody had served in a senior position in the Pacific during this time, which covered a lot of folks, they were caught up in this until their name could be pulled out,” Mabus said. “It took in a huge percentage of flag officers, and it really hamstrung the Navy in terms of promotions, in terms of positions.”
The sheer volume of Navy personnel exposed to Francis is indicative of how ubiquitous GDMA’s reach was in the Western Pacific from the late 1990s to his 2013 arrest. The Japan-based U.S. 7th Fleet relied heavily on GDMA to carve out places where U.S. warships could make port calls as Washington wrestled with Beijing for influence in the South China Sea, several officers who served in 7th Fleet have told USNI News.
China was at the time seen as the U.S. Navy’s greatest adversary, and therefore the best and brightest officers in the service cycled through deployments in 7th Fleet. Many of those same officers’ promotions were later put on hold while the investigation was ongoing, with the effects rippling up to the highest levels of the service.
While the total number of Navy personnel DoJ has under investigation is unknown, as of early 2018 Justice had passed to the Navy almost 450 names that they elected not to prosecute. Of those, the Navy elected to take a handful to court-martial, issue seven letters of censure from the Secretary of the Navy, and issue about 40 other administrative actions. As of early 2018, there were about 170 names still pending before the CDA.
Long article continued here: https://news.usni.org/2019/01/24/paying-price-hidden-cost-fat-leonard-investigation