Investigative reporter takes deep look into 'Fat Leonard' scandal. 'The skeletons are in this book.' (2024)

Craig Whitlock can still remember the moment he first heard about “Fat Leonard.” He was covering the Pentagon for The Washington Post in late 2013 when he read news reports out of San Diego about the arrests of a Malaysian defense contractor, a Navy officer and a special agent tied up in a bribery scheme.

Soon thereafter, Whitlock was wandering the corridors of the Pentagon when he bumped into a Navy officer acquaintance. He asked if the officer knew the defense contractor, Leonard Glenn Francis.

“Oh, you mean Fat Leonard?” the officer replied. “Everybody in the Navy knows who Fat Leonard is.”

A new book published this month goes in-depth on the Fat Leonard scandal.

(Courtesy of Simon & Schuster)

Whitlock was immediately intrigued — how could he not be when a subject has such a moniker? Now an investigative reporter who sometimes publishes just a few stories per year, Whitlock has written roughly 60 stories about the scandal for the Post over the past decade. Earlier this month, Simon & Schuster published his new book, “Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy.” The 369-page tale chronicles the con artist at the center of the Navy’s worst-ever corruption scheme, the officers he bribed and the failure of the Navy to reckon with the scandal.

“The Navy tried to keep all the skeletons in the closet, but I got the key — the skeletons are in this book,” Whitlock told the Union-Tribune in a recent interview. “The Navy hasn’t wanted to come to grips with how many of its leaders were wined and dined. So many knew this was going on for years, yet stood by and didn’t do anything. There has been a real lack of accountability.”

Those familiar with the scandal — it has been covered at length in the Union-Tribune over the past decade — will recognize many of the book’s main characters at the heart of the scheme. Francis, nicknamed “Fat Leonard” because of his girth, bribed Navy officials with lavish gifts, five-star resort stays, gourmet dinners and the services of prostitutes. In exchange, officers did his bidding, leaking confidential military information to him or steering ships to ports that he controlled around Southeast Asia.

Francis and his firm, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, provided Navy ships with security, water, trash removal and other supplies and services. With the help of the officers in his pocket, he consistently overbilled. In a plea agreement, he admitted to cheating the Navy — and U.S. taxpayers — out of at least $35 million, though investigators have sometimes estimated the loss between $50 million and $100 million.

Whitlock also treads new ground by revealing that at least 91 admirals were “placed under investigation or queried about their contacts with Francis,” including one who had risen to become the highest-ranking admiral in the entire Navy. The book names some of those admirals for the first time, documenting their connections with Francis and how they used their powerful positions to largely thwart serious repercussions.

The book also details an incident in which a Glenn Defense executive treated several Navy officers to a night of food, partying and prostitutes in 2010 in Vladivostok, Russia — far from the usual Southeast Asia ports where Francis typically carried out his corruption schemes.

“From a counterintelligence standpoint, the scene was an obvious debacle,” Whitlock wrote. “(A)t least six officers from the Seventh Fleet flagship, wearing dress-blue Navy uniforms, drinking with prostitutes on Russian soil.”

Whitlock reported that investigators determined two officers took off their uniforms, accompanied the women in a sauna and had sex with them. By the time the investigators learned this information, one of the officers had received a prestigious faculty appointment at the Naval Academy where he was — ironically — teaching courses about ethics and moral character. The other officer had taken a highly public press job at the Pentagon, was in the process of becoming an admiral and was in line to become the Navy’s top spokesperson.

“Mindful of the potential damage to its public image, the Navy cited both officers for misconduct but kept the whole affair a secret,” Whitlock wrote.

A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Whitlock said he gathered more documents related to the Fat Leonard scandal than he has for any other reporting project in his 34-year career — including the Afghanistan Papers, a six-part Post investigation into America’s war in Afghanistan that Whitlock later turned into his first book.

Craig Whitlock

(Marvin Joseph )

The new book’s endnotes stretch nearly 70 pages and meticulously document where or how Whitlock obtained every critical piece of information in the book. Those details came from first-person interviews, court documents, Navy records and a massive trove of prosecution files, among other sources.

What the Navy has never produced, however, is any sort of comprehensive report or study analyzing how Francis was able to penetrate its ranks so thoroughly, Whitlock said. He reports in the book that the Department of Justice referred 685 cases — almost all of them Navy personnel — to military authorities for review. That’s on top of the 33 people, many of them Navy officers, charged in connection with the scheme in federal court in San Diego.

“I think they’ve tried to sweep it under the rug,” the author told the Union-Tribune. “There has been no public reckoning. The Navy didn’t ever try to understand the fundamental question of how so many of its best and brightest officers fell for this or went along with it.”

The book is split into seven parts, starting with Francis’ childhood, family life and early run-ins with the law. It tells how he became a swaggering businessman who controlled ports all around Southeast Asia while packing on weight — at one point he carried about 500 pounds on his 6-foot-4 frame. It documents alleged fraud and bribery involving Navy officers that occurred in the early 1990s, long before the conduct included in the federal prosecutions.

Francis, who declined Whitlock’s interview requests, previously described his upbringing and told his life story in a podcast that he secretly recorded while on house arrest.

A middle portion of the book ends up reading like a spy thriller as Whitlock inches the story’s timeline toward Francis’ 2013 arrest. He describes in detail how the investigative net tightened around Francis, and the steps that federal authorities took to ensure the contractor’s sources — especially his mole inside the Naval Criminal Investigative Service — didn’t catch wind of the plan to lure him to San Diego and arrest him.

Leonard Glenn Francis, aka “Fat Leonard,” poses for a mugshot after being caught on Sept. 20, 2022, by Interpol in Venezuela. He had fled house arrest in San Diego 16 days earlier, slipping into Mexico, flying to Cuba then to Venezuela. He was arrested at the Simon Bolivar International Airport of Maiquetia, outside of Caracas, where he had been planning to board a flight to Russia.

(Interpol)

The last third or so of the book tells the story San Diegans will likely be most familiar with — that of the federal prosecution of Francis and his co-conspirators, as well as his time in and out of custody and his escape from house arrest.

Whitlock reports that just weeks after his arrest, Francis sat down with prosecutors for his first proffer session — a meeting in which he agreed to provide information to the government about other defendants with a promise that his statements wouldn’t be used against him. Prosecutors learned the corruption ran much deeper and wider than they knew. Soon, Francis was spending much of his time not in jail, but at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where he was either engaged in proffer meetings or preparing for future sessions.

Whitlock includes descriptions — and photographs — of stories that had previously only been whispered about in the halls of the downtown San Diego federal courthouse. Francis began using those preparation days inside a conference room in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to pamper himself.

“While Francis did some work on these occasions, he mostly exploited them to focus on self-care,” Whitlock writes. “His legal team dubbed the sessions ‘spa days’ ... his female ‘paralegals’ massaged his feet and tended to his toenails with a pedicure drill while he relaxed in a chair, resting his eyes. He took long breaks in the prosecutors’ restroom, where he whitened his teeth, gave himself sponge baths, and colored his lustrous black hair in the sink.”

One photo included in the book shows Francis daintily adjusting a cosmetic face mask. Another shows him smiling in a chair as a woman dyes his hair. During the proffer sessions themselves, Francis’ defense team would order him huge breakfasts and lunches from expensive restaurants. His attorneys from that time — Francis has churned through lawyers over the years — did not respond Friday to the Union-Tribune’s request for comment.

“Prosecutors and federal agents plugged their ears and looked the other way, partly because Francis covered his own expenses but mostly because he was an irreplaceable witness,” Whitlock wrote.

The book details how Francis and a new defense team later convinced U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino to allow him out of custody for treatment of renal cancer that at one point seemed likely to kill him. But as his health improved, he remained on house arrest, even as he claimed more and more liberties for himself despite nominally being under supervision by the court’s Pretrial Services division.

Whitlock told the Union-Tribune that the book is not just about how Francis conned the Navy, but also “how he conned the Justice Department. He conned a federal judge.”

Sammartino could not be reached for comment.

Whitlock wrote that Francis hosted a documentary film crew at his home just before he absconded over Labor Day weekend 2022. After escaping across the border to Tijuana, he flew to Cancún and then Cuba. Whitlock reports that Francis had hoped to stay in Cuba, but authorities there wouldn’t allow it. They suggested he try his luck in Venezuela.

While it’s been previously reported that Francis went to Venezuela with the hopes of ultimately making it to Russia, Whitlock reports that Francis applied for asylum at the Russian embassy in the Venezuelan capitol. But before Russian officials could rule on his claim, Venezuelan authorities captured him. He was returned to the U.S. late last year as part of a prisoner swap.

The book’s epilogue briefly discusses the recent unraveling of the federal prosecution due to what Sammartino, the judge, described as “outrageous” misconduct by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, including the failure to disclose certain evidence to defense attorneys. “While the omissions didn’t change the core truth about Francis’s corruption of the Seventh Fleet, they were fundamental legal errors that deprived the defendants of a fair trial,” Whitlock wrote.

In recent months, a new prosecution team put in place to review the misconduct allegations recommended throwing out the felony convictions of eight military officers who had either pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. The judge accepted those recommendations, and those officers instead pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, avoiding both prison and steep restitution orders. A ninth officer had his case completely dismissed.

San Diego U.S. Attorney Tara McGrath was sworn in late last year, long after the legal case had begun to crumble. She briefly spoke with the Union-Tribune on Friday when asked about the book, after she had just attended an unrelated sentencing hearing for a corrupt Border Patrol agent prosecuted by her office.

“There has been a lot of news coming out of this courthouse recently,” McGrath said. “That news reflects our dedication to accountability. Whether it’s accountability of military officers who are accepting bribes, or holding public servants accountable, or holding ourselves accountable. We are laser focused on accountability.”

The book leaves open the question, unanswerable at this point, of what kind of punishment Francis might face — for the original scheme and for absconding. While that has seemed for some time like the last remaining issue to sort out, the prosecutorial misconduct has left open the possibility that previously convicted defendants will seek to have their charges dismissed or reduced.