Fat Leonard
How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
#1 New York Times bestselling author Craig Whitlock’s masterful account of one of the biggest public corruption scandals in American history—exposing how a charismatic Malaysian defense contractor bribed scores of high-ranking military officers, defrauded the US Navy of tens of millions of dollars, and jeopardized our nation’s security.
All the admirals in the US Navy knew Leonard Glenn Francis—either personally or by his legendary reputation. He was the larger-than-life defense contractor who greeted them on the pier whenever they visited ports in Asia, ready to show them a good time after weeks at sea while his company resupplied their ships and submarines. He was famed throughout the fleet for the gluttonous parties he hosted for officers: $1,000-per-person dinners at Asia’s swankiest restaurants, featuring unlimited Dom Pérignon, Cuban cigars, and sexy young women.
On the surface, with his flawless American accent, he seemed like a true friend of the Navy. What the brass didn’t realize, until far too late, was that Francis had seduced them by exploiting their entitlement and hubris. While he was bribing them with gifts, lavish meals, and booze-fueled orgies, he was making himself obscenely wealthy by bilking American taxpayers. Worse, he was stealing military secrets from under the admirals’ noses and compromising national security.
Based on reams of confidential documents—including the blackmail files that Francis kept on Navy officers—Fat Leonard is the full, unvarnished story of a world-class con man and a captivating testament to the corrosive influence of greed within the ranks of the American military.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rollicking exposé, Washington Post reporter Whitlock (The Afghanistan Papers) recaps the exploits of Leonard Francis, the Malaysian owner of Glenn Defense Marine Asia, a Singapore-based logistics company that robbed millions of dollars from the U.S. government by overcharging the Navy. (Exaggerating the amount of sewage pumped out of ships' septic tanks was a favorite scam.) From the 1990s onwards, Francis kept his fraud going by corrupting Seventh Fleet officers, who signed off on bogus invoices, steered contracts to his company, and quashed inquiries; he even had a mole in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who helped him dodge investigations. Drawing on troves of incriminating emails and Francis's colorful testimony after his 2013 arrest, Whitlock's vivid narrative is a whirl of blithe graft as the charming, insidious, free-spending Francis recruits Navy personnel with gourmet feasts at swanky restaurants, luxury vacations, gifts of furniture and electronics, envelopes of cash, and many, many prostitutes, who sometimes snapped compromising pics of boozy sailors. It's also an appalling indictment of an out-of-control Navy that ditched its ethos of duty and honor in favor of craven toadying, and then, when the scandal came out, shielded the top brass from accountability while lower ranks went to jail. The result is an entertaining picaresque about a magnetic rogue that also spotlights troubling rot in the U.S. military.
