Battling the U.S. Navy: Documents and sources cut through secrecy
Twelve years ago, I was stomping through the corridors of the Pentagon as a military beat reporter for The Washington Post. At the Defense Department, there’s always a deluge of potential news stories and international incidents to monitor. The trick is figuring out which ones will keep your editors happy, which ones you can safely ignore for the moment, and which ones might be diamonds in the rough that are worth pursuing, yet haven’t caught the eye of all the other smart, well-sourced reporters.
One day I noticed a short Associated Press dispatch from San Diego: federal prosecutors there had charged a U.S. Navy officer and a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service with taking bribes and accepting sex workers from a U.S. Navy contractor. The contractor was a businessman named Leonard Francis whose Singapore-based company resupplied Navy ships and submarines during port visits in Asia.
“Bribes,” “prostitutes” and “NCIS” — the Navy’s law-enforcement arm known for an eponymous long-running TV melodrama — jumped out at me. But I didn’t know what to make of the case beyond that. I looked up the indictment, which listed names, dates and places without much context.
Luckily, while making my Pentagon rounds the next day, I bumped into a Navy officer I trusted and asked him whether he knew anything about this Leonard Francis guy.
“Oh, you mean ‘Fat Leonard,’” he said with a mischievous smile. “Everybody in the Navy knows Fat Leonard.”
And with that, I was hooked.
Preliminary reporting put some skin on the bones. Fat Leonard’s arrest warrant described him as standing 6-foot-3 and weighing 350 pounds. Navy sources said he was notorious for inviting officers — especially admirals — to over-the-top dinner parties at Michelin-starred restaurants and that he was a front-row fixture at military change-of-command ceremonies. His company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, held U.S. defense contracts worth $250 million and its business model allegedly hinged on overcharging the Navy for services. A Malaysian citizen, Leonard had also been charged with bribing a Navy officer for classified information, so it was shaping up as a possible espionage case, too.
In October 2013, I published a front-page article in The Washington Post about the burgeoning Navy sex-for-secrets scandal. It quoted a former chief of naval operations — the highest-ranking admiral in the Navy — sounding shocked and commented that it was “unheard of” for Navy officers to get arrested on bribery charges. During our interview, the admiral neglected to mention that Fat Leonard had wined and dined him personally and attended his retirement ceremony as a VIP guest, secrets that took me several more years to unearth.
Also unbeknownst to me was that Fat Leonard — during the same week the article came out — secretly met with federal agents and prosecutors in a bid to cut a plea deal. And the feds were shocked, too, by what they heard. Leonard breezily admitted to bribing more Navy officers than he could count, dating to the early 1990s, and holding sex parties for the brass in Asian ports from Vladivostok to Sydney. He also bragged about how easy it had been for him to infiltrate the Navy’s chain of command and run circles around NCIS.
The case gradually snowballed as the feds indicted more people. Over the next five years, I wrote around 50 news articles about the criminal investigation, many on the Post’s front page. The more I reported, however, the more I realized the story was still much bigger and more damning for the Navy than federal authorities were letting on. Fresh leads kept multiplying. I could barely keep track of all the crazy stories I heard about Fat Leonard’s exploits and the unbecoming conduct of Navy officers who pocketed his bribes.
The most important questions seemed obvious but proved difficult to answer. How could a Malaysian high school dropout seduce the leadership of the most powerful navy in the world? How had
he gotten away with massive fraud for 20 years? Why had Navy leaders allowed such unlawful and disgraceful behavior to fester? I became convinced that the only way to get to the bottom of the story
was to report and write a book.
Navy officials had zero interest in shedding light on the matter and disclosed almost nothing without a fight. I filed dozens of public records requests and a federal lawsuit to pry loose documents, but the Navy slow-rolled my queries for years (to this day, the FOIA lawsuit is still pending). Over time, the Navy released more than 3,000 pages of court-martial proceedings, contracting records and disciplinary letters — but with most of the names and incriminating details blacked out. Eventually, the Navy grew tired of my questions and informed me in writing that it would no longer respond to my FOIA requests or release any new information.
I kept digging elsewhere and conducted more than 150 interviews. One retired Navy captain said he repeatedly warned his superiors that Fat Leonard would inflict more damage to the service than the Tailhook scandal did in the early 1990s, but that his words went unheeded. Some people were afraid to talk because they didn’t want to get swept up in a still-unfolding federal investigation. But I was surprised by how many, with a little encouragement, were willing to shed light on a story that I found increasingly irresistible.
Even major players under the feds’ microscope couldn’t help themselves. Ironically, the person who loved the publicity more than anyone was Leonard, even though it invariably cast him in an unfavorable light. I mailed my story clips to him in jail in hopes of persuading him to grant an interview. He always declined, but he proudly showed off the articles to the guards and other inmates to prove what a big deal he was.
Meanwhile, I mined federal and state court records across the country, collecting more than 30,000 pages of transcripts, exhibits, affidavits, warrants, and charging documents. I also obtained court and police records from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Australia. Finally, trusted sources gave me an enormous and invaluable trove of information: federal agents’ case files for the Fat Leonard investigation.
Comprising several terabytes of data, the confidential case files contain notes of interviews with several hundred people and transcripts of interrogations of dozens of criminal suspects. Critically, the
case files included investigators’ notes from more than 300 hours of debriefings with Fat Leonard after his arrest. The cache also held millions of emails, text messages, photographs, hotel bills, brothel receipts, travel records, and dinner menus recovered from Leonard’s electronic devices and his company’s computer server. There were even Christmas cards and handwritten letters that Navy officers had sent Leonard over the years, thanking him for illicit gifts and favors.
In my 30-plus years as a reporter, this was by far the biggest motherlode of records I had obtained, larger even than stash of confidential documents that I drew upon for my previous book, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. Now my biggest challenge was to sift through all the material and organize it. That alone took me two full years.
To catalog and tag the records, I relied on Casefleet, a software program used by law firms to prepare cases for trial. It enabled me to organize facts chronologically, by subject and by name – and then to run queries and generate reports about specific events, themes and individuals, with links to the original documents. While it took months to annotate all the records and entries, Casefleet saved me a ton of time on the back end while I was writing and fact-checking my book manuscript. Combined with my other reporting, this primary-source material finally helped me gain a full understanding of the corruption scandal and how Fat Leonard infiltrated the Navy.
At a time when the public has become understandably skeptical of anonymous sources in the news media, I am proud that this book is wholly based on documents— most of which the Navy and Justice Department tried to keep secret— and on-the-record interviews. There are no blind quotes. None of the dialogue is re-imagined. Everything in quotation marks is exactly as people said it, based on contemporaneous audio recordings, notes, emails, and text messages. The sourcing is spelled out in great detail in the end notes.
The story of Fat Leonard and the U.S. Navy may be mind-boggling, but every word is true.