how a businessman bribed half the US navy — RT USA News

 “Manilla, 2007. The chauffeured Mercedes crawled south for half an hour within the interminable visitors – the turbid waters of Manilla Bay on the precise. The center-aged males packed contained in the vehicles have been in an exuberant temper … Leonard Glenn Francis was taking out the senior commanders of the US seventh Fleet. These have been essentially the most highly effective navy officers in Asia, and so they managed the actions of round sixty ships and submarines, 150 plane, and 20,000 sailors in an enormous operational space, stretching from Hawaii to India …”

“The boys moved rapidly by an air-conditioned foyer and thru a curtain on the again. On the opposite aspect, Filipino ladies – many simply college students – sat in rows in a sort of fish bowl, identifiable not by their names however by the numbers connected to their skimpy outfits … At all times the … huge boss or Lion King to those navy officers, Leonard dominated the motion …”

“The afterparty was within the $4,000-a-night McArthur Suite on the Manilla Lodge … It was Normal Douglas McArthur’s house and operational command throughout World Struggle II. The boys piled into the Spanish-Mission-style room with wood ceiling beams, marble tiles, an ornate chandelier and closely draped curtains. Leonard … stocked the suite with $10,000 bottles of Dom Perignon … The 2-bedroom suite was full of McArthur memorabilia. Within the suite’s examine, two ornately carved wood chairs – the one objects to outlive the Battle of Manilla, stood in entrance of a desk … One of many males, fairly drunk by now, opened a case on the desk containing a reproduction of McArthur’s well-known corn-cob pipe and grabbed a lady.”

Fats Leonard, as he got here to be recognized, remembers the scene as follows: “Being warriors, they’d been at sea for such a very long time – the aviators, your nukes … they’re, uh, captains of ships. They’ve obtained this interior aspect of them that could be a beast that should come out … We went there and picked up a bunch of karaoke women and booked them out and introduced them again. They’re like rockstars. They’re residing their life – residing their desires – issues that they’ll by no means ever, ever once more do of their lifetime. No one would give them that sort of get together that I do … You realize, they simply began stripping and having intercourse proper there … The pipe was used as a dildo on the hooker, making a mockery of Normal McArthur’s memorabilia … they completely desecrated and insulted,” he says, laughing.

“It was a mass orgy … That’s how deep we have been with the navy … The whole command – the chain of command – needed to be in your pocket. And that’s what occurred. All people was in my pocket … I had them in my palm and was simply rolling them round.”

As he says within the trailer to the interview, “I had the navy by their balls … I turned my weapons in opposition to them as a result of they betrayed me.”

Fats Leonard was a Malaysian businessman who bribed quite a few officers and others within the US Navy till he was arrested. He paid for prostitutes and orgies for naval officers, rating all the way in which as much as admiral. He threw lavish events and $30,000 dinners, despatched presents for the officer’s wives – little issues like Chanel and Gucci purses, Cohiba Cigars – the good stuff that no officer or his spouse ought to need to dwell with out.

In return, the officers he corrupted made positive their ships docked at ports throughout Asia that Fats Leonard managed. Because the Nineteen Eighties, Leonard made financial institution by provisioning the Navy at extortionate charges for gasoline, meals, even safety, by offering what he referred to as a “ring of metal” across the ships – as if the US Navy ought to need assistance defending itself. The ring of metal was nothing however a line of barges tied up across the army ships to forestall an assault just like the one which occurred in 2000 in Yemen’s harbor when two Al-Qaeda operatives rammed a ship filled with explosives into the aspect of the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, killing 17 sailors and injuring one other 37.

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2001 grew to become an excellent 12 months for Leonard after 9/11 for the “husbanding” monopoly of his provisioning firm referred to as Glenn Protection Marine Asia. You would possibly say Leonard obtained fats off his contracts with the US authorities from that interval on, residing in a $130-million mansion in Singapore the place he saved 20 vehicles, together with Rolls-Royces and militarized Hummers, all proceeds from his US Navy contracts.

Fats Leonard was a larger-than-life character in additional than simply weight (the place he took the scales as much as 160 kilograms – a whopping 352 kilos on his six-foot-three body). He wore Stars-and-Stripes ties, had Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless The USA’ as his ringtone, ate sloppy joes and rooted for US baseball groups, so the individuals he served actually preferred him. And he preferred the USA as a result of it was excellent to him – with out most individuals in authorities realizing it was being excellent to him. Fats Leonard liked to contract with the US army.

However now Fats Leonard is mad. It’s not simply that his money-making empire got here crashing down round his ft in 2013 when he was arrested. He pled responsible in 2015 to all that and continues to be awaiting sentencing beneath home arrest in San Diego. No, Fats Leonard is mad as a result of among the individuals in his pocket – the very best higher-ups who took his bribes – didn’t get taken down with him, although none of what he did might have occurred with out them. They continue to be at giant whereas the authorized system exhibits no obvious curiosity in them, and that made the normally jolly Leonard, who sounds drunk with energy in his interviews, mad sufficient to talk out publicly.

Oh positive, the corruption scandal led to varied naval officers being charged, jailed for some time and demoted, and to damaged marriages, the same old falderal that comes with such scandals. However Leonard needs to know, the place is the jail time for the excessive brass that he himself is now dealing with?

Now that superior kidney most cancers has left him with out a lot to lose, Fats Leonard is crying out publicly. Journalist Tom Wright not too long ago interviewed him, and even Wright admits that, in the course of the first interviews, Leonard’s pure allure conned him into feeling sympathetic towards his story of a tricky childhood and a person who made good by taking good care of the US Navy’s most pressing ‘wants’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd_xH2JjB34

“I did like him at one level,” says Wright, “however then … there was some private cruelties to ladies in his life … The misogyny that runs by this entire story is surprising … On the very finish of our interplay … I challenged him on a number of this stuff … That was the final time we talked … and his reactions to it is extremely, very telling.”

At one level in that last episode, Leonard mentioned to Wright in obvious shock, “I don’t know why you’re so frightened about hookers,” and the hooker they have been speaking about was the mom of his kids. Wright ties his considerations in regards to the misogyny to the sorts of issues that occurred within the Tailhook scandal within the 90s as changing into endemic within the armed forces again then, as a result of ladies have been new within the US army, and a few male troopers apparently didn’t know easy methods to comport themselves round them as colleagues in struggle.

It’s not a salacious connection for Wright to make as a result of the large key to Leonard’s success with the Navy was orchestrating orgies. Leonard’s lengthy success story wasn’t simply in regards to the nice job he did in offering the ‘ring of metal’. He additionally did an enthusiastic job of operating intercourse rings for troopers – a hoop of beds, because it have been. It didn’t matter that he charged exorbitant charges for offering these unlawful companies, as a result of these shopping for have been utilizing US authorities cash, not their very own, and their participation in such companies nearly assured they’d by no means squeal on Leonard.

Leonard obtained a style of his personal therapy of ladies when he was arrested for his crimes. He was stripped, chained, handcuffed, and made to squat.

“Right here you’re handled like an animal as soon as inside,” he complained.

They stripped away the dignity of a person who claims he had loved the facility of steering $20-billion ships to ports of his personal selecting, boasting that he might successfully place the US Navy as a civilian by selecting the place he’d supply explicit companies. He was additionally charged with acquiring categorised data from these he corrupted.

Leonard says the actual scandal is that some prime admirals who benefited from his provisioning stay free, a few of them having been allowed to retire honorably, regardless that he had submitted proof that incriminated them.

“I really feel utterly betrayed,” says Leonard. “They requested me to call all these concerned or face 50 years in jail and I spilled the beans … I gave them about 40 names. I instructed mainly how deep the bribery was within the US Navy. It mainly shook the inspiration of the navy … I felt very upset as a result of simply take a look at what I’m going by … My total life has been destroyed. My companies, my household, all the pieces is gone, you already know, being hit like a tsunami … [Yet,] One four-star admiral I named was let off scot-free simply because he was appointed by the president and the senate. There isn’t a approach they will embarrass the federal government by indicting him. It could have been a humiliation.”

Alas, the nice instances didn’t final eternally. Fats Leonard’s empire has collapsed, and he’s palpably offended as a result of the Epstein-like secrets and techniques that he held on army brass did him no good. The safety he thought he had wrapped round himself like a hoop of metal failed to carry collectively.

“I had over 2,800 workers working for me in over 30 nations and all the pieces folded. So many harmless individuals misplaced their jobs, many households have been destroyed. This was deliberate monetary destroy introduced upon me.”

Leonard’s crimes and people who joined in them have been reported to the NCIS (Naval Prison Investigative Service) by a Navy spouse who was bodily mistreated, but for years, nothing was carried out about something that was reported as a result of Leonard had, through his secrets and techniques, primarily purchased everybody off whereas individuals have been nonetheless having fun with his companies. Based on Wright, Leonard even managed to deprave one of many prime NCIS officers – ‘corrupt’ normally that means, in tales like this, to get somebody to partake in these sexual companies, thereby assuring Leonard’s safety from the highest of the NCIS, lest the officer in query incriminate himself.

As Leonard put it within the preliminary interview, “All people has their wants. And I gave them that sense of confidence, and I additionally offered them what they wished … and so they might belief me … I performed skilled. I performed sexual – no matter you wanted – something.”

It labored like a well-lubricated machine, concealing its personal misdoings… till sooner or later it didn’t.

By David Haggith is an writer revealed by Putnam and HarperCollins. He’s writer of The Nice Recession Weblog and writes for over 50 financial information web sites. His Twitter web page of financial humor is @EconomicRecess.