My Counterterrorism Magazine Q&A With Craig Whitlock, The Author Of “Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked and Seduced the U.S. Navy”

Counterterrorism magazine published my Q&A with Craig Whitlock (seen in the below photo). 

The Washington Post investigative reporter has covered the “Fat Leonard” U.S. Navy bribery scandal since the beginning and he has published a fine book about the sensational crime story.  

You can read the Q&A via the below pages or the below text:

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998. 

Craig Whitlock is the author of “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.” He has also written “Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy,” which covers the massive bribery and contractor fraud case that involved many senior Navy officers across the world. 

Offering fine cigars, extravagant dinners, expensive gifts and even prostitutes, Leonard Francis, the owner and operator of the Glenn Marine Group in Southeast Asia, bribed Navy officers and other officials into providing him classified information that helped him enrich his contracting business. Suspicion of Leonard’s padded invoices led to an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS), which in turn led to the arrest of numerous Navy officers for bribery.    

Craig Whitlock was interviewed by Paul Davis. 

IACSP: Your book on the Fat Leonard bribery and procurement fraud case interested me as I’m a Navy veteran having served as a teenage sailor on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. And prior to becoming a full-time writer, I did security work as a Defense Department civilian employee. I worked on a good number of contractor fraud cases, but nothing as big as the Fat Leonard case. 

How did you begin reporting on the Fat Leonard story? 

Whitlock: I was a Pentagon beat reporter for the Washington Post in 2013 and one day I saw there was an Associated Press report from San Deigo about the arrest of a Navy contractor from Malaysia on bribery charges. At the same time, the U.S. Justice Department in San Deigo announced that they had also arrested a U.S. Navy officer for taking bribes, and the one that really caught my eye was the arrest of an NCIS civilian special agent. It was unusual for a Navy officer - this was a commander, an 0-5 - and an NCIS special agent taking bribes from a foreign national contractor to the Navy. I was wandering the corridors of the Pentagon and I bumped into a Navy officer I knew and I mentioned this case and asked him if he had heard of this guy Leonard Francis who was the contractor, and this Navy officer just laughed and said, “Oh, you mean Fat Leonard.” I said is that what they call him because I didn’t know he was so big at that point. The guy said everybody in the Navy knows Fat Leonard. And so, I’m a reporter and I like to tell stories, and certainly this caught my eye for a potentially really good story. I wrote a page one story for the Washington Post in the fall of 2013 about this unusual bribery case and how the guy at the center of it was a Malaysian defense contractor nicknamed Fat Leonard. At that point not much had been made public but every month there was some new bombshell that came out of my reporting or there were additional people who came under investigation, including the Director of Naval Intelligence, so it became clear that the more you kept pulling the string, the bigger and bigger it got. I kept going for the next ten years.               

IACSP: Did your Washington Post editors encourage you to pursue the story?

Whitlock: They did. The Washington Post is really good about that. One of our core missions is doing accountability reporting of public officials and so if there are allegations of corruption, particularly involving senior naval officers and the NCIS, that is not a hard story to sell to your editors. I was able to keep delivering a lot of stories about it. I wrote probably about 60 or 70 articles for the Washington Post over several years and to this day my editors are still very hungry for Fat Leonard stories. It is such an unusual case, and the scope is so big, and the fact that the Navy by and large has tried to cover it up, it makes all the more important to get to the bottom of it.       

IACSP: What sources did you have for the story?

Whitlock: I had a lot of sources. I had documented sources, meaning court records, and I filed a lot of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests with the Navy, dozens and dozens of them. I’m a big document hound when it comes to reporting, because there is no greater source than getting documents. I also developed human sources both inside and outside of the Navy, many of whom were on the record, because as the Navy officer at the Pentagon told me, everyone in the Navy heard of Fat Leonard, so people had stories to tell about him. People in the Navy were less willing to comment on the ongoing investigation, because there were so many high-ranking officials involved, but over time, I was able to piece things together with a combination of human sources, court records and documents I obtained under FOIA.  

    

IACSP: How would you describe Leonard Francis?

Whitlock: Fat Leonard is one of the world’s most accomplished con men. He is really a criminal mastermind. He is charismatic. He loves to tell stories. He loves to charm people. Part of the secret to his success as a criminal is people underestimate him. One reason they underestimate him is because he was such a big guy. They didn’t take him as a threat. He weighed anywhere from 350 to 500 pounds, and he was this enormous guy. He doesn’t look like somebody who is trying to penetrate Naval Intelligence. He loved to party and throw dinners and give people gifts, and he was kind of a “Good Time Charlie,” so a lot of people in the Navy really underestimated the threat that he posed to the Defense Department. He knew how to take advantage of that, and he was a very quick study of human behavior and psychology. He was a really smart guy even though he was a high school drop out in Malaysia. He’s a brilliant guy and he really knows how to study people and search out their weaknesses and their vices. Over time, he was gradually able to reel in hundreds of people in the Navy who took his gifts and bribes. There is no other case like it that I’ve been able to uncover.                

IACSP: What specific crimes did he commit and how did those crimes affect national security?

Whitlock: He pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud charges in federal court. The crux of the case is that he was bribing navy officers and other personnel, such as the NCIS special agent, to give him information that would enable him to gouge the Navy for his company’s services. You’re a Navy veteran, so you’re familiar with husbanding contractors who resupply ships whenever they appeared in port. Over time, he got contracts worth more than 250 million dollars. He built himself up to become the dominant Navy contractor in Southeast Asia. He was essentially buying people off to look the other way so he could overcharge the Navy systematically for hundreds of port visits a year. How he damaged national security, besides defrauding the government, is that he also persuaded 12 Navy officers to leak him classified material over the period of seven years. This was not top-secret material. Most of the time it had to do with the planned schedules of Navy ships and what ports they were going to up to a year in advance.

IACSP: The Navy calls it “Ship’s Movement” information, and it is classified.

Whitlock: He also got one officer to leak him ballistic missile information that was highly classified. So that was the real damage that he did to the Navy. He penetrated the counterintelligence defenses for years on end. To this day, the Navy has never really done a public assessment of the damage he caused in that regard.    

IACSP: Why do you think so many high-ranking Navy officers, admirals, captains and commanders, fell for his bribery?

Whitlock: That’s a great question and it is really at the heart of my book. There were 90 admirals, active duty and retired, who came under investigation or were questioned about their dealings with Leonard Francis. It is a pretty striking number. Leonard was omnipresent out in Asia, so they would all run into him. Leonard was clever. He understood the importance of rank in the military. So if he could get one admiral to take his gifts, the rest of the officer’s wardroom would take their cues from that. If they saw the admiral at one of Leonard’s extravagant dinners that cost a thousand dollars a plate, everybody else would see that it was OK to deal with Leonard and it was OK to take his gifts. Over the years he had lured so many admirals to his dinners or even his sex parties, that it became accepted behavior, even though senior officers knew that this violated every ethics law in the book. It was sort of a “wink-wink, nod-nod” kind of behavior. Leonard had gotten so many to be his friends and take his gifts, people were afraid to blow the whistle. Who is going to blow the whistle on an aircraft carrier strike force commander or the commanding officer of a ship? People knew their careers were at stake. Even other admirals were reluctant to blow the whistle on their peers. No one wanted to bring the house down.                 

IACSP: How would you describe the typical officer that Leonard Francis was able to bribe with a cigar, a good meal and a bottle of champagne?

Whitlock: Leonard would start out slow and small. The gift limit for taking gifts from contractors was 20 bucks, but Leonard would note who would take a cigar from him or just a drink from the bar.

IACSP: Not just any cigar. He offered a Cohiba, a really fine cigar.

Whitlock: He would not start out flashing envelops of cash. He would see who would take a little gift. Then he would take them out for a nice meal, or a whole bunch of cigars, or put them up in a five-star hotel, or send a gift to their wife. A lot of officers would say no. Leonard had a reputation for doing this. He wanted to see who would be willing to take his gifts as this was in Asia, half-way around the world from Navy headquarters. He wanted to see who would look the other way and let their ethics slide. Slowly, he would reel them in. There were officers he knew who wanted nothing to do with him and he would keep his distance from those officers. He would gather background information on incoming commanding officers. He had all these moles on his payroll in the Navy who would feed him inside information, and he would study who would be a good person to recruit. By and large the people he was able to bribe were those who had a sense of entitlement. They had served in the Navy for many years and made sacrifices and felt what was the harm if Leonard wanted to take them to dinner. But what they didn’t foresee was that Leonard had them over a barrel. He knew that the officers had broken ethics rules and the law. Sometimes even when officers wanted to get out of their relationships with Leonard, he wouldn’t let them. He became very demanding because he could blackmail them if necessary and he knew he had that power. People fell into that trap.             

IACSP: How was Leanard Francis arrested in a sting operation and captured by U.S. agents in the U.S?

Whitlock: The Navy and the Justice Department were actually considering a sort of counterterrorism-type operation to apprehend him. They were concerned if they caught him in Maylasia, they would not be able to extradite him. Originally, they contemplated luring him on a U.S. Navy ship in Asia and sticking him in the brig and bringing him back to the U.S. but thought it would be too complicated. So they set up a sting where they invited him to a change of command ceremony for some admirals in San Deigo. Leonard loved to rub elbows with admirals above all else, so they thought they could get him to come to San Deigo and then they could arrest him. That’s what happened even though Leonard knew he was under criminal investigation by NCIS. He was thought his moles would protect him. It did not dawn on him that he would be arrested.        

IACSP: How was he able to later escape and end up in Venezuela? How did the U.S. get him back?

Whitlock: I said Leonard Francis was one of the greatest con men in history. Here is this guy that they had to set up this international sting operation to lure him to the United States, but in a nutshell, he conned the Justice Department and conned the federal judge into thinking he was dying of cancer. He did have kidney cancer, and he was pretty sick, but as he was cooperating as a state witness at that point, he persuaded the Justice Department to let him out of jail so he could get special treatment with his own doctors in San Deigo. They put one of those ankle bracelets on him, but he was dictating his own conditions. He was a risk to flee, and one day he did. He just snipped off his ankle bracelet, called an uber and went to the border and crossed over into Tijuana, Mexico. A couple of days later he flies to Cuba and then ends up in Venezuela for the better part of a year. The Venezuelans put him under arrest in their custody as they saw him as a bargaining chip with the Americans. In the end the Biden Administration negotiated a prisoner swap that brought him back to the United States in December of 2023. He is now back in jail in San Deigo.         

IACSP: What did the prosecution do wrong, which enabled many of the cases to be overturned?

Whitlock: There was an enormous prosecution. The Justice Department filed charges against 35 individuals, so this was a pretty big fraud and bribery case. Just about all of them pleaded guilty, but there were five holdouts who insisted on going to trial as they said they were not guilty. During the trials the juries found four of them guilty of taking bribes from Francis and one was found deadlocked on. Later, the Justice Department dropped charges against an admiral whom the jury was deadlocked on. But then it emerged that the prosecutors had effectively cheated by withholding some evidence from the defense. This led to a slow unraveling of the case and so these four who were found guilty at trial of several felonies were able to get much more palpable plea deals where they pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor and didn’t have to serve any jail time. Because they were off the hook, all of these defendants who had already pleaded guilty said they wanted the same kind of deal. Some cases are still under review, including Leanord’s. The Justice Department really made a hash of the whole thing. They could have had three dozen individuals convicted in this case. Instead, they ended up with egg on their face.          

IACSP: When will Leonard Francis’ case be finalized?

Whitlock: Leonard is in jail in San Deigo and his sentencing hearing is scheduled for Election Day, November 5^th. Because of this taint to the overall prosecution, I think Leonard is hoping they will have to let him out of jail. His argument is he was arrested in 2013, so he served a few years behind bars, he served several years in home detention, and he served time in Venezuela, so his argument is I served more time than anybody else so they should let me go. We will see what the judge says.   

IACSP: What a fascinating story. Any calls from Hollywood?

Whitlock: Yeah, lots. It is one of those stories where truth is stranger than fiction and the truth is pretty unbelievable, so I think it will make a great series. There is also a documentary I’m working on. It is an unbelievable story of greed and corruption. 

IACSP: Thanks for speaking to us.