Fat Leonard: The Man Who Corrupted the US Navy

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Chapter one – Paper Planes

Manila, 2007 The chauffeured Mercedes crawled south for half an hour in the interminable traffic. The turbid waters of Manila Bay on the right. The middle-aged men packed inside the cars were in an exuberant mood. Leonard Glenn Francis was taking out the senior commanders of the US Seventh Fleet. These were the most powerful Navy officers in Asia, and they controlled the movements of around 60 ships and submarines, 150 aircraft and 20,000 sailors in a huge operational area, stretching from Hawaii to India. The officers had helped Leonard's Singapore-based company, Glen Defense Marine-Asia, win a huge contract in the Philippines. He had to keep them sweet. The car pulled up at Air Force one, a karaoke bar, in a building that looked like an American strip mall topped with a huge neon sign of a rising sun, a plane taking off from the foreground. The tropical heat was cloying, but the men moved quickly into the air-conditioned lobby and through a curtain at the back. On the other side, Filipina women, many just students, sat in rows in a kind of fishbowl. Identifiable, not by their names, but by the numbers attached to their skimpy outfits. Leonard is six foot three, barrel chested, and over 300 pounds. It's hard to place where he's from. He sounds American except for when his accent slips a little. He's Malaysian and an ethnic mix. Scottish, Sri Lankan, and Portuguese. Leonard: Everybody has their needs. I gave them that sense of confidence and I also provided them what they wanted. It was safe and they could trust me. I never let him down. I played

professional. I played Anything.             

sexual.

Whatever

you

needed.

Always the ringleader, the big boss or lion king to these Navy officers, Leonard dominated the outing. Peer closer and you could sense an artifice in his behavior. He wasn’t as drunk as the other men, who were falling over themselves. Leonard: I mean, I do get a buzz, of course, you know. I mean, I'll get drunk after drinking like 10 bottles of wine and champagne. I'll get drunk. The after party was in the $4,000 a night MacArthur Suite at the Manila Hotel. Opened in 1912, it was General Douglas MacArthur's home and operational command during World War II. The men piled into the Spanish mission-style room with wooden ceiling beams, marble tiles, an ornate chandelier, and heavily draped curtains. Leonard had stocked the suite with $10,000 bottles of Dom Pérignon. The original hotel was destroyed during WWII, but the twobedroom suite was filled with MacArthur memorabilia. In the suite's study, two ornately carved wooden chairs, the only objects to survive the war, stood in front of the desk. One of the men, stumbling into the suite’s study, opened a case on the desk containing a replica of MacArthur's famous corn cob pipe and grabbed a woman. Leonard: The pipe was used as a dildo on the hooker. The Seventh Fleet was making a mockery of General MacArthur's memorabilias. He's a historical figure and they totally desecrated and insulted. It was a mass orgy. That's how deep we were with the Navy. That's how close we were. We were touching skins. ***

Penang, Malaysia - 1964 Leonard grew up around the port of Penang. A bustling harbor in Southeast Asia, where in earlier days, trade in opium between India and China fueled huge fortunes. Leonard's grandfather on his mother's side, Don Joseph, a Sri Lankan of Portuguese blood, ran a company that provided supplies like food, water, and fuel to merchant ships. Even in the 1960s, this was a world closer to the 19th century than today, with half naked laborers carrying loads up wooden gang planks into the holds of merchant ships from Britain, Greece, and elsewhere. Leonard was attracted to stories of powerful men. He saw the Greek ships come in and wanted to emulate Aristotle Onassis, the shipping tycoon. As a young man, in the 1970s, he saw The Godfather, and was fascinated by the way Mob bosses controlled people. Leonard: Yes. I was always very ambitious growing up. I always had a great ambition. Leonard got everything he dreamed of as a child and more. He built a billion-dollar business supplying the US Navy with food fuel and security, but he was no mere contractor. He bribed Navy officers with Michelin starred dinners, Cohiba cigars, $900 haircuts, luxury hotel stays and prostitute after prostitute, to win contracts and inflate invoices. Leonard infiltrated the Navy like a mafia don and built an empire that exceeded anything his young self could have imagined. Leonard had a flotilla of 180 boats, including his own warship, The Braveheart, protected by armed mercenaries, which he deployed to keep the US Navy safe. US embassies gave him diplomatic cover. He even took part in covert Navy missions against Al-Qaeda. Leonard was also a useful buffer. Paying bribes to local authorities and allowing the US Navy to operate effectively. With so many Navy officers in his pocket, Leonard was able to move the world's largest warships into ports that he controlled, where he could charge more for food, fuel, and water.

Leonard: What he had to do was, the entire command, the chain of command, the command and control had to be in your pocket. That's what happened. Everybody was in my pocket. I had them in my palm. I was just rolling them around. And then I could just move the carriers like paper ships in the water. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers, strike groups. And I could like put them in anywhere I wanted them to go. And that's how I could influence it because I could shift the ships around. *** San Diego, 2013 Leonard was in a suite in the Marriott hotel preparing to discuss a new round of multi-million-dollar contracts with the US Navy. Suddenly a SWAT team barged into his room. Leonard: Oh my God. It was like crazy. They were coming in to take some drug lord, they came running in with guns blazing. And then slammed me against the wall and then put me on a chair, started frisking me, checking me, everything. What happened that day eight years ago upended Leonard's life? He spent years in jail and then house arrest. I contacted him in early 2021 and we spoke for over 25 hours about his story. Leonard was awaiting his sentencing. He admitted the bribery, but he said everyone knew what was going on. And, as you’ll see, he wasn’t willing to wait around to spend more time in jail. Leonard: I just felt very betrayed, to be honest with you. I don't think I deserve that, to be treated that way. Why are you treating me this way? I've been a loyal person, contractor, defense contractor, and I've done a lot for the last 30 years. Supporting hundreds if not thousands of ships, hundreds of thousands of sailors and Marines in all kinds of places. I've never brought any harm to the United States. This was just a financial matter. It was not me hurting anybody. Nobody got hurt.

There was no blood was spilt. Nobody was killed. Nobody was hurt. Prosecutors thought they had an open and shut case. The government expected to prosecute Leonard and a few Navy officers who had signed fake invoices in return for free holidays, gifts, or prostitutes. An embarrassing episode, perhaps, but the Navy could get back to protecting the homeland. Instead, Leonard found himself in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, across the table from prosecutors from the Justice Department, handcuffs on his wrists, his legs shackled like a murderer. And in that cold, sparse interview room, Leonard started to talk. And the tale he told about the Navy sent shockwaves through the defense establishment. That a foreigner was so embedded with the Navy is one of the biggest national security failures in modern US military history. Leonard was trusted with top secret information, ship and submarine schedules, and the position of ballistic missile defenses. And perhaps most extraordinarily of all, he was the keeper of the sexual secrets of the Navy's most powerful men and some women. In that room, he named names, including four-star admirals. He had all kinds of compromising material on the most senior people in the US Navy. Leonard: I'm telling you I have my checklist. I made a good dossier of   everybody… I made my list of gifts. I made my list of whoremongers. I made my list of cash receiving people. I broke it all down. I'm good at this. China is threatening the balance of power in the Pacific and the US bet on Leonard to meet this challenge. Instead, its dealings with him have rocked the Navy to its core. Beijing could never have inflicted this much damage. This is a story that will change the way you look at the US Navy. A revered institution, it spawned movies and TV shows like Top Gun and NCIS. But this is a dark tale of alcoholic Navy officers, mediocre types, willing to sell out their country for tawdry sex.

Navy officers who blew the whistle on Leonard were ignored by the NCIS. Most people knew what was going on. But they were too implicated, or just too lazy, to act. Prosecutors have indicted almost 30 Navy officers, including the first serving admiral to go to jail in US history, as well as Leonard and his staff. Four of the officers in the MacArthur suite were convicted by a jury in the summer of 2022. Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor of the US Air Force, says a lot of Americans and members of Congress should be shocked by the extent to the depravity that the Navy in the Fat Leonard case, and the lack of accountability for those who engaged in that kind of conduct. “None of the people that are involved are doing interviews, so there's nothing on television or anything that you can pull up on the internet to look at, so I think that's part of the problem,” Don says. Well, until now. In 25 years as a journalist, I've never had a relationship like the one I conducted with Leonard Francis, and I've dealt with many fraudsters. I co-wrote the bestseller Billion Dollar Whale about Jho Low, a con artist who allegedly stole billions and used the money to make the Wolf of Wall Street film, buy jewelry for Miranda Kerr and Picassos for Leonardo DiCaprio. When I was looking for my next project after Billion Dollar Whale, I came across Leonard's story and it fascinated me. When a Malaysian intermediary offered to put me in touch with Leonard, I jumped at the chance to learn more about him. I first spoke to him on the phone in February 2021. At that point, he’d been in home detention for over three years, living in a quiet area of San Diego alone with his three children from two Filipino girlfriends. Before that he did four years in a San Diego prison, but he was allowed out after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. He was closely watched, a GPS monitoring bracelet on his ankle.

For weeks he was cagey, testing me out to see if I could be trusted. He'd already turned down requests from other reporters. The fact I've lived for years in Southeast Asia and my history with Malaysia helped kindle a bond between us. Leonard: I'm trying to put it all together and perspective because I've had so many different chapters in my life, I've had more lives than a cat. There's so many different times where I personally had a lot of close debt situations where I came back and survived. It’s unclear why Leonard talked to me. Maybe he was bored in detention. Perhaps he enjoyed reliving his heyday. He was also sick with cancer — and had nothing to lose. More than anything: he felt scapegoated, and it was hard to disagree. Leonard: It's a huge risk for me to do what I'm doing, but I'm so upset with it. Well, I'm portrayed as the bad guy, and I wasn't the bad guy. I did everything that they wanted me to do. I've lived my life. I've been up this close to heaven and down to hell. I've seen it all. So, my legacy's important too. We're all going to die one day. And I only fear God, I don't fear nobody else. And of course, I've got to face my judge one day and it's all in her hands, that's about it. How many life sentences can you give me? 1, 2, 10? In the end, I smuggled a microphone into his home, and we began to record his story, his night in San Diego, my daytime in Singapore. Along the way, Leonard tried to spin me. He's a confidence trickster after all, but he also unburdened himself, enjoying telling stories of his corrupt past and reliving the times when he was Leonard the legend. It's our job to work out where the truth ends, and the lies begin. ***

Penang, 1977 We must go back to the beginning to really get a handle on this crazy story. At 13, Leonard was already 6 feet tall, with sideburns.  He was a hard child to manage. Leonard joined a biker gang, and he didn't pay much attention to his studies, but he was smart and entrepreneurial. He made money collecting the runoff from tin mining and selling it to electronics companies and soon was working for his father, supplying merchant ships. His father, Michael Francis, looms large in this story. Michael never fit in. His own father had come to Malaysia from Scotland to work on the rubber plantations and married locally. The plantations were a hard scrabble world of heavy drinking and backbreaking work in the stultifying heat, and Leonard's father sought escape in the British army, and in the bottle. Posted to Singapore, he met Leonard's mother, left the army, and took over his father-in-law's business. Young Leonard looked up to his father, but he got little in return. His father would take off to Europe on vacations with other women leaving his family behind and doing little to further the business. Things were even worse when he was at home. Leonard: Well, my mom was always the victim because you see my dad was very abusive. So, I do understand why she left because if she didn't leave, she probably would've... My mom tried to OD a couple times, had pills. She was traumatized by my father. My father was very violent. Soon Leonard's family was torn apart. His mother fled to England with his brother and sister. Leonard opted to stay behind and help his dad run the business and attempt to prove himself. But his father was lazy, and Leonard began to take a larger role in dealing with commercial ships.

Bereft of a family to guide him. Leonard would soon land in big trouble. *** Penang, 1985 Penang Island, near the border between Malaysia and Thailand, is a beguiling place, with old Chinese shop houses and white sand beaches that are popular with tourists. It also has a frontier feel. In the 1980s pirates still attacked boats in the Harbor as they had for centuries. Heroin smuggling was rife. This was the rough world Leonard entered as a young man. He learned to operate in a corrupt port, paying bribes to captains for the right to supply merchant ships with food and water. The seamen, burly and tattooed foreigners, spent their time ashore in the bars and brothels of Penang, and Leonard began to accompany them. He often spent entire nights in bars, rarely sleeping. He plowed some of the profits from his business into his own bar, Tropicana. It became a hangout for Triads, the Chinese mafia. Soon Leonard was in debt. And to get himself out of dire straits, he made a move that would color the rest of his life. He joined the Triads in his club, pock-faced young men, high on smack, blades tucked into the belts of their jeans, in an armed robbery, as a getaway driver. On the day of the robbery, Leonard sat behind the wheel of a Volvo, across the street from a money lender. In the back, the Triads, carrying pistols, dripping with sweat, smoked, and argued. He questioned what he was doing there, a middle-class kid, but it was too late to back out. The plan was to steal from the money lenders, like a bank robbery. Eventually some men came out of the shop, carrying bulging bags of cash, dumped them into the trunk of a car and sped off.

Leonard: So I was driving the car, these guys are armed, they had guns. So, we drove. Basically, followed them from this shop on the way to the airport. We went ahead and then we waited, overtook them, and waited for them to pass us. We saw an the area where the road was clear and then drove out and then pretended there was a collision, like an accident. Leonard positioned the car as if it had spun out of control, blocking the road. Then he sat and waited, a bulletproof vest under his clothes. The other car approached and slowed, trying to work out what was going on. Leonard gripped the wheel, until his knuckles turned white. The Triads sprung from the back of the car, screaming, and brandishing the pistols. They pulled the other men to the ground, forcing them to lay spread eagled. Then they opened the trunk, slung the bags of cash over their shoulders, and jumped back into the Volvo. The Triads screamed at him to drive. Leonard spun the car around and headed straight for the Penang Bridge. And then on the way across the bridge, the gangsters threw the empty bags out into the sea. They drove to the Triads village, a rural area. The gangsters took the local cash and left Leonard to look after the foreign currency and the guns. The haul was worth tens of thousands of dollars. Leonard went back to work, spending his days on the docks. He paid off his debts, but he was followed by the gut-wrenching unease that he'd left a trail. Maybe it was a paranoia of the guilty, but his mind kept going back to the guns at his house. One day Leonard was sitting in his car, outside a restaurant, waiting for a friend. Before he could react, a police inspector slipped into the backseat. The officer took him to the station and later police searched his house. They found the guns, a bulletproof vest, and foreign currency hidden in a secret compartment of a cupboard. Leonard never learned the identity of who had ratted him out.

He was held in detention without trial for 60 days, locked up in police headquarters with hardcore criminals. Other prisoners were tortured, whipped with cables. Almost before it began, Leonard's shipping career appeared over. He was festering in a dank jail from the Victorian era, a slop bucket for a toilet, a 21-year-old, basically a kid, in fear for his life. The police charged him for the possession of guns and 30 rounds of bullets, a capital crime in Malaysia. Over the next quarter century, Leonard, a failed getaway driver, the noose hanging over his head, will transform into one of the world's most powerful military contractors. As a TV script, it would seem overcooked. Languishing in prison, he was working out his next angle. By the late 1980s, the US Navy had a problem in Asia. Leonard was positioning himself to benefit.

Chapter 2 – Ring of Steel Penang, Malaysia - 1985 Terrified, aged only 21, Leonard Francis, soon to be an integral part of the U.S. Navy, is festering in a Malaysian jail, arrested for his part in an armed robbery. The brick prison is as dank in the 1980s as it was 100 years earlier, with rusted iron bars, peeling paint and mold-stained walls. The stench from open septic tanks, where prisoners dump their effluence, permeates the cells. The tropical heat is overbearing. For a middle-class kid, never wanting for anything, the mental strain is unbearable. He’s crammed up against Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers, Westerners arrested for heroin trafficking. Foreign media are camping outside, as a diplomatic spat brews between Australia and Malaysia. Forgotten now, the pair’s gruesome death by hanging was the subject of a Julie Christie film. During fitful sleep, Leonard is pursued by the hangman’s noose.                                                                                                                                                                                             Leonard: The prison experience, it was traumatic, because of everything that I went through and saw at such a young, tender age. Gripped by panic, Leonard’s mother rushes back from England. With his father, they pull strings to help their son. Worried for his mental health, they get him moved to the prison hospital, but conditions are hardly better.  Leonard seems to find his troubled past a source of amusement, rather than shame. I can’t help but see it as the same devil-may-care

impulse that drove him to get involved in an armed robbery without a second thought, or to embark on a career to corrupt the U.S. Navy. Leonard: I think every Thursday, everybody who has a sentence, who has a corporal punishment, they get whipped. So, after they get whipped, they come to the prison infirmary, and they put the iodine in their butts, and they'd start screaming. It chops into you. It's like cutting, slicing into you. Leonard was fearful for his life and grasping for anything to give him succor. It was a Hindu holy day, and a procession of devotees were burning incense to their gods. The smell wafted into his cell. Near breaking point, Leonard took it as a sign of divine intervention. Then, after two weeks of anguish, Leonard was taken for sentencing. His mother, who’d abandoned him, running from her abusive husband to England, her maternal instinct fired by despair that her son was about to be hanged, appears at his sentencing, and pleads with the judge. The judge fined him for the guns and bullets, but then let him loose. In his mind, God had performed a miracle. And, like many people who have cheated death, Leonard, from this moment on, would fear nothing.

  *** There isn’t a how-to book about becoming a contractor to the U.S. Navy in a foreign land. It’s a dirty secret in the Navy that it’s reliant on all kinds of shady characters to get the provisions it needs in far flung corners of the world. After prison, Leonard saw an opening. The U.S. Navy was building its presence in Malaysia, but no one had a permanent contract to supply the ships.

  Through his family’s connections, he finagled invites to July 4th and other celebrations at the U.S. Embassy and he turned up, a

gregarious 300-pound presence in an ill-fitting suit and bad tie.  Behind this facade of success, Leonard was struggling. After prison, he had set up in a Chinese shophouse, his office out front and a bedroom in the back. One night, a cobra slid over Leonard while he was sleeping. Leonard was busy sidling up to bored officers and their wives, like he was some personal concierge service, extending invites to the best dinner spots in town, or hooking them up with a sought-after tailor. Soon, Leonard got his first U.S. Navy commission: to supply fresh food to the USS San Bernardino, a tank-landing ship that had seen action in the Vietnam War. It was a minnow compared to an aircraft carrier. But it was a start. A High Court overturned his acquittal, and Leonard ended up doing another year in jail. But once out, he kept on working for the U.S. Navy. You might think that the U.S. Navy, with its $20 billion aircraft carriers, a professional officer class, and Pacific headquarters in Hawaii, would have no need for small operators like Leonard. But when pulling into a remote port, the Navy was just as dependent on the local help as the clippers of yesteryear. In Navy lingo, suppliers like Leonard are called “husbanding agents.” In the past, the “husband” was a colloquial term for the master of a shipyard. A damaged ship “needed her husband.” And often they were just like Leonard, mom, and pop shops with connections to the local police and port mafia. David Kapaun, a Navy officer who would ultimately go to jail for his connection to Leonard, said he was a necessary evil for the US Navy. While the US Navy does well in San Diego or any home port, it’s at the whim of the likes of Leonard, when it’s abroad, Kapaun said.

A sometimes-overbearing presence, Leonard would waddle down the ladders of ships into the engine rooms and supply offices to trade gossip. He’d grown up on the docks and was just as comfortable with officers as with enlisted men. He knew how sailors on the Navy ships, just like in the commercial world, wanted their cut. Leonard: Shipping is full of corruption. You know, you got to pay everybody off to get the business. So, we would give cuts to the captain, give commissions to the chief steward, the guy that receives the stuff, and he kind of puts the orders out. So, everyone gets a cut and percentage. For Leonard, this point is crucial. It’s going to be his justification for the events that unfold in our story. Like many fraudsters, he sees himself as purely transactional. He didn’t invent corruption in shipping. It always has been, and always will be, a dirty game. *** Washington, DC - 1991 Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, speaking to the Congressional foreign affairs committee, faced a difficulty. The Philippines was threatening to throw the U.S. out of its historic naval base at Subic Bay. And the US was dependent on the base for training and as a forward deployment position in Asia. Subic Bay was home to thousands of troops, a ship repair facility, and supermarkets, bowling alleys and bars. When ships came back from months at sea, it was a great spot for sailors to relax. But now, suddenly, the Navy was looking at other places in Asia for refueling, ship maintenance and rest and relaxation. Leonard was ready to pounce. With its sandy beaches and famous surf, the Indonesian tourist island of Bali was a perfect spot for “R&R.” But there was no proper

pier for large craft. The husbanding agent was an Indonesian woman who ran a yacht charter business, and she helped the Navy on the side. She paid turtle fisherman, poor, bedraggled men, to sail out to the U.S. Navy boats, and sailors climbed aboard, using ladders thrown over the edge of their ships. It was an age-old practice but quite dangerous. In 1990, 21 sailors had drowned in Israel when the boat transferring them back to their aircraft carrier overturned in rough waters. Leonard took a risk. He partnered with a local firm that was close to Indonesia’s military dictator. And then he invested his own money to build a pier on government land. He needed to pay off all kinds of local politicians and bureaucrats for permits. Soon US Navy ships began to visit regularly. No one else was offering what he did, in a faraway corner of the globe. He was learning about the power of monopoly, and he started to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars. Leonard was also a useful buffer, paying bribes to local authorities, and allowing the U.S. Navy to operate effectively. *** Singapore, 1994 Leonard was establishing himself. …a military contractor and confidence trickster...He’d figured out how to tap into the gusher of U.S. defense spending...and, like Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, he knew how to splash it around. He moved to Singapore, where the U.S. Navy had a base, rented an old whitewashed colonial bungalow, and began to throw legendary parties. He didn’t hurl dwarves against a target, but he did chew on glass as a party trick.

Imagine Leonard, barely 30, chewing glass, surrounded by beautiful women and U.S. Navy officers, as waiters fill everyone’s glasses with Dom Perignon. Leonard hired beautiful women as representatives of Glenn Defense Marine Asia, or GDMA, his new company. Dressed in revealing outfits, these women waited on piers as Navy boats arrived, and took care of officers’ needs. Blake Herzinger, then a U.S. Navy officer, remembers a fellow sailor telling him about the bacchanal that began as soon as a ship hit a port controlled by Leonard. A ship would pull in, and Leonard would be sitting there on a Mercedes, the trunk filled with top-shelf liquor. He’d give the keys to the captain. At the ensuing parties, often in restaurants of five-star hotels, Leonard was a larger-than-life presence. He would take over the microphone and croon Elvis songs, as a crowd of inebriated Navy officers joined in. He made people feel like they were part of an exclusive crowd. Polite Singaporean society gossiped about this new arrival. A hulking figure, in clothes that hung off him at odd angles, Leonard sought to play the role of respected business titan. He joined the prestigious Tanah Merah golf club, and would take U.S. Navy admirals there, even though he himself didn’t play. Leonard tried to settle down, marrying a Filipina woman, with whom he had two boys, but he never stopped philandering and the marriage failed. He pursued an Indonesian fashion model. The model, who became his second wife, charmed officers like Steve Barney, a Navy lawyer, who met her on several occasions. “These people seemed to be nice people,” Barney said. “He waved that American flag very proudly, and really presented himself as one of the greatest advocates for the United States Navy that we

could have in that region. And that aspect of his relationship and reputation were undoubtedly valuable to him in developing his business.” Leonard learned Navy lingo and could pass for an American. He wore Navy-style baseball caps with “Glenn Marine” in silver lettering, stars-and-stripes neckties, and he had his cellphone ring programmed to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” He sponsored Navy balls in Singapore and became part of the U.S. community. Eventually Leonard opened a warehouse down on the water, complete with its own pier, and he began to do work for a range of bigger U.S. vessels: frigates, destroyers, cruisers. Ship commanders started to write “Bravo Zulus” for Leonard, Navy speak for commendation letters, which he used to secure more contracts. Often, he’d return home to his tony neighborhood in the early hours. Only to head straight out to work. Leonard: Because when I ran my business, I worked 20 hours a day. And I could never sleep because it's just this mind of mine... that’s always thinking. Even as I sit and talk to you, my mind's already thinking 10 years ahead. *** Gulf of Aden, Yemen - 2000 On the morning of October, the 12th, two suicide bombers in a fiberglass boat approached the USS Cole in Aden’s harbor. As the Al Qaeda militants bumped up against the ship’s port side, they detonated the C4 explosives stashed aboard. 17 sailors died and 37 were injured. Leonard, however, stood to benefit -- in a major

way. That attack, and the events of Sept. 11 the following year, created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for defense contractors. It’s easy to forget the panic in the months and years following Sept. 11. I was working back then for the Wall Street Journal in Southeast Asia. We regularly covered attacks by Al Qaeda affiliates on Western targets. Islamists bombed nightclubs in Bali and the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. A guy whom I knew from a pickup soccer game lost his legs. Danger was around every corner, and the Navy mandated its husbanding contractors to build a floating perimeter around their ships. He started a jerry-rigged solution, purchasing hundreds of 55gallon drums, the kind used for storing liquids, and strung them together with cables to create a floating perimeter. GDMA ran patrol boats inside and outside of this secure zone, watching for would-be Al Qaeda attackers. Later, Leonard upgraded to steel barges, rigged together with heavy cables, which he called the Ring of Steel. Some in the Navy weren’t taken in. Bruno Wengrowski, a former U.S. Navy contracting officer in Singapore, said the office nickname for Leonard was Big Boy. He was so large he couldn’t fit in the passenger seat of his chauffeured Mercedes. Wengrowski always got the impression Leonard was playing angles. During one aircraft carrier visit to Malaysia, Bruno balked at the $680,000 that Leonard proposed to charge to erect a protective barrier on land, basically 40-foot-high containers stacked three high. Bruno knocked his price down by two thirds. Leonard needed allies. People who would ensure the Navy didn’t ask too many questions, like pesky Bruno Wengrowski. He found such an officer in Lieutenant Commander Edmond Aruffo. Aruffo, an Italian American in his mid-30s, was even taller than Leonard, six-foot-four, with greased back short hair and blue eyes.

He was the 7th Fleet’s protocol officer, which meant he’d fly into a port before the arrival of a U.S. Navy ship to work with the husbanding agent to get everything ready. Steve Barney, the top lawyer for the 7th Fleet, worked closely with Aruffo. Soon after joining the Navy, Arrufo was selected for an officer training program. Within 15 months, he was named junior officer of the year in the western Pacific. But for Steve there was something off about Aruffo.  Steve had good reason to distrust Aruffo, although he had no idea about what was really going on. Aruffo, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and is awaiting sentencing, had gotten to know Leonard a few years earlier, while on R&R from a guided-missile frigate. Leonard says he entertained Aruffo and other officers, arranging dinner, drinks, and prostitutes. When Aruffo later became the force protection officer in the 7th fleet, the two got together to make sure the Navy used the “Ring of Steel” on every occasion. Leonard: I made a lot of money when Aruffo was in Seventh Fleet, because he was the force protection officer...So, Aruffo would write all the force protection plan for all the seventh fleet ships, and everybody had to use the Ring of Steel...So literally, the military spec force protection became the golden goose for me. In a Facebook message, Aruffo denied playing a crucial role in the use of the Ring of Steel, pointing out the 7th Fleet command in Japan ultimately was responsible for decisions about security. In a separate phone call, Aruffo said he never took bribes for personal enrichment. In the post 9/11 world, everything was on steroids: subprime lending, house prices, billionaire wealth...and of course, the military. And like American defense contractors who made millions in Iraq, Leonard built his own dynastic fortune. In the end, the Navy paid

whatever Leonard was asking -- sometimes over $1 million for a ship visit -- and his profits started to pile up. Leonard: Like I said, you don't need to overcharge, they give you, their money. They'll just give you money for free. I mean, if anybody's got a defense contract, you're good for life because the military overall, the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, every branch, there's no one that has a due diligence, fiscal. because it's not their money, it's Uncle Sam's money. By now, Leonard’s life started to look like an episode of Keeping Up with The Kardashians. He built the largest luxury car collection in Singapore of over 20 vehicles: Lamborghinis, Rolls Royces, Bentleys. He moved into a 70,000-square-foot mansion at 40 Nassim Road, the most expensive street in Singapore, a former colonial bungalow, beautifully restored, with multiple swimming pools, servants’ quarters, and a landscaped garden. It was worth around $130 million. Leonard was renting, but thanks solely to the US taxpayer, he had enough cash to make an offer. Every Christmas, his staff mounted a light show on the lawn of his mansion that cost tens of thousands of dollars, drawing visitors from across Singapore and landing Leonard on the local TV news. Leonard: We've been talking a long time now. I'm just trying to get you to reflect on what you might've done differently. Because we agree that you did a good job, and actually a lot of people I have checked it out with in the Navy agree with this, too. But you were also living on Nassim Road with $100,000 Christmas lights, and a fleet of 20 luxury cars. Didn't you go too big? Didn't you take out just a little bit too much? Well, I think that's part of success. That's part of life. You have to be, you're looked upon differently, glamorously. The Navy looked at you differently, and success comes at a price. What am I supposed to do? Go live a humble life? Oh no, absolutely not. I'm a bigger than life kind of person.

What the rappers have, all the sports personalities and Hollywood guys. But I did this like 15 years ago. Imagine the scene: Leonard, dressed to the nines, spread out in the back seat of a militarized Hummer like some rap video kingpin. It’s a ridiculous image for sure, but one funded in its entirety by America’s feverish and misguided response to the threat of terrorism.

Chapter 3 – Paula Las Vegas, 1991 Hundreds of naval aviators were packed into a conference room at the Las Vegas Hilton. The previous day, three of the aviators shot down and captured by Iraq during the Gulf War, had given presentations about their experiences. Everyone was in a victory mood. This was the annual Tailhook convention. The Tailhook is a little hook on the tail of an aircraft that catches the arresting wire suspended across the flight deck on an aircraft carrier to stop the landing plane quickly. That Saturday, a row of Navy leaders sat on a stage, taking questions from the audience. 40,000 women had been deployed to the Gulf War earlier that year, but by law were not allowed to serve on combat ships or fly fighter jets. One woman in the audience questioned when the Navy planned to finally open the doors to female fighter pilots. The crowd jeered at her. That set the tone for what occurred later that evening.  Paula Couglin, a helicopter pilot in her late 20s, with short blonde hair, took an elevator up from the conference room to a suite of rooms where parties were taking place. As she got off the escalator, Paula noticed the hallway was lined with a couple of hundred male aviators in swimsuits and shorts, holding drinks. But unlike the film “Top Gun: Maverick,” this was no place for women aviators. Leonard: As soon as I made it to the head of the hallway, all the members, probably a couple of hundred people close in on me, and this was known as the gauntlet, and once the call was

made, “Admiral's Aide,” the ranks just closed in and I was sort of pushed, sort of pulled down the hallway while they tried to remove my clothes, groped, went underneath my skirt, in my shirt. I mean, it was just an entire gang of men attacking me, and I fought back. I kicked and punched and actually bit somebody on the forearm and finally probably 40, 50, 60 feet down the hallway and ejected out the end, and I turned the corner and went into one of the hospitality suites. In the suite, Paula sat down with the aide to the secretary of the Navy. When the aide heard she had walked the gauntlet, he was incredulous. “Why would you do that,” he asked. The Tailhook scandal, three decades ago, is largely forgotten these days. But it dominated the media for months in the 1990s. Women were assuming a greater role in the Navy. The first mixed crew ships had supported the Gulf War, even if they were not allowed to take part in active combat. The world was modernizing, and women were fighting for equal rights in the military, as in other careers.

Tailhook showed just how far the Navy lagged. Naval aviators had posters up in their hospitality suites that said, "Women are property." In some hospitality suites, women were invited in to shave their pubic area and get shots of alcohol. The mascot for one squadron was a rhino. In the squadron’s room, liquor flowed from the penis on a papier-mâché rhino, and women were urged to suck on it to get a free shot. *** As you’ll see our story shows the Navy still has not fully reckoned with its treatment of women laid bare by the happenings at Tailhook all those years ago. And that’s because, back then, as now, the Navy prefers to protect its own. Women had to suck it up. And those who

complained, like Paula Coughlin, ended up being ostracized. Paula: In the context of what you're looking at systemically in the military, Tailhook is a shiny, nasty little abscess that is a microcosm for the attitude that, I'm sorry to say, still is very prevalent in the military… abusing women is a commodity. Whether it's at a hotel in Las Vegas provided by the Tailhook association or whether it's by Fat Leonard, it's a currency. *** Paula Couglin is different from other whistleblowers I’ve known over the years. During our interviews, she came across as smart and humorous. The injustices dealt out to her by the Navy haven’t made her bitter. You sense a hard core of resilience, built up over years of men telling her she should have stayed quiet, not been such a killjoy. But she’s able to look at her own story, and the Navy’s predicament, with a detachment that’s rare for people whose lives have been defined by an injustice. Paula: I spent most of my career before the Navy working in an all-male dominant field and my observation is that when men recognize that women can do their job just as well, somehow that is perceived as diminishing the value or the difficulty of the job... So, in order to maintain their stature and their... I guess their self-esteem as superstar jet pilots or boat drivers or naval officers or corporate leaders, whatever position they're in, keeping women out of it because obviously it's too difficult or it's too technical or it's too physical. In hours of my conversations with Leonard, he constantly played on this trope that Navy officers are somehow special, a cliche propagated by TV shows and films like Top Gun and NCIS. And Leonard explained away the wild sexual nature of these officers as a release from the stress they’re under. 

Leonard: Well they're all war fighters. They have this insight. It's their psyche. For them, they have a lot of stress internally. Pressure. There's a lot of pressure with their jobs. But the officers involved with Leonard weren’t exactly battlehardened. Although many had rotated into Iraq or Afghanistan, few had experience of combat like the Marines or Army. And yet when they got arrested, many claimed PTSD, or stress from war, had caused them to fall into corruption and debauchery with Leonard. Blake Herzinger, a U.S. Navy Reservist based in Singapore, has no time for this excuse. From a Navy family, Blake was keen to talk, angry at what he sees as a failure to properly account for the Fat Leonard corruption. He’s from Sandpoint, Idaho, “All American,” in his 30s, well-built. “To say like, "Oh, well these guys have really been in the wars and now they need to come here and engage in some sort of weird paid-for orgy in the top of a hotel in Manila." I don't know about that,” Blake said. I agree with Blake. These Navy officers felt entitled to the sex, a perk of the job, and only after the fact did they resort to this selfjustifying myth about the needs of combat veterans to blow off steam. A lot of excuses have gotten thrown around in the Fat Leonard saga. But Paula has an explanation for how male Navy officers behave, and it’s simpler and more brutal. “There's just this gray area where the military culture has always viewed women as secondclass citizens, as property, as a reward when you get into port, to rape and pillage,” she said. Leonard agrees. Leonard: This is the way the Navy operates. It's kind of normal. The military is always like that. You know that sex, sex

drive, sex driven. That's why there's so much of sexual harassment, rape. So much goes on in the military. It's covered up most of the time. *** Penang, Malaysia - 1992 The USS Acadia pulls alongside Swettenham Pier in Penang, a basic facility more used to hosting cruise ships than a Navy vessel. Leonard Francis, aged only 27, is waiting expectantly on the pier. He’d done some contracting jobs for the U.S. Navy, but the flow of ships between the U.S. and the Middle East during the recent Gulf War had increased, and that made Penang attractive as a midway R&R spot. The thousand-strong crew started down the gang plank to the pier. Leonard had everything planned out in folders: dinners, drinks, entertainment, touring and shopping. The Acadia, an auxiliary ship, had repaired damaged vessels and supplied Tomahawk missiles to destroyers during the Gulf war conflict. After some time in the Pacific, it was heading back to the Middle East. But the ship was notable for another reason: it was the first-ever mixed-sex U.S. Navy vessel to be deployed during war time. Of the 1,000 crew, about a third were female. By the time it berthed in Penang, the Acadia already was notorious, dubbed in the U.S. media as the “Love Boat” after 36 women, or one in ten of the female crew, became pregnant and had to be flown home during the war. For years, conservatives in the Navy argued against letting in women exactly for this reason. They would distract men, they said. Senators and military generals, old men, bloviated for hours in Congress about how women were not up to the task.

But the tide was turning. Two years after the Gulf War, Congress finally allowed women to serve on combat ships. Ten years ago, they were permitted to serve on submarines. Five years ago, they could apply for any combat job, although no woman has yet been made a Navy SEAL. Still, the women on the Acadia back then were in a maledominated environment, and they were expected to play by the boys’ rules. Leonard and his group from the Acadia stumbled out into the street and ended up back at a hotel. Leonard says he had sex with one of the female officers. Leonard: I mean, you got to do what you got to do, it's survival. And I was a bachelor then too so it's okay, I wasn't married. We're all just having some good, fun, some good sailor fun. See that's why I said I was in bed with the Navy all the way. Leonard makes all his sexual encounters sound fun. Innocent even. But every now and again, he makes a word choice that shows his deeper feelings about women. Leonard: She was a bloody whore you know. I just look at them, that's just shocking the way they are. Conflict of interests, sexual relationship, man, with a contractor, lord. Leonard’s misogyny, his gratuitous use of hostile language, perhaps started with his father, who battered his mother and had multiple affairs. But Leonard’s view of women as sexual objects appears to have deepened through his work with the U.S. Navy in the years that followed. *** Navy defenders say most officers don’t act this way, and no one doubts that. But it’s hardly the point. The almost 30 officers who

have been indicted for their involvement with Leonard were supposed to be among the “brightest and best” of the Navy. Take Mario Herrera, a commander aboard the Blue Ridge, who was nicknamed “Choke,” according to an indictment. Leonard told me Herrera’s nickname referred to the fact he liked to strangle prostitutes. Herrera was found guilty by a U.S federal jury in 2022 of accepting bribes from Leonard and is awaiting sentencing. Then there’s Jose Luis Sanchez, another Navy commander, almost as huge as Leonard, with a double chin and thinning hair, who sent regular requests for photos of prostitutes. Sanchez would write “Yummy...daddy like,” according to an indictment. Sanchez has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and is awaiting sentencing. After orgies, Leonard regularly sent around nude photos of the women for the men to ogle and comment. They called prostitutes “barbeque ribs,” “chocolate shakes” and other names. One Navy official asked Leonard for “disease-free” hookers. Leonard: Well you're a young yandy dandy man, you know. I mean I’m used to orgies, that's my specialty. Back then, Leonard was soaring high. In the post-9/11 years, he organized lavish dinners for officers of the biggest aircraft carriers in places like Hong Kong and Singapore. The dinners, often in Michelin-starred restaurants, cost 1,000 dollars per plate. Afterward, officers smoked 2,000 dollars-a-box Cohiba cigars and 2,000 dollara-bottle cognac -- and often they slept with prostitutes. Leonard also took care of the grunts, when they got into trouble in bars in far-flung ports, including paying off female victims of sexual assault, as well as local police. Paula: He's monetized debauchery, and it's what, the oldest profession? He just really brought it into the 21st century… He

just really made it an empire. He really made it lucrative. *** Don Christensen, the U.S. Air Force’s former top prosecutor, points out that clear misogyny in the Navy creates a culture in which violence against women can thrive. He’s now president of Protect Our Defenders, a nonprofit that advocates for victims of sexual assault in the military. Don cites some incredible statistics. About 20,000 men and women are sexually assaulted every year in the active-duty force, he says. About 13,000 of them are women, about 7,000 are men. Don is 60, tall, and talks about the military with a resignation born from experience. Seven years ago, he left the Air Force in disgust because of the military’s failure to address sexual assault and its opposition to reform. “When I was the chief prosecutor of the Air Force, I had virtually no authority. I had no ability to send any case to trial. That was completely a commander's decision,” Don says. The U.S. military has its own legal system, called the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And, as Don said, a major issue for years has been that military commanders -- not independent prosecutors -decide whether to go forward with sexual assault cases. That has meant many are thrown out. In 2012, Don successfully prosecuted a case involving a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot who was accused of sexually assaulting a civilian woman on a base in Italy. Don found the woman among the most credible victims he’d worked with in over 300 sexual assault cases. The pilot was sentenced by a jury of officers to a year in jail and a dismissal that stripped him of his retirement benefits. But three months later a senior commander concluded the evidence was insufficient. He determined that the pilot -- whom he considered a “doting father and husband” -- could never have committed the act, and he threw out the verdict.

“They could've cared less about the victim. It was kind of the last straw for me that the process needed to be changed, but I wasn't going to be able to do it from the inside,” Don said. He left the Air Force in protest. It’s this very same military justice system that’s dealing with many cases in the Fat Leonard scandal. As we’ll hear, the Navy justice system is again coming up short. *** Back in 1991, Paula dug in. She wrote a letter to the Navy, which was leaked to Senator John McCain, himself a former aviator, who called for an investigation. A Defense Department probe found over 80 other women claimed they’d been victims of sexual assault or harassment at the Tailhook convention. The Navy also dug in. Because of the scale of the Tailhook scandal, the Navy set up what’s called a “consolidated disposition authority,” headed by an admiral, to administer justice. Prosecutors looked at 300 officers and 35 admirals but did not pursue a single court martial. Some officers got censure letters or monetary fines in what amounted to a slap on the wrist. Many in Congress pushed back against this whitewash. In 1992, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, was born, under civilian leadership. You’ve probably heard of NCIS from the long running TV show, but as we’ll see it’s nothing like the crack law enforcement agency portrayed on screen. And that’s largely because ultimate prosecutorial power remained in the hands of Navy officers, as it does to this day. Paula resigned four years later, a figure of hate for what she had done. She sued the Hilton, was awarded a multi-million-dollar judgment, and reinvented herself as a yoga teacher. Today, as a board member of Protect Our Defenders, she’s still involved in the fight for equality in the military.

One of her neighbors, the wife of a former Naval officer, recently bumped into her while Paula was out walking her dog. The woman said she would pray for Paula for what she had done to the Navy for going public all those years ago with her complaints. Paula: Even now, there are these strongholds of misogynistic military men that still want to take me down. Men that believe I ruined the military… That's a pretty...wow. I mean, I'm 5'4, 120 pounds. I'm super fit and I'm smart, but I'm not enough of a resource to ruin the United States Navy. The question now is: Can Fat Leonard ruin the Navy? By talking to me he’s trying to blow up the institution and bring it down with him. He’s bragging about the sexual misconduct at the heart of his fraud, at the same time exposing misogyny in the Navy. Leonard doesn’t deny the corruption -- or the prurience -- but, in his view, everyone knew what was going on and now the Navy’s involved in a cover-up. It’s hard not to agree. The Navy has failed, as during Tailhook, to hold its most senior admirals to account for their involvement with Leonard. This isn’t a case of a few wrongdoers, but a systemic breakdown in a culture.

Chapter 4 – The Braveheart Singapore, 2006 I have a photo here of Leonard. He’s on the “Glenn Braveheart,” a warship that he purchased in 2003 and renamed, a nod to his Scottish grandfather. It captures Leonard Glenn Francis at the height of his legend. In the photo, Leonard is wearing shades and a Glenn Defense Navy-style baseball cap. The loose-fitting safari suit is meant to disguise his bulk, but still his thighs are straining at the material. You couldn’t wrap your hands around his neck. Everything seems outsized. Even his shoes are enormous. There’s something a little clownish about the photo. He’s surrounded by 23 Gurkha soldiers, some with their hats at a jaunty angle, others with berets or hard hats, automatic weapons in hand. They look faintly ridiculous, holding staged, serious expressions, as Leonard grins. Gurkhas are Nepali soldiers, whose regiments in the British and Indian armies are renowned for their bravery. After leaving the service, many Gurkhas take up better-paid work as mercenaries. These Gurkhas protected the Braveheart – Leonard’s own private warship. The Braveheart was an old British warship that had taken a bomb in the Falkland’s War.  It became a casino ship and then a training ship for the Singapore Navy, before Leonard acquired it. Leonard had his own warship. And his own army. As I continued to investigate, I uncovered the astonishing role Leonard, the Braveheart and his Gurkhas came to play in U.S.

national security policy. That someone like Leonard was given access to classified secrets ranks as one of the U.S. military’s worstever national security failures *** Singapore, 2021 In a crowded bar in Singapore, just before a new round of Covid19 restrictions, I met a former Navy officer, and the story he told me was almost too outlandish to believe. Few people realize it, but, after Sept. 11, the U.S. waged its most successful war against Al Qaeda, not in the Middle East, but in Southeast Asia. At the time, I was working for the Wall Street Journal in the region. We seemed to write about nothing but terrorist attacks in those days, and the fear that Al Qaeda was about to overrun Southeast Asia. The worst attack was on nightclubs in Bali, Indonesia, in 2002 that killed 202 people, many of them Western tourists. In the Singapore bar, the former Navy officer and I were reminiscing about those dark days. He’d played a role in Operation Freedom Eagle, a U.S. military mission aimed at rooting out Islamist fighters from their hideouts on remote islands in the southern Philippines. The U.S. initially sent in over 1,000 advisers, special forces drawn from all branches of the military and CIA. The advisers provided equipment and technical know-how to aid the Philippines military hunt down the terrorists. The former Navy officer was almost wistful. He talked about the “fun shit” that went down in 2002, when U.S. and Filipino forces “messed up” the militants. He talked about returning after missions to let loose at all-night parties in an old Lighthouse that’s now a luxury hotel in Subic Bay.

As we drank -- a beer for him, a white wine for me -- talk turned to Leonard. And that’s when he told me an astounding fact: Leonard had played a role in supporting these covert missions. One of the militant groups was called Abu Sayyaf, and its leaders, many of whom had fought in Afghanistan, attacked Western targets, and kidnaped foreign tourists. They hid out on small islands, and evaded capture by speed boat. The U.S. sent Navy SEALs, its special operations force, to aid in the fight. The SEALs sailed from Singapore in Mark Vs, fast-paced patrol boats armed with gatling guns. Mark Vs only have a small tank and can’t travel for long before running out of fuel. The Navy was looking for a solution. It could use its own ships for replenishment, but that attracted too much attention for a stealth operation. One day, during one of our many video calls -- Leonard’s late evening in San Diego and my afternoon in Singapore -- he told me about his part in the fight. He’d learned about the Navy’s predicament from his contacts, he said. In fact, one of the reasons he bought the Braveheart in the first place was to give him a ship to help the U.S. Navy fight Al Qaeda. LEONARD: My ship, the Braveheart, used to also replenish them at sea. That's a capability we had, and this was like very hush hush. We did that for them. You know, we'll resupply them with fuel and give them what they want. They would be very discrete...because having SEALs flipping around...And then they will hit all the different ports. Just to rest and refuel and then take off.

  Let’s stop for a minute to consider the absurdity of this image. Leonard, a foreign national who’s in the process of ripping off the U.S. taxpayer, is playing at being a Navy SEAL, hired guns at his beck and call. There’s probably no image that better sums up the War on Terror than this. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so deadly serious.

And it gets more bizarre. I asked Leonard how he was able to sail the Braveheart and his armed Gurkhas into foreign waters. He claimed the U.S. arranged for diplomatic clearance for his ship and men. He bypassed customs, immigration, and any security checks, enjoying the protection of the US. *** A couple of weeks later, I was poring through U.S. court documents of Navy officers caught up with Leonard and found corroboration of his seemingly outlandish claims. A U.S. Naval attaché in the Philippines called Michael Brooks, who pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiracy to commit bribery, had arranged for diplomatic clearance, allowing Leonard to bring the Braveheart and its armed mercenaries into the country’s waters without any inspections. As the Naval attaché, Brooks was the official representative of the U.S. Department of Defense in the Philippines during the war against Abu Sayyaf. But Brooks wasn’t only concerned with the War on Terror. Like so many other Navy officers, he also enjoyed Leonard’s largesse. In return for prostitutes and dinners, Brooks supplied ship schedules, as well as arranging diplomatic clearance, according to his sentencing documents. And he partied on the Braveheart, which of course doubled up as a floating brothel. Brooks declined to comment. Bruno Wengrowski, the former Navy supply official, said Leonard would have nude dancers on the boat. Bruno was talking about Leonard’s “Elite SEAL Team,” prostitutes from across the world, whom he would rotate onto the Braveheart. As the officers drank whiskey and played roulette, the women performed live sex shows and took men off to the rooms...Mercenary ship, floating pleasure palace. The Braveheart was at the pulsating heart of Leonard’s -and the Navy’s -- strange and hedonistic world.

I was learning that Leonard’s mix of covert work for the U.S. Navy, and the sexual kompromat he had on its senior officers, was a very dangerous combination indeed.  *** Manila, 2008 In late May, the USS Blue Ridge pulled into the Philippines. At the time of the visit, the U.S. mission in the Philippines was proving hugely successful. Many top Abu Sayyaf leaders had been killed or imprisoned. The group was in disarray. But the commanders on the Blue Ridge had other things on their minds. By now, they were not even pretending to do their jobs. Instead, they headed straight to the Presidential Suite at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel and started to drink, according to court documents. The Naval attaché, Brooks, would join them after his day at the Embassy. 36 hours later, after enjoying a raging multi-day party with a carousel of prostitutes in attendance, and wiping out the hotel’s supply of Dom Perignon, the men headed back to the boat, the indictment says. And unbeknownst to them, Leonard says he recorded the goings on. At many events, Leonard claims he would put secret cameras in the karaoke machines that he set up in the suites of hotels. The existence of Leonard’s secret sex videos, never reported, are extremely unsettling. He told me he would sometimes watch them. Imagine Leonard, sitting alone in his darkened office, watching Navy officers -- not to mention himself -- engaging in orgies. These videos both fed his morbid fascination with sex and gave him a sense of power over the weak, sensualist officers of the Navy.

Leonard said he enjoyed seeing how people behave when they’re drunk. But what if Leonard was collecting blackmail on the Navy? Photos and videos he could sell to America’s enemies, Russia, or China. Leonard: What really worried the United States the most was their officers being corrupted by me. Being that they would be corruptible by the foreign powers. Foreign spies began to circle around Leonard. Leonard’s sprawling white bungalow was in the most sought-after part of Singapore. Across the road is the Botanic Gardens, laid out by the British as a respite from the tropical heat, a reminder of home with bandstands and lakes. His neighbors were a who’s who of the city state, including several diplomats. Leonard: I met the Russian defense attaches, the Colonel a couple of times at receptions…And then he found out where I lived and…he would just come by uninvited to drop gifts to me, vodka, and stuff like that… The same goes with the Chinese defense attaché. He was always very keen to invite me to play golf...and he was always asking my staff, I want to meet your boss, I've heard so much about him. Since WWII, when the U.S. occupied Japan, China has bristled at America’s domination of the Pacific. U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea, so close to Chinese territory, remain a point of contention. China is looking to upend this balance of power in its backyard. It regularly sends fishing fleets and Navy patrols to tiny, disputed islands in the South China Sea, claimed both by China and several other Asian countries. It’s illegally constructing outposts on these atolls.

Turning Leonard would have given China a look inside the U.S. Navy. He told me his computer systems were secure. But Leonard’s blasé about the risks he ran. More sophisticated systems than his have been hacked by China and Russia. *** My own family knows the reach of China. Over the years, I’ve written about Chinese Communist Party corruption. In 2018, I got hold of minutes of a meeting of Communist party leaders in Beijing that detailed a discussion about efforts to bug our family home in Hong Kong. As China moved to quash democracy protests in Hong Kong last year, ending any pretense of rule of law in that territory, we made the decision to leave for Singapore. For many Asian nations, the U.S. Navy is a final bulwark against China’s aggressions. As China tried to turn Leonard, the Navy again relied on him to help project U.S. power... Indian Ocean, 2007 A stage five cyclone is scary, with waves of six meters and winds of over 150 miles per hour. The swell was buffeting the Braveheart, and the crew wanted to turn back. Leonard had a near mutiny on his hands. The Braveheart was sailing from Singapore to Chennai in India to support the nuclear-powered USS Nimitz aircraft carrier on an important diplomatic mission. Leonard got on the radio to the commanding officers on the Nimitz. Then, disaster struck.

The Braveheart was accompanied by a flotilla of about 20 ships from Leonard’s company. There was a supply boat, loaded up with small ferries and patrol craft, and towing steel barges. As the group of small ships were hurled here and there, the barges became loose and disappeared into the waves. For hours, the men were tossed and turned, clinging to anything that didn’t move. And then, an act of God. The cyclone passed. As the waters calmed, the men spotted the barges drifting on the horizon. Finally, the Braveheart met up with the Nimitz just off the coast of India. Officers monitoring the trip on radar could see the small dots of the Braveheart, accompanying the warship as if it was part of the Navy. For security reasons, the Nimitz was berthing offshore, and Leonard’s job was to protect the ship and to transport the 6,000 crew to Chennai. I asked John Bradford, a former Navy officer stationed in Asia at the time, why the U.S. would be relying on Leonard to bring all this material from Singapore, 1,800 miles, the equivalent of New York to Denver, rather than using an Indian company. Bradford said there was no local husbanding agency in India that could fulfill the navy’s requirements. Leonard claims it was his job to make all kinds of backhand payments to local politicians to make sure the visit happened. He won a $5 million contract to support the visit, bringing boats and equipment from Singapore. It was an astronomical cost, but the Navy was happy with its opportunity to stand up to China and discuss a lucrative arms deal with India. Leonard was helping the U.S. project its power across the Indian Ocean. No one in the Navy, however, had any idea that, at this time, Leonard was also being approached by Chinese spies. And no one,

it seemed, knew that Leonard was also working for the Chinese Navy, supplying its ships when they pulled into Singapore. With all the kompromat Leonard had on U.S. Navy officers, his contact with the Chinese navy was extremely worrisome. Even Leonard acknowledges the national security failure at the heart of his story. “I probably had too much information,” he said. My investigations have uncovered another side of this story, one which is much more problematic for the Navy. This isn’t a question of a few corrupt Navy officers, but a massive security breach in the U.S. fleet charged with keeping the world safe from China. Leonard says he never gave up information to China or Russia, sexual or strategic. He was making too much money. But, as we’ll hear, China would get hold of the kompromat, nevertheless.

Chapter 5 – Marcy

Littleton, Colorado – 2013 Marcy Misiewiscz, then 45 years old, was dealing with a tangle of emotions. For years, she’d endured the indignities of a Navy wife: a cheating husband who was never around, domestic abuse, and an institution that cared more for operational tempo than the security of her family. When she complained, even to senior Navy officers, she was told to endure it. Then, her husband, Captain-select Michael Misiewiscz, became one of the first officers to be arrested in the Fat Leonard scandal. Marcy was in turmoil. She was a whistleblower who’d helped bring down Leonard. She’d never expected her actions would lead to Michael’s arrest. But finally, she no longer felt voiceless. She flew to Colorado, where Michael was serving, to bail him out. Marcy: When I flew out to Colorado after he was arrested to bail him out, up until that point, he was very cold, standoffish. I mean, I thought he probably would feel better for a stranger he met on the street than he felt for me. But once he was bailed out and we spent a day and a half together after his arrest, he was a little bit more of the person I... Sorry, the person I knew. Today, Marcy is 53, living in Shannon, a village of 750 people in rural Illinois, the area where she and Michael met over three decades ago. She’s smart and articulate, but prone to self-doubt and blaming herself for what happened in her relationship. She’s angry at what she sees as a cover up that has spared the Navy admirals who were involved with Leonard.

Marcy is in a much more precarious position. Despite her role in bringing down Leonard, she has been left financially insecure, forced to fight for pension money from the Navy. Now divorced, her exhusband just released from jail, she’s working in a bank after years of putting her own career on hold, scraping together cash for her four children’s’ education. Marcy still loves the U.S. Navy. But she doesn’t buy the story that only a few bad apples like Michael are to blame. How was Leonard able to exploit weakness to make good people do bad things? Few people set out to be criminals, especially someone like Michael Misiewiscz, a soft-spoken, American immigrant hero, with a seemingly happy family life. Leonard loved The Godfather as a child and now he built his mafia inside the Navy, a group of people who called themselves “La Familia.” What did it take to bring someone like Michael, who had given his life to the Navy, into the fold? And we’ll see how Marcy, unlike many Navy spouses, wasn’t willing to turn a blind eye to the wrongdoing. *** Sihanoukville, Cambodia - 2012 Commander Michael Misiewicz, in his mid-40s, looked out from the deck of the Blue Ridge, the 7th Fleet’s flagship, to the land of his birth, the strife-torn Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia, a place almost as foreign to him as the next man on board. It was a poignant homecoming to celebrate an extraordinary life - the kind of immigrant success story on which the American myth is built. The officers of the Blue Ridge climbed downstairs onto the pier, and Michael, in his crisp white uniform, three gold bands and a star on his epaulets, saw his aunt waiting for him in a huddle. He moved

toward the woman, in her mid-70s, bowed by illness, and they embraced. Other family members crowded around, Michael at the center of the group, his stern, well-proportioned face breaking into a smile. Captain Ron Carr, a fellow officer on the Blue Ridge, found the scene moving. That evening there was a lavish party: food, drink, dancers, and a band.  “It's an amazing rags to riches story,” Ron said. For all the heartwarming backstory, though, Ron didn’t trust Michael, although he kept those feelings to himself.  One of Michael’s jobs on the 7th Fleet staff was to manage the schedules of 60 ships and submarines, 150 aircraft, and 20,000 sailors in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It was a powerful position. In Ron’s eyes, Michael seemed secretive about the information he controlled. “I remember he would use the word “close hold,” like don't tell anybody this. Hey, be careful on that,” Ron said Ron’s instincts were solid. Michael kept all kinds of secrets -from the Navy and from his family. And one of them was the identity of the benefactor who had paid for this lavish reunion. “I must've been naïve, how I didn't see this. How I did not realize what they were doing,” Ron said. *** Back in Japan, where the USS Blue Ridge was based, Marcy was happy that her husband could reunite with his family. She had a newborn, and three other children to take care of, and so hadn’t been able to join this or other trips to Cambodia. Michael Misiewicz was born as Vannak Khem in Cambodia. During his childhood, in the 1970s, the country was ravaged by the Khmer Rouge, a murderous group of Maoist guerillas who wanted to

take the country back to a stone age agricultural utopia. His family fled its village, as the Khmer Rouge fighters approached, taking refuge in a stilt house over mosquito-infested waters in the nation’s capital. His aunt landed work as a cleaner for Maryna Misiewicz, an Army administrative assistant at the U.S. Embassy. The aunt took her nephew to play while she cleaned. Maryna took a shine to the little boy, who ate popcorn and watched cartoons. Michael’s father knew the situation was deteriorating under the Khmer Rouge. So, he arranged for Myrna to adopt his son and take him back to the US. As he said goodbye to his mother, aged only 7, Michael promised he’d get a good education and buy her a big white house in America.

Maryna took Vannak Khem back to Lanark, Illinois, a town of 1,500 people, many of whom had never laid eyes on an Asian. The little boy worked hard to fit in. He took a new name, Michael Misiwiecz, and learned to speak English with an American accent, slowly forgetting his Khmer. News from Cambodia was spotty, and letters to his family went unanswered. He met Marcy in high school. He was a good student, well liked, and an athlete. Michael adored his adopted mum, whom he idolized for making a huge sacrifice to bring him to America. He thanked her in a Memorial Day speech in Lanark in 2013. “She's been my personal heroine,” he said. After high school, Michael enlisted in the Navy. He was a year above Marcy and would come back to Lanark on furlough. They had hung out as kids, and now a long-distance romance blossomed. As news of the Khmer Rouge genocide filtered out of Cambodia, Michael lived with the unfaltering weight of guilt. Around 1.8 million

people had died in the Killing Fields, and he thought often about his family. His father perished, as did two siblings. The guilt drove him to work hard to rise out of the enlisted ranks and become an officer. *** Marcy married Michael after he graduated from the Naval Academy, and they moved around like all Navy families: Texas, San Diego, Washington DC. After high school, she’d taken a promising job at an insurance company in Milwaukee, but she gave that up, and shelved her plans to study business in college. While Michael did a tour in Iraq, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star, Marcy put her own ambitions on hold for the sake of her husband’s career...and for the good of the Navy. I contacted her on Facebook and, at first, she wasn’t keen to engage. Reporters had been asking her to talk for years, but the wounds were still festering. Then we got chatting, and Marcy’s story started to tumble out, a cathartic process after years of relegating her own happiness to that of others.  She had young children and gave herself completely to rearing them while Michael was away at sea. He was on a career path to one day commanding his own ship. The fact he’d served as an enlisted man, not going straight to the Naval Academy, gave him a way with the crew, and the family was proud. Behind the facade, though, Michael felt like an impostor. How could he, a fatherless immigrant from Cambodia, one day run his own ship? Marcy began to ask why he was home less than the other officers. He felt others were smarter than him. As he dealt with his own insecurities, Michael began to belittle Marcy, commenting on her weight or lack of self-esteem.

On one of his Asian tours, Michael allegedly began an affair with another sailor’s wife. He and Marcy went to counseling, but he didn’t show any remorse. Under military law, adultery is a court martial offense. But Michael was a skilled officer and, in 2009, he got command of his own boat, the USS Mustin and its 380-strong crew. The family left the U.S. for the first time to a new life in Japan -- and a fresh start for the marriage. Then, he was moved to the USS Blue Ridge, and onto the radar of Leonard Francis. *** Manila, Philippines - 2011 The Ringside Bar in the Philippines capital has a full boxing ring in the center, where a dance floor should be. Michael stood with Ed Aruffo and other officers from the 7th Fleet, holding a beer as he watched the goings on. In Manila, nightlife can be out of the ordinary. There was a Hobbit House, a Tolkien-themed bar set up by a former Peace Corps volunteer and staffed entirely by little people. Not to mention the scores of karaoke bars, fronts for brothels, that grew up to service the sizable U.S. military presence after WWII. At the Ringside Bar, there was a bout between little people, then women dressed in revealing outfits began to spar in a desultory fashion. Men came up and put on gloves and pretended to hit the women. The crowd pushed forward against the ropes, leering, and shouting. Then it was Michael’s turn to enter the ring. He ducked under the ropes. Quickly his top came off and he ended up mock wrestling with women.

It was Valentine’s Day. Someone snapped a shot of Michael on the floor of the boxing ring, wearing only his jeans, two Filipina women in blue and red boxing uniforms bending over him. Ed Aruffo had arranged for Michael and others from the Blue Ridge to party in this bizarre Manila bar. Aruffo was the confident, slick Navy officer from New York who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and is awaiting sentencing. He’d left the Navy, gone to Cambridge in the UK to study for a masters, joined Barclays for a while, and now was in Japan working for Leonard’s company. Now outside the Navy, his job was to stay close to the 7th Fleet. Leonard had built out a mafia-like network in the 7th fleet, reaching from the chief of staff down to petty officers. These conspirators, many of whom have pleaded not guilty, helped to push ships to ports that Leonard controlled, where he could charge exorbitant fees, according to indictments. They overrode ships’ complaints about Leonard’s high costs, and they helped him win business over rival contractors. By now, Leonard had a near monopoly in the Pacific region, using his Navy conspirators to win contracts in Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines, as well as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The scheme constantly needed new recruits, just like the mafia, as officers were rotated in and out of the 7th Fleet. In Manila, they were testing out Michael to see if he was the right kind of material. That night, Michael went home with a prostitute, paid for by Leonard, according to court documents.

A few weeks earlier, according to an email exchange entered in court records, Leonard had written Aruffo about Michael: “We’ve got to get him hooked on something.” LEONARD: Because Misiewicz...he had value. He was like the number two guy in the scheduling department. Aruffo replied that Michael liked Japanese women, but they were costly, and suggested Leonard could fly him to Bangkok, or else he would take him to Tokyo. In a Facebook message, Aruffo denied ever providing prostitutes to anyone. Leonard knew about the gossip on base about Michael’s affair. And he knew Marcy wasn’t happy. Aruffo started to appear more at the Misiewiczs’ detached house on base at Yokosuka. Marcy had a bad feeling. MARCY: I mean, I think like I've told you, and I've told many people, he has that cheesy car salesman smarmy personality. He can talk to everybody from the janitor to the CEO, and he's going to charm anybody. Life on a U.S. Navy base can be like a hot house. Everyone knows each other’s business -- affairs, problems kids are having at school, that kind of thing. And on the Yokosuka base, many Navy officers knew enough about Aruffo, and his relationship with Leonard, to tell their wives to avoid him. Aruffo tried to befriend Marcy, arranging for family tickets for the Lion King musical in Tokyo, according to court documents. Although Marcy enjoyed the show, she was a little surprised that Michael would accept the tickets from a representative of a Navy contractor. She thought they’d be paying him back. Michael was spending more time with Aruffo and Leonard -supposedly for dinners in Tokyo. She suspected women were

involved, although he denied it, claiming she was paranoid and insecure. Aruffo’s presence became cloying. Some of the 7th fleet wives allegedly had no qualms about taking gifts from Leonard. One received a $8,400 Versace purse, another a $25,000 Ulysse Nardin watch, court records show. Some even allegedly helped rope others in. One woman whose husband was an alleged conspirator approached the wife of an official that Leonard wanted to bring in, offering her an expensive gift supplied by Aruffo, according to an indictment. They called these operations “shaping.” Like wives in a mafia movie, it’s easy to imagine these women turning a blind eye to their husbands’ infidelities but enjoying the lifestyle. LEONARD: They want to live that life. They wanted to have the good life that they could not have. They wanted the fine dining. They wanted the fine gifts, the hotel rooms, the sedans, the luxury cars, watches, handbags, the fancy meals, alcohol, cigars. Marcy, though, wasn’t going to be a way to get to Michael. She was too principled, and wary of Aruffo, and their marriage was still strained from his affair. So, they focused on Michael instead. The partying and the prostitutes helped. But they found another way in: Michael’s need to see his Cambodian family. In mid-2011 Michael got word that his 72-year-old aunt in Cambodia was ailing. Leonard stepped in to pay for the trip, sensing this was his weak spot. Since reconnecting with his family, there was pressure to pay for so many flights. He knew taking from Leonard was wrong, but he also felt the pressure of the successful immigrant, the Navy commander. And maybe he was trying to assuage the guilt he’d felt since a child, the weight of having escaped the Killing Fields.

He told Marcy he got to Cambodia, quote, “by means that neither of us can speak of.” A couple of weeks later, Leonard made his first demand, classified U.S. Navy ship schedules for Australia. Michael sent them over, using a new private Gmail account he’d set up just for this purpose. “We got him!” Aruffo emailed Francis. “You bet Godfather,” Leonard replied. Back in Penang, as a kid in the 1970s, Leonard had fantasized over The Godfather when it first came out. I asked him what he loved about the film. LEONARD: Oh, how the family was so close-knit and how much of a respect and power a single don could have over an entire clan. Michael started to hand over reams of ship schedules and he intervened to send ships to ports where Leonard could charge more. “See you ask, I deliver,” he wrote Leonard. He began to call Leonard, who was three years older, “Big Bro” in emails. And Leonard kept paying for the family to keep in touch -- a miracle sent from heaven. But for Leonard it was no more than leverage. In his Memorial Day speech, Michael had warned his proud town about the dangers out there in the world. “This reminds me of a recent article I read, about the type of people in our world. You're either wolves, sheep, or sheep dogs. For many, there's a peaceful acceptance to being a sheep and hoping the wolves won't get them.” He had set out to be a sheep dog, protecting the U.S. from foreign threats. But as Michael sunk into dependency on Leonard, he looked more like the prey.

Marcy and Michael were apart for months on end. On the base, Marcy worried neighbors were gossiping about his infidelities. One day, when he returned, the children noticed he didn’t even hug her. She started to talk about divorce. One day, Michael was laying on the couch at home watching a Navy football game when Marcy asked to go outside and talk. He was furious at being interrupted and exploded in a volcanic rage. She had never seen him like this in over 20 years of marriage. Marcy says Michael grabbed her and pushed her up the stairs. A couple of days later a female acquaintance noticed some bruising. Under pressure from her friend, Marcy reported the incident to the 7th Fleet command. After an investigation, the Navy issued an “order of protection,” forcing Michael to live temporarily on the Blue Ridge, away from his family. Marcy declined to press charges, worrying about the embarrassment on base. But she applied to the Navy for her and the kids to be returned early to the U.S. A female Navy doctor on the base advised this would be prudent, given the toxic atmosphere at home, according to a copy of a letter to the 7th Fleet commanders. The Navy did not approve the request, instead ordering Michael stay on the ship until the end of his tour. Leonard, too, got wind of the problem. An angry Marcy was going to make it more difficult for him to control Michael. So, he supplied the commander with a Gucci handbag, a gift to give to his wife. Marcy’s misery made little difference to Michael. He kept partying with Leonard and Aruffo at events that cost tens of thousands of dollars. And his star kept rising. The Navy even awarded him the Legion of Merit, a prestigious U.S. military award, for his time in the 7th Fleet. Marcy stewed at home, emotionally wrung out, but also angered she could not relocate her family for another year.

MARCY: It was definitely like the old boys club mentality, I felt like to a certain degree with some of that. So, it's like, "Let's just hush her up...Oh, if we do this protective order and that’ll appease her. That will hush her up for a while." But Marcy, as we’ll find later, wasn’t going to stay quiet. Not about Michael’s infidelities, and not about all the gifts and trips he was clearly taking from Leonard. She didn’t know everything -- but she knew enough to go to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. MARCY: Perhaps had they gotten me out of Japan sooner, maybe I wouldn't have met with NCIS. That part of it maybe wouldn't have happened. I don't know. I’ve been asking myself why the Navy would protect someone like Michael after he struck Marcy. And the answer seems to be that Michael was very good at his job, a workaholic who kept a ship running no matter what. That’s why Leonard continued to flourish, despite his personal cruelties toward Marcy, and many other women in this story. And that’s why I decided to track down Leonard’s own former girlfriend...one who had paid a terrible price … the loss of her children.

Chapter 6 – Morena In his own telling, Leonard is a likeable rogue, who has sex with a lot of women, but wears it on his sleeve. They know what he’s about. No one gets hurt. It’s all good sailor fun. His first wife, a Filipina woman with whom he had two children, now young adults? She was too lazy for him. The second, an Indonesian catwalk model. They couldn’t have children. Through his marriages Leonard was constantly unfaithful. LEONARD: They came to me with their eyes open. They weren't blind, you know. They all knew I had multiple wives and partners, and I was kind of a playboy. They all knew it. It wasn't like, "Oh, I mean, listen, I was this Virgin Mary from the convent or something." And then I met Morena Galvizo de Jesus. Morena was the mother to Leonard’s third and fourth children, and her story will break your heart. *** Singapore - 2004 Leonard walked into the Amara hotel in Singapore. He was comfortable there. It was luxurious but also quiet, a little outside the central business district, and he was less likely to bump into anyone he knew. Leonard liked to meet corrupt Navy supply officials here, and he used the dark bar to hand over envelopes full of cash to ensure he won contracts.

He spent so much time in the hotel he’d gotten friendly with Morena de Jesus, a receptionist at the Amara. The 23-year-old was doing a short job training as part of her college studies in the Philippines. She was smart and driven, with shoulder-length dark hair and a wide smile. She came from a poor family in a rural area north of Manila, and Leonard, aged 40 at the time, seemed so worldly, arriving at the hotel in chauffeured Rolls Royces, staff running to his every whim. He also seemed pious, an attraction to Morena, who like many Filipinas, is a practicing Catholic. Leonard’s mother was descended from Portuguese mariners who had landed in Asia, bringing the faith with them, and she had brought her son up as a Catholic. He always carried the rosary beads with him. Leonard took a liking to Morena and invited her to church one Sunday. Alone in a foreign country, asked to church by an intriguing older man, Morena accepted. He began to court Morena. Leonard told her about his two children, both over 10 years old, with his first wife, also a Filipina. But he didn’t mention he was remarried to the Indonesian model. After her training was over, Morena returned to the Philippines, but Leonard kept calling and texting her. He offered to pay for her to fly to Hong Kong to meet him. She was unsure, but eventually accepted. Morena’s father was a poor farmer, and she never expected to be able to travel the world. He put her up in a luxury apartment in Manila, and, although he was a transitory presence in her life, coming into the country now and again for business, she had fun. In 2007, she gave birth to their first child, a baby boy, and within a year, a baby girl. Having a child out of wedlock was stigmatized in the Philippines and Morena started to pressure Leonard to get married.

For all his womanizing, and his happy-go-lucky posturing about sex, Leonard harbored deep insecurities. For Morena, Leonard’s father, with his multiple mistresses and violence toward Leonard’s mother, had left the son with deep psychological scars.  He was paranoid about Morena cheating on him. *** Penang, Malaysia – 1979 Michael Francis, with gelled back hair, a bulbous nose, and uneven teeth, grabbed Leonard’s mother and smacked her across the face. She screamed, and cowered, as Michael kept on lashing out. Who knows what drives a man to hit a woman. But Michael, then 42, felt insecure, a poor man’s son married into wealth. His own father, a rubber plantation worker from Scotland, his mother a local. His marriage into the wealthy Portuguese-Sri Lankan family of Leonard’s mother left him feeling never quite good enough. But he enjoyed his new riches...and the women that it bought. Michael was cruel. He’d bring his mistresses back to the family home, in front of his wife and children. His wife would complain, and Michael would batter her. For years, Leonard had to endure the violence, as small children always do. Michael beat him, too, along with his brothers and sisters. But by the age of 15, Leonard was already six foot tall, with Elvisstyle mutton chops, a young man, not a boy, and ready to challenge his father. He was in a biker gang, hung out with triads, and had seen enough of the blows raining down on his mother. That evening, Leonard grabbed his father, and pulled him off her. LEONARD: "You ever touch my mother again," I said, "I'll kill you."

Leonard’s father, scrawny compared to his lumbering son, was taken aback. He never laid hands on her again. His mother tried to take her own life. When his mother, brother and sister went to live in England, Leonard had opted to stick with his father, despite the violence. Michael died in 2021, aged 84. Leonard was crumpled by grief, and we didn’t talk for a month. Under house arrest, he could only witness his father’s death through the screen of a computer. LEONARD: So that really took us in a very hard way, just seeing your father die in front of you and he's struggling to breathe with his oxygen mask, you could see that. You could see his eyes, his tears. Oh my God... my dad was always this lion, and you could see the fear in his face to die. The life was just coming out of him and he's calling his mother's name… I don't cry, I don't shed tears. I always stay very stoic in my facial expressions in front of everybody and there was tearing in my eyes, but not in front my kids. My kids are all breaking down, so I have to hold the family together. What makes a person? It’s hard to know, even as we look inwards to find explanations for our own behavior. But as we peel away the layers to get to Leonard’s dark core it’s hard not to see this childhood trauma as a seminal event in his life. And it helps explain - if not excuse -- the savage behavior toward Morena. *** Manila, Philippines – 2009 One day, Morena found out from someone at Leonard’s company that he was still married. And then, another Filipina woman came to Morena’s door. She said she was the mother of another of Leonard’s sons, born only a few months after Morena's baby girl. Morena decided to confront him.

The next time Leonard came to the apartment, Morena told him she wanted to split up. He could support the children, and still see them, but they should go their own ways. Leonard was furious. He immediately assumed there was another man in the picture, and he demanded to know if he was the father of the children. Leonard became unhinged after she asked to separate. He allegedly sent her terrible, deranged text messages, entered into court records in the Philippines, fueled by his fears that she had other men: Nov 6, 2009, 11:53 am: God will burn you in hell bitch prostitute. Go sell yourself with your sisters bitch! Nov 14, 2009, 7:11 pm: You low dog prostitute. Your sisters act like angels in front of me. They are all cheap like you. I will kill you soon bitch. You better find a job. Your time is up. Nov 15, 2009, 10:25 pm: Get ready to sell your handbags and shoes. You are too old to sell now. Cheap price. Wanna take photo in bikini bitch. You had a good life for five years now go back and rot in the provinces with the worms. The next month, Leonard appeared to have calmed down, and he asked Morena to come to Singapore on vacation. By now, he was divorced. She was only 28, and extremely naive. She took the flight, with their two infants, aged one and two. When Morena landed, Leonard’s driver took them from the airport to a serviced apartment. She was surprised not to be staying at his palatial Singapore home. Later, the driver returned to take the kids to spend time with Leonard’s mother in the mansion. He fobbed Morena off, telling her that he did not want his teenage sons to meet her. Morena had little to do, and so she invited over a male friend, whom she knew from her hotel internship five years earlier. While the friend was at the apartment, Leonard walked in. He thought she was cheating on him.

Leonard starts railing at the guy to get out, filled to bursting with anger that his mistress, his possession, would even talk to another man. Morena says Leonard threatened her. MORENA: He always threatened me and my family. "You know your family? I can do anything for them." He's very dangerous. He's very evil, evil person. He has no heart. He has no heart. He is evil. Her tourist visa for Singapore was running out and Leonard told her to go back to the apartment in the Philippines for eight days before returning. He seemed calmer, and she decided to go. She left her children behind with Leonard’s mother. It was the worst misstep of her life. When she arrived back at the apartment, it was cleaned out, her possessions all gone, the lease terminated, and the doors locked. The return air ticket also was canceled. She went to stay with her poor family in the rural Philippines.  Incapacitated by grief, with no money, and fighting a more powerful opponent, Morena began her long struggle to get her children back. She took any job she could to raise money for a ticket. A friend helped. But when she got back to Singapore, standing in front of the mansion’s gates, there was no reply. Back in Manila, Morena began legal proceedings against Leonard, borrowing money from a friend. A year later a Philippines regional court ordered Leonard to return the children, and that    decision was upheld by the Singapore family court. But, by then, Leonard had been arrested in San Diego. His mother in 2013 had fled Singapore to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia with the children. Morena couldn’t locate them. The court orders were unenforceable.

Since Leonard’s arrest, Morena has been trying to find her children, presuming they were in Kuala Lumpur. What really happened to them, she never could have imagined. *** San Diego - 2021 After Leonard was arrested his mother looked after Morena’s children, and another infant from a different Filipina woman. When Leonard moved from prison to house arrest in San Diego over three years ago, he sent for his three infant children. LEONARD: The kids want to be with me, of course. I'm super daddy, mommy, grand-daddy, grand everything. My kids understand. They all know. I'm a very open book dad. I don't hide anything. Leonard’s looking after them alone in his detention. Over our latenight conversations, he talked tenderly about his children, and the need to get them ready for school the next day. In his delusional world, Leonard has saved his children from mothers who were nothing more than craven, fallen women, not living, breathing people. He’s incapable of seeing women, other than his own mother, as anything but sex objects or baby-making machines. Abandoned himself as a kid, Leonard thinks he’s charting a better path as a father.  I asked Leonard why he’d abducted the children, and the answer lays bare the moral character of the man on whom the U.S. Navy was dependent. LEONARD: No, I did not kidnap the kids. They were all just mistresses and my children were legally born, and they have my name, and they're Malaysian citizens. So, she was the mother.

Unfortunately, it's a long story short because they were mistresses, they were fooling around. I caught them and I fired them. That's it. The last time I spoke with Leonard, our relationship began to sour as I challenged him about Morena. Tom: I mean, for all this time, I was really shocked to see your SMSs to Morena. I mean, why did you write that stuff?

Leonard: What was that?

Tom: “You dog prostitute” and all that. Leonard: I don’t...Listen, my life before is the past, it's not the future. Whether I wrote those SMSs, those texts, whether they were mine or not, I've not seen them. Tom: This is when you were furious when you told me you thought she was having an affair with some man she knew from the Amara Hotel, right?

Leonard: I'm not going to talk about all this. It's not important to me. They're nannies. There are the managers that took care of them. They’re all there. This is all too petty stuff. I think of the big picture right now. This is all petty. You, me, you, me, you, me. And now I'm dealing with mistresses?

Tom: But this is Leonard Francis's life story.

Leonard: Yeah, but like I said, it's going to do more damage to me now in my position, because the hate is going to become even more. Leonard: What has happened? Why the change? Do you think I'm such a bad guy because of what Morena said to you? Is she really getting to you? My God.

Tom: That's just part of it.

Leonard: The Department of Justice doesn't give a damn about hookers. I'm shocked that you're so concerned about it. Morena worked hard in a hotel, and now in a nursing home, and never was a prostitute. That Leonard would claim this about the mother of his children says so much about him.

Leonard: Well, they're all part of the same thing. Why did I say all those things? You're just like going on and on and on and on about all this nonsense.

Tom: I thought she worked in a hotel.

Leonard: Well, everybody worked in a hotel. I am really confused by what is important to you right now. Do you want to talk about the big picture of this case, or you want to talk about my personal life and all these mistresses? Tom: I'm also tired of this. I'm tired of it too, because I think you're a misogynist.

Leonard: I'm not. I just think you're getting the wrong idea about everything. I feel that you trying to now turn it around and try...So, I'm the bad guy. I don't think so… You know what? You're being unreasonable. I should have just drawn the line from the beginning. I don't want talk about it. I'm not like that. Just because I'm being so truthful and honest to you, and now you're trying to judge me. Morena eventually married a Filipino and moved to Sydney where she studies and works in a nursing home, trying to raise money to find her kids. Until I spoke to her, she had no idea what had happened to her kids. Morena was not surprised. She has first-hand experience of how Leonard, who still controls millions of dollars, can get what he wants. The children are 13 and 14 now, an older boy and younger girl, and Morena hasn’t seen them for over a decade. Morena: I always dream them every day. But whatever I saw in my dream, they're just only a little, they're still young, they're still young. But I don't know what they look like now, but every time I dream about them, they are still young. It's very sad. That's why I keep myself busy, not thinking. I need to move on now, so you know. How can I fight for my children if I will not help myself too?

Morena has a composed way of talking about her personal tragedy. She never cried, like Marcy, but, as she talked to me from her apartment in Sydney, looking down the camera of a computer, I found myself thinking that I’ve rarely come across someone who has suffered such a life-defining loss...and is still living with the pain of not knowing. Morena: Before, I want to end my life. I wanted to end my life, I don't want to live anymore, because they're my first love, they're my children, I don't want that anymore. I don't want to eat; I don't want anything. I want to ruin my life. I'm like I cried. I sleep for just two hour, but still thinking of them, dreaming of them, it just trauma. If you sleep, you don't want to wake up anymore. If you're dreaming about that you are happy, you want to stay in the dream and you don't want to wake up. Because after you wake up you won't remember anything, it's not a dream anymore. This is reality, that's why I have to survive. *** Not everyone was as powerless against Leonard as Morena. As his fraud deepens, a few brave whistleblowers move to take him on. Soon Leonard will be backed into a corner and lashing out to survive.

Chapter 7 – ” Suppos” Hong Kong - 2004 David Schaus, a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant, from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had just challenged Leonard Francis, the most powerful contractor to the Navy in the Pacific. And, by this point, nobody questioned Leonard the Legend. David, who is smart and doesn’t suffer fools, had found something amiss and he wasn’t scared of pointing it out. The USS Abraham Lincoln strike group had just docked in Hong Kong, and David, who was an assistant officer in charge of an office in Hong Kong that helped supply US Navy ships, suspected Leonard was overcharging for fresh water. The invoices in front of him showed Leonard was charging for double the amount of water the ship could hold. Leonard got up and pounded on the table, furious. His company, GDMA, had just won the contract to supply U.S. Navy ships in Hong Kong, and he wasn’t going to stand for a junior officer questioning his invoices. “He said, "I don't take orders from lieutenants." He said that very specifically to me, and I found this very strange because I'm a junior officer, but I'm still a commissioned officer in the Navy and in my mind, he's just a contractor,” David remembers. David is not the kind of person to back down. GDMA was clearly trying to push through fraudulent invoices. And Leonard was facing an unusual situation: someone from the Navy, however junior, had crossed him. David didn’t know that Leonard had admirals on speed dial. To him, he was just a contractor. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

*** Hong Kong’s Shangri-La Hotel sits on a rise above the harbor, the majestic outline of Victoria Peak soaring behind. On the 56th floor, with sweeping views of the boats below, Leonard was hosting a lavish party. Dressed in a dark suit with a Christmas tree pin on his lapel and festive tie, Leonard was talking to the commanding officers of the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group. To spice things up, Leonard had paid for Western women, dressed in revealing Santa outfits, to mingle and flirt with the guests. He tried to put the argument with David Schaus out of his mind. The party was a celebration of the U.S. Navy’s decision to give him the Hong Kong contract, and he wasn’t going to let that upstart ruin this event. He saw to it that David wasn’t invited. Several U.S. government officials who attended realized that a contractor like Leonard paying for all of this amounted to bribery. As always, Leonard had the cover of top Naval officers, many of whom he counted as friends. He chatted with Capt. Craig Faller, the commander of the USS Shiloh, who was 43 but looked older, with prematurely greying hair and sparkling white teeth. After the reception, Leonard says, some of the officers had sex with the women dressed in Santa outfits. Leonard: So Faller was one of them. Admiral Faller went on to become a one-star later on for a strike group. That was just the start of Capt. Faller’s rise to become a four-star admiral with one of the top jobs in the U.S. Navy, running the Navy’s Southern Command, including Central and Southern America.

The Washington Post, in 2018, first reported that Leonard told investigators he had organized a prostitute for Faller. The Navy found “insufficient evidence” that Faller had patronized a prostitute, the Post reported. In a statement to the newspaper, a Pentagon spokeswoman said: “Faller never solicited a gift, dinner, service or item from GDMA and never attended an event without clearance from an ethics counselor.” In October 2021, Faller retired from the Navy. He did not respond to requests for comment.

As he hobnobbed with the top officers, Leonard didn’t think he needed to worry about the likes of Lieutenant Schaus. But the events of that Christmas sowed seeds that mark the beginning of the downfall of Leonard Francis. *** We’ve explored how Leonard’s fraud worked. In his inner circle, he allegedly leant on officers like Lieutenant Commander Aruffo, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and is awaiting sentencing. He counted on Commander Misiewicz and others to direct ships into ports he controlled, where he could charge huge amounts for protection and fuel, according to court records. And Leonard delivered, keeping ships safe and ensuring supplies were always available, not to mention getting sailors out of trouble. His parties with the Navy’s top admirals, who may not have dirtied their hands with the details, gave him a veneer of respectability. Tom: But those Admirals, they were never paid cash in envelopes or anything like that?

Leonard: No, but they all received gifts. When you are attending a thousand-dollar (a) plate dinner, that is a bribe. It’s not a $10 McDonald's here… Everyone's looking down. “Well, if the admirals are all doing it, what is that? Why can't we party too? We all want to have a good time.”

We’ve heard about many parties in this series, but this next one perhaps mark Leonard’s high-water mark. *** Singapore - 2003 From the helipad of the Swissotel the Stamford, a semi-circular, 741-foot tower, designed by I.M. Pei, the 35 officers of the Nimitz strike group, drinks in hand, could see hundreds of oil tankers and container ships waiting to unload at Singapore’s port. Beyond them, Leonard pointed out the islands of Indonesia. Then, in the other direction, he gestured toward the glistening lights of Singapore’s business district, and further still, the faint glow from a far-off Malaysian city. Suddenly, a Singapore F-16 fighter jet came barreling overhead on a training flight, drowning out the sound of the Filipina band. The group went downstairs for a Michelin-starred meal…foie gras and $1,000 bottles of wine. The Nimitz, the largest nuclear-powered warship in the world, a symbol of U.S. military might, had just anchored in Singapore on the way back from supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Robert Gilbeau, in his early 40s, salt-and-pepper hair and jowls, was the supply officer on the ship. Leonard had known Gilbeau for several years, since he was a junior supply officer, or “suppo,” on an amphibious landing ship. Gilbeau was gregarious. He liked to take the microphone at Navy events, acting the host. He was married with children but, like most Navy officers, was absent from home for months at a time. In Bali, Leonard had plied him with meals, hotel rooms and prostitutes, according to court papers filed by prosecutors. Gilbeau presented himself to women as a fighter pilot. Leonard nicknamed him “Casanova.”

Servicing the Nimitz, with over 5,000 crew and 90 aircraft and helicopters, is a prestigious—and lucrative—job for a husbanding agent. So, Leonard was putting on a celebration—and making the point that his company was now playing in the big leagues. During the dinner, Leonard says he had arranged for Chinese prostitutes to be waiting in rooms of the hotel for select guests. Gilbeau, who was responsible for signing off on the Nimitz’s bills, allegedly was among them. Another woman was waiting for Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, commander of the Nimitz strike group, and one of the most powerful men in the Navy, Leonard says. In a gap between courses, Leonard claims he handed them both a room key, and they went up to the prostitutes. As the evening wound down, a group of Chinese prostitutes arrived at the hotel for the more junior officers. The party, Leonard said, cost $50,000, a clear breach of Navy rules, which limits sailors to accepting gifts of not more than $20. Gilbeau later pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about never receiving gifts from Leonard and he acknowledged destroying documents. In emails entered into the court record, he discussed arrangements for prostitutes with Leonard during the trip to Singapore. Attempts to reach him were not successful. Admiral Locklear did not respond to requests for comment. The Washington Post first reported these allegations about Locklear in 2018. He denied sleeping with prostitutes, and said he had ethical clearance to attend the dinner. A fighter pilot on the Nimitz was quoted in the Post as saying Locklear left when the Chinese prostitutes arrived at the end of the evening. Leonard says this is untrue. Leonard: He had all the hors d'oeuvres first, you know, you know, he had the hors d'oeuvres, then the bus load of women showed up later.

Leonard says he more than recouped his costs thanks to Robert Gilbeau, who he claims signed fake invoices and took $40,000 in cash in return. Gilbeau’s counsel said prosecutors found no evidence he ever got this money from Leonard, and he took a polygraph test which found his denial “not indicative of deception.” At this juncture, you may be asking why, out of 20,000 sailors in the 7th Fleet, no one called out the blatant fraud and overcharging before now. The fate of David Schaus answers the question. David says he was told by his boss to stop asking questions about Leonard, including the overcharging for water. His complaints went nowhere. *** Hong Kong - 2006 Two years later, when the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier sailed into Hong Kong, a supply officer on board tried to get David to sign off on some inflated invoices for sewage removal. This time, he was at his breaking point. He decided to contact NCIS. You may know of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, from the beloved TV show on CBS. NCIS, now on its 19th season, is the second-longest-running scripted TV show after Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The NCIS’s primary role is to investigate criminal activities involving the Navy and Marines. It was set up in 1992 under civilian leadership, after the failure of the Navy to prosecute anyone for their role in the Tailhook sexual assaults the year before, which we explored earlier in this investigation. Not surprisingly, the real NCIS bears little resemblance to the TV version, where Mark Harmon plays a former Marine sharpshooter

who holds corrupt officers to account. NCIS officers interviewed David and the commanders on the Ronald Reagan and prepared a report. But unlike the TV show, the real NCIS lacks the power to prosecute cases. Instead, it handed the report to the commanding officer of the ship. The Ronald Reagan’s commanding officer was Captain Terry Kraft, who would later become an admiral. On that visit, Kraft attended a dinner in Hong Kong organized by Leonard that cost almost $800 per attendee, according to a later censure letter issued by the Navy’s secretary. He issued a “Bravo Zulu” commendation letter for GDMA calling it the best contractor in the world. A copy of the NCIS report, laying out David’s claims, says the commanding officer of the Reagan -- that is Kraft -- be apprised of its contents. The NCIS closed its investigation without any action. In an email, Kraft said the Bravo Zulu was a pro-forma document issued by the supply department. He said he had ethics approval from the Navy to attend the dinners, for which he paid over $100. Kraft said he was not made aware of the NCIS report. And, if you think about it, that’s the core of the problem. What David experienced played over again and again. A few Navy supply officers, who order provisions for ships from the husbanding agents, began to make complaints about Leonard’s high costs. In fact, the NCIS opened 27 files around this time, according to law enforcement records obtained by the Washington Post. But the agency closed them all without action. Leonard had the ships in his pocket, and he used his Bravo Zulus to block anyone questioning him, and to make these inconvenient NCIS investigations go away. David was often alone in the small supply office in Hong Kong. So, when the USS Blue Ridge came into port, he looked forward to the socializing.

But many of the officers on the Blue Ridge stayed away from him, David says. Soon after, David left the Navy, disillusioned. Leonard claims he saw to it that the Hong Kong ship supply office was shut down, further reducing any scrutiny. Leonard was so influential that he could get a Navy position eliminated. But David wasn’t finished yet. *** Out of the Navy, David took up a job in Hong Kong working for a contractor that competed with Leonard. He was bent on revenge. There had always been rumors about Leonard’s criminal past -- his jail time for armed robbery in the 1980s -- and David had a friend who worked in security for an investment bank pull up the court records. He set up an anonymous email account, [email protected], and sent the documents to the State Department and NCIS. Under U.S. Navy laws, a contractor can’t have a criminal record. The NCIS somehow worked out that David, considered a troublemaker, was behind the anonymous email. Special Agent Albert Wong interviewed David. But rather than investigate the fraud, Wong wanted to know if David had sent the anonymous emails. They continued to use Leonard as a contractor. Agent Wong referred questions to the Navy, which declined to comment. Today, David still lives in Hong Kong, with his American wife, a lawyer, and children. Like most whistleblowers, his experience of being ignored has left its mark. Not long ago he gave up his U.S.

passport for a Hong Kong one. That possibly makes him the first ever U.S. Navy officer to become a Chinese citizen. I asked him what most stood out about what Leonard was able to do. The fact Leonard was able to direct $20 billion aircraft carriers wherever he wanted, David responded. Well, David’s right, that’s remarkable. But it’s not the craziest part of this story. Leonard was about to corrupt the investigators. *** Singapore - 2010 David felt like he’d failed. But just after he left the Navy, another official picked up the baton, a Navy civilian called Teresa Kelly. She recently had joined the supply office in Singapore. Blonde, in her 40s, Teresa had quickly built a network in the office, and drank with the senior officers at the Terror Club, a bar and pool at the U.S. Navy base. She was well liked -- open and friendly -but also tough. After Barack Obama became president, and the War on Terror slid down the agenda, the Navy was reining in its budgets. Teresa’s job was to negotiate the contracts with Leonard’s company, and she paid extreme attention to detail. Teresa was principled and determined. She knew Leonard was overcharging. Crucially for this story, she was not susceptible to Leonard’s bribes of cash or prostitutes. And she wouldn’t be swayed by other Navy officers just to let it drop. Teresa sent an email to a male colleague in the contracting office in Singapore outlining her suspicions that Leonard was bloating his

costs to protect Navy ships in Thailand. Rather than help, the colleague, a middle-aged man called Bobby Pitts, who enjoyed entertainment provided by Leonard, immediately forwarded the email to a representative of Leonard’s company, according to court documents. Leonard: Oh I had the inside information, of course. I had too many informers. Everybody was my informer. Pitts used a personal AOL account, to avoid detection. But the Thai Navy told Teresa that Leonard had a copy of her email. She was furious, and immediately suspected Pitts. She confronted him in her office. Taken aback by anyone bothering to question the relationship with Leonard, Pitts claimed that he’d been hacked, court documents show. Pitts pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. Teresa wouldn’t be deterred. She forwarded her complaint to the NCIS and pushed the agency to open yet another investigation into Leonard. It’s no surprise that it would take a woman to take on Leonard. Faced with a strong female, he didn’t know how to act. Leonard was starting to get worried. He’d swatted back complaints by David Schaus and others, but with a strong opponent in Teresa, this investigation didn’t look like it was going away. *** One night, drinking in a bar in Singapore, Leonard sent a chilling message to a U.S. Navy official in the Philippines who also was questioning his costs. He got a young lieutenant commander drunk and sent him out from the bar to buy a burner mobile phone and a prepaid SIM card.

Leonard had provided the officer with the employee’s phone number, and told him to send threatening, anonymous text messages. “Back off,” one of them read. He was getting desperate. When I challenged Leonard on these threats, he was uncomfortable. They don’t fit with his narrative of being a loyal servant of the Navy. At no point in our story is the Mafia aspect of the fraud more apparent than in these texts. He tried to make it sound like the young lieutenant commander, not Leonard himself, was behind the threats. This is bluster. Leonard was destabilized by Teresa’s doggedness, and the questioning of other Navy officials, and he feared he was losing his grip. The threats didn’t work. Teresa continued to press. The NCIS investigations rolled forward. Leonard needed to stay one step ahead. He needed a mole in the NCIS. He found one in John Beliveau II, a rising star at the agency. The information Beliveau had to impart was most unwelcome. After years of failure, the NCIS was finally taking matters seriously this time around.

Chapter 8–The Sting

Bangkok, Thailand - 2012 In a conference room, a young Thai woman known as “Yin,” was holding a meeting with staff. Yin was the head of the Thailand offices for Leonard Francis, the largest U.S. Navy contractor in the Pacific, and she had a problem. Leonard’s company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, was the focus of an ever-expanding fraud probe by Navy investigators, the NCIS. And Yin, under pressure from Leonard, was trying to get him out of the mess. As Yin talked, one of her female staff leaned in over the table. The two women didn’t like each other, and often were at loggerheads in the office. And now, unknown to Yin, the woman was about to exact the ultimate office revenge. Under her clothes, she was wearing a wire. Finally, after years of NCIS investigations going nowhere, this one, pushed by Teresa Kelly, the tenacious Navy supply official in Singapore, had traction. Teresa had suspicions Leonard was overcharging the Navy for fuel and to protect its ships in Thailand. Yin, whose full name was Pornpun Settaphakorn, had prepared fake invoices from port authorities to justify the exorbitant costs, according to a grand jury indictment. She has pleaded not guilty. As the NCIS agents listened into their headphones, she was caught on tape discussing what to do next. But Leonard was deeply entrenched with the Navy. His top-level connections had allowed him to smother NCIS investigations over and again. He always had inside information. And this time, so he thought, would be no different.

He knew the woman was wired up, and he acted to take care of the situation. *** Quantico, Virginia - 2012 The town of Quantico, on the Potomac River, just south of Washington DC, is surrounded by a huge Marine base, the FBI Academy, and the Russell Knox building, home to the NCIS. The building was brand new, completed at a cost of $361 million, and featured an office and training center for 3,000 personnel, a gym and retail convenience store. It seemed like the drab headquarters of any medium-sized company. Only barbed wire on the perimeter hinted at the classified nature of the work going on within. That August night, most of the employees, the staff of multiple military criminal investigative agencies, had already gone home. John Beliveau II, special agent in charge of the NCIS headquarters, switched on his computer, and, looking furtively around, accessed a system called K-Net. He tapped away fast as he searched through K-Net, which contained all details of ongoing NCIS investigations. In his mid-40s, single, Beliveau had the fleshy face of a heavy drinker, topped with a mop of graying hair, parted at the side. He blended into the background like any suited government bureaucrat. He appeared dedicated to protecting the U.S. Navy, and he’d risen the ranks. He’d recently been named “Agent of the Year” in an organization of over 1,000 people and had snagged the sought-after position as director of the Quantico office. This is the stuff of TV dramas. Beliveau should have been solving crimes like Mark Harmon or LL Cool J on NCIS, dressed in a baseball cap and staff jacket.

Instead, Beliveau was a mole for Leonard, and he had a troubled mind. *** Leonard had known Beliveau for several years, back from when he was an NCIS bodyguard for a Navy admiral stationed in Japan. He was small fry, but Leonard bet he would show up again later, in a more useful role. And sure enough, Beliveau was promoted to an NCIS job in Singapore, ensuring the protection of Navy ships. It was then, as investigations into Leonard began to build, that Beliveau started to offer up tidbits. The pair would meet at a Japanese restaurant in the Goodwood Park Hotel, an eclectic Victorian-era building, with a turret like a Rhineland castle. Nothing major at first, just office gossip. Leonard began to reel Beliveau in. He gave him cash to spend in nightclubs, and, of course, he arranged for women, according to court documents. Beliveau was lonely, had struggled with obsessivecompulsive disorder since a child, and had never experienced a steady relationship, his defense counsel later claimed. After arriving in Singapore, he’d traveled for work to the small nation of East Timor, where he’d witnessed a beheading. He was in a perturbed state when he came under Leonard’s tutelage and would do almost anything the Big Boss asked. And, slowly, Beliveau began to divulge information about the NCIS investigation sparked by Teresa Kelly’s concerns about overcharging in Thailand. *** By 2012, Beliveau had transferred to the U.S., promoted to the Quantico job, where he was in a much better position to act as

Leonard’s spy. Beliveau knew Special Agent Sanz, a longtime NCIS investigator, was leading the probe into allegations GDMA was defrauding the Navy. And so, that August night, he searched for “Sanz and Glenn” and the phrase “oral wire intercept,” court documents show.  He was shocked to find a writeup of the recent meeting in Bangkok between Yin and her staff member. Earlier complaints about Leonard, like those from David Schaus, had gone nowhere. This was a serious investigation, involving wiretaps. Beliveau reached for his mobile phone and tapped out a panicked message to Leonard in Singapore. “I have 30 reports for you. Not good. Your girl in Thailand f’ed up and got caught on tape,” he wrote. Leonard and Beliveau quickly exchanged 22 text messages. Leonard was fighting for his survival, and although he won’t admit it to me, he, or someone else clearly put pressure on the Thai employee to stop cooperating with NCIS agents. She left the company and disappeared. Beliveau was not happy. He knew Leonard was finally in trouble and that his information was gold. But, now in the U.S., he couldn’t get easy access to spending money and prostitutes. He fired off an angry email, according to court documents: “I will always be your friend, but you will get nothing else...until I get what you promise...You give whores more money than me...I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I am not an amateur,” he wrote. The emails went back and forward, with Beliveau suggesting a payment through Western Union.

How had this NCIS star performer become so corrupted? The behavior of this top U.S. military law enforcement agent is scandalous. Leonard has his own theory. Leonard: Anybody who joins the NCIS, they're all like, my gosh, third rated or fourth rated… All of them are just like a bunch of clowns. Wannabes. I call them wannabes. If you compare them to FBI, then you see a different caliber of investigative officers, CIA, FBI. The NCIS had failed to do anything about Leonard for years, ignoring whistleblowers like David Schaus. With Agent Beliveau in his pocket, Leonard, even now, felt like he had control of the situation. But there was another complication. Beliveau’s snooping that August night had uncovered a more perilous development than the wiretap in Thailand. As he scrolled through the documents his eyes alighted on a report that detailed a new cooperating witness in the investigations. It was Marcy Misiewicz, the estranged wife of Commander Michael Misiewicz. *** Yokosuka, Japan – 2012 On Father’s Day, Michael had plans to improve his relationship with his two eldest children. There were strains after he’d hit Marcy, and Michael had been cast out to live on the USS Blue Ridge. He’d picked the kids up from the family home on base and brought them to Tokyo for dinner. The next day, the Navy had organized a family cruise on the Blue Ridge back to the base in Yokosuka. At dinner that evening, there were two unexpected guests: Leonard Francis and Edmond Aruffo, the former Navy officer who now worked for GDMA.

When the children returned from the cruise, they told Marcy about the dinner. Marcy had never met Leonard, but she knew he’d been paying for vacations to Cambodia for her husband and his family. And she suspected Michael was sleeping with other women, and that Leonard was a bad influence. Despite the talk of divorce, she felt jilted, and furious Michael was allowing her children to be around Leonard. Marcy agonized over what to do, and then, she made a momentous decision. She set up a meeting with the chief of staff of the 7th Fleet on the base. In the meeting, she reported her husband’s suspected adultery. And she handed over emails from Michael about his vacations in Cambodia and credit card statements showing he was living above his means. Marcy had grown to believe her husband was taking corrupt payouts. Some Navy spouses enjoyed the lifestyle, and stayed quiet, but Marcy, fired by indignation about Michael’s adultery, acted. She began to suspect the Gucci purse that he’d gifted her was not in fact a present from Michael. The next month, Marcy says an NCIS agent named Erika Mariner called her in for an interview. Dressed in jeans, with a polo shirt, her NCIS badge on her belt, Mariner had long black hair and a steely manner. Marcy’s information had been woven with other strands the NCIS was collecting about Leonard, and what Mariner told Marcy stopped her dead in her tracks. Michael was on the NCIS radar, Marina said, not for adultery or breaking the Navy’s policy on receiving gifts, but as part of a major criminal investigation. Agent Beliveau, accessing K-Net that day, knew that Marcy was cooperating.

Beliveau immediately contacted Leonard by Skype, warning him about Marcy and telling him to keep his distance from Michael, now that he was under investigation, court documents show. “Don’t trust him. Never email or text him. Never speak on the phone with him. Sopranos. Trust me. Only in person with noise, and protect yourself through bugs,” he said. The NCIS agent was educating Leonard in the arts of spy craft. But Leonard disregarded the advice. He’d been untouchable for too long and that bred an arrogance in him. Instead, Leonard did exactly what Beliveau had warned him against: He emailed Michael, letting him know about his wife and the NCIS investigation. Michael immediately deleted his private email accounts, one called “litterbug,” or little brother of Leonard Glenn Francis. But he decided not to tell Marcy that he knew about her cooperation. After meeting NCIS Agent Mariner, Marcy finally had transferred back to the U.S., relocating to Shannon, Illinois, near where she’d first met Michael in high school. She filed for divorce and got a job in a bank. Although their life together was ending, Marcy felt wretched about what she’d unleashed. But she couldn’t stay quiet. Another NCIS agent visited Marcy in her home in Illinois. But by now, she was distraught, trying to keep her family together, and she’d lost faith in the Navy’s judicial process. She stopped responding to phone calls from NCIS agents. Again, Leonard thought he had the situation under control. But he’d been careless. As agents monitored Michael’s email, they saw the warning from Leonard about Marcy. How could he possibly know about this secret investigation and Marcy’s cooperation? The NCIS ordered its cybersecurity teams to investigate who could have tipped Leonard off. And they soon came across a stupefying fact: Agent Beliveau, who was not assigned to the case,

had been downloading hundreds of pages of investigative documents from K-Net, all at night and on public holidays. A review of security footage showed Beliveau using a CD burner to take the files out of the office without detection... *** Tokyo, Japan - 2012 On November 30, a chauffeured Mercedes picked up Michael for the hour-long drive from the USS Blue Ridge to the Ritz Carlton in Tokyo. There, Leonard was waiting for him in his suite, with spectacular views of the city and Mount Fuji, according to court documents. Even knowing Michael was under investigation didn’t stop Leonard. The NCIS had never acted before. Why would it do so now? In the room, Michael, Leonard, and another officer pored over organizational charts of the 7th Fleet. Michael, too, would soon relocate back to the U.S. and the conspirators were looking for another officer to fill his shoes. Then, Michael handed over an envelope filled with 40 pages of classified material: ship schedules -- stamped “SECRET” -- covering the next 14 months, according to court records. The wad of documents also included the positions of top-secret U.S. ballistic missile defenses in Asia. These defenses would protect U.S. allies like Taiwan in the event of a Chinese missile attack. They remain classified until today. It’s not clear why Michael would hand over this kind of classified material, or what benefit it gave Leonard, and it seems unlikely Michael knowingly was acting against U.S. national security interests. Perhaps it was a mistake.

Leonard didn’t care that Beliveau had warned him not to meet Misiewicz. He felt untouchable. Leonard: I was always ahead of the game. I knew what was going on. I had top cover. I had intelligence. I had the fleet protecting me. I had the admirals behind my back. Everybody knew I was under investigation. The flag officers knew. They were still wining me and dining me in their official residences. Whether admirals knew he was under investigation, I don’t know. But while the NCIS probe moved forward, Leonard rubbed shoulders with the highest-ranked admirals at Navy events aboard the Blue Ridge, in Hawaii and Annapolis, media reports show. Leonard just couldn’t imagine the Navy cleaning house and dealing with the festering sore at its heart. Then, Agent Beliveau contacted him with an even worse piece of news. The NCIS, realizing the severity of the security breach with Michael, had roped in the Justice Department. This was no longer purely a Navy matter. The FBI was involved. Beliveau warned Leonard by text to take precautions. A Grand Jury was considering charges. “Indictments are coming. Did you dump your Gmail? I cleaned it. Maybe not best to send me anything from your Gmail account. Delete all contacts and boxes and delete your trash bin,” he wrote. With this advice, Leonard moved all his company files to Chinse servers. The security risk of U.S. ballistic missile defense documents being hidden from the NCIS on a Chinese server is hard to overstate. One thing Leonard didn’t do fast enough was close his Gmail accounts. Just before he got around to doing that, agents had sent what’s called a “preservation hold” to Google. They kept all details of the account even though Leonard thought it was deleted.

By this point, the NCIS and Feds were monitoring Beliveau. The NCIS knew they had a mole, and so they set up a top-secret group to investigate Leonard. The hand-picked team of agents signed nondisclosure agreements. Even many top admirals were not informed of the unit’s existence. To get Beliveau and Leonard off their trail, agents planted fake documents in the NCIS database that the investigations against Leonard were closed and no charges would be filed. It worked. “The cases are closing. The cases are closing,” Leonard wrote Michael in an email. It was, thought Leonard, the resumption of business as usual. *** San Diego, 2013 In September, Leonard was on the way to San Diego to go win some more business from the Navy. He thought the cases were closed. He even had a plan to go to Colombia on vacation with Agent Beliveau after meeting Navy admirals. If anything, Leonard thought he might just have to repay some money to the U.S. government, some kind of fine. That’s how untouchable he’d been, for years. He thought himself indispensable. When Leonard landed at LAX, he was bundled into a room by immigration officers for questioning about the purpose of his visit. This was unusual, but Leonard thought little of it. After an hour, Leonard was allowed into the U.S. and he was driven to a Marriott in San Diego, where he checked into a suite. He met for dinner with former Navy officers who now worked for GDMA, including Ed Aruffo. They went to Nobu for dinner with their wives.

The next day, Leonard gave a PowerPoint presentation to the Navy about a new round of contracts that he hoped to win.  He returned to the hotel and the buzzer rang. It was a couple of NCIS officers, a man, and a woman. The NCIS agents were just there to assure Leonard was in the room. They asked him some vague questions about bribery in the Navy and then left. Leonard: As soon as they stepped out of the door, we had a posse of agents and SWAT team. Oh my God, it was crazy. They were coming in to take some drug Lord. They came running in, with guns blazing. And then slam me against the wall and then put me in a chair, and started frisking me, checking me and everything. In a coordinated action, the FBI arrested John Beliveau II in Virginia, Ed Aruffo in San Diego, and Michael Misiewicz in Colorado, where he’d been transferred after Japan. When Marcy heard the news, she traveled over from Illinois to bail him out. Like many newly arrested people, Michael was delusional: he thought he could just put in his papers and retire. As the news flowed out into the international media about Michael’s crimes, especially the prostitutes, Marcy was embarrassed and seething. Michael pleaded not guilty at first, but faced with a much longer sentence, changed his plea. He admitted to one count of conspiracy and one count of bribery. Before going to jail he gave an interview in which he argued Leonard played an important strategic role for the U.S. Navy. “He was a crook, but he was our crook,” he said. In April 2016, Michael was given a jail term of 78 months, one of the longest sentences handed out yet, due to the top-secret ballistic missile defense documents he had provided to Leonard.

Agent Beliveau pleaded guilty and was given 12 years, which he’s still serving, the longest jail term meted out so far. My attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. Aruffo, who has pleaded guilty to running a fake invoicing scam for Leonard’s company in Japan, is awaiting sentencing. He answered a few questions on Facebook. He recently passed the California bar exam, pulled his study notes together as a book, and is running classes for aspiring lawyers. Michael served his time in a low-security jail in Lompoc, California. One of his cell mates was a parent sentenced in the college admissions scandal. Marcy called it “Club Fed.” In the summer of 2020, he was allowed into house arrest due to Covid after four years in jail. He’s now out, after serving 5.5 years, about a year less than his original sentence.  He did not respond to my efforts to get in touch with him. Marcy is making the best of things, surrounded by a loving family. She still goes down to see Michael’s Cambodian relatives in Texas, but has cut off most ties with her ex. Despite everything that’s happened, her eldest son is in his final year at the Naval Academy, where his father studied all those years ago. There’s little contact between father and son. But Marcy wondering, as indeed am I, why more Navy admirals haven’t faced more severe punishment.  The problem for the Navy was that, as Leonard started to talk, it dawned on investigators just how many officers were involved with him. Not just commanders like Michael, but captains...and even admirals.

Chapter 9–Different Spanks San Diego - 2013 Leonard Francis, for thirty years the most powerful U.S. military contractor in the Pacific, finally, has been brought low. He believed himself untouchable, and, in the blink of an eye, he’s shackled in the metropolitan correctional center in San Diego. He was denied bail. The reason: his imprisonment almost three decades earlier for his part in an armed robbery in Penang. For years a vaunted businessman, Leonard was furious prosecutors painted him as a common thief, and a threat to society. Leonard had only one weapon left. And, right there in the investigation room in San Diego, he started to exact his revenge. He started to name some of the most senior admirals in the fleet as complicit in his schemes. Leonard: Oh yes. They were shocked. I think I opened a Pandora box. It just shook the ... what do you call it? ... The Citadel of the Navy, the foundation. *** Kabul, Afghanistan - 2013 Rear Admiral Robert Gilbeau’s heart began to palpitate, and he broke out in a sweat, as he read the headline on the newspaper handed to him on the U.S. military base. His fellow servicemen and women were discussing the bombshell arrest of Leonard Francis. Not only Leonard, but Commander Michael Misiewicz and NCIS Agent John Beliveau were named.

Gilbeau, the supply officer on the USS Nimitz who had a history with Leonard dating back to the 1990s, had gone up in the world. Now he was a rear admiral, putting him in the ranks of the top 250 or so officers in the Navy. That evening, his subordinates noticed Gilbeau making strange, ponderous statements about Leonard and dinners and women, according to court documents. What was his connection to this breaking story, they gossiped? In the coming days, Gilbeau, who was on a tour in Afghanistan, removed electronic devices from his living quarters. He inquired with IT support staff about how to erase files, and he destroyed other documents. He began to insist on meeting advisers in open fields, and he asked others to remove cell phone batteries to ensure they weren’t being snooped on. And he made peculiar inquiries of them about receiving gems and money in Afghanistan. Gilbeau’s superiors on the base noticed this erratic behavior, and he was relieved of command and medevac’d to Germany, where he lied to NCIS investigators about the receipt of things of value from Leonard, according to court documents. It was too late. Leonard, in jail in San Diego, had begun to tell FBI agents about all the admirals who were involved with him. And he started with Rear Admiral Robert Gilbeau and the party in Singapore back in 2003. *** San Diego - 2017 Admiral Gilbeau, dressed in a black suit, with a gray tie, walked up the steps to the courthouse of the Southern District of California in San Diego, his small white service dog, Bella, on a leash. Doctors had prescribed the dog as a balm for his anxiety.

Gilbeau’s case was sensitive as no admiral had ever been criminally indicted in the Navy’s then 223-year history. But the Justice Department pushed for a prosecution. Gilbeau pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about never receiving gifts from Leonard and he acknowledged destroying documents. At his sentencing, he claimed PTSD, due to an explosion in Iraq, as a mitigating factor. “I know in my heart of hearts that I’m not corrupt,” he told the judge. “I’m still proud of my Navy career, and I’m proud to be an American.” Another admiral, who had studied with Gilbeau at the Naval Academy, stood up to say that his former friend’s scandalous actions had unfairly cast suspicion on everyone in the Navy. Gilbeau, surrounded by friends and family, was handed an 18month sentence. He served it in Lompoc, California, alongside Michael Misiewicz. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. The FBI had taken the lead on the investigation, and they began working through the names Leonard had provided. The bureau decided which cases to prosecute criminally, while passing hundreds of less serious cases to the Navy. Leonard, who pleaded guilty in 2015 and since has been the government’s star witness, says there was tension from the start between the Navy and the Justice Department. Leonard: Well, I think the Navy was taken aback by the Department of Justice that are looking at it more seriously, because the Navy is trying to cover up… They did not want to accept, they didn't want to charge any of their senior leadership. That's when you could see DOJ and the Navy locking horns, because the Navy wanted to protect their own. They still do to this very day. That's how the military is.

The Justice Department and the Navy, citing ongoing judicial action, declined to answer a list of detailed questions. The closest to an official reaction we’ve had was when former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus talked to CBS News in October 2021. “This was terrible for the Navy,” Mabus said. But he insisted admirals didn’t get off easy, saying, quote: “I censured a vice admiral and two rear admirals, ended their career” end quote. We’ve focused on just a few Navy officers: Ed Aruffo, Mike Misiewicz, and John Beliveau of the NCIS. But the Justice Department indicted almost 30 officers and enlisted men, as well as supply officials and Leonard and his staff. The U.S. government says the scheme cost the country around $35 million, which Leonard agreed to forfeit, but the true number is undoubtedly many factors higher. The Justice Department also handed the names of over 450 people, including 60 admirals, to the Navy for review. These were cases the DOJ declined to prosecute, in some circumstances because too much time had passed since the alleged crime. The Navy set up a Consolidated Disposition Authority, or CDA, headed by an admiral, to decide what to do with these cases. As during the Tailhook scandal back in 1991, which we covered earlier, military leaders have been left to decide on punishments for their equals. And, as back then, the Navy has failed to administer justice, and it hasn’t exactly been transparent. The Navy stopped updating the public on its actions in mid-2019. Only two Navy court martials we know about have led to time in confinement.  The Navy has given out at least 11 letters of censures -- official reprimands -- and forced some officers to retire. The most senior leader to come before the CDA was Admiral Samuel Locklear, who was Gilbeau’s commanding officer on the

USS Nimitz, and by 2013 was commander of all military forces in the Pacific and a leading contender to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Washington Post, in 2018, reported that Leonard told investigators that Locklear had slept with a prostitute that evening when the Nimitz was in Singapore. Locklear had been on a White House shortlist to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an email from a National Security Council official made public by Wikileaks -- and first reported by the Post. The official noted that Locklear’s chances had dimmed, and he likely would be forced to retire, due to his alleged connections to Fat Leonard. According to the Post, Admiral John M. Richardson, then head of the CDA, wrote in a memo regarding Locklear that it would be -- and I quote -- “inappropriate to substantiate allegations of misconduct in regard to these dinners or any other matters.” Locklear did not respond to emailed questions about the evening. In a letter to the Post, he denied Leonard had provided him with a prostitute. “It is inconceivable to me, as it is to others who know me, that I would engage in such activity no matter the circumstances,” he wrote. “So once again let me be clear: I was never offered a prostitute by Leonard Francis. I never requested a prostitute from him, and I never discussed prostitutes or escorts with him. If there were prostitutes...they did not present themselves to me as such and I had no reason to suspect they were.” Weeks later, Locklear retired from the military, the Post said. Today, he sits on the board of a defense contractor and is a senior fellow at the National Defense University. I asked Don Christensen, the former chief prosecutor of the Air Force, about the matter. “It is no punishment,” he said. “If you retire as a senior admiral, you're going to make more in the rest of your life doing nothing than the average American taxpayer who's paying that salary will make if they were working two or three jobs.”

Then there’s Admiral Craig Faller, a four star, who we met earlier. Leonard told investigators that Faller slept with a prostitute at a dinner in Hong Kong, back when he was a captain. The Washington Post broke the story, and Faller, at his Senate confirmation hearing to become head of Southern Command, including Central and Southern America, was grilled by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren: Admiral Faller, I had hoped to talk with you about the crisis in Venezuela today. Instead, I have to ask you about yesterday's report in the Washington Post. You were allegedly offered a prostitute. This does not pass the smell test for me. Admiral Craig Faller: Senator, every decision I made in my nearly four decades of service has tried to be through the best ethical lens, with ethics counselor. One of the benchmarks I use is would my wife of 34 years or my two grown daughters, if they were present or watching me or saw it on video, would they be embarrassed, or would I have discredited them? And I can look you in the eye and the committee and say that I believe I've passed that benchmark. Elizabeth Warren: I appreciate that, Admiral. But if I could just ask you to answer my question, which is, is it now or was it then common for senior Navy officers to attend events at which prostitutes and women in scantily clad outfits were expected to provide entertainments? Admiral Craig Faller: No. The Navy found “insufficient evidence” that Faller had patronized a prostitute, the Washington Post reported. In a statement to the Post, a Pentagon spokeswoman said Faller “never solicited a gift, dinner, service or item from GDMA and never attended an event without clearance from an ethics counselor.” Admiral Faller retired from the Navy in October 2021. He was replaced by a female army general, the first time a woman has headed Southern Command in the U.S. military’s history. He did not

respond to requests for comment and the Navy declined to answer questions. In 2021, Mark Montgomery, a former U.S. rear admiral, wrote a major report on the fighting readiness of the U.S. Navy, prepared under the direction of several Republican members of Congress. It was picked up by the Wall Street Journal and talked about widely in defense circles. For the report, Montgomery canvassed a wide range of Navy personnel. The interviewees included a former secretary of the Navy, now almost 80 years old, who opined that political correctness was hurting the U.S.’s war-fighting ability. He cited several WWII Navy heroes, admirals who today would not have made it past captain level because of their heavy drinking and womanizing. The report cited an incident in 2019 in which a Naval officer was overheard by a journalist encouraging sailors to “clap like you’re at a strip club” for then-Vice President Mike Pence. Amid the ensuing media coverage, the officer resigned. Montgomery and his coauthor, rather than decrying this sexist language, found the media to be conducting nothing short of a witch hunt of an experienced officer. The report found disdain among interviewees for what they called the “One Mistake Navy,” or the idea an officer’s career can be terminated over one error of judgment. The authors said that “isolated infractions such as an alcohol-related indiscretion” should be weighed against an overall service record. But Montgomery himself has had little trouble recovering from his mistakes. He was censured by the Navy in 2018 for his dealings with Fat Leonard. Montogmery’s Navy censure letter, although redacted, shows how he intervened in August 2007, when commander of a destroyer squadron to ensure two U.S. Navy vessels took expensive fuel from Leonard after they had initially declined. Montgomery also gave

Leonard advance notice of ship visits. And he improperly endorsed GDMA in email traffic, the censure letter stated. Montgomery solicited discounted hotel stays for his family and helped plan a dinner in Hong Kong costing $32,000, for which he paid nothing, it says. When asked by the Navy about the hotel stays and dinners, Montgomery made a false official statement denying accepting a hotel room in Hong Kong and a dinner in Tokyo. The letter ends with an admonishment. You were… quote, “expected to model the core values of the Navy as a leader and shape our Navy leaders of the future. Instead, you abused your position to accept gifts from Mr. Francis/GDMA, improperly endorse GDMA, and commit graft.” He had already retired from the Navy and is now a senior director at a conservative think tank in Washington and executive director of a U.S. government commission on cyber security. He kept his rank. In a statement to me, Montgomery acknowledged errors in attending a dinner hosted by GDMA and allowing hotel room upgrades. “These mistakes are absolutely mine, and I was held accountable for them,” he wrote. “But I have always maintained that the evidence does not support the further allegations in the Secretary’s letter.” Montgomery didn’t specifically address the allegations he had directed two ships to take fuel from Leonard. But he said it was, quote, “completely understandable that my staff and I would communicate with GDMA,” end quote, given that Leonard’s firm organized over 100 port visits for ships under his command. “I erroneously thought of GDMA as an essential mission support element,” he wrote.

His report about the Navy’s war readiness doesn’t mention the Fat Leonard scandal. There are others in the Navy who think the investigations have gone too far, freezing promotions, firing talent, unfairly hurting the careers of people only tangentially connected to Leonard. They say the Navy is in disarray because of it. Two U.S. Navy ship collisions in Asia in the summer of 2017 that killed 17 sailors, and a fire last year on an assault ship docked in San Diego, show how the Fat Leonard investigations have hollowed out the Navy’s leadership, they argue. But as the rehabilitation of Rear Admiral Montgomery himself shows, rather than a witch hunt, the Navy has not gone far enough. Blake Herzinger, the U.S. Navy Reservist in Singapore, believes there’s been a coverup. “I think there is at least some popular perception of what we would call different spanks for different ranks,” he said. The week Montgomery’s report came out, I interviewed David Kapaun, a former Navy commander, a much lowlier figure than a rear admiral, who had just finished 18 months in jail in Hawaii due to his connections with Leonard. David, who is 62, with a walrus moustache and a languid way of talking, worked in Singapore for the Navy, and he admits to writing letters for Leonard, handing over a ship schedule, and taking drinks, food, and prostitutes. “When he was arrested in 2013, yes, the chills did go up my spine,” he said. “I made some Navy ethical violations, they were obviously Navy ethical violations, but I was naive enough to think that they wouldn't arise to the level of Justice Department interest.” In the end, David pleaded guilty for failing to declare his connections to Leonard on a standard security clearance. Then the

reality of the public shaming hit David, the mention of the prostitution. As he stews at home in Hawaii, writing posts about films and politics on his blog, David is seething over what he sees as unequal treatment for admirals. Leonard himself agrees that Rear Admiral Montgomery was worth more to him than David Kapaun. Leonard: I would say in terms of value, Montgomery would have probably given me more value than Kapaun. Kapaun was just a, what do you call it? A low fruit commander. He was more of a worker bee. Montgomery was where the big bucks were. For example, he could direct his ships to take fuel in my port, and I could make millions out of it, because he is the boss. He would direct it. "Don't take fuel here. Just go there and get your gas there." That's where the money is made. It’s true the Navy has made some reforms. Today it relies on multiple contractors, not one behemoth like Leonard, and has set rules to keep costs under control. Apart from GDMA and its subsidiaries, the Navy has debarred hundreds of vendors from contracts. As a result, Navy visits to some of the far-flung places that Leonard serviced, like Thailand, have fallen in frequency. But in 2021, the Justice Department arrested the CEO of a huge Navy husbanding firm, MLS, which had taken over many of Leonard’s contracts. It sounds like the Fat Leonard scandal all over again -- allegations of cash bribes to a Navy official and fake invoices. Leonard, it seems, is right to say that corruption is endemic in the Navy. The Navy needs to let in more light, not less, and be transparent about how it’s handling this awful mess. I hope this investigation deepens the debate in the Navy, started all those years ago by Paula

Coughlin, about how to end endemic misogyny. Paula was an advocate of a bill in Congress, passed in late 2021, that took the decision to prosecute sexual assault cases away from military commanders. It’s a baby step but progress, nonetheless. In late October 2021, I took a train out of New York to meet a source in his charming cedar-shingled home. The source, a wellconnected individual, had recently spoken to a senior Chinese Communist party official. The official, the source said, had told him a worrying piece of information: China’s government was in possession of sexual kompromat, photos, and videos of U.S. Navy officers. As we sat in the library after lunch, the source told me the Chinese official said that Leonard hadn’t sold the material. Instead, China had identified him as a target and had hacked GDMA, his company. And as you’ll remember, Leonard had moved all his files onto Chinese servers to avoid the NCIS investigation. What else the Chinese got hold of --- the position of ballistic missile defenses, for instance -- is unclear. What’s for sure, is the U.S. is still trying to work out, years after the fact, the extent to which its national security has been compromised. In our final conversation in August 2021, Leonard seemed to lose his certainty that speaking out was a sensible course of action. He asked for a podcast I was making not to come out, after hours of taped conversations, and brave talk that he didn’t care what the judge does in his case. Leonard: Yeah, I don't understand a writer. I don't understand that that is my memoir. I don't understand a journalist. I haven't spoken to anybody except you. Many approached me, but I don't talk to them, because I've been warned about talking to people. I speak to you because I trust

you… And I just want you to know that. It's about how serious this is. Just be patient. We're about there. Leonard: I waited this long. That's why at the end, I started talking to you, because I felt I trusted you... You got to think about it. Do you understand, Tom?

Tom: No. It's a total mystery to me why you're talking like this based on how we started this whole process six months ago.

Leonard: Well, what are you trying to get out of this? Are you trying to get rid of me?

Tom: No.

Leonard: Are you being the judge on me now?

Tom: No.

Leonard: Then what?

Tom: I'm not your judge. Just to be clear, I'm not your judge at all. I'm the guy that you came to, to tell your story and I've done it.

Leonard: Yes, but right now …

Tom: And you were not clear at all about the fact that you thought ... In fact, you said the exact opposite. You said that you were being made to sit around, to wait around, and that it was so important to you to get the truth out. Tom: You came into it with your eyes wide open, right? You know I'm a journalist. You know I'm not a stenographer, right? Leonard: I mean, you want to do podcasts, you want to do a movie later, whatever you want to do, that's fine, but I just got to make sure that everything falls in place, because this can just blow up in my face, and that will be the end of me. Leonard always saw me as a useful tool, like most of the people in his life. Talking to me was his way to get his side of the story out -to cement his legacy. I think Leonard did achieve one of his goals through our interactions: to let the world know that, rather than the corrupt contractor portrayed in newspaper articles, he was a trusted partner of the Navy for decades.

But I don’t believe Leonard thought through the consequences of talking to a journalist. He couldn’t conceive that I’d dig into his past and uncover his hurtful, misogynistic treatment of Marcy, Morena, and other women. As his sentencing approached, in September 2022, Leonard made a rash decision. He’d already been in jail and home detention for nine years. Watching admirals get off scot-free, and facing a total 25-year term, he wasn’t willing to risk spending any more time in jail. Leonard Francis’ story wasn’t over yet – not by a long shot.

Chapter 10 – The Escape

San Diego - September 2022 Before dawn on a quiet Sunday, Leonard Francis surveyed the empty rooms of his five-bedroom house. The streets of the San Diego gated community were quiet. It was from his office, on an upper floor of this home, that Leonard had talked to me for over 25 hours after we smuggled in a microphone. Now everything was gone: the furniture, his clothes, his three young teenage children…and even the microphone we’d sent him. He sat down in the empty living room, and with a pair of scissors, severed a GPS-enabled monitoring device from his ankle. He opened a plastic water cooler and placed the device inside. Then Leonard put the scissors on top, and he walked out of the house into a waiting SUV with out-of-state plates. When Leonard cut through his ankle device, an alarm was set off at pre-trial services in San Diego. They alerted Leonard’s lawyers, who went to the house. They knocked, but there was no answer. The lawyers called the Marshals, who didn’t arrive until 4 p.m. — seven hours after Leonard had fled. Inside the house, officers found the water cooler sitting there in an empty room, the GPS monitoring bracelet inside. The officers radioed in a criminal was on the run, suspected to have jumped over the border into Mexico. Leonard had absconded only three weeks away from his sentencing. Over 20 Navy officers, including an admiral, had gone to jail, or were awaiting sentencing in the Fat Leonard affair. Leonard had pleaded guilty and helped to convict many of them. After contracting

renal cancer, he’d been allowed into home detention five years earlier. Now it was his turn to face sentencing. U-Haul trucks had arrived a few days earlier. His three young teenage children left with his mother. The private security guards outside his home believed Leonard was moving out ahead of his sentencing on September 22. But Leonard had other plans. Kristina Davis of the San Diego Union-Tribune has followed the Fat Leonard story for years. “The thing that the marshals were very clear on,” she said, “was that he had planned this for a long time. This was very planned. This was not just a rash decision.” Why would Leonard go on the run after so many years cooperating with the government, and so close to his sentencing? Kristina has a theory. Just a few days earlier, his lawyers had received Leonard’s pre-trial sentencing documents. “And maybe he was very surprised at what he read. I mean, that's just one thing we're wondering if, if something in that pre-sentence report scared him,” Kristina said. Back last year, when I spoke at length to Leonard, he often said he thought he’d get off with time served. He’d been in detention for almost a decade.  Leonard: Well, I've already done my time. Even if they give me 12 years, it's time served. Do you understand?

Tom: You've been there eight years.

Leonard: Yeah, but with good time, if you count that up, how many months I get off and then all my corporation, it's all shaved off. I mean, you should understand how the US legal system works. But something had changed. That conversation was the last I had with Leonard in September last year. Leonard talked to me because he wanted to get his story out. But he changed his mind at the last

minute. He wanted to pull the podcast, but I refused. He figured it might anger U.S. prosecutors. He was probably right. The government clearly didn’t like that he’d talked to us. They haven’t said as much, but they pulled Leonard as the witness in the trials of other Navy officers — a sign they now saw him as a liability. So, Leonard, sitting in his San Diego home, decided going on the run was preferable to doing more time in jail. Back in San Diego, the Marshals Service had egg on its face. How did Leonard get away so easily? Leonard was supposed to be under 24/7 guard at his home. But it was a strange arrangement. Trying to save money, the court ordered him to pay for the security. Back in December 2020, a federal court judge who had allowed Leonard to go into house arrest after he got sick had chastised Leonard’s lawyer for an incident in which a court official had visited the house and found it unguarded. Now, authorities were giving no details, including even the name of the private security firm. Maybe Leonard paid off the guards? Maybe they were incompetent? What’s sure he was over the border into Mexico before U.S. authorities had a clue he was missing. The U.S. Marshals put a $40,000 bounty on Leonard, but he was nowhere to be found. From Mexico, Leonard, accompanied by his adult son, Leonardo, had taken a plane to Cuba, and a few days later, another flight to Venezuela. It was the middle of the night in London when Bradley Hope, my colleague, called me in Singapore. He had received information that

Leonard was in Venezuela. We can’t discuss how we knew…but we were right. And we published his location in our newsletter. Venezuela was only supposed to be a pitstop. After a couple of days in a hotel in Caracas, the capital, Leonard headed back to the airport. He was flying to a Venezuelan resort island in the Caribbean, and from there he planned to travel to Russia. Leonard would have been an asset for Russia. He knew the inner workings of the Navy and he had sexual kompromat — photos and videos of US Navy officers engaged in lewd acts. Back in Singapore, the Russian defense attaché had even courted Leonard. But he was making too much money from the US Navy. Now, circumstances had changed. But Leonard wouldn’t get to Russia. As he tried to board that flight, Leonard was arrested. The U.S. had put out an Interpol Red Notice, and apparently Leonard hadn’t been careful. The U.S. had been able to track Leonard via a cell phone number. Interpol was waiting. The head of Venezuela’s Interpol office gave details of the arrest on his Instagram account. In a photo, Leonard looked disheveled, in a windbreaker and flower-patterned tracksuit. The official said Leonard would be handed over to the judicial system to begin extradition proceedings. But the government of President Nicolas Maduro had other ideas. The U.S. doesn’t recognize Maduro’s government, and the president saw Leonard as a political bargaining chip. A few days after his arrest, a state-owned newspaper, a mouthpiece for the government, said Leonard had requested political asylum. “What I think is gonna happen to him is what's gonna ha is what has happened to every American in Maduro custody,” said

Carlos Camacho, a Venezuelan journalist. “This is gonna develop into some sort of trade. Maduro is gonna engage in some sort of horse trading to do this.” Who could Maduro want in return? My money is on Alex Saab, a man who is in jail in Florida on money laundering charges and has shadowy ties to Maduro. The Venezuelan government has repeatedly asked for his return. Will the Biden administration trade? “It's such a politically fraught situation too, because even the mere act of requesting extradition to Maduro's regime basically is a signal legit legitimizing Maduro's regime. So, it's a can of worms,” said Kristina Davis of the San Diego Union Tribune. In October 2022, though, the U.S. did release two nephews of Maduro’s wife, who had been jailed on narcotics convictions, in return for the release of seven Americans held in Venezuela. Perhaps Leonard will be next.  So how does the Fat Leonard story end. Will he release the sexual kompromat? Will the new attention on the national security aspects of this case, and a possible Russian play for Leonard, finally lead to a U.S. congressional investigation? The fact Leonard was trying to get to Russia should raise concern. But I doubt anyone in Congress will take this up…the coverup has worked and now Leonard has gone. Leonard has already lived a colorful life. Now he’s looking at an extended exile in a country that often has power outages and water shortages. It will be very different from the life he had in detention in San Diego — and a world away from his heydays in a $130 million mansion in Singapore, with 20 luxury cars. I’m not even sure how long he has to live given his late-stage kidney cancer. He never gave me a straight answer.

Tom: I didn't want to ask you this before because it seems private, but I hope you don't mind me asking. So are you dying?

Leonard: No. I mean, if I'm dying, I wouldn't be talking to you this way, right? But as long as I'm on my medication, I'll be alive because the medication is what keeps your cancer and everything in check. I mean, immunology medication here in the United States is very advanced.

Tom: Is your cancer in remission?

Leonard: No, I mean, I have to maintain my medical condition because that's what keeps me out. That's why I have my liberty. If I am well, I'm definitely not going to be here. Since his abusive childhood on the docks in Penang over a half century ago, Leonard never lost his outsized ambition. After all that happened, he wasn’t willing to admit that his story is nearing an end. I’m sure now in Venezuela, he’s feeling the same way. Leonard: I always talk to my doctors, my oncologists, I talk to my nurses, and they tell me that. They go, "Mr. Francis, I see everybody. I see patients die all the time. All the time," because they give up, and I got such a strong spirit to live. That's what keeps me going too. I'm just such a strong person. I'm not bragging about it but it's just that the will to live. Leonard: I feel I have so much more to do. I feel I can build up another business empire again one day. It's not that I don't have the talent, I know I can, it's all here...And I've done it and it all came crumbling down, but it's not over for me. ***

About the Author Tom Wright is cofounder of Project Brazen, a journalism-focused content studio, a New York Times-bestselling author and Pulitzer finalist. In 2018, he co-authored Billion Dollar Whale, the definitive account of one of the world’s most audacious frauds. He’s the creator and host of Fat Leonard, an award-winning podcast about a man who corrupted the U.S. Navy. Both Billion Dollar Whale and Fat Leonard are being adapted into television series. In 2020, Stanford University honored Tom with its Shorenstein award for services to journalism in Asia over a twenty-year career.

















About Project Brazen With an exciting slate of podcasts, books, documentaries, TV shows and films in development, Project Brazen is co-founded by bestselling authors and Pulitzer finalists Tom Wright and Bradley Hope. Based in London and Singapore, Project Brazen finances, produces, and markets its own projects, working with production partners and journalists around the world. Wright and Hope were long-time collaborators at the Wall Street Journal where they wrote ground-breaking front-page stories on some of the biggest events of the day and uncovered global crime. They led the newspaper’s team that broke open the 1Malaysia Development Bhd. (1MDB) scandal, a $6 billion fraud which brought down a government and forced Goldman Sachs to pay the largest ever penalty under U.S. bribery laws. Together they co-wrote the #1 international bestseller Billion Dollar Whale (2018) about the Malaysian playboy Jho Low at the center of the fraud, who ensnared banks, Hollywood celebrities and politicians in his schemes.