“Manilla, 2007. The chauffeured
Mercedes crawled south for half an hour in the interminable traffic – the
turbid waters of Manilla 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 7th Fleet. These were the most powerful navy
officers in Asia, and they controlled the movements of around sixty ships and
submarines, 150 aircraft, and 20,000 sailors in a huge operational area,
stretching from Hawaii to India …”
“The men moved quickly through an
air-conditioned lobby and through a curtain at the back. On the other side,
Filipino 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 … Always the … big boss or Lion King to these navy officers, Leonard
dominated the action …”
“The
afterparty was in the $4,000-a-night McArthur Suite at the Manilla Hotel … It
was General Douglas McArthur’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
… stocked the suite with $10,000 bottles of Dom Perignon … The two-bedroom
suite was filled with McArthur memorabilia. In the suite’s study, two ornately
carved wooden chairs – the only objects to survive the Battle of Manilla, stood
in front of a desk … One of the men, quite drunk by now, opened a case on the
desk containing a replica of McArthur’s famous corn-cob pipe and grabbed a
woman.”
Fat
Leonard, as he came to be known, recalls the scene as follows: “Being
warriors, they had been at sea for such a long time – the aviators, your nukes
… they’re, uh, captains of ships. They’ve got this inner side of them that is a
beast that needs to come out … We went there and picked up a bunch of karaoke
girls and booked them out and brought them back. They are like rockstars. They
are living their life – living their dreams – things that they will never ever,
ever again do in their lifetime. Nobody would give them that kind of party that
I do … You know, they just started stripping and having to make love right there
… The pipe was used as a dildo on the hooker, making a mockery of General
McArthur’s memorabilia … they totally desecrated and insulted,” he says,
laughing.
“It was
a mass orgy … That’s how deep we were with the navy … The entire command – the
chain of command – had to be in your pocket. And that’s what happened. Everybody
was in my pocket … I had them in my palm and was just rolling them around.”
As he says
in the trailer to the interview, “I had the navy by their
balls … I turned my guns against them because they betrayed me.”
Fat
Leonard was a Malaysian businessman who bribed numerous officers and others in
the US Navy until he was arrested. He paid for prostitutes and orgies for naval
officers, ranking all the way up to admiral. He threw lavish parties and
$30,000 dinners, sent gifts for the officer’s wives – little things like Chanel
and Gucci handbags, Cohiba Cigars – the nice stuff that no officer or his wife
should have to live without.
In return, the officers he corrupted made
sure their ships docked at ports across Asia that Fat Leonard controlled. Since
the 1980s, Leonard made bank by provisioning the Navy at extortionate rates for
fuel, food, even security, by providing what he called a “ring of
steel” around the ships – as if the US Navy should need help defending
itself. The ring of steel was nothing but a line of barges tied up around the
military ships to prevent an assault like the one that happened in 2000 in
Yemen’s harbor when two Al-Qaeda operatives rammed a boat full of explosives
into the side of the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, killing 17
sailors and injuring another 37.
2001 became a very good year
for Leonard after 9/11 for the “husbanding” monopoly of his
provisioning company called Glenn Defense Marine Asia. You might say
Leonard got fat off his contracts with the US government from that period on,
living in a $130-million mansion in Singapore where he kept 20 cars, including
Rolls-Royces and militarized Hummers, all proceeds from his US Navy contracts.
Fat Leonard was a larger-than-life
character in more than just weight (where he took the scales up to 160
kilograms – a whopping 352 pounds on his six-foot-three frame). He wore
Stars-and-Stripes ties, had Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless The USA’ as his
ringtone, ate sloppy joes, and rooted for US baseball teams, so the people he
served really liked him. And he liked the USA because it was very good to him –
without most people in government knowing it was being very good to him. Fat
Leonard loved to contract with the US military.
But now Fat
Leonard is mad. It’s not just that his money-making empire came crashing down
around his feet in 2013 when he was arrested. He pled guilty in 2015 to all
that and is still awaiting sentencing under house arrest in San Diego. No, Fat
Leonard is mad because some of the people in his pocket – the highest
higher-ups who took his bribes – didn’t get taken down with him, though none of
what he did could have happened without them. They remain at large while the
legal system shows no apparent interest in them, and that made the usually
jolly Leonard, who sounds drunk with power in his interviews, mad enough to
speak out publicly.
Oh sure, the
corruption scandal led to various naval officers being charged, jailed for a
while, and demoted, and to broken marriages, the usual falderal that comes with
such scandals. But Leonard wants to know, where is the prison time for the high
brass that he himself is now facing?
Now that advanced kidney cancer has left
him without much to lose, Fat Leonard is crying out publicly. Journalist Tom
Wright recently interviewed him, and even Wright admits that, during
the first interviews, Leonard’s natural charm conned him into feeling
sympathetic toward his tale of a tough childhood and a man who made good by
taking care of the US Navy’s most urgent ‘needs’.
“I did like him at one point,” says
Wright, “but then … there was some personal cruelties to women in his life …
The misogyny that runs through this whole story is shocking … At the very end
of our interaction … I challenged him on a lot of these things … That was the
last time we talked … and his reactions to it are very, very telling.”
At one point in that final episode,
Leonard said to Wright in apparent surprise, “I don’t know why you’re
so worried about hookers,” and the hooker they were talking about was
the mother of his children. Wright ties his concerns about the misogyny to the
kinds of things that happened in the Tailhook scandal in the 90s as
becoming endemic in the armed forces back then, because women were new in the
US military, and some male soldiers apparently did not know how to comport
themselves around them as colleagues in war.
It’s not a salacious connection for Wright
to make because the big key to Leonard’s success with the Navy was
orchestrating orgies. Leonard’s long success story wasn’t just about the great
job he did in providing the ‘ring of steel’. He also did an enthusiastic job of
running sex rings for soldiers – a ring of beds, as it were. It didn’t matter
that he charged exorbitant fees for providing these illegal services because that buying was using US government money, not their own, and their
participation in such services virtually guaranteed they’d never squeal on
Leonard.
Leonard got a taste of his own treatment
of women when he was arrested for his crimes. He was stripped,
chained, handcuffed, and made to squat.
“Here you are treated like an animal
once inside,” he complained.
They stripped away the dignity of a man
who claims he had enjoyed the power of steering $20-billion ships to ports of
his own choosing, boasting that he could effectively position the US Navy as a
civilian by choosing where he’d offer particular services. He was also charged
with obtaining classified information from those he corrupted.
Leonard says the real scandal is
that some top admirals who benefited from his provisioning remain free, some of
them having been allowed to retire honorably, even though he had submitted
evidence that incriminated them.
“I feel completely
betrayed,” says Leonard. “They asked me to name all those involved or
face 50 years in jail and I spilled the beans … I gave them about 40 names. I
told them basically how deep the bribery was in the US Navy. It basically shook the
foundation of the navy … I felt very upset because just look at what I am going
through … My entire life has been destroyed. My businesses, my family,
everything is gone, you know, being hit like a tsunami … [Yet,] One four-star
admiral I named was let off scot-free just because he was appointed by the
president and the senate. There is no way they are going to embarrass the
government by indicting him. It would have been a humiliation.”
Alas, the good times did not last forever.
Fat Leonard’s empire has collapsed, and he is palpably angry because the
Epstein-like secrets that he held on military brass did him no good. The
protection he thought he had wrapped around himself like a ring of steel failed
to hold together.
“I had over 2,800 staff working for me
in over 30 countries and everything folded. So many innocent people lost their
jobs, many families were destroyed. This was deliberate financial ruin brought
upon me.”
Leonard’s crimes and those who joined in
them were reported to the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service)
by a Navy wife who was physically mistreated, yet for years, nothing was done
about anything that was reported because Leonard had, via his secrets,
essentially bought everyone off while people were still enjoying his services.
According to Wright, Leonard even managed to corrupt one of the top NCIS officers
– ‘corrupt’ usually meaning, in stories like this, to get someone to partake in
these sexual services, thereby assuring Leonard’s protection from the top of
the NCIS, lest the officer in question incriminate himself.
As Leonard put it in the initial
interview, “Everybody has their needs. And I gave them that sense of
confidence, and I also provided them what they wanted … and they could trust me
… I played professionally. I played sexual – whatever you needed – anything.”
It worked like a well-lubricated machine,
concealing its own misdoings… until one day it didn’t.
Written by: David Haggith is
an author published by Putnam and HarperCollins. He is the publisher of The
Great Recession Blog and writes for over 50 economic news websites.
Think your
friends would be interested? Share this story!
RT NEWS
Post a Comment