Nonfiction
Bribing the Navy Is Easier (and More Entertaining) Than You Might Think
In “Fat Leonard,” Craig Whitlock investigates one of the worst corruption scandals in U.S. military history.
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Nicolas Niarchos is a freelance journalist whose writing on military matters has appeared in The Nation and The New Yorker. He is at work on a book about the supply chain for battery metals.
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FAT LEONARD: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy, by Craig Whitlock
In ports throughout the Western Pacific, the brave officers of the United States Navy gulped down lobster thermidor, truffle royale, Osetra caviar, white asparagus custard and kombou seaweed jelly; they guzzled gallons of Cristal and Dom Pérignon; they puffed boxes of Cohiba cigars.
Near the end of a meal, they sometimes received what Leonard Glenn Francis, the venal military contractor who was picking up the tabs, called “oriental dessert”: an “armada” of sex workers hired to flash their breasts and perform intimate acts.
An attendee described one of Francis’ dinners as a “Roman orgy.” At one of Francis’ most sordid parties, in Manila in 2007, a replica of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s corncob pipe was used as a sex toy. At least one of Francis’ dinners cost more than $3,000 a head. In return, Navy officials looked the other way as his companies charged far above the regional rate to service American vessels.
In “Fat Leonard,” a masterly investigation into one of the Navy’s worst scandals in modern times, the Washington Post journalist Craig Whitlock brings to bear 10 years of research to show how Francis came to be known as Leonard the Legend, Mr. Make-It-Happen, Fat Bastard, and, most of all, as Fat Leonard.
Francis rose from fairly comfortable origins on the Malaysian island of Penang and followed his father into the family business in the 1980s as a “husbanding contractor,” providing services like food and water delivery, bilge pumping, tugboat hiring and a whole manner of other prosaic but important logistical tasks that fleets need to operate.
His plan, Whitlock writes, was to become the Malaysian Aristotle Onassis. He learned early that the captains of merchant ships, “after weeks at sea, gladly accepted his offers to get drunk and meet women” in return for “all sorts of favors.” When the U.S. Navy came into the equation, in the early 1990s, Francis went into overdrive. “The Navy’s byzantine accounting policies made it easy for Francis to jack up his prices with minimal resistance,” Whitlock notes. (While no one knows exactly how much Francis stole, he has admitted to making at least $35 million off the U.S. taxpayer.)
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