Fat Leonard How one man bribed, bilked, and seduced the U.S. Navy

In this rollicking exposé, Washington Post reporter Whitlock (The Afghanistan Papers) recaps the exploits of Leonard Francis, the Malaysian owner of Glenn Defense Marine Asia, a Singapore-based logistics company that robbed millions of dollars from the U.S. government by overcharging the Navy. (Exaggerating the amount of sewage pumped out of ships' septic tanks was a favorite scam.) From the 1990s onwards, Francis kept his fraud going by corrupting Seventh Fleet officers, who signed off on bogus invoices, steered contracts to his company, and quashed inquiries; he even had a mole in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who helped him dodge investigations. Drawing on troves of incriminating emails and Francis's colorful testimony after his 2013 arrest, Whitlock's vivid narrative is a whirl of blithe graft as the charming, insidious, free-spending Francis recruits Navy personnel with gourmet feasts at swanky restaurants, luxury vacations, gifts of furniture and electronics, envelopes of cash, and many, many prostitutes, who sometimes snapped compromising pics of boozy sailors. It's also an appalling indictment of an out-of-control Navy that ditched its ethos of duty and honor in favor of craven toadying, and then, when the scandal came out, shielded the top brass from accountability while lower ranks went to jail. The result is an entertaining picaresque about a magnetic rogue that also spotlights troubling rot in the U.S. military. (May)

A vigorous investigation into the life of a con artist and swindler who had half the leadership of the U.S. Navy in his pocket. Leonard Glenn Francis (b. 1964) was a high school dropout with few visible prospects. However, according to one of his former nemeses, he was "smarter than anyone he ever met." Francis, a former street hustler in Malaysia, made no effort to conceal himself: He was heavy and uncommonly tall, and he threw himself around on the principle that "with a little luck and the right connections, you could pretty much get away with anything." Washington Post reporter Whitlock, author of The Afghanistan Papers, capably chronicles how Francis did just that. Starting a seat-of-the-pants naval resupply business, which "faced scant competition in what was then a niche market," Francis serviced ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Pacific. Soon, as what the Navy calls a "husbanding contractor," he was gouging prices and cooking the books, such as when he billed one visiting missile destroyer $2.8 million for fuel and port services: "More than half the amount was fraudulent, based on fake invoices from fictitious subcontractors." To enable his bilking, he bribed Navy officers and officials with prostitutes, booze, and baubles, playing on weaknesses--drinking problems, failing marriages--as deftly as the KGB. He also had spies everywhere, including inside the Navy's vaunted NCIS. It all came crashing down when a few honest sailors began to doubt "Fat Leonard," who grew grotesquely obese as the dollars accumulated. By 2018, 90 Navy admirals came under investigation for illicit dealings with Francis. The close of Whitlock's account is the cat-and-mouse game of Francis' trials before U.S. judges, an unlikely escape to Venezuela, and now, in 2024, extradition and resumed judicial inquiry. Maddening and astonishing in its revelations of a crime spree that cost taxpayers untold millions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.