Angry Planet - Booze, Bribes, and Prostitutes: How Fat Leonard Seduced the U.S. Navy

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

It’s the greatest story you probably don’t know anything about. Or, at least, you have no idea how bad it actually is. The U.S. 7th Fleet is the most powerful Navy in the history of the world. Its area of operations stretches throughout the Pacific. It comprised of up of upwards of 70 ships, 400 aircraft, and around 40,000 sailors and Marines. For about a far too many years it was the plaything of a Malaysian playboy who grifted a fortune off the American taxpayer.We’re finally doing it. We’re finally doing a Fat Leonard episode.Our guest today is journalist, best selling author, and host of the incredible Fat Leonard Podcast, Tom Wright. The nine part Fat Leonard Podcast is, for my money, the most comprehensive and well researched version of the story we’re going to lay out for you here. If you’re interested at all in what you’re about to hear, you must check it out.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world of their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. And welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. It's the greatest story you probably don't know anything about, or at least you have no idea how bad it actually is. The U.S. 7th Fleet is the most powerful Navy in the history of the world. Its area of operations stretches through the Pacific. It's comprised of upwards 70 ships, 400 aircraft, and around 40,000 sailors and Marines. And for far too many years, this powerful naval force was the plaything of a most.

Malaysian playboy who grifted a fortune off the American taxpayer. We're finally doing it. I've talked about it vaguely on multiple episodes of this show. We are finally doing a Fat Leonard episode. And our guest today is journalist and bestselling author and the host of the incredible Fat Leonard podcast, Tom Wright. The nine-part show is, for my money, the most comprehensive and well-researched version of the story. And we're going to lay out a very small version of it today for you. And if you're interested at all in what you hear, you have to go check out the Fat Linder podcast. It's everywhere. And it will, it's a deep dive into this. Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Okay. So your show is, this is something I've been following for a long time.

I've read a lot of the court documents. And your show opens on a very specific image that I think if you are telling the Fat Leonard story, it's the image you have to focus on because it says it's the most jarring. and it says so much about what happened. Can you tell us about MacArthur's pipe? Well, first of all, thanks for saying what you did about the podcast, because I know you know a lot about it. So it's nice to hear that you found it revelatory. So that's great.

The MacArthur pipe is how to do this in a decorous way. I don't know. I don't think you can. I think you just do it. Also, we're not that kind of show. No. Oh, you're not a decorous. You're an indecoran.

Is it in decorous? You're an indecorate. Okay. In decorous. So the pipe. General MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur, was in command of U.S. forces in the Philippines, in the Second World War, and famously smoked a corncob pipe, a little bit like what Popeye smoked. And the hotel where he commanded the forces from, the Manila Hotel in Manila,

Philippines, has a replica of that pipe in the suite where MacArthur lived during the Second World War. In this famous party that the military contractor Leonard Francis put on in that hotel, Well, party, it was actually an orgy that Leonard Francis put on in that hotel. The replica of the pipe ended up getting used in sex acts with prostitutes in the hotel. And we, I mean, we start the podcast with that episode, with Leonard telling that episode with sort of frat boy glee, not because we are, we're not sort of reveling in the sexual deviance of the story, but it's just such a shocking tale because we're not talking about some enlisted semen here. We're talking about the upper echelons of the U.S. 7th Fleet,

and that's why we start the podcast with that image. So who is this person? Who is Leonard Glenn Francis? I know that's a big question, but he's a big man. He is. So Leonard Francis was what's called a husbanding agent for the U.S. Navy, and sounds boring, but it's actually incredibly powerful. So this guy, what his company did was they provided food, fuel and security for U.S. naval ships and for the $20 billion aircraft carriers with 5,000, 6,000 people aboard. So this is incredibly lucrative work. Leonard came from a ship, a shipping family. His maternal grandfather in Malaysia, in Singapore and Malaysia in Southeast Asia,

had done this kind of work for commercial ships, so much smaller scale. And Leonard is a genius at networking. And so as a young man, he gets to know all the naval attaches, the U.S. naval attaches, the U.K. naval attaches out here. And in the 80s and 90s, especially in the 90s when the Gulf War, first Gulf War was happening, he starts to build his business doing this work for the U.S. Navy and taking off the sewage, putting on fresh water. And then after September the 11th and actually the year before the attacks on the USS Cole in Aden's Harbor, when a bunch of some U.S. Navy officers were killed in an Al-Qaeda attack, the Navy becomes extremely worried about security.

So Leonard then branches out into also securing the boats when they're at ports in Asia. He creates this thing called a ring of steel, which were steel barges around the boats. And in very short order, he becomes exorbitantly wealthy because the context for this whole story is the war on terror and just the gushes of defense spending that are that are pouring through the world. And he ends up living in a $130 million mansion in Singapore. He has a fleet of 20 luxury cars. And the reason I was so fascinated by him was I think there's no better symbol than for the craziness of this period we've lived through since September the 11th. So one of the things that, I mean, so can you, I guess can you describe the way that this becomes a criminal enterprise?

and how he plays the Navy, essentially, and to the point that he is directing where the fleet goes. Yeah. Well, I've written about fraudsters before. I wrote a book called Billion Dollar Whale about Jolo, who defrauded this fund in Malaysia, which was used to fund the film The Wolf of Wall Street. And one thing that's amazing is, why do these fraudsters not stop when they get to the – there's an acceptable level of fraud in the world that a lot of people are able to know. where that line is and continue to operate and become very wealthy. Lots of bankers operate like that all the time, right? A lot of military contractors, too.

Right. Not just, not just Litterglen, Francis. Well, so the point is you're asking about, like, how did the criminal enterprise happen? So from the very beginning, Leonard, we should say in this podcast, Leonard's talking in his own voice. We'll get to how we got to him. He's under house arrest, but he's talking for the first time. And he explains about how corruption was always there from the very first days when he does this job.

He had to pay off the petty officers to get the contracts. He talks about doing that from the 80s, taking the naval attach to his wife for dinner. But then later on in the years after September the 11th, this fraud gets supercharged. It becomes what we call a mafia organization in the center of the U.S. Navy. They go looking for people who can control the movements of U.S. Navy ships. And this is the most shocking part of this story. He corrupts a guy called Michael Meshavits, who's a key central character in all of this. And Michael Moshavits is the deputy scheduling officer.

So this guy, working in Japan, can decide where all U.S. Navy ships go, where they port. And that's important to Lennon, because if they go to ports that Leonard controls, he can do fake invoicing, overcharge. And he's charging millions of dollars for his ring of steel. They go into a base that the U.S. control, or say, a base in Singapore, like Singapore. where the Singapore government controls it and the Singapore government is not corrupt. He can't make as much money. So then they end up,

it ends up becoming like an episode of Goodfellers. They're talking about shaping Navy officers through their wives, giving gifts of Chanel handbags to their spouses. And then the spouses approached them to see they'd be willing to come onto the inside of this calm. And so the thing, and Leonard talks about how the godfather's his favorite movie.

They refer to each other as godfather. And it's shocking because this is a, Seventh fleet, the U.S. Navy's largest fleet and forward-deployed fleet in the world in Japan. And they're all acting like a chain of commander, acting like a group of mafia. Well, mafia members and fratbrose, too, like the kind of stuff that Leonard is doing for them, it's like letting them live in college indefinitely, essentially, whenever they come into one of his ports, right? And you kind of describe like the parties, orgies, quite frankly, that he would throw.

I talked to one guy who actually isn't in the podcast. He said that our job was to party. So I know, I mean, if you're in the Navy, I mean, most people in the U.S. Navy, let's make it clear are not like this, right? The majority of people who serve there. And I have not got a grudge against the U.S. Navy. In fact, I moved my family from Hong Kong to Singapore a year ago because I'm not happy living in the China sphere with the current government there. And I want the U.S. Navy to be powerful. But I think part of the problem was they're not fighting. And so they're going around on the Blue Ridge, which is the flagship of the 7th Fleet, from port to port. And this group of guys, and this is in the period from mid-2000s into the, when Leonard was arrested in 2013, partying from port to port into Manila to the Manila hotel party. There's this party in the Shangri-La Hotel in Macati in Manila where there's a rotating carousel of prostitutes and they drink straight for 36 hours. Then they go on to down to another port in the Philippines and continue to party. And so it is. It does seem very frat-poish. And one of the big questions is, why not just get your own prostitutes, right? If you're, because this is another angle to this story. It's a massive national security risk for the U.S. Navy. What happened here, just huge. And I do want to get into that. I want to back up for just a second, though, and say that one of the reasons the show is so good is the incredible amount of access you had to kind of everybody. There were quite a few people that wouldn't talk to you. But you got a lot of wives.

and especially at the center of this, Fat Leonard himself. How did you get this guy to talk to you so candidly? So Leonard was arrested in 2013 in San Diego. We'll get into the mechanics of how he ended up getting arrested, because he was protected for a long time because it wasn't just the lower-level officers who were involved with him. It was the admirals, too. He was organizing prostitutes for people who went on to become four-star admirals.

And so he had top cover. So when he gets arrested, he's shocked because he thought this is the arrogance of the corrupt and the protected. In the same way that Jolo in the billion-dollar well story thought that he had the cover of prime ministers and shakes and in the Middle East, Leonard had the protection of the top admirals. And even when the NCIS are investigating him, he's still turning up at Annapolis and Hawaii and Yokoska and Japan at these big naval events.

So when he's arrested, he gets very, very angry because he thinks he's being scapegoated. And he refuses to cooperate. But eventually, two years later, 2015, he pleads guilty. Now, the problem for him, a bunch of people went to jail, some of the early Navy officers who were arrested. But then a lot of other, there are about 30 Navy officers have been indicted. And Leonard is a cooperating witness in the trials of some of them. And six of them have refused to plead guilty because they look at all the admirals who've been let off, like all the admirals who are involved with Leonard in this case didn't get into much trouble.

And so they've refused to plead guilty. They've pleaded not guilty. And so Leonard can't be sentenced. So Leonard is, we think, one of the longest serving cooperating witnesses in U.S. judicial history. He's been sitting there since 2013, eight years ago and hasn't been sentenced. So he got to the breaking point. He's also got kidney cancer. Potentially he's dying.

It's not actually clear. And so he wanted to tell his story. And he ended up reaching out to me via a Malaysian intermediary who I know. And he wanted to tell his story. And so that's how we ended up getting him on tape. smuggled in a microphone. He was allowed into house arrest from jail in San Diego in 2017 because of his kidney cancer. So we smuggled in a microphone and he just sort of, we recorded him using one of these programs so we get like studio quality audio. And then of course,

the key to it though was that Leonard is an unreliable narrator of his own story, of course. He's a con man. So we needed to get all the other pieces. And one of the key pieces of the story was Marcy Mischavitz, who is the wife of Michael Mischavitz, who I mentioned earlier. who was corrupted by Leonard. And so getting her was also crucial because through her and through Leonard, we understood how Leonard was brought down because Marcy played a role in that. Yeah, I think I first learned about this in 2015. I believe that he had pleaded guilty by then, I think, when I had come in.

Correct. And so I wrote this big piece, kind of collecting all the pieces. And I remember he had a sentencing date. And I would always call, I would call San Diego and be like, all right, because he'd been sentenced, what's going on trying to get the early word. And they're like, oh, it got pushed back another couple months. And I was like, okay, so new charging documents are coming out on somebody else, right? And I kept that up for about a year and the can kept getting kicked down the road and kicked down the road.

And it just continues. New Navy officers are continually being swept up in this. Six years later, it's still happening. So I think you're right. I think he may be the longest unsettenced cooperating witness in U.S. judicial history. It's incredible that this hasn't stopped yet. I think it's important, the unreliable narrator bit, and what you just said, I think is really important. Because it really struck me listening to him talk.

He felt like he was celebrating himself in some ways. He was like happy to be telling the story. He's crafting the narrative of what happened, right? And trying to make himself sound. And like, he knows that he's an anti-hero, but still trying to make himself the protagonist of this story. Right. How did you, how did you read him? Like, what did you make of him?

Well, he's a fascinating character. You're right. He's partly just, he lived at the peak of Leonard's life, which would be 10 years ago, say. He's living in this $130 million mansion on Singapore's most expensive street with Rolls Royces and militarized hummers and women in every port. And he's living this rock star life. And so partly the podcast is him reliving that. And he's not a very deep guy in many ways. He wants to just tell these stories. of it's like hanging out with a bunch of sad middle-aged guys who want to talk about when they didn't have beer bellies and were enjoying getting laid in their 20s, right? I think that's the impulse that he's got. But he's a charming guy, right? And the ride you go on in this podcast, I think, at least, and this mirrors the right I went on reporting and interviewing him. He's superficially charming and makes you feel like, and I don't know if women respond

to this in the same way listening to the podcast, probably a little less, but it's easy to sort of be swept up with him. And the second episode is a bit like a wolf of Wall Street type of rise, like a Jordan Belford kind of rise. And we try to do a similar thing as that film, which is later on, you're going to really hate this guy as you learn about his personal cruelties to women and all of this. So the key thing to his life, Leonard's life, not to front run the podcast for those who haven't listened to it, is that his father was an extremely cruel person and beat his mother and brought other women home to the family house. And that led Leonard to have an extremely strange and warped view of relationships with women. And you'll see if you listed the podcast how Leonard treats his own girlfriends with tragic consequences. And so I ended up sort of having a real problem with him and finding him extremely difficult to talk to once I knew.

And I'd talk to some of the women that he'd hurt. And you'll see in some of the episodes, my relationship with him breaks down quite dramatically. And he has no idea what I'm talking about. He doesn't see that he's done anything wrong. And I think that's where you start to really wonder about him and how the Navy ever relied on this guy. It's funny you mentioned that in episode like three or four, I remember there's a moment where you're confronting him about some of the stuff, specifically around women. And I can hear in your voice that you are anger. There was like an anger or an upset there that it's not like journalistic, I would say.

Did you ever find yourself losing patients or getting angry with him in the moment? Yeah, I tried to, I mean, it's all about getting the story, right? You know that. And so you just try to keep it going and ask questions and let them say their side. But then at the very end in our last conversation, which was in late August or early September, which was about a month before the podcast came out, I call him a misogynist to his face. And then he says some shocking things. I mean, the most shocking line in the whole podcast is when he says the Department of Justice doesn't give a damn about hookers.

And he's referring to the mother of his own children. He doesn't seem to view women as people. I really took that from like all the conversations we hear with him. And I think that I think one of the smart things you do in the show is you kind of dovetail that with Navy culture. And it seems like there's a little, there's a sickness at the heart. And my dad's, my dad's a sailor. One of my very good friends was a sailor. there's something about Navy culture that allowed him to act this way and allowed him to get away with it for so long, I think.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So one, I was expecting to get a lot of emails from Patriots saying, you suck after this podcast came up. But that hasn't really happened. But one of the things, one of those criticisms I've seen at least on the people writing comments on the podcast on Apple or wherever is in episode three, we go back in time to Tail Hook. which is this, obviously, for those who don't know, it's a sexual assault scandal in the early 90s after the first Gulf War, when naval aviators sexually assault some women who, the helicopter pilot called Paula Coughlin and some other female Navy officers who were in a hotel in Las Vegas.

The reason we do that in episode three, you know, is after Leonard's rise, is to sort of telescope back and talk about what you just mentioned, this culture of misogyny in the Navy and how would somebody like Leonard be so central? I mean, we can't overstate how important he was for the U.S. Navy. He was opening ports for them. He was a bagman for them. He was even going on Al-Qaeda missions with his own warship. How does a misogynist get into that position? So we tell us to go back to this culture. And some of the criticism that we got was that, look, the what happened back in the 90s is not relevant to your connection you're making between that and what's happening today is tenuous and the Navy's moved on and it's gotten more professional women weren't women were

new in the in the war fighting forces in those days 30 years ago and they're not today and and I just respectfully disagree with that I just think that the fact that the senior chain of command were having orgies put on by a contractor just shows how far they've still got to go and if you compared it to the debate that's going on the Me Too debate that's going on in other workplaces like our own like in journalism or in finance, the Navy seems to be just so far behind. But there's changes it changes afoot. I mean, I don't know if you saw, but Congress passed a new bill that's, or they've agreed in principle, sorry, to pass a new legislation that will take the power to prosecute sexual assault cases out of the hands of commanders, which has been one of the problems in all of

this. So this is, this podcast and the work you do and what we all do, it's all part of the debate, right? And I think misogyny is still a problem in the Navy. And not just the Navy. And I would encourage anyone that kind of balks at that as they're listening to this to really take a hard look at the totality of the American Armed Forces and, you know, Google Marines United photo scandal, which is just a few years old. And look at what's been happening in the Army, especially in the bases in Texas. This is a culture that permeates the rest of the military. It's not just the Navy. I think the Navy has a unique problem that is probably.

due to a culture that develops on ships when you're kind of separated from everyone and everything. It's maybe outside of the remit of this particular episode, and is my opinion, but I think that's a deep part of it. Something you just kind of teased in what you were saying just now is this, and this was something I didn't know about until I listened to the podcast, was absolutely fascinated and horrified by. Can you tell us about the Braveheart and Leonard's Gurkhas? One of the reasons Leonard wanted to talk was he did a really, good job for the Navy. And it was actually pretty competent. We shouldn't not acknowledge that. One of the problems the Navy has is when Subic Bay, which was a big naval base in the Philippines,

shut down in the early 90s, they didn't really know where to go anymore. And so Leonard opened up ports for them. So he did that. And then his roles just started to grow. I mentioned the ring of steel earlier. So he started after all the fear of Al-Qaeda, he was protecting ships by putting these steel barges down out on the sea side of the boats. And then he had, he had to be a little, had his own warship called the Braveheart, which was staffed with these mercenary Gurkir soldiers. And this is where the story gets really crazy. The Braveheart was an old British warship called the Salantzalod. And it had actually taken a bomb in the Falklands War in the 80s when Britain was fighting

Argentina. It had then become a casino ship in South Africa. It was bought by the Singapore government as a training ship and midshipmanship. And then Leonard bought it from them as his own warship. and you'll see the photos if you go online and look at our podcast website. And he would fly these Gurkaz in who were former British Army soldiers normally from Nepal. He'd fly them in to staff his boat. And they would be like armed to the teeth with machine guns.

Now, we couldn't do that in Singapore. Singapore's very strict about private guns and private soldiers. But he would fly them in and then they would be civilians in Singapore. Then they would take the boat out and he would go around Asia in it. Now, it gets even crazier. he got U.S. diplomatic cover to move that ship and its army into other countries without having to go through immigration controls. And in the case of the Philippines, he got that because he corrupted the U.S. naval attache in the Philippines with prostitutes and things. So he would then get these diplomatic clearances to just sail into these ports.

Now, that helped him because he was able to run out his rivals in those ports, which were the local husbanding agents. So that was good for him. But he also ended up going on missions with Navy SEALs. So, I mean, nobody remembers this, but one of the fronts of the war on terror was actually in the Philippines. There was a group called Abu Sayyaf, which had trained in Afghanistan with the Taliban. And then a lot of their fighters came back to the Philippines. And so the Navy SEALs were helping the Philippine government fight them. And Leonard would go along in his warship and refuel the Navy SEAL Mark V boats.

And it's just, I mean, he was really part of the Navy. He was the Navy in many ways. How did he see himself? I mean, was he a hero with if he's willing to go into combat or at least along with combat? I mean, he has his own warship. I mean, what's his self-image? Well, I think he's sort of overstating it a little bit, to be honest.

Like, he doesn't fight. Let's be clear about that. He's resupplying fuel to these, these what are called Mark V boats. They're like the speed boats that the Navy SEALs use. And like I've talked to people who said, Well, Leonard definitely big ups himself, right? Like, did he really protect the Navy from attack in ports? I mean, but you know what?

The Navy were willing to pay him millions of dollars to do this ring of steel because they were, you know, I think you need to see it from the, if you're like a supply official or a Navy logistics person, the money, the gusher of money was sort of in practically infinite, right? I mean, at the time. And the fear of being the person who did the wrong thing that would lead to the next attack, It's hard to remember that time, right? I mean, I was based in Southeast Asia. There was the Bali bombings that killed 200 plus people.

There was attacks in Madrid, London subway all the time, right? And so Leonard sees himself as a protector of the Navy. And he was loyal. We haven't gotten onto another crazy part of this story, which is that he videotapes the orgies that he organizes for secretly videotapes, the orgies that he organizes for these Navy officers. He puts cameras in the karaoke machines of the suites. But he claims, and I found no evidence to go against this, that he never sold any of that information as sexual compromise to China or Russia, despite China and Russia trying to turn him.

And the Russian naval attache would turn up at his house in Singapore with a bottle of vodka. And they saw him as a very – so his self-image is of a U.S. Patriots. This guy with the star-spankled banner neckties at the July 4th parties in Singapore at the embassy. And he speaks, if you listen to the podcast, he speaks with an American accent, despite never having lived in America. So he definitely saw himself as part of the Navy. Something we haven't done that we should do is, will you describe him physically? Yeah. So he is, I think, six foot four.

He is, I don't know what he weighs now, but I think it is Heidi was like between three and three, 50, 400 pounds. He's, he is definitely, he was definitely fat. I mean, we didn't come up with the term fat Leonard. That's what people called him. but I don't, I mean, I didn't meet him in the flesh. I met him down, like, long calls like we're doing now with almost like a Zoom call. He's, he comes across as huge, broad-shouldered, heavy set, very, very heavy set. There's a photo of him on the Braveheart with the Gurkers where his shoes just look huge.

Everything's big and outsized about him. And he's an amazing character. I mean, it's almost like a cinematic character, right? Everything's larger than life. The parties he put on were larger than life. He would give Rolexes, as door prizes to people. He would grab the microphone. from the Filipino bands at his parties and starts crooning Elvis songs.

So he was, everything was sort of caricature-ish about him. But then there are a few moments of the podcast where he sort of, at this one point where he says, I'm talking about my life and he sort of giggles. There's another time where he's talking about his dad beating his mom and all this kind of stuff. And you can, you get it's almost like the curtain is just drawn back for a millisecond and you see that there's a deeply troubled person there. But you don't get, after almost 30 hours of talking to him.

And you don't get to that level of human connection with him. And he never asked me a thing about my life, my family or anything like that, not interested in a two-way conversation at all, that kind of person. Would you have been comfortable telling him if he'd asked? Well, I think, I mean, there's one point where he says, I'm not like you. I'm not a good guy who got married. So he knew I was married.

I knew I had children and things. But he just never, we all got people like that in our lives who don't ask us questions, right? I'm not asking you questions now because we're in a formal internet. you, but I mean, otherwise, I'd be quite interested to, like, where are you living, what you're up to? We'll do that when the tape stops rolling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us a few more minutes. How much...

Sorry, Jason, did you have something? It just sounds like everything was so open and out there. Who wasn't talking? I mean, why was there no one talking until this had been going on for such a long period of time? So the reason that this runs from... This is like the real bad part of the con is going for over a decade, but, you know, Leonard's been around for 25 years, right? The reason is a few things. He's doing a good job from a practical level, right?

The Navy's getting protected. He's got, no one can match him. Before Leonard, it was all mom and pop shops that would do this husbanding work for the Navy. So Navy sailors were climbing down, rope ladders off the boats, well, sorry, ladders off the boats into fishing vessels to get taken to shore. and people were dying, when drunk, coming back to the boats. This is before sort of the professionalism that Leonard brought to the whole thing. He would build ports. He built a port in Bali for them to come up piercide in Indonesia.

So he's doing a good job. He's got 180 ships in his naval yard. His naval yard in Singapore, according to people who went there, looked like the naval yard in San Diego, the U.S. naval yard. So he's professional. When the U.S.S. Nimmits, which was at the time, the largest warship in the world, wanted to go to Chennai in India, which is the first ever visit of an aircraft carrier to India. They couldn't find a husbanding agent in India to do the job.

So Leonard did it. And he charged $5 million for that. But he did it. So that's one reason. And then if the person's competent and he's getting you laid in orgies and you're getting crystal and cohabas cigars and your wives are getting designer handbags, that that all together is creating a service. This is why Leonard says, you know, in one of his quotes, I played second.

I play professional, whatever you wanted. So he's getting top cover. And then some later on in episode seven, we meet David Schauss, who's one of the early whistleblowers. And this guy's like, in Hong Kong, it's not interested in getting laid or getting kebub of cigars. And he's like, no, you're overcharging. You're saying you've taken this amount of fresh water, but it's double the amount that you're shipped and hold. And he takes it to the NCIS. And then nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is because nobody wants to get rid of this guy Leonard who's kind of competent and fun. And the other thing is it's nobody's money. This is all kind of like U.S. taxpayer money.

So it's the U.S., it's the who cares, like whether this is the amount of money getting spent. And that's always the case in these frauds where governments, it's the same as the billion dollar wealth fraud. That was just Malaysian taxpayer money. Nobody cares. And it's hard to. So yeah, so that's why it rolls on for so long. And so that leads us to, should we talk about how he does eventually get brought down? Yeah, how does this end?

So basically, the thing that I was sort of proudest about that we were able to find out in our reporting was how he got arrested. Because the Navy's, after the NCAS, the Washington Post had reported that, you know, 27 NCIS investigations were open and closed without Leonard being found, nothing being found amiss. And then the NCAS, so we should say that the Navy and has never really explained what happened in this case. They've just hunkered down because it's so embarrassing. The failure of the NCIS, obviously this famous TV show with LL Cool J, it was like the NCIS is nothing like that from what I've learned. So they didn't, the Navy never wanted to talk about it. And their story was, oh, we found out that what had happened and we sort of lured him and

arrested him. And this was some kind of redemption for the Navy. But the truth is so much more complicated. So Leonard's, these NCIS investigations aren't going anywhere. But eventually, Marcy Mischovitz, who we mentioned earlier, whose husband Michael Meshavitz, was a scheduling officer and had been corrupted. She finds out her husband's sleeping with prostitutes put on by Leonard. She's extremely angry because Leonard's taking her family, her four children to meet. Sorry, Michael is taking her four children to meet Leonard and also other women.

And she finds out about all of this. So she takes her husband. Oh, and then there's a sort of a physical altercation between Michael and herself. She gets beaten by him. And she takes this to the Navy. And she ends up sort of cooperating with the NCS and giving over documents to them about Michael and how he got corrupted by Leonard, including taking these paid vacations and all this stuff, handing over credit card receipts. So that gets Michael onto the NCS radar and they start going through his emails and find out much more about his connections to Leonard. And then anyway, it's just an amazing story because Leonard has corrupted one of the top NCIS officers, this guy called John Belivow.

So he finds out that Marcy's cooperating. So this is the endgame, basically. And we won't spoil that. You can listen to the podcast. But that's sort of like the sequence of events. And we were able to paste this all together from indictment. So the indictments sort of mentioned Marcy not by name. They talked about witnesses who cooperated and then stopped cooperating.

So we sort of worked out who that was and then persuaded Marcy to talk to us. And then Leonard talked about Marcy and we were able to sort of triangulate what had happened without any help from the Navy. That's a good, that's a good tease. And there's so many other, like, it's such a bottomless well of just bizarre and incredible and, like you said earlier, cinematic characters. Like even the woman that is DOJ is prosecuting the case. Like her background is fascinating. But, you know, we'll leave that. But I do want to ask, like, kind of this big picture question, which is something that's always frustrated me and been fascinating about this is that I feel like you've got. this rich and fascinating character, you have this thing that says, this scandal that says so much about the last 20 years of the American military. Why did this not dominate even one news cycle? Like you, like I reported on it for a while. A bunch of defense blogs would hit it repeatedly as soon as a new indictment came out. We would kind of go through it and report on things like the corncob pipe. Craig Whitlock at the Washington Post, you cite a couple times in the podcast.

has been reporting on it, I think he's working on a book. But other than that, it doesn't penetrate, really. Why? I don't know. I mean, I've asked myself the same question. I think it's penetrating more and more, though. I mean, a lot of people have listened to the podcast. And so you're interviewing me now and we're all talking about it, right? And so hopefully, I think the answer is also, it's a cover-up. I mean, the Navy has not punished. So we should explain what happened after Leonard gets arrested. He cooperates and he starts saying all these names of all the people who've, you know, slept in with prostitutes and taking gifts and all of this. And it's a lot of names. And it's a lot of names. And there are ads like top top people. Sorry. Yeah, very top people. And so the Navy just

doesn't know what to do. So the DOJ indicts 30 or so people, which are Navy. Some people from Lenin's company, Leonard himself, the NCAIS officer, the turncoat. They pass on a lot of other names to the Navy. Now, some of that's because statute of limitations meant it was difficult to prosecute. some of it, but a lot of it is just good old-fashioned politics and the Navy saying, look, you're not touching that person, I believe. And so there's a phrase in the Navy, different spanks for different ranks. And it means if you're, yeah, it doesn't refer to the Leonard scandal. It refers to just general life of the Navy. If you're a senior person, you don't get punished in the same way that if you're a junior person, junior persons get given

rations. Actually, I think they've got rid of the rations of bread and water now, but you know, in the past, that's what they used to do. And the very senior people, the people, The people who slept with prostitutes, according to Leonard, just did not get punished. Some of them didn't get punished at all. Some of them just got what are called censia letters, which are like slaps on the wrist. They're like letters saying, you did something a bit naughty and gone your way. Very few got reduced rank, retired with full benefits. And we, in our last episode, we talked to a guy called David Capone, who was a commander who did 18 months in jail in Hawaii for his interactions with Leonard. And he's furious. He wants to ask for a pardon.

because he's looking at these censor letters thinking, well, how's it any different to what I did? And I did 18 months in jail. And I just think the Navy and the DOJ, they just don't know how to deal with this. This is like an unprecedented situation. And how do you, you know, where do you draw the line? How do you, don't forget, four star admirals, they were appointed by the president and the Senate. What do you do with that? Yeah, it's so massive and so comprehensive and affected so much of the seventh fleet that it is, yeah, you can't just reboot everything, right? It is absolutely fascinating. Tom Wright, thank you for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this.

The show, once again, is the Fat Littered podcast. It's out everywhere. And if you want to know anything more about this, that's the place to go. For sure. It's the best thing I've seen about all of this. Thank you again. Thank you for having me on. Thank you for listening, Angry Planet listeners.

I'm going to make this quick because this is literally the last thing I have to do before I go on Christmas vacation. Thanks, everyone. If you're listening throughout the rest of the year, the next two episodes on the mainline feed are going to be reruns. We do have one at the Substack. That's at Angry Planet.substack.com that's going to go up on Christmas Day. That is a new episode. We've already got the next episode for the new year recorded. We're just taking a break.

We'll take a few weeks to take it easy. We'll get that up the first week of January. From me, Jason Fields and Kevin O'Dell, stay safe during the holiday season. and we will be back next year with more conversations about conflict on an angry. Stay safe until we're going to.