‘Fat Leonard’ Was a Crook U.S. Admirals Called Bro (2024)

On Sept. 22, 2022, Venezuelan authorities spotted a hard-to-miss figure at Simón Bolívar International Airport, about to board a flight to Russia. Leonard Glenn Francis, known widely as “Fat Leonard,” was 6-foot-3 and 350 pounds—and was among Washington’s most wanted after escaping custody in California two weeks earlier. The 57-year-old Malaysian felon was enormous, rich, and charming. He was also at the center of one of the worst corruption and espionage scandals in U.S. history.

As Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock details in his deftly told new book, Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy, over the course of his career Francis swindled the Navy out of tens of millions of dollars. His firm, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, held “more than $200 million in defense contracts to resupply U.S. warships and submarines at almost every port in the Western Pacific.”

Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy, Craig Whitlock, Simon & Schuster, 480 pp., $32.50, May 2024

Francis’s 2013 arrest and subsequent plea deal would result in nearly 1,000 people being investigated, including 685 U.S. Navy personnel, more than 90 of them admirals. But it also exposed just how tightly masculinity and corruption are intertwined. Francis was able to pull off his scamming because of who he targeted: the entitled, insecure, horny men who made up much of Navy leadership in the Pacific.

His technique was simple. Expensive dinners, sometimes running up to $30,000 or more for a dozen people, were the hook. Navy officers who went along with that—often claiming on their own forms that the dinner had been no more than $50 a head, to get around ethics inquiries—were offered sex with women Francis provided. Once a solid foundation of mutual wrongdoing had been established, Francis would start offering money directly.

Francis was spending thousands to make millions. In exchange for his bribes, he received huge, overpriced contracts, as well as confidential information about U.S. Navy needs and scheduling. Like a lot of grifts, he started in the early days of the so-called war on terror, claiming to provide a “ring of steel” that could protect ships from small boat attacks like the USS Cole. The efficacy of the system, which cost the Navy between $50,000 and $100,000 a day, was never tested, save in one incident in Malaysia that Francis is suspected of faking. But the food, water, and fuel that the Navy runs on provided even bigger profits. At every port stop, a ship has to be resupplied with enormous quantities of goods—and if, like Francis, you secure exclusive deals to do so, you can pad the bill at every turn.

Whitlock raises one big question: Was Francis working for anyone else but himself? The answer seems to be no; there is no evidence that Francis passed on or sold his information to foreign intelligence services. Even just having data such as Navy timetables sitting on his unsecured company servers, however, was a security risk.

And while Francis took photographs of officers cavorting with the women he provided, he doesn’t seem to have used them for blackmail. After all, turning anyone in would expose him as much as them—although the possibility must have been in some of his accomplices’ minds. But his main toolset was complicity, not coercion. As the Chinese internet saying goes, better to do one bad thing with your boss than a hundred good things for your boss.

Francis was able to operate essentially unchecked for more than a decade. Even those officers who were repelled by the banquets, and refused any more social events, felt they couldn’t rock the boat. When Cmdr. Robert Gonzales of the U.S. Seventh Fleet arrived to find his fellow officers drinking Cristal on a skyscraper roof at an event that he was told would cost $50 a person, he realized that it was “unbelievably 100 percent” not right and that it “broke every ethics rule in the book,” Whitlock writes. Still, he didn’t report or raise the issue with others, sensing that this was “business as usual” with the fleet. Gonzales, like others who refused Francis’s offers, discussed the issue with his wife—and having a female perspective, and a grounded relationship, seems to have been critical. Whitlock describes numerous marriages that were falling apart, and divorced or soon-to-be-divorced men with no relationships to anchor them were Francis’s bread and butter. Adultery is a crime for naval officers—but perhaps the first concern should be marriage counseling and therapy.

Women weren’t immune to Francis’s corruption; he had a nice sideline in offering expensive gifts to the wives of captains and admirals, even as he was taking their husbands off for sex tours. Three mid-level female workers who managed husbanding contracts for the Navy were cultivated by Francis, including Sharon Kaur, who spied for him in return for large cash payments. Yet as charming as Francis could be, he was frequently verbally and even physically abusive with subordinates, especially the women working for him.

At every stage, Francis’s schemes catered to men in the Navy, where leadership was 87 percent male. Events could move from expensive banquets to literal orgies. Smug emails between officers joked and winked about their experiences the night before. Leonard was a good guy, a bro, a “legend in the RONALD REAGAN STRIKE GROUP.” The officers, one of Francis’s moles reported after an evening out staffed by Mongolian prostitutes, “were all grins this morning.” The assistant chief of staff for logistics for the Seventh Fleet, Jesus Cantu, literally ended up in bed with Francis for a threesome. “We were embedded together,” Francis recollected to his interrogators. “It’s called embedded, really embedded.”

It mattered a lot that all this took place in Asia, where naval officers felt free to behave with a wanton disregard for the rules they might follow back in the United States. Francis “exploited an unofficial Navy tradition that abided and even encouraged personal misbehavior as long as it happened far from home,” Whitlock writes. Most of all, the working assumption was that Asian women were sexually available, and also unimportant. As one commander stumblingly explained to his interrogators about the woman Francis offered him, “I mean, she wasn’t your typical prostitute. She was a white girl that I was talking to.” These attitudes prevailed even among the many nonwhite officers, such as Cambodian American Michael Misiewicz.

Francis was peculiarly fitted to exploit these biases. The scion of an upper-class Scottish-Indian-Malaysian family, he ran the family contracting business despite a swerve into gangsterdom as a young man, resulting in a year in prison. His spoken English was fluent and American-sounding, and he claimed, falsely, to have gone to college in North Carolina. That allowed the men he worked with to convince themselves that he was on their side, even patriotic toward the United States. At the same time, his foreignness rendered him outside the rules, a charming intermediary into the world of the Pacific. Even his weight, sometimes reaching 500 pounds, made him seem more of a comical figure than a concerning one—hence his nickname.

And while investigators eventually uncovered the scandal, the Navy did everything it could to keep it under wraps. Numerous cases, as Whitlock details, weren’t pursued—especially when it came to the dozens of admirals who had been intimate with Francis. The old Navy saying is “different spanks for different ranks,” since an offense that might get a major sent to jail would result in nothing more than a warning for an admiral. Some of the men who accepted women as gifts from Francis were promoted even after the Navy discovered what they’d done.

Ultimately, Francis was able to charm even his U.S. prosecutors, who heaped him with extravagant meals and allowed him to live virtually unsupervised in an expensive villa in San Diego. That made his eventual escape trivially easy; he snipped off his monitoring bracelet and was across the border a few hours later. It was only a prisoner exchange with Venezuela last year that got him back, this time into federal prison.

The Navy is hardly unique in these problems. Think of the Secret Service, where in the early 2010s, agents routinely hired prostitutes on overseas trips. Most of the world’s major security and military institutions are boys’ clubs, with everything that implies. Sometimes monsters hide inside them, more often just slightly pathetic men, protected by the unwritten codes of their institutions.

When the CIA went mole-hunting for Soviet spy Aldrich Ames in the 1980s, for instance, the investigation of one facility produced 10 suspects out of 90 personnel and “so many problem personalities … that no one stands out.” Ames was not at the facility, and his alcoholism and womanizing went unreported by his colleagues. The Senate report concluded that Ames’s inept but deadly spying had gone undetected for nine years thanks to “a bureaucracy which was excessively tolerant of serious personal and professional misconduct among its employees.”

All the lectures and warnings about global security only go so far when the internal culture stays the same and the most powerful offenders get slaps on the wrists. Francis’s charisma and connections were unusual; the bro-ey complicity he exploited, on the other hand, remains depressingly normal.