Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy

by Craig Whitlock

Overview

Winner of the 2024 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award
Winner of the 2024 Commodore John Barry Award for Excellence in Maritime Literature

#1 New York Times bestselling author Craig Whitlock’s “masterly investigation into one of the Navy’s worst scandals” (The New York Times).

All the admirals in the US Navy knew Leonard Glenn Francis—either personally or by his legendary reputation. He was the larger-than-life defense contractor who greeted them on the pier whenever they visited ports in Asia, ready to show them a good time after weeks at sea while his company resupplied their ships and submarines. He was famed throughout the fleet for the gluttonous parties he hosted for officers: $1,000-per-person dinners at Asia’s swankiest restaurants, featuring unlimited Dom Pérignon, Cuban cigars, and sexy young women.

On the surface, with his flawless American accent, he seemed like a true friend of the Navy. What the brass didn’t realize, until far too late, was that Francis had seduced them by exploiting their entitlement and hubris. While he was bribing them with gifts, lavish meals, and booze-fueled orgies, he was making himself obscenely wealthy by bilking American taxpayers. Worse, he was stealing military secrets from under the admirals’ noses and compromising national security.

Based on reams of confidential documents—including the blackmail files that Francis kept on Navy officers—Fat Leonard is the full, unvarnished story of a world-class con man and a captivating testament to the corrosive influence of greed within the ranks of the American military.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982131630
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Afghanistan Papers. He has worked for the Post since 1998 as a foreign correspondent, Pentagon reporter, and national security specialist, and has reported from more than sixty countries. His coverage of the war in Afghanistan won the George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Freedom of Information Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting. He is also a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

Explosive, brilliantly reported and meticulously documented, Craig Whitlock's Fat Leonard reads like a thriller but depicts one of the most sordid chapters in U.S. military history, a tale of brazen corruption that soiled the Navy and is an infuriating insult to the American taxpayer. You won't be able to put this book down, and you won't stop wondering how it could have happened.”—David E. Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Billion Dollar Spy

PRAISE FOR THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS

"Fast-paced and vivid... chock-full of telling quotes."
— The New York Times Book Review

"The excellent new book... Bombshell revelations... [and] damning evidence of things we already intuited.”
— The Washington Post

“At once page-turning and rigorous, The Afghanistan Papers makes a lasting and revelatory contribution to the record of America's tragic management of our longest war.”
— Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S

“The Afghanistan Papers is a gripping account of why the war in Afghanistan lasted so long. The missed opportunities, the outright mistakes and more than anything the first-hand accounts from senior commanders who only years later acknowledged they simply did not tell the American people what they knew about how the war was going.”
— Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon correspondent

“A searing indictment of the deceit, blunders and hubris of senior military and civilian officials.”
— Tom Bowman, NPR Pentagon correspondent

From the Publisher

2024-03-14
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.

Kirkus Reviews