Leonard Glenn Francis, whose Singapore-based company Glenn Defense Marine Asia had contracts to provide food, fuel and security for US Navy ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans for three decades, pleaded guilty in 2015 to masterminding a decade-long conspiracy involving dozens of US Navy officials, tens of millions of dollars in fraud, and millions of dollars in bribes.
Describing himself as a “loyal person”, he insisted that he had “never brought any kind of harm to the US”.
“This was just a financial matter,” he said today in the first of a nine-episode weekly podcast with journalist Tom Wright.
“It was not me hurting anybody. Nobody got hurt. No blood was spilt, nobody was killed, nobody was hurt.
“Initially, they (prosecutors) thought I was Mr Bad. Look at what I did. But as the case moved forward, the Navy pushed back as they didn’t want to clean the house.
“They wanted to shove this all under the carpet and let me and three or four other bad apples take the blame.”
The podcast marks the first time Francis is publicly talking about the huge scandal involving some senior officials that rocked the US Navy. Francis claimed that the Navy only chose to prosecute junior officers involved in dealings with him.
Commonly known as “Fat Leonard”, Francis was accused of providing cash, prostitutes, travel expenses, luxury items and concert tickets to US navy officers, including those from the US Seventh Fleet – which controls the movement of 60 ships and submarines, 150 aircraft and 20,000 sailors in a huge operational area stretching from Hawaii to India – in return for information.
The Navy officers provided Francis with classified information such as ship movements and allowed him to overcharge the Navy for services his company provided them – which included communications, ground transport and sewage removal.
Wright described this as “one of the biggest national security failures in modern US history”, with Francis now the star witness in the cases of seven Navy officers, some of whom allegedly attended a 36-hour booze-fuelled orgy in Manila which Francis organised in 2008.
Francis was arrested in a luxury hotel in San Diego while discussing a new round of multimillion-dollar contracts with US Navy officials. He was unhappy with the way the authorities had nabbed him in the raid, claiming that “there could have been a better way of doing this”.
Currently under house arrest, Francis also explained why he was opening up to Wright – he says his days are numbered as he is suffering from kidney cancer.
Stressing that “it’s a huge risk” for him to go public with his claims, which also goes against the terms of his plea deal, he said he felt compelled to do so as he was upset at being portrayed as the “bad guy”.
“I’m not the bad guy. I did everything they wanted me to do,” he said. “I’ve lived my life, I’ve been up this close to heaven and down to hell. I’ve seen it all.
“So, my legacy is important too. We’re all going to die one day. I only fear God, I don’t fear anybody else.”