After more than a decade, the Fat Leonard scandal may finally be over — but not for everyone

For nearly a decade the downtown San Diego federal courthouse served as the backdrop as a steady stream of current and retired U.S. Navy officers and contractors filed in and admitted their guilt in a massive corruption scandal.

Pricey meals, swanky hotels, booze, and sex became the keywords of what is known as the “Fat Leonard” scandal. It got its name from the unflattering nickname Navy personnel had for Leonard Glenn Francis, the corpulent Malaysian businessman and defense contractor who masterminded a decade-long fraud and bribery scheme as the CEO of his ship servicing company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia.

While the Fat Leonard cases — comprising the largest corruption scandal in Navy history — have faded from relevance, they are not entirely over. 

The stunning way the investigation came to a close — awash in findings of prosecutorial misconduct that forced the U.S. Attorney in San Diego to take the extraordinary step of forfeiting guilty verdicts won against four officers at a lengthy trial in 2022 and agreeing instead to lesser misdemeanor charges — are still reverberating.

Two officers who pleaded guilty and have already served 30-month prison sentences are seeking to reopen their cases, in the hope of getting the same charge reduction that the four officers ultimately got. 

One, Capt. David Haas, also tried to pry loose from the Department of Justice any evidence concerning a review of 32 other cases that were charged to determine if the misconduct that surfaced in the 2022 trial infected those cases. 

In addition to Haas, retired Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless also wants some accountability from the Justice Department. 

He occupies a unique place in the decade-long Fat Leonard prosecution. Of the 30 people who were charged, he is the only one not to be found guilty by a jury, or plead guilty. 

He wasn’t fully acquitted either: A jury in that 2022 trial deadlocked on the charges Loveless faced. Weeks later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego quietly dismissed the case against him. 

Since then, Loveless has thought a lot about the cauterizing experience of the indictment, trial, and result. For years his name was featured in the extensive worldwide coverage of the scandal, news releases from the DOJ, and court filings. 

But when his case was over without a conviction, the silence was deafening. It made him think about consequences, accountability, service. 

“I remember being in the courtroom during the trial at one point, while basically the prosecution team and Mark Pletcher himself are overstating almost everything,” he said in an interview with inewsource, naming the lead prosecutor on the case, “and thinking to myself, gosh, if I overstated things like this in my professional career, no one would’ve trusted anything I said to them.”

Haas failed to convince U.S. District Court Judge Janis Sammartino to reopen his case, or order the DOJ to reveal information about its review of the other cases. 

His lawyer Charles La Bella, a former federal prosecutor and one-time U.S. Attorney in San Diego, said he would seek to appeal the ruling.

Francis appealed his sentence, but a panel of judges of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him earlier this month.

A decade of scandal

Francis’ company operated in ports across the Pacific where the Navy’s 7th Fleet sailed. He captured hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts to provide basic services to ships in port, like providing fresh water, security, sewage disposal and the like.

But starting with his arrest in a sting operation in San Diego, salacious details of other services Francis provided surfaced in the court cases. He plied navy officers with gifts, fancy meals, trips, cash and the services of sex workers for more than a decade.

In return, prosecutors contended Navy officials steered contracts his way, gave him classified information about which ports ships were headed to, and bad-mouthed GDMA competitors to Navy bosses. He even had an investigator with the Navy Criminal Defense Service on his payroll, tipping him off to investigations of his company.

As the years went by the convictions — all via guilty pleas — mounted. But at the 2022 trial and after, allegations of government misconduct by Pletcher surfaced and cast a new light on the case.

The long court battle became known as the 7th Fleet trial, because the officers were serving with that fleet when the crimes occurred. In opening statements Pletcher told jurors that one of the officers had sex with a prostitute that Francis supplied during a wild party in 2008.

However, before the trial, when contacted by federal agents, the woman denied she had sex with the officer. While agents relayed this information to Pletcher several times during the trial and asked how they should write it up in a report that would be furnished to the defense, Pletcher kept putting them off, Sammartino later concluded. 

Eventually a report was provided, but six weeks after the agents first got the information and while the trial was underway.

That incident led the judge to conclude the government had violated the Brady Rule — a legal obligation that prosecutors must give the defense any potentially exculpatory evidence — and committed “flagrant misconduct,” though she declined to throw out the case. It was one of several allegations of withholding evidence that defense lawyers made in subsequent motions after the trial ended.

They argued prosecutors had not revealed a federal agent who played a key role in the probe had made inaccurate statements in a different case that also dealt with Navy corruption.

They also said that there were serious questions about how numerous computer hard drives from Francis’ company, which contained a massive amount of evidence used in the investigation, were obtained and handled. 

These allegations and others ultimately led to the U.S. Attorney in San Diego replacing Pletcher and the trial team, and installing a new team to review the issues. That team, citing “serious issues” with the case — but giving no specifics — decided to give up the convictions earned at the trial.

Sammartino reluctantly agreed and at a hearing two years ago, she told prosecutors to review the cases of all previous defendants who had pleaded guilty and respond with “legal and factual specificity” whether those cases had been tainted by the government misconduct.

Yet the extensive court file on the case contains no written record that the review was done. Sammartino acknowledged at a hearing in May 2024 that the government has not responded to the court’s questions about other defendants “and, perhaps, the government will choose to remain silent.” 

That silence irks Haas, who readily acknowledged in an interview that he was guilty and broke the law. 

“They’re never held accountable there,” he said. “I went to jail. I paid my fines and restitution. I did everything I was supposed to do. Why can’t they do what they’re supposed to do?”

Haas was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to accepting bribes from Francis in exchange for using his position to benefit GDMA. 

La Bella, Haas’ lawyer, said not knowing if such a review was done and what the results were is a cloud hanging over the long-running investigation. 

“There is a real contrast here,” he said. “The defendants took responsibility for what they did. The government has never taken responsibility for what it did, and the government has never really fully acknowledged what it did. It has been able to keep it below the surface, admitting only ‘mistakes.’ 

“And it looks like this was all deemed to be OK by DOJ, and there are no ramifications for it.”

Pletcher did not respond to requests for comment. 

Kelly Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney in San Diego, declined to comment when asked if a review had been done and what the results were.

In addition to seeking a reduction for Haas, La Bella also tried to force the DOJ’s hand by filing in February a motion seeking a sheaf of records. 

They included “reports, memoranda and correspondence” of any investigation by the department into prosecutorial misconduct in the case, as well as a description of the process the government undertook to examine the cases of other defendants for potential misconduct.

Sammartino turned down that request too, concluding Haas had not shown “how any of his discovery requests might demonstrate that his conviction was illegal or unconstitutional.”

Lone survivor

In March 2023 the Office of Professional Responsibility at the DOJ, which handles complaints against government prosecutors, declined to open an investigation against Pletcher. 

A lawyer for one of the officers on trial in 2022 had filed the complaint but OPR determined an investigation would not conclude Pletcher had committed misconduct.

That lack of accountability on the part of DOJ bothers Loveless. 

“To see him displaying unethical behavior in the course of his position while he’s trying to prosecute us for unethical behavior just seems like this strange — it’s cognitive dissonance,” Loveless said.

It is rare for OPR to sanction a federal prosecutor. In fiscal year 2024 the office received more than 1,300 complaints, according to the annual report for that year, the most recent one available.

The office opened only 65 inquiries, closing 61 with no action, the report said. When an inquiry merits more review, the office formally opens an investigation.

That same year the office had 13 investigations (some were initiated the previous year and not completed until 2024), and made a finding of professional misconduct in just seven.

For Loveless, the years-long experience gave him a view of what he called the “unbounded power” of prosecutors focused on winning convictions.

“It redefines win-at-all-costs, because the costs aren’t high,” he said. “But where is the accountability in all that? In fact, there’s not.”

Thornton would not respond to questions about whether Pletcher or anyone else was disciplined following the misconduct findings, nor what internal changes, if any, were made in the wake of the controversy.

Pletcher left the San Diego U.S. Attorney’s Office, apparently earlier this year. The three other members of the prosecution team also no longer work at the office.

Owen Roth, a former assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego who worked in the office during that time and is now in private practice, said it was mistaken to think there was no internal review of other Fat Leonard cases, even though there has been no public accounting.

“I would not take it as a failure to follow through by the government, just because they did not file anything,” he said. 

He also said the misconduct finding had an impact on Pletcher. He said that after the case Pletcher had a far lower profile in the office, and noted that any public misconduct finding can be damaging.

“A finding of a Brady violation is almost always going to have rough consequences for the AUSA that are very real, if not explicit,” he said. “AUSAs in that position face a loss of trust from colleagues and supervisors, deep skepticism from opposing counsel, and loss of credibility with the Court. Those things can make it difficult, if not impossible, to be effective, and they last a very long time.”

For La Bella, who said the allegations of misconduct in the 7th Fleet trial were “about as serious as I’ve ever seen,” there is a larger institutional issue in play. 

“Because for DOJ, it’s a lesson learned. The institution goes on and it’s only as good as the lessons it learns. And if they made a mistake here, which seems based on the court’s own finding, they made some serious mistakes here, then it’s up to DOJ to say, ‘OK, we’ve now learned the lesson and we’ve made the following calculations and corrections.’”