Two former Navy captains who went to prison for taking bribes as part of the “ Fat Leonard” corruption scandal have asked federal prosecutors to dismiss their felony convictions and instead allow them to plead guilty to misdemeanor crimes.
Retired Navy Capt. David Williams Haas and former Navy Capt. Jesús Vasquez Cantú, both of whom have finished their prison terms, have also requested that the San Diego-area U.S. Attorney’s Office follow a request by the judge in the case to provide more specific details about the government misconduct that has marred the long-running prosecution of the Navy’s worst-ever bribery and corruption scandal.
While government attorneys have admitted in court and in written filings to “serious issues” regarding government misconduct, prosecutors have only provided vague details of that misconduct and not a full reckoning either publicly or to defense attorneys. U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino, who previously told prosecutors she wanted “legal and factual specificity through briefing with supporting declarations,” has ordered the government to respond by March 3 with arguments why it should not have to disclose those details as part of a discovery process.
Attorneys for Haas and Cantú argued in the recent filings that their clients are similarly situated to nine other Navy and Marine Corps officers whose felony convictions were reduced to misdemeanors or dismissed altogether, arguing the only difference was that their clients had already been sentenced. The attorneys argued that Haas and Cantú received disproportionate sentences from those nine defendants, none of whom were sentenced to prison, and that the “disparity raises significant questions about the selective application of justice” by federal prosecutors.
“The public deserves to know exactly what happened here,” Chuck La Bella, who is representing Haas, told the Union-Tribune.
Haas and Cantú were among the three dozen people, most of them Navy officers, charged with taking bribes and committing other crimes as part of the corruption scandal centered around Leonard Glenn Francis, the Malaysian contractor known as “Fat Leonard” because of his enormous size. Francis, who plans to appeal the 15-year sentence he received in November, spent decades bribing a rotating cast of officers from the Navy’s 7th Fleet in the Western Pacific with gourmet meals, five-star hotel rooms, premium liquor, prostitutes and cash.
Many officers in turn steered ships to the Southeast Asian ports controlled by Francis and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA). Francis then defrauded the U.S. government of at least $35 million by charging heavily inflated prices for routine services such as security, tugboats, trash removal, food and water replenishment.
The corruption by Francis, who was arrested in 2013, reached the “highest levels of the U.S. Navy … to an extent that has never been seen before,” an assistant U.S. attorney said during his sentencing.
Cantú admitted in his plea agreement that he accepted bribes — usually in the form of dinner, drinks, hotels and sex with prostitutes — on at least eight occasions between June 2012 and September 2013 while serving on the Blue Ridge, the 7th Fleet command ship from which Francis heavily recruited allies. He admitted that in return, he supplied Francis with proprietary Navy information and advocated inside the Navy on behalf of GDMA.
Haas admitted that while he was a captain on the Blue Ridge, he accepted bribes valued at nearly $91,000, including multiday parties in Indonesia and Tokyo, at least one of which included dinner, nightclub entertainment and the services of prostitutes. Haas admitted that in return, he used his influence to benefit GDMA, including ensuring that an aircraft carrier docked at one of Francis’ ports in Malaysia.
Other officers pleaded guilty or were convicted of similar actions, but the case has been tarnished in recent years by misconduct that Sammartino has described as an “embarrassment to the government” that first emerged during the lone trial in 2022. Sammartino found after the trial that Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Pletcher, then the lead prosecutor, had committed “flagrant misconduct” by withholding evidence. Prosecutors dropped charges against one of the trial defendants after a deadlock from the jury and later threw out the jury convictions of the four other defendants, allowing them to instead plead guilty to a single misdemeanor each.
At a 2023 hearing, government attorneys admitted to “serious issues” involving prosecutorial misconduct, and last year the prosecutors filed a brief vaguely outlining those issues and arguing that four other defendants who had pleaded guilty to felonies should also have their charges reduced to misdemeanors, and one should have all charges against him dismissed. Sammartino eventually — and reluctantly — followed those recommendations.
In the same document outlining the issues with the prosecution, the government said it was “committed to ensuring all the defendants receive any redress that is owed them for the (prosecution) issues.” Prosecutors said they were reviewing other cases “to determine if other defendants were affected by the issues above and merit relief.”
Prosecutors have never said publicly what came of those reviews, but emails from the new lead prosecutor included as exhibits in the recent court filings indicate the government did not consider Haas or Cantú deserving of a reduction in charges. Their attorneys argued it’s unclear if those reviews even happened.
“There is no evidence that the promised meaningful review has in fact occurred,” La Bella, the attorney for Haas, wrote in the recent filing. “Moreover, if such a review was conducted at all, it was conducted behind closed doors by the very office from which the misconduct emanated. This review, to the extent it was conducted, needs to see the light of day.”
To that end, both La Bella and Douglas Applegate, who is representing Cantú, filed nearly identical motions requesting the ability to conduct discovery. They hope to compel the government to produce evidence that would inform their clients and the judge of the “scope of the misconduct and pervasive issues that tainted” their plea-bargaining processes.
Sammartino has not ordered the government to turn over such discovery but has ordered prosecutors to submit their arguments about whether they should have to turn over such evidence by the first Monday of March.
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