Capt david pimpo biography

David Pimpo.
David R. Pimpo was censured, reduced in rank and forced to retire as a captain, according to the Washington Post.
Capt.

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Lavish dinners. Pricey cognac and Cuban cigars. An all-expenses-paid vacation in the Philippines and a $30,000 hotel bill in Singapore.

These are the elements of the kind of cozy relationships with defense contractors that Navy ethics overseers warned Navy officers to avoid.

Yet one former top-ranking Marine Corps officer at Pearl Harbor is among dozens of top naval officers now facing charges they committed bribery to benefit a defense contractor. Hundreds more active and retired military personnel are under investigation.

But in an unusually bold move in the far-reaching bribery and fraud scandal, Enrico DeGuzman is fighting back against the U.S. government that indicted him earlier this year on numerous charges. DeGuzman intends to plead not guilty to the allegations, according to his Honolulu attorney, Birney Bervar.

“He denies all bribery allegations,” Bervar said in an interview. “He says he did not do anything different than he would have done in the best interests of the United States.”

Bervar said DeGuzman believes that what he did was standard operating procedure in

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Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy, by Craig Whitlock. Simon & Schuster, 480 pages.

When the feds finally caught up with Leonard Francis in 2013, he admitted to having defrauded the U.S. Navy of $35 million. Everyone knew the real number was much higher. His prosecutors estimated $50 million, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service guessed $100 million, and other higher-ups in the Navy, too embarrassed to speak openly, privately set it somewhere in the billions.

His story is almost too absurd to be true. For more than a decade, this semi-literate and dangerously overweight Malaysian defense contractor—everyone called him “Fat Leonard”—was the Navy’s best friend and worst enemy. Best friend because he hosted the rowdiest sex parties and drinking bouts in the West Pacific, where he debauched nearly 700 officers, among them 90 admirals. Worst enemy because, in exchange for the good times, he compelled those same officers to hand over classified documents and allow him to shamelessly rip off the Navy for his port services.

How did Fat Le

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It seems like everyone’s talking about bribery these days – but I, and anyone else who works for the federal government, have to limit what we can say about what does or does not constitute an ethical or illegal lapse.

I am an ethicist who teaches leadership, ethics and law, and I believe a recent bribery case in the U.S. military offers an interesting and distinctive perspective through which to consider these issues. Unfortunately, due to current restrictions on what federal employees can and can’t say about political matters, I can’t discuss all the ways that case might apply to a broader debate.

Nonetheless, there is one thing I can say without caveat or equivocation. Bribery laws for government officials have a powerful ethical principle at their core: If you work for the government, your actions in office are meant to serve the public interest – not your own.

Trouble in the 7th Fleet

The so-called “Fat Leonard scandal” is the largest bribery and corruption case in U.S. Navy history.

The key player is Leonard Glenn Francis, a Malaysian-born businessman based in Sing