FAT LEONARD: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy, by Craig Whitlock
In ports throughout the Western Pacific, the brave officers of the United States Navy gulped down lobster thermidor, truffle royale, Osetra caviar, white asparagus custard and kombou seaweed jelly; they guzzled gallons of Cristal and Dom Pérignon; they puffed boxes of Cohiba cigars.
Near the end of a meal, they sometimes received what Leonard Glenn Francis, the venal military contractor who was picking up the tabs, called “oriental dessert”: an “armada” of sex workers hired to flash their breasts and perform intimate acts.
An attendee described one of Francis’ dinners as a “Roman orgy.” At one of Francis’ most sordid parties, in Manila in 2007, a replica of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s corncob pipe was used as a sex toy. At least one of Francis’ dinners cost more than $3,000 a head. In return, Navy officials looked the other way as his companies charged far above the regional rate to service American vessels.
In “Fat Leonard,” a masterly investigation into one of the Navy’s worst scandals in modern times, the Washington Post journalist Craig Whitlock brings to bear 10 years of research to show how Francis came to be known as Leonard the Legend, Mr. Make-It-Happen, Fat Bastard, and, most of all, as Fat Leonard.
Francis rose from fairly comfortable origins on the Malaysian island of Penang and followed his father into the family business in the 1980s as a “husbanding contractor,” providing services like food and water delivery, bilge pumping, tugboat hiring and a whole manner of other prosaic but important logistical tasks that fleets need to operate.
His plan, Whitlock writes, was to become the Malaysian Aristotle Onassis. He learned early that the captains of merchant ships, “after weeks at sea, gladly accepted his offers to get drunk and meet women” in return for “all sorts of favors.” When the U.S. Navy came into the equation, in the early 1990s, Francis went into overdrive. “The Navy’s byzantine accounting policies made it easy for Francis to jack up his prices with minimal resistance,” Whitlock notes. (While no one knows exactly how much Francis stole, he has admitted to making at least $35 million off the U.S. taxpayer.)
The word “farce” comes from the French word for “stuffing” and originally referred to the stuffing of comedies into serious religious plays. Whitlock’s book is a farce of the highest order, as richly stuffed as the liver of a foie gras goose. His reporting is astonishingly detailed, thanks to the “several terabytes” of leaked government data he was able to obtain. Reading “Fat Leonard,” you almost feel sick at the amount of consumption that Francis visited upon the U.S. sailors who became his lap dogs in exchange for champagne, sex and cash.
By 2013, he was on a first-name basis with captains and admirals and even had the power to redirect U.S. Navy ships to ports where he could make the most money off them. As Francis became wealthier, his weight ballooned to almost 500 pounds. Whitlock tracks this detail with perhaps too much glee, but he also usefully makes clear that the magnate’s girth was yet another tool in his box: Francis repeatedly used tales of his gastric bypass surgery to show his vulnerable side and build a rapport with officers.
Whitlock is particularly good at revealing the way that Francis profited from the “entitlement” of Navy officers who seemed to think that they had a God-given right to accept freebies in return for wasting U.S. government funds and leaking classified information, including ship schedules. In 2011, a captain’s wife returned a Versace handbag she was gifted by Francis not because of ethics concerns but because the gold lettering was cracked. Before a dinner in 2007, an officer wrote that rather than having one type of champagne, he’d “like to compare”: “Dom Pérignon, Cristal and Bollinger’s.” At another party, that same officer poured champagne off the top of a skyscraper in Singapore, just to show that he could.
Unsurprisingly, Francis led a squalid existence. As Whitlock notes, he “treated women as expendable objects,” rotating between multiple mistresses and sequestering one of his partners away from her children.
In 2015, two years after Francis was finally arrested, he pleaded guilty to bribery and conspiracy charges and faced up to 25 years in prison. He eventually managed to barter and charm his judges and prosecutors into letting him live in a luxury mansion in San Diego while he awaited sentencing. He even hired his own guards, Pablo Escobar-style. Francis made a mistake, however: He escaped to Venezuela, where he was captured and used as collateral in a 2023 prisoner exchange with the United States.
In many ways, Francis is the antihero of Whitlock’s book, with the Navy and its officers filling the role of villains. Francis collected kompromat on his clients, photos of officers carousing and signed dinner menus, but he doesn’t seem to have needed to use much of it while he was in business, so willing were his marks to receive gifts.
After Francis’ arrest, the Navy stymied scrutiny and tried to protect culprits, despite the serious national security implications of the leaks that Francis was able to extract. As one of Whitlock’s sources tells him, “Leonard Francis would have made a wonderful intelligence officer.”
In the end, scores of Navy top brass were let off lightly while lower ranks were thrown under the bus. Francis is set to be sentenced soon, but, as Whitlock makes clear, the culture of entitlement he exploited has gotten off scot-free.
FAT LEONARD: How One Man Bribed, Bilked and Seduced the U.S. Navy | By Craig Whitlock | Simon & Schuster | 460 pp. | $32.50
