The Naval brass were already waiting when Leonard Glenn Francis pulled up to the security gate of the San Diego base and flashed his ID. Off in the distance, massive steel-gray destroyers towered in the harbor, above the palm trees and squat, cream-colored barracks. In a military that now outsources many of its functions to the private sector, Francis specialized in servicing ships, specifically the Navy's 7th Fleet in the Pacific, the largest forward command in the world. When a ship or submarine came ashore for a port visit, Francis' firm, Glenn Marine Defense Asia, could provide whatever the crew might need: barges that emptied hundreds of gallons of sewage, divers that scanned the harbor for explosives, vans that took sailors into town to get drunk. "He was actually just really good," says a retired captain who once commanded a 7th Fleet submarine. "There were others. But Glenn Defense was the best." Around Singapore, where Francis kept his headquarters, he drove around in bulletproof Hummers, wore Armani silk suits and Gucci calf-skinned loafers. But on official business with the Navy, he just as often wore American flag neckties, his ringtone programmed to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." He was 6-foot-3, and weighed nearly 350 pounds – with his stomach stapled. Behind his back, the officers called him Fat Leonard.
When Francis started contracting with the Navy over 25 years earlier, he faced over a dozen competitors; now, he held claim to nearly the entire Pacific, a region spanning 48 million square miles, with a Naval presence of some 70 ships and 20,000 personnel. Glenn Defense held $250 million in contracts. Francis was meeting with the officials in San Diego to drum up even more business. What he didn’t know is that for two years, a secret team of agents from the Naval Criminal investigative Service (NCIS), the branch’s law enforcement arm, had been monitoring Glenn Defense, gathering evidence of falsified invoices, bribery and fraud.
NCIS investigators estimated Francis had stolen $35 million from the Navy over the past two decades, relying on a network of paid informants within the Navy to secure contracts, prod aircraft carriers to more lucrative “pearl ports” and undercut the competition. He had spies in the contracting office in Singapore, the embassy in Manila and the wardroom of the USS Blue Ridge, the 7th Fleet’s flagship. His network of moles had fed him military secrets and classified information, compromising national security in what prosecutors and other officials call the worst breach since the Cold War.