SAN DIEGO >> Since escaping two weeks ago, officials say, the fugitive Malaysian defense contractor nicknamed “Fat Leonard” — who orchestrated one of the U.S. Navy’s largest bribery scandals — zipped between countries to find a place where he could become virtually untouchable for American authorities.
It almost worked.
After cutting off an ankle monitor and slipping away from house arrest in San Diego on Sept. 4, U.S. and Venezuelan officials say Leonard Glenn Francis went across the border into Mexico, then traveled to Cuba and Venezuela, where he was arrested Tuesday at Simon Bolivar International Airport outside Caracas.
Francis planned to travel to Russia, according to Interpol Venezuela Director General Carlos Garate Rondon, who disclosed the arrest in a statement posted Wednesday on Instagram. He said Francis would be handed over to the country’s judicial authorities to begin extradition proceedings.
Greg Rinckey, a former Army lawyer who is now in private practice, said he thinks Francis was “trying to play the angle of using some countries to get outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. Marshals Service.”
“It looks like they caught him just in time,” Rinckey said. “If he made it to Russia, I don’t believe the Russians would have turned him over to us.”
And while Venezuela and the United States have an extradition agreement, the U.S. government could face an uphill challenge returning the fugitive to American soil. The Biden administration doesn’t officially recognize President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government, has no embassy in Venezuela and has imposed crushing sanctions on the country that have further embittered relations. Law enforcement cooperation between the two countries is rare.
There was no immediate word on when Francis might be extradited to the U.S.
The arrest came on the eve of his scheduled sentencing in a federal court in California for a bribery scheme that lasted years.
Francis pleaded guilty in 2015 and had been allowed to remain in home confinement to receive medical care while he cooperated with the prosecution. With his help, prosecutors secured convictions of 33 of 34 defendants, including more than two dozen Navy officers, one of them a former director of public affairs with U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The scandal also resulted in two high-profile censure cases involving a retired rear admiral in Hawaii and the commander of a Pearl Harbor destroyer.
The towering man with a wide girth and gregarious personality wielded incredible influence as a main point of contact for U.S. Navy ships at ports across Asia. His family’s ship servicing business, Singaporean-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia Ltd., or GDMA, supplied food, water and fuel to vessels for decades. He plied officers with Kobe beef, expensive cigars, concert tickets and wild sex parties at luxury hotels from Thailand to the Philippines. In exchange, commanders passed him classified information and steered their ships, mostly from the Navy’s 7th Fleet, to ports he controlled so he could cover up as much as $35 million in fake charges.
A law enforcement official familiar with the case said authorities tracked down Francis using a cellphone number they were provided. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly, said Francis was located Tuesday in a Caracas neighborhood.
Venezuelan authorities deployed a team of officers at the airport after a cabdriver tipped them off that Francis was leaving a hotel and headed there.
His sentencing hearing was still held Thursday to deal with the changing situation. When he returns, Francis will need new attorneys. His defense attorney, Devin Burstein, told the judge he plans to file a motion severing their ties due to an “irreparable breakdown in the attorney-client relationship.”
And when he does return, prosecutors indicated Francis will face an even longer sentence, asking the court to note his failure to appear at his sentencing hearing as ordered. That could add five years to his potential sentence of 25 years if he is ultimately charged for not showing up.
U.S. District Court Judge Janis Sammartino set a Dec. 14 status hearing for Francis with the caveat that all parties could meet sooner depending on how events unfold.
Sentencing hearings are scheduled in October for four Navy officers who went to trial and were convicted in the case.
In the cases involving Navy officials in Hawaii, retired Navy Capt. Jeffrey Breslau was sentenced in 2019 in federal court to six months in prison and ordered to pay $85,000 in restitution and fines for secretly moonlighting as a paid public relations consultant for Francis, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Federal attorneys said Breslau had secretly advocated for Francis “behind the backs of his Navy colleagues” and accepted more than $65,000 from the contractor without disclosing the agreement to the Navy. Breslau was chief of public affairs for U.S. Pacific Fleet, headquartered at Pearl Harbor, from October 2009 until July 2012.
One of the censure cases involved Capt. Heedong Choi, former commander of the USS Chafee, who received a scathing censure in 2019 from Navy Secretary Richard Spencer accusing him of accepting tens of thousands of dollars in improper gifts from Francis and demonstrating a “higher loyalty” to Francis than to the United States.
Further, Spencer said Choi in 2012 obstructed justice by wrongfully notifying Francis of an ongoing investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and Korean authorities into Glenn Defense’s fraudulent business.
In the other censure case, Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral who last served as U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s director of operations on Oahu, was censured in November 2018 by Spencer for “repeatedly and improperly” soliciting and accepting gifts from GDMA.
