Monday, March 20, 2006
Wade's MZM Skullduggery Revisited
The sordid tale of Mitchell J. Wade, who bribed Randy "Duke" Cunningham in order to obtain government work for his defense contracting company MZM, reads like a pulp novel of the perversely greedy taking advantage of the clueless incompetent.
According to excerpts of e-mails collected by a Pentagon employee and provided to The Washington Post, one contract official inaccurately thought Wade was a former undersecretary of defense. Another wrote that "Mitch Wade is a force to be reckonned (sic) with . . . he has a lot of perceived power that can slow us down . . . maybe even grind us to a halt."
Nice.
Wade first bribed Cunningham on Nov. 16, 2001, according to prosecutors' court papers. That Friday, barely two months after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the contractor bought the congressman $12,000 worth of antiques, and Cunningham told Wade that he would make him "somebody." At the time, the government filings said, MZM had contracts of less than $1 million a year.
Their partnership became apparent early the next year as Wade requested a $15 million earmark for a counterintelligence program. He was also working at the time to get on the General Services Administration's schedule of companies authorized to seek federal business, a prelude to the broader intelligence-related "blanket purchase agreement" he pursued that summer and fall...
The blanket purchase agreement, signed with a Defense Department contracting office in September of 2002, was written so broadly that any agency inside or outside the Pentagon could order a wide variety of help. It seemed crafted for the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 push for more defense and intelligence spending. It referred to homeland security, law enforcement planning, geospatial integration, document exploitation and what is called MASINT, for measurement and signature intelligence...
To ensure that MZM "could milk that account without interruption or interference" from the Defense Department officials who oversaw the contract, Wade enticed them with personal favors, the government said in court documents filed along with Wade's guilty plea. He hired the son of one Defense Department official at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville in early 2002, when MZM was still a subcontractor. In return, the official gave MZM inside information and favorable performance reviews ensuring further work, prosecutors alleged...Two days after the war in Iraq started, MZM won a $1.2 million contract to provide interpreters for "post conflict" work. And in March, Wade's company got a $6.2 million contract, this one with the Pentagon's new Counter Intelligence Field Activity. In fiscal 2003, MZM got a total of $38.6 million in orders through the blanket purchase agreement...
The global war on terror was good for business. There was lots of work at the National Ground Intelligence Center and the Counterintelligence Field Activity. The Pentagon called on MZM to help seek counters to roadside bombs in Iraq. The Special Operations Command in Tampa needed help too. And thanks to an earmark from Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. (R-Va.), MZM was picked to run a Foreign Supplier Assessment Center in Martinsville, Va., to check out foreign-based contractors...
Last July, a month after the San Diego Union-Tribune triggered the investigation by disclosing the home sale, the Pentagon was still telling Cunningham's office that money was in the pipeline for his latest MZM earmarks.
Crikey!
I wonder if the Pentagon will keep a better eye on the defense contractors in the future.
I doubt it. Defense contracting companies are the preferred destination of Pentagon officials following retirement from the government.
That arrangement does not inspire too much motivation for government officials to aggressively look to find wrongdoing in contracting.
One wouldn't want to damage one's future career prospects, after all.
