For twenty years the U.S. Navy paid a Malaysian contractor to feed and fuel its warships across Asia. He overcharged them $35 MILLION and bought their classified secrets with Kobe beef, prostitutes, and Spanish suckling pig.

Leonard Glenn Francis ran Glenn Defense Marine Asia, a Singapore firm that resupplied U.S. ships in foreign ports.
He was six foot three and weighed 350 pounds. Everyone called him Fat Leonard. He did not mind.
For more than two decades he was the main contact for the U.S. Seventh Fleet at ports from Thailand to the Philippines.
The job was simple. Supply water, fuel, and food. Bill the Navy. Move on.
Instead he built a machine for buying officers.
He paid more than $500,000 in cash bribes. He added Cuban cigars, Kobe beef, Spanish suckling pigs, ornamental swords, designer handbags, watches, and fountain pens.
He paid for prostitutes. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth.
In February 2007 he hosted a party in the General Douglas MacArthur suite of the Manila Hotel. According to the federal indictment, officers used historical MacArthur memorabilia during sex acts.
The suite held a replica of MacArthur's corncob pipe. It was inscribed "I shall return."
In May 2008 the group threw a multiday party at the Shangri-La in Manila. They drank every bottle of Dom Perignon the hotel had. The bill passed $50,000.
One commander wrote Francis a thank you note afterward. "I finally detoxed myself from Manila," it read.
One officer took $100,000 and prostitutes, then messaged Francis on Facebook. "Yummy, daddy like."
In return the officers leaked ship and submarine schedules. They steered warships to ports Francis controlled. They tipped him off to investigations into his own billing.
They called themselves the Wolf Pack. They called themselves the cool kids.
The fraud ran on fake port fees and inflated invoices. He billed the Navy for services that did not exist.
The FBI lured him to a San Diego hotel under false pretenses and arrested him on September 16, 2013.
He pleaded guilty in 2015. More than 440 people came under scrutiny, including 60 admirals.
Rear Admiral Robert Gilbeau became the first active duty Navy admiral in modern history convicted of a felony.
Nearly two dozen officers, contractors, and officials were convicted. Sentences ran from months to years. Several lost pensions, rank, and careers.
Francis was facing up to 25 years. He had kidney cancer. The court let him out on medical furlough into a million dollar San Diego home.
On September 4, 2022, days before sentencing, he cut off his ankle monitor and left it in a water cooler. Neighbors had seen a U-Haul loading for weeks.
He fled to Mexico, then Cuba, then Venezuela. Agents caught him 17 days later, boarding a flight to Russia.
The U.S. got him back in a 2023 prisoner swap. To free Fat Leonard and ten Americans, the Biden administration released Alex Saab, a money laundering ally of Nicolás Maduro.
In November 2024 he was sentenced to 15 years. He was ordered to pay $20 MILLION in restitution and forfeit $35 MILLION.
Some of the officers he took down had their felony convictions vacated for prosecutorial misconduct. A few pleaded down to a misdemeanor and a $100 fine.
He fed the United States Seventh Fleet foie gras and suckling pig for twenty years and walked out with its secrets. The men sworn to guard those secrets traded them for a concert ticket and a night in the MacArthur suite. The fine for some of them came to one hundred dollars.