Battleland

Iraq: Marine Pilot Lands…in Federal Prison

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Ben Franklin: MIA in Iraq, 4,400 times or more?

Sherlock Holmes famously spoke of the dog that didn’t bark as a key clue in a case of Silver Blaze, a missing racehorse. Then there’s the case of the supposedly missing cash intended to rebuild Iraq. It too involves a criminal case, as well as something absent. In this case, the perpetrator – a Marine jet pilot – seems to have gotten away with it…or at least most of it.

What’s telling about the tale of Maj. Mark Richard Fuller, as Holmes would tell us, is that the government must know what it possesses before it can prove it has been stolen. And when the U.S. government was flying $12 billion of shrink-wrapped blocks of brand-new, crisp $100 bills into Iraq to buy off the locals, accountability – in the strictest sense of the word – was missing in action. Like any good fighter pilot, Fuller apparently noted that weakness – and moved in for the kill.

Fuller, 43, was an F-5 Marine Reserve pilot from Yuma, Ariz., when he got orders to spend six months in Iraq as a contracting officer in 2005. Working out of Fallujah – then one of the country’s deadliest cities – he helped pass out so-called Commander’s Emergency Response Program funds. There was a veritable blizzard of squeaky-new $100 bills paid to Iraqi contractors to build schools, improve roads and for other development projects.

“After Fuller returned from Iraq, he began depositing large quantities of brand new $100 United States currency notes, into various bank accounts controlled by him,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Raymond K. Woo alleged in the May 11, 2010, indictment. “Between October 5, 2005, and April 3, 2006, Fuller made 91 cash deposits, totaling over $440,000.00…” into his accounts at local branches of the Bank of America, Chase Bank, and the Navy Federal Credit Union. All were less than the $10,000 that requires banks to report large cash deposits to federal authorities. “In many cases, the defendant would make several cash deposits, under $10,000 each, on the same day to different banks,” Woo added in Fuller’s Jan. 4 sentencing memo. “Some of these deposits would be made within fifteen minutes of each other.”

When a Navy Federal teller asked him about the source of the money as he made a November 2005 deposit, he told her that “he was selling a family member’s personal property and that this was the last cash deposit he would make.” (The teller told authorities that she “had observed other cash deposits made by the defendant and noted that the deposits were all in $100 uncirculated bills.”) After being questioned by the teller about the source of the money, Fuller “immediately opened checking…and money market savings accounts…at Bank of America on November 29, 2005, and a checking account…at Chase bank on December 9, 2005.”

Selling family property to generate hunks of brand-new $100 bills may have been what he told bank tellers. But he told a fellow Marine officer “that he had come across something that would set him up for life,” the sentencing memo said. “Also, the defendant mailed approximately 20 packages to his wife while in Iraq. The United States has not been able to confirm that the packages contained money.”

So Woo’s grand jury indicted Fuller on 22 counts of structuring the financial transactions to avoid the $10,000 sum requiring the bank report the deposit to the feds. Each carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, or both.

Fuller turned himself in to federal authorities in May 2010, and struck a deal in federal district court in Phoenix last August: he pleaded guilty to two of the 22 counts involving four separate deposits totaling $32,000 that he made at two Yuma banks in January 2006. “I knowingly structured my cash deposits in amounts less than the $10,000.00 for the purpose of evading the currency transaction reporting requirements under federal law,” he said in the plea agreement. He agreed to pay $300,000, in monthly payments of $3,000. Federal prosecutors agreed to drop the remaining counts.

“While it can be assumed that this money was stolen while he was in Iraq, there are no witnesses and therefore no evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to prove that is what occurred,” Robbie Sherwood, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Phoenix, said Friday. “No one in his unit or any Iraqis came forward to say he took the money, or that he was getting kickbacks from Iraqis he worked with.”

Because the government couldn’t prove Fuller stole the money, all it could do was seek to convict him on his evasion of the $10,000 reporting requirement. The judge sentenced Fuller to a year’s incarceration, which he’s now serving in Taft federal prison in California.

“Certainly the implication that [prosecutors] were making was that he had stolen the money — they just couldn’t prove it,” says Eric Chase, Fuller’s lawyer. “They had no way of telling who took this money, and that’s their fault — not Major Fuller’s fault.” Chase added: “It’s always difficult to prove the theft of cash when the cash is not being accounted for, and no one’s responsible for where it is or what they did with it…If they could have proven that he stole money, he would have been convicted of it.”

So where did the money come from? “That’s part of my privileged conversation that I can’t disclose to you,” Chase said Friday. “His wife was working and he had stuff going on the side, so he had money coming from lots of sources.” In any event, he adds, the government could never prove all the deposits were in brand-new $100 bills. “They didn’t have a teller for every transaction,” Chase says. “And tellers don’t remember every transaction.”

With time off for good behavior, Fuller is due to be released on Dec. 17, just in time for Christmas shopping. If, as the government suspects, he stole at least $440,000 – and he paid a fine of $300,000 – he may just be pocketing $140,000 for the year he’s spending behind bars.