Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:
A longtime Army Corps of Engineers employee and the mastermind of a government contracting scam of “historic proportions” will spend nearly two decades behind bars, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
“You made history for the wrong reasons,” U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said before sentencing Kerry F. Khan of Alexandria to 235 months in prison and ordering him to pay more than $32 million in restitution.
Khan, a former contracting officer, was the ringleader of a network of corrupt public officials, government contractors and family members who stole taxpayer money through inflated billings and fake invoices in what authorities have called the largest bribery and “bid-steering scheme in the history of federal contracting.”
The investigation has led to the prosecution of more than a dozen people and exposed weaknesses in oversight of federal government contracting.
“The business of our town is government and with government comes government contracts – lots of government contracts,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Atkinson told the judge, urging him to send a message to thousands of public officials and contractors who must decide daily “whether to give in to the temptation of government corruption.”
By the time Khan was arrested in October 2011, he had been paid more than $12 million in kickbacks and was still owed more than $14 million from two subcontractors. Kahn was motivated by “greed on a massive scale,” prosecutors said in court filings.
He used the money to live large: building a “real estate empire” of a dozen homes and apartments in Northern Virginia, West Virginia and Florida; leasing BMWs; buying clothes at Nieman Marcus; and paying expenses of mistresses in three states and one in the Philippines.
Read More... http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/ex--army-corps-official-sentenced-in-contracting-scheme-of-historic-proportions/2013/07/11/7d8ba21e-ea21-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
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