Sex, lies and trade deals: how a businessman bribed half the US navy

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Leonard Glenn Francis is a Malaysian businessman who infiltrated the greatest power on the high seas and built a billion-dollar empire by providing officers with sex, champagne, and security. And now, he’s ready to talk.

 “Manilla, 2007. The chauffeured Mercedes crawled south for half an hour in the interminable traffic – the turbid waters of Manilla Bay on the right. The middle-aged men packed inside the cars were in an exuberant mood … Leonard Glenn Francis was taking out the senior commanders of the US 7th Fleet. These were the most powerful navy officers in Asia, and they controlled the movements of around sixty ships and submarines, 150 aircraft, and 20,000 sailors in a huge operational area, stretching from Hawaii to India …”

“The men moved quickly through an air-conditioned lobby and through a curtain at the back. On the other side, Filipino women – many just students – sat in rows in a kind of fish bowl, identifiable not by their names but by the numbers attached to their skimpy outfits … Always the … big boss or Lion King to these navy officers, Leonard dominated the action …”

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“The afterparty was in the $4,000-a-night McArthur Suite at the Manilla Hotel … It was General Douglas McArthur’s home and operational command during World War II. The men piled into the Spanish-Mission-style room with wooden ceiling beams, marble tiles, an ornate chandelier and heavily draped curtains. Leonard … stocked the suite with $10,000 bottles of Dom Perignon … The two-bedroom suite was filled with McArthur memorabilia. In the suite’s study, two ornately carved wooden chairs – the only objects to survive the Battle of Manilla, stood in front of a desk … One of the men, quite drunk by now, opened a case on the desk containing a replica of McArthur’s famous corn-cob pipe and grabbed a woman.”

Fat Leonard, as he came to be known, recalls the scene as follows: “Being warriors, they had been at sea for such a long time – the aviators, your nukes … they’re, uh, captains of ships. They’ve got this inner side of them that is a beast that needs to come out … We went there and picked up a bunch of karaoke girls and booked them out and brought them back. They are like rockstars. They are living their life – living their dreams – things that they will never ever, ever again do in their lifetime. Nobody would give them that kind of party that I do … You know, they just started stripping and having sex right there … The pipe was used as a dildo on the hooker, making a mockery of General McArthur’s memorabilia … they totally desecrated and insulted,” he says, laughing.

“It was a mass orgy … That’s how deep we were with the navy … The entire command – the chain of command – had to be in your pocket. And that’s what happened. Everybody was in my pocket … I had them in my palm and was just rolling them around.”

As he says in the trailer to the interview, “I had the navy by their balls … I turned my guns against them because they betrayed me.”

Fat Leonard was a Malaysian businessman who bribed numerous officers and others in the US Navy until he was arrested. He paid for prostitutes and orgies for naval officers, ranking all the way up to admiral. He threw lavish parties and $30,000 dinners, sent gifts for the officer’s wives – little things like Chanel and Gucci handbags, Cohiba Cigars – the nice stuff that no officer or his wife should have to live without.

In return, the officers he corrupted made sure their ships docked at ports across Asia that Fat Leonard controlled. Since the 1980s, Leonard made bank by provisioning the Navy at extortionate rates for fuel, food, even security, by providing what he called a “ring of steel” around the ships – as if the US Navy should need help defending itself. The ring of steel was nothing but a line of barges tied up around the military ships to prevent an assault like the one that happened in 2000 in Yemen’s harbor when two Al-Qaeda operatives rammed a boat full of explosives into the side of the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, killing 17 sailors and injuring another 37.

2001 became a very good year for Leonard after 9/11 for the “husbanding” monopoly of his provisioning company called Glenn Defense Marine Asia. You might say Leonard got fat off his contracts with the US government from that period on, living in a $130-million mansion in Singapore where he kept 20 cars, including Rolls-Royces and militarized Hummers, all proceeds from his US Navy contracts.

Fat Leonard was a larger-than-life character in more than just weight (where he took the scales up to 160 kilograms – a whopping 352 pounds on his six-foot-three frame). He wore Stars-and-Stripes ties, had Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless The USA’ as his ringtone, ate sloppy joes and rooted for US baseball teams, so the people he served really liked him. And he liked the USA because it was very good to him – without most people in government knowing it was being very good to him. Fat Leonard loved to contract with the US military.