Cunningham said to be uncooperative

By: MARK WALKER - Staff Writer
Last modified Tuesday, May 9, 2006 11:17 PM PDT

Randy Cunningham has not been helping federal authorities as they continue to probe the former North County congressman's web of corruption, a top Pentagon investigator said Tuesday.

Rick Gwin, special agent in charge of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's western regional office, said he is troubled by the lack of assistance, particularly in light of Cunningham's plea agreement that calls for him to tell all that he knows.

"In my opinion, he has not been cooperative and I have not gotten any information from him to further develop other targets," Gwin said in a telephone interview from his office in Mission Viejo. "I was hoping that from a jail cell, he might become more cooperative, but we just don't have the cooperation that I think we should have."


Cunningham pleaded guilty in November to bribery and tax evasion, admitting he took more than $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors.

K. Lee Blalack, Cunningham's attorney in Washington, declined comment Tuesday when asked about the former Republican's lawmaker's level of cooperation in the weeks since he was sentenced to a little more than eight years in prison.

Immediately after the March 3 sentencing, Blalack said he hoped Cunningham's continuing assistance would ultimately lead to a reduction in his prison time.

Blalack said he talked with Cunningham on the telephone on Tuesday.

"He is doing as well as he can under the circumstances," Blalack said. "He is simply trying to serve his time and take his punishment like a man."

Cunningham remains at a federal correctional center in North Carolina undergoing medical and physical evaluations.

Gwin said the continuing investigation into three unindicted Cunningham co-conspirators and others who may have assisted them in the awarding of defense contracts is a widespread probe with many different avenues.

"This is much bigger and wider than just Randy 'Duke' Cunningham," he said. "All that has just not come out yet, but it won't be much longer and then you will know just how widespread this is."

The fallout from Cunningham's more than five years of taking bribes from defense contractors continues to reverberate from coast to coast.

In Washington on Monday, the No. 3 official at the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, announced he is retiring in the wake of last week's resignation by Porter Goss as the spy agency's director.

Foggo's resignation may have more to do with his relationship to Cunningham and Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes than with Goss' decision to step down.

Reports in The Washington Post and elsewhere Tuesday from unnamed sources said that the FBI had confirmed it is investigating whether Foggo improperly intervened in the awarding of defense contracts to Wilkes' firm, ADCS.

The CIA issued a statement on Foggo's behalf denying he had done anything improper.

The CIA's inspector general also is investigating Foggo's relationship to Wilkes and how ADCS was able to win CIA contracts to provide the agency with bottled water, first-aid kits and other unspecified services in Iraq.

Wilkes is one of three co-conspirators in the Cunningham case who remains under scrutiny by the U.S attorney's office in San Diego, which refuses to comment on the status of its work.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal, citing an unnamed source, reported that Wilkes also provided prostitutes for Cunningham at poker games he sponsored at Washington's Watergate Hotel, a claim that Wilkes' attorney Nancy Luque vehemently contested Tuesday.

"Not only is it absolutely false that Brent Wilkes provided those kinds of services to anyone at any time, it is irresponsible for any news organization to report that something happened just because the FBI is reportedly investigating something," Luque said.

"There is no evidence of any person having said that it happened."

While ADCS remains in business, the building that Wilkes constructed to house the company is for sale and numerous staffers have been laid off, Luque said.

Luque also said there are no ongoing discussions to resolve the case against her client.

"Mr. Wilkes does not believe he has done anything wrong and therefore there is no reason to discuss any kind of resolution with the government," she said.

The status of the investigation into two other unindicted co-conspirators, New York developer Thomas Kontogiannis and his son-in-law, John T. Michael, is unclear. Like their San Diego counterparts, officials at the New York U.S. attorney's office declined comment Tuesday.

Back in San Diego, the government and Cunningham's estranged wife are said to be nearing a deal on her claim to a portion of the sale proceeds from the couple's former Rancho Santa Fe mansion.

Her San Diego attorney, Douglas C. Brown, said he believes the case that Nancy Cunningham is contesting could be settled within a month.

"It has not reached its conclusion, but we are hoping to have some movement in the next four or five weeks to wrap it up," Brown said.

The gated mansion sold in December for $2.6 million, $500,000 more than the couple paid for it in early 2004.

Randy Cunningham forfeited his interest in the sale proceeds when he pleaded guilty.

But Nancy Cunningham has continued to fight the government's claim that it is entitled to all the sale proceeds because the home was bought with her husband's ill-gotten gains.

She contends she is entitled to a portion of the money because part of the funds used to buy the home came from the sale of the couple's former home in Del Mar Heights.

The assistant U.S. attorney handling the home sale case was out of town Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

The late 2003 sale was the transaction that tipped federal authorities to Randy Cunningham's bribery. Washington defense contractor Mitchell Wade paid the Cunninghams $700,000 more for the home than he would sell it for less than a year later.

Wade pleaded guilty in February to providing more than $1 million in bribes to Cunningham and faces up to 11 years in prison.

Wade's attorneys say he continues to cooperate with authorities, a factor they will undoubtedly argue when Wade is sentenced. He is scheduled to appear in a Washington courtroom on Aug. 26 for a presentence hearing.

Sounds like the typical game of saying he isn't being cooperative because they think they can squeeze more or it wasn't all they promised they'd get.

Can additional time be added to his sentence if he doesn't cooperate any further?

Sounds like the typical game of saying he isn't being cooperative because they think they can squeeze more or it wasn't all they promised they'd get.

Or perhaps someone has made threats against him or his family if he tells any more. Maybe the visitor logs at the prison should be checked. 

Is Duke Cooperating Or Not?

By Justin Rood - May 11, 2006, 12:06 PM

Following published complaints by a Pentagon investigator in the North County (Calif.) Times, the New York Times today reported that former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA), now in prison for taking bribes in exchange for legislative favors, is "refusing" to give information or speak with him and his agents.

I spent a good part of yesterday looking into this, and I think the picture's not as clear as the NY Times describes it.

I spoke with the Pentagon investigator, Rick Gwin, yesterday morning, and he repeated his original claim that he was unsatisfied with Cunningham's level of cooperation.

"We haven't talked to [Cunningham]," he said. "He's not talking to us."

Have you asked to speak with him? I asked Gwin.

"He has to make the overture to come forward to us," the investigator said.

So have you ever made a request to Cunningham or his lawyer to interview the prisoner?

"I think we have," he responded, "through my agents. But I have not seen a response."

The conversation didn't make sense on a number of different levels. How does a senior investigator not remember conclusively if he has asked to interview his key source? Why would he assert that Cunningham carries the burden of voluntarily offering information to investigators? How can he make the public claim that Cunningham isn't cooperating?

I'm still stumped. Cunningham's lawyer K. Lee Blalack wouldn't speak about the matter for the record. None of the assistant U.S. attorneys working the case returned my call. Gwin's Pentagon counterpart handling the East Coast side of the investigation said he didn't know anything about Cunningham's cooperation. When I called Gwin back for more explanation, I got his voice mail. I left a message, and he hasn't called back.

Now, as an old grade school teacher of mine used to say, I may be dumb but I'm not stupid. During an investigation, comments and leaks from prosecutors, sources and targets are strategic and usually carry meaning beyond the factual assertions they contain. Was trying to speak to someone else? Perhaps the Justice prosecutors -- but Gwin insisted to me his staff was working "very closely" with Justice and the IRS.

I can't for the life of me puzzle out what Gwin is trying to say, or who he's trying to say it to.

Are Feds to Blame for Duke's Silence?

By Paul Kiel - May 11, 2006, 1:25 PM

Below, Justin noted the mixed signals coming from Rick Gwin, the Pentagon's top investigator into the Duke Cunningham case, about Duke's level of cooperation. I called legal experts and asked -- if Cunningham isn't talking to investigators, as Gwin claims, why not?

If Duke's staying silent, it's because prosecutors have already forfeited their only leverage to get him to talk, the experts said. In fact, they've given him incentive to hush up.

Prosecutors rushed Duke's sentencing -- and now that he's in prison, he has little reason to talk to them, the experts told me. Even worse, if Duke tells them anything that implicates him in crimes they didn't know about, he's in for a new world of hurt for violating his plea agreement.

"If I were Duke Cunningham, frankly, I wouldn't be cooperating," Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and the Executive Director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. "They sentenced him too fast -- once you're sentenced, you're done. There's no more carrot and stick." She went on to explain how an investigation with as wide a scope as the Cunningham investigation typically runs: "Generally, your deal is dependent on cooperating, and your sentencing is put off until your cooperation is complete." Prosecutors should have gotten everything they could from Cunningham long before they sent him off to prison.

Especially telling in this respect is that prosecutors sought the harshest possible sentence for Cunningham - 10 years. In cases where defendants provide a substantial amount of information on other investigation targets, prosecutors typically temper their requested sentence.

It took a remarkably short amount of time for prosecutors to tie up the Cunningham case. The San Diego Union Tribune broke the story on June 12, 2005. By November 28, Duke had pled guilty. He was sentenced to 8 years, 4 months incarceration March 3, 2006. From start to finish, the investigation and prosecution lasted less than 9 months.

"They stopped looking very quickly. They stopped digging," Sloan said, pointing out that Cunningham had been accepting bribes for years - for at least six years, according to the prosecutors. Since the investigation ran its course so quickly, she doubted that they'd really gone back to explore the breadth of Duke's corruption.

Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, agreed: "This was not handled in a way that would normally be done for an ongoing investigation."

"Cunningham's greed may have been more obvious than other members of Congress, but it's clear that there is a wider circle of individuals involved in this scandal. The fact is Duke Cunningham became the designated defendant for D.C.... From the beginning, the fix was in on this investigation."

None of the prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in California's Southern District could be reached for comment.

Today's news about an investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) proves Gwin right: this scandal is potentally much bigger than just Cunningham. But if prosecutors are going to press their case against Lewis, Brent Wilkes, Dusty Foggo, and others, it seems they'll have to do it without Duke's help. There's a growing belief that they only have themselves to blame.

SDUT: Duke Never Cooperated

By Paul Kiel - May 11, 2006, 2:59 PM

That's according to Marcus Stern, the San Diego Union Tribune reporter who broke the Duke Cunningham story. Here's what he wrote back in March, after Duke's sentencing:

...the onetime war hero's teary acknowledgements of his congressional crimes, including taking more than $2.4 million in bribes, belie the fact that the scope of the plea agreement largely covers his dealings with only two defense contractors over a period of only five years.

There is no evidence that Cunningham has provided any significant information to the government beyond the proof the government already had - much of it from Wade - when Cunningham approached prosecutors about a plea agreement. People closely involved with the case privately admit as much.

. . . .

When Cunningham went behind bars Friday, he left behind a legacy of unanswered questions. He failed to address a much wider swath of potentially criminal activity going back farther than 2000 in his 15-year House career.

. . . .

He went without offering much-needed assistance in pending investigations involving unnamed and uncharged co-conspirators, known to be Poway, Calif., defense contractor Brent Wilkes and New York businessman and felon Thomas Kontogiannis.
Cunningham also failed to publicly address the flaws in the congressional appropriations and military procurement systems that he exploited for gain for years. And, even though his actions exacerbated the public's mistrust of Congress, he didn't offer a scintilla of support for congressional reform.

Cunningham's friendship and dealings with Wilkes go back to the mid-1990s, before Cunningham's friendship began with Wade. But the plea agreement didn't address Cunningham's dealings with Wilkes before Wade entered the picture.

Cunningham's "earmarking" activities, using his influence as a member of the House Appropriations Committee and a member of Congress to benefit friends and supporters, go back 15 years and involve areas other than defense and intelligence....

When the prosecution argued for a stiff jail sentence for Cunningham, it said Cunningham had cost the country financially and had harmed it. But it never said how much Cunningham's crimes had cost the country or how much damage had been done.

That's because nobody knows.

Most of the money Cunningham directed to Wade and Wilkes involved classified programs. Many of these so-called "black" or secret programs were funded in response to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Because these programs are part of the nation's black budget, there is almost no way for Cunningham's colleagues to have fully known the details of the earmarking he was doing as both a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the defense appropriations committee.

One of the programs Wade got for MZM Inc. was to combat the deadly roadside bombs that are the biggest threat to U.S. forces in Iraq. Is this program being conducted on the up and up? Was it one of the programs prosecutors found had profit margins of 800 percent? The public doesn't know.

Nor does the public know how extensively Cunningham exploited post-9/11 anxieties and the secrecy of the black budget to make quick bucks for himself and friends.

The larceny might have involved many different contractors, projects and appropriations bills over many years. So, only Cunningham could know for sure.

And while he was crying when last seen, he still wasn't talking.