Military Madness > 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 …”

“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.

But now Fat Leonard is mad. It’s not just that his money-making empire came crashing down around his feet in 2013 when he was arrested. He pled guilty in 2015 to all that and is still awaiting sentencing under house arrest in San Diego. No, Fat Leonard is mad because some of the people in his pocket – the highest higher-ups who took his bribes – didn’t get taken down with him, though none of what he did could have happened without them. They remain at large while the legal system shows no apparent interest in them, and that made the usually jolly Leonard, who sounds drunk with power in his interviews, mad enough to speak out publicly.

Oh sure, the corruption scandal led to various naval officers being charged, jailed for a while and demoted, and to broken marriages, the usual falderal that comes with such scandals. But Leonard wants to know, where is the prison time for the high brass that he himself is now facing?

Now that advanced kidney cancer has left him without much to lose, Fat Leonard is crying out publicly. Journalist Tom Wright recently interviewed him, and even Wright admits that, during the first interviews, Leonard’s natural charm conned him into feeling sympathetic toward his tale of a tough childhood and a man who made good by taking care of the US Navy’s most urgent ‘needs’.

“I did like him at one point,” says Wright, “but then … there was some personal cruelties to women in his life … The misogyny that runs through this whole story is shocking … At the very end of our interaction … I challenged him on a lot of these things … That was the last time we talked … and his reactions to it is very, very telling.”

At one point in that final episode, Leonard said to Wright in apparent surprise, “I don’t know why you’re so worried about hookers,” and the hooker they were talking about was the mother of his children. Wright ties his concerns about the misogyny to the kinds of things that happened in the Tailhook scandal in the 90s as becoming endemic in the armed forces back then, because women were new in the US military, and some male soldiers apparently did not know how to comport themselves around them as colleagues in war.

It’s not a salacious connection for Wright to make because the big key to Leonard’s success with the Navy was orchestrating orgies. Leonard’s long success story wasn’t just about the great job he did in providing the ‘ring of steel’. He also did an enthusiastic job of running sex rings for soldiers – a ring of beds, as it were. It didn’t matter that he charged exorbitant fees for providing these illegal services, because those buying were using US government money, not their own, and their participation in such services virtually guaranteed they’d never squeal on Leonard.

Leonard got a taste of his own treatment of women when he was arrested for his crimes. He was stripped, chained, handcuffed, and made to squat.

“Here you are treated like an animal once inside,” he complained.

They stripped away the dignity of a man who claims he had enjoyed the power of steering $20-billion ships to ports of his own choosing, boasting that he could effectively position the US Navy as a civilian by choosing where he’d offer particular services. He was also charged with obtaining classified information from those he corrupted.

Leonard says the real scandal is that some top admirals who benefited from his provisioning remain free, some of them having been allowed to retire honorably, even though he had submitted evidence that incriminated them.

“I feel completely betrayed,” says Leonard. “They asked me to name all those involved or face 50 years in jail and I spilled the beans … I gave them about 40 names. I told basically how deep the bribery was in the US Navy. It basically shook the foundation of the navy … I felt very upset because just look at what I am going through … My entire life has been destroyed. My businesses, my family, everything is gone, you know, being hit like a tsunami … [Yet,] One four-star admiral I named was let off scot-free just because he was appointed by the president and the senate. There is no way they are going to embarrass the government by indicting him. It would have been a humiliation.”

Alas, the good times did not last forever. Fat Leonard’s empire has collapsed, and he is palpably angry because the Epstein-like secrets that he held on military brass did him no good. The protection he thought he had wrapped around himself like a ring of steel failed to hold together.

“I had over 2,800 staff working for me in over 30 countries and everything folded. So many innocent people lost their jobs, many families were destroyed. This was deliberate financial ruin brought upon me.”

Leonard’s crimes and those who joined in them were reported to the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) by a Navy wife who was physically mistreated, yet for years, nothing was done about anything that was reported because Leonard had, via his secrets, essentially bought everyone off while people were still enjoying his services. According to Wright, Leonard even managed to corrupt one of the top NCIS officers – ‘corrupt’ usually meaning, in stories like this, to get someone to partake in these sexual services, thereby assuring Leonard’s protection from the top of the NCIS, lest the officer in question incriminate himself.

As Leonard put it in the initial interview, “Everybody has their needs. And I gave them that sense of confidence, and I also provided them what they wanted … and they could trust me … I played professional. I played sexual – whatever you needed – anything.”

It worked like a well-lubricated machine, concealing its own misdoings… until one day it didn’t.

By David Haggith is an author published by Putnam and HarperCollins. He is publisher of The Great Recession Blog and writes for over 50 economic news websites. His Twitter page of economic humor is @EconomicRecess.

I wonder how many billions of dollars were wasted by the Pacific fleet in this scandal. The military is not nearly controlled enough over their spending. The media seems completely disinterested in this extraordinary case. 

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Islam - Current Day - Still Doing What They Have Always Done, Destroying Any Sign of Christianity

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Desecrated and Defecated on: Churches in Europe under Islam

03/10/2021

by Raymond Ibrahim

“Cross” made of excrement at church of Nimes, France.

 

A few days after Muslim migrants firebombed an 800-year-old Swedish church twice over the course of four days—once on Jan. 20, 2021 and another on Jan. 24—a Feb 4 report came out saying that 829 “hate crimes” against churches in Sweden have been reported between just 2012-2018, or about 138 attacks on average every year.

Thus the churches of Sweden join those of other Western European nations that have taken in sizeable Muslim migrants. In France, for example, two churches are vandalized every day.  According to a 2019 PI-News report, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons, statues) were registered in France in 2018.  This represents a 17 percent increase compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered—meaning such attacks are only going from bad to worse.

They are also getting increasingly vile.  As one example, vandals used human excrement to draw a cross on the Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in Nimes in 2019; consecrated bread was also found thrown outside among garbage. One week later, vandals desecrated and smashed crosses and statues at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur; they mangled the arms of a crucified Christ in a mocking manner and burned altar materials.

Similar reports are coming from Germany.  After reporting how four separate churches were vandalized and/or torched over the course of four weeks in 2019, PI-News, a German news site, explained: “In this country, there is a creeping war against everything that symbolizes Christianity: attacks on summit crosses,  on holy figures on the way, on churches and recently also on cemeteries.”

Although mainstream media regularly claim that the vandals—who are seldom caught to verify their identities—are “mentally ill” or part of “right wing extremist” groups, as the recent Swedish report states, PI-News offers a hint: “Crosses are broken, altars smashed, Bibles lit, baptismal fonts overturned, and the church doors smeared with Islamic expressions like ‘Allahu Akbar.’”

Similarly, another German-language report from late 2017 noted that in the Alps and in Bavaria alone, some 200 churches have been attacked and many crosses broken: “Police are currently dealing with church desecrations again and again. The perpetrators are often youthful rioters with a migration background.”

Another telling indicator is that those European regions with large Muslim migrant populations often see a concomitant rise in attacks on churches and Christian symbols.  Before Christmas, 2016, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, where more than a million Muslim migrants reside, some 50 public statues of Jesus and other Christian figures were beheaded and crucifixes broken.

In 2015, following the arrival of another million Muslim migrants to Dülmen, a local newspaper said “not a day goes by” without attacks on Christian statues.

France, where one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations resides—and where churches are attacked every single day—is also indicative that where Muslim numbers grow, so do attacks on churches.  A January 2017 study revealed that “Islamist extremist attacks on Christians” in France rose by 38 percent, going from 273 attacks in 2015 to 376 in 2016; the majority occurred during Christmas season and “many of the attacks took place in churches and other places of worship.”

As a typical example, in 2014 a Muslim man committed “major acts of vandalism” inside a historic Catholic church in Thonon-les-Bains.  According to the report with pictures (since removed) he “overturned and broke two altars, the candelabras and lecterns, destroyed statues, tore down a tabernacle, twisted a massive bronze cross, smashed in a sacristy door and even broke some stained-glass windows.”  He also “trampled on” the Eucharist.

For examples of Muslims being caught red handed desecrating churches in other European nations, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Should there still be any doubt concerning the true identity of those most responsible for vandalizing churches throughout Europe, one need only turn to the treatment of churches in the Muslim world itself, or even in areas that have very large Muslim populations.

Thus, Muslims in Kenya torched five separate churches between Jan. 20 and Jan. 24—the very same days Muslims twice firebombed an 800-year-old church in Sweden.  “A majority of the church members were afraid to attend services [in or near the ruins] in the aftermath of the burning of the churches, fearing that the arsonists might follow them right into their homes, risking the lives of their families,” a local source said.

As occurred when vandals in France used human excrement to draw a cross on the Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in 2019, so these Kenyan arsonists also “committed the heinous acts of scooping human feces onto the buildings,” the source added.

The fact is, the vile desecration of churches (including with human excrement) has for centuries been a Muslim trademark—a sort of “Islam was here.” As copiously documented in Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, during their invasions of Christian nations, Muslims ritually desecrated hundreds of thousands of churches (Caliph Hakim b’amr Allah alone reportedly destroyed 30,000 churches during the early eleventh century). Think what ISIS did but on an exponential level—and not for a handful of years but for over a millennium in dozens of nations spread out over three continents.

Most recently, according to a Feb. 17, 2021 report, the ninth church to be torched in Muslim-majority Sudan recently occurred.  Before it was set aflame, local Muslims shed light as to why they attack churches: “In every city or village where Muslims live, they should not allow anything that belongs to infidels such as church buildings to be there,” one Muslim wrote on social media; another insisted that, wherever Muslims allow the existence of a church, that place becomes “disgraced.”  In short, and in the words of  the Rev. Kuwa Shamal, of the Sudanese Church of Christ, “They targeted the church because they do not want to see any sign of the cross in the area.”

As seen from what is happening to churches throughout Western Europe, at least some Muslim migrants share this sentiment, despite being minorities in and guests of the West.

Islam - This Day in History - Late 1700s - Forced Conversions, Massacres, Rapes, Kidnappings, Desecrations in Southern India

Tipu Sultan: a freedom fighter or Islamic bigot?

Even today, several villagers in Tamil Nadu call Tipu “killer of Brahmins and demolisher of temples”, in a bitter memory of his murderous regime

Nivan Sadh

OpIndia

Tipu Sultan is often credited in our history textbooks as a ‘secular’ ruler of Mysore who fought against the British in the late 1700s. While the latter part of the sentence does hold merit, the former is nothing but blatant propaganda planted in History textbooks by the Congress party. 

Tipu Sultan was one of the most ruthless Islamic invaders in South India. There have been several recorded instances of Tipu’s army forcefully converting, raping and kidnapping Hindus on his orders. Many temples are recorded to have been demolished under his reign. Historians such as Khan Hussain Ali Kirmani have pointed out that Tipu Sultan had animosity for the local Hindus and tribals in the area. 

Letters to army commanders ordering them to kill Hindus

(Cited from K M Panicker’s article in ‘Basha Posini magazine’ dated August 1923 and also mentioned in ‘Tipu Sultan: Villain or Hero’, by Sita Ram Goel, also cited by Rediff in their article ‘The truth about Tipu Sultan’)

Letter dated March 22, 1788, to Abdul Kadir: ‘Over 12,000 Hindus were honoured with Islam. There were many Namboodri Brahmins among them. This achievement should be widely publicised among the Hindus. Then the local Hindus should be brought before you and converted to Islam. No Namboodri Brahmin should be spared.’

The letter set a precedent and it followed several other orders by Tipu Sultan, calling for violence against Hindus. 

One of his letters to an army commander in Calicut on 14th December 1788 says- 

“I am sending two of my followers with Mir Hussain Ali. Along with them you should capture and kill all Hindus. Those below 20 years may be kept in prison and 5000 from the rest should be killed by hanging from tree tops. These are my orders.”

In a letter dated January 18, 1790 to Syed Abdul Dulai, Tipu Sultan openly condones the killing and forced conversions of Hindus, and proclaims this as a ‘Jihad’. The letter reads- 

‘… almost all Hindus in Calicut are converted to Islam. I consider this as jihad.’

In 1790, Tipu sent a letter to Syed Abdul Dulai (an army commander under his reign)- “With the grace of Prophet Mohammad and Allah, almost all Hindus in Calicut are converted to Islam. Only on the borders of Cochin State a few are still not converted. I am determined to convert them also very soon. I consider this as “Jehad” to achieve that object.” (Source: Sharma, 1991, pp. 111-112)

Destruction of temples

It has been recorded that at least 3 temples in South India were demolished by Tipu Sultan’s army, such as Harihareswara temple at Harihar, the Varahaswami temple at Srirangapatnam, and the Odakaraya temple at Hospet. (Source: Archaeological Survey of India)

Historian Roderick Mackenzie in 1793 wrote about Tipu’s campaign to Trinomaly, recording the barbarism and brutality unleashed on the Hindu population in areas he passed. 

“Here neither respect, for the grandeur and antiquity of their temples, nor veneration for the sacred rites of a religion whose origin no time records, proved any protection for the persons or property, even of the first Brahmins. Their pagodas, breached with sacrilegious cannon, were forcibly entered, their altars defiled, their valuables seized, their dwellings reduced to ashes, and the devastation was rendered still more horrible by the scattered remains of men, women and children, mangled beneath a murderous sword.” (Ref: Roderick Mackenzie’s records cited by Narasingha Sil)

The following was found inscribed onto a stone in Seringapatam- 

“Oh Almighty God! dispose the whole body of infidels! Scatter their tribe, cause their feet to stagger! Overthrow their councils, change their state, destroy their very root! Cause death to be near them, cut off from them the means of sustenance! Shorten their days! Be their bodies the constant object of their cares (i.e., infest them with diseases), deprive their eyes of sight, make black their faces (i.e., bring shame).” (Source: Mysore Gazetteer)

Like other Islamic invaders in India, Tipu Sultan was known to brutally suppress the local Hindu population and forcefully convert several Hindus. In Tamil Nadu and Malabar, Tipu was referred to as ‘Killer of Brahmins and demolisher of Temples’. 

Murdering and converting local Hindu populations of South India

Historian IM Muthanna, in his book ‘Tipu Sultan X-Rayed’ states that Tipu’s raids weren’t a compulsion for the expansion of his territory, but was simply a barbaric intent backed by religious bigotry and cultural invasion. Muthanna claims that he murdered 40,000 Hindus in Coorg, and converted an equal number to Islam in his campaigns there. 

Several European historians have also recorded the gross brutality of Tipu on Hindus. In Calicut, several men and women were found to be tied by the neck on trees, with even young children’s neck tied to their mothers on the side of roads. Often considering the Hindus and Christians as animals, Tipu tied naked Christians and Hindus to the legs of elephants and made the elephants move around. He continued to make the elephants move until the helpless Hindus and Christians were torn into pieces or squashed by the gigantic weight of the animal. (Source: A Voyage to the East Indies by Fra Bartolomeo, a Portugese traveler in India)

A French soldier named Francois Fidele Ripaud de Montaudevert who came to Mysore to aid Tipu in his fight against the British was absolutely disgusted by his barbarism. According to him, the heads of Brahmins were daily exposed (split) by Tipu’s soldiers in forts during the siege of Mangalore, to show the Hindu population the inferiority of their religion. 

The Tyrant Diaries by Outlook magazine comments on Tipu’s campaigns in Calicut: 

“Kozhikode was then a centre of Brahmins and had over 7,000 Brahmin families living there. Over 2,000 Brahmin families perished as a result of Tipu Sultan’s Islamic cruelties. He did not spare even women and children..”

Tipu Sultan himself claimed to be the direct descendant of Islamic prophet Mohammed, and even inscribed the following words on his ceremonial sword, “My victorious sabre is lightning for the destruction of the unbelievers.” (Source: Sil, Narasingha. (2013). Tipu Sultan in History Revisionism)

In 1788, Tipu had reportedly ordered his Calicut governor Sher Khan to convert the local Hindus to Islam. According to Nishan-e-Haidari, 200 Brahmins were forced to consume cow-meat by July 1788. (Source: Sil, Narasingha 2013)

Tipu Sultan’s reign ended when Mysore was defeated in the Anglo-Mysore wars, when the Marathas and Britishers squashed the brutal rule of Tipu Sultan.

There have been malicious attempts by Marxist and Islamist historians to make Tipu gain a ‘secular’ image in modern India, however such attempts have often been futile. Recently, when the Congress government of Karnataka tried to glorify this barbaric murderer, staunch opposition was seen in Coorg, where most of the barbaric acts were committed.

Even today, several villagers in Tamil Nadu call Tipu “killer of Brahmins and demolisher of temples”, in a bitter memory of his murderous regime.

Coorg (Kodagu) and Tamil Nadu, India

Kristallnacht Light in Denmark as Growing EU AntiSemitism Celebrates Germany's Darkest Night

Over 80 gravestones VANDALIZED at Jewish cemetery in Denmark ahead of Kristallnacht anniversary

A Jewish cemetery in Denmark was targeted by vandals who spray painted and destroyed over 80 headstones. The incident may have been an anti-Semitic attack, as it occurred before the anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom.

The ancient Jewish cemetery dates back to the early 19th century and is located in the central Danish city of Randers, which is home to a large Jewish community.

“More than 80 gravestones were daubed with green graffiti and some were overturned,” local police said in a statement.

Footage from the scene shows the headstones smeared with green paint, while some of them are overturned. It was not immediately clear whether all of the damage was done by the vandals or if some of the graves had crumbled due to old age.

The police don’t know exactly when the attack occurred, but it was reported on Saturday – on the Kristallnacht pogrom anniversary. Kristallnacht took place on 9–10 November, 1938. The major Germany-wide coordinated attack by Nazi paramilitaries on the Jewish population resulted in over 100 deaths and numerous properties destroyed.

And it was the physical beginning of the Holocaust.

Such a coincidence suggests the attack may have been a deliberate anti-Semitic action, yet the vandals did not leave any explicit anti-Jewish messages or symbols at the scene.

The very disturbing rise in antisemitism in Europe indicates to me that it will not be many years before another Kristallnacht starts off another Holocaust. As hard as that is to believe, that even while some are still alive who have experienced the original Holocaust, another is likely to happen. Such madness!