Big Fraud in the Far Abroad, Part XI: The End

Sorry for the long gap between Part X and this, the final installment in the Long Saga. This post provides a bit of a look at the aftermath of the arrest of Long and AC, and some reflections on what it all meant. Boring stuff, no doubt, but it's the best I can do on just ten years' notice.

As FBI and STATE DS agents told me subsequently, Long was taken from the embassy to the airport, allowed to change clothes, and put on a flight with escort to London. British authorities helped transfer her and "her party" to a flight to Washington DC. Long behaved well, making no attempt to run or create a scene. One agent who flew with her the whole way told me that she never said a word, sat perfectly still, not eating or drinking; he couldn't recall her ever going to the bathroom. She sat most of the flight eyes closed, lost in her thoughts. On arrival at Dulles airport, she was escorted to a magistrate in a small office at the airport, where she was formally charged with a long list of crimes. She said nothing. She was put into a van and driven to a holding facility in Virginia. Only during that portion of the trip did she say anything since leaving Colombo nearly 24 hours earlier. She turned to an agent and said, "This is probably not good for my career. This is probably the end of my career."

One of the FBI agents who had interrogated her that night in the Embassy told me he had never seen anybody quite like her. She had an answer for everything, replied very quickly and smoothly with no hesitation, and despite the hours of interrogation, kept her storyline consistent. She never lost her cool. He told me, "Somebody trained her very well." I remember saying, "It wasn't us."

AC, on the other hand, proved a very different guest of the feds. I saw the pictures of the raid on his house, and how he was taken while standing in the doorway. AC, according to one agent who was there, was terrified, shaking visibly, and absolutely incredulous that he was being arrested. He quickly gave up his denials of wrong-doing when presented the testimony of the young marine guard who had used my desk to have sex with Long. He became furious upon hearing that he was not the only one in the AC-Long household having sex in the Chancery after hours, and began spilling the details of the operation, blaming it all on Long.

The feds also raided the soon-to-open "Lemongrass" Vietnamese restaurant in Medford, Oregon and found a large number of illegal aliens living on the grounds in squalid conditions. Mostly Vietnamese, but also Indian and Sri Lankan, they had been brought there by Long and AC to help set up and operate the restaurant. (Note: I think that the restaurant is now a Thai restaurant.) The Los Angeles-based Vietnamese madam was arrested and many girls and women taken out of her brothels. The Virginia-based Iranian and his mistress, Long's daughter, were also arrested. The nascent limo operation in Colorado was shut down. There were other arrests, too--you can Google for the details.

In the end, neither Long nor AC got the 15-20 years prosecutors had assured us would be the punishment. I believe they were sentenced to six and seven years, respectively, and both were released after about four and half years. The case never went to trial, and Long and AC agreed to a deal for reduced sentences in exchange for a complete accounting of their activities and the forfeiture of all their assets--including Long's State pension and AC's Marine Corps pension. As part of the deal, the daughter in Virginia was allowed to keep her townhouse in exchange for taking on the care of the little handicapped girl, Zu. For what it's worth, and I told this to the prosecutors, I do not believe that Long gave up the full extent of her activities, and am convinced to this day that she hid money in Vietnam.

When investigators began looking at AC's and Long's household effects, they found gold, precious stones, antiques, and cash, stuffed and sewn into sofas and mattresses. They also found that the State Department Credit Union is not exactly run by financial geniuses. The thieving duo ran some $3 million through their accounts there without ever triggering some sort of an alert.

Subsequent to her release from prison, Long wrote a semi-ficitional autobiography which you can find on Amazon. I have no intention of reading it much less buying it. People who have read it have told me--and I don't know how accurate this is--that she barely touches on the visa scandal and does not mention the harm she caused other people and the country, the country that took her in as a refugee, in her bid to get rich.

Now, back to me.

 I, of course, was interviewed by the investigators and by the State IG. Just about everything I had to say or knew about the case I already had passed to the investigators. The IG gave me grief for a bit about the fraudulent representation vouchers which I had signed knowing that they were fraudulent. I showed them the memos I had written to DS each and every time I signed one, but the IG argued that DS did not have the authority to approve the signing of fake vouchers. They fought among themselves; I stayed out of it. I took the opportunity to grill DS on whether I ever had been a suspect in the investigation, and was told, "No." One DS agent, however, did mention that it had struck DS as odd that the Ambassador would try to keep me out of the investigation. My views on that were well-known, and I did not want to vent all over again. I did, however, ask whether anything would be done to BS for spilling his guts on a confidential investigation and for trying to malign me. DS agents said that BS had been reprimanded by the head of DS, and that "the decision had been made to leave it at that."

To paraphrase Long, this scandal did not do good things for my career. No matter how much I explained what had happened, my name was associated with something not kosher in Colombo. You must remember that the Department, when it comes to personnel decisions, operates largely on "corridor reputation," i.e., gossip, and half-information. I already had a reputation of being a trouble-maker and for being, let's say, somewhat more open about my views than is good for a career bureaucrat--you can Google that, too. I, in particular, had had run-ins with certain senior people in personnel (HR) and in the Consular bureau (CA). Some of them made a half-hearted effort to smear me with the scandal, but that did not go very far. I wrote a memo to CA and HR laying out how I thought they had let down the embassy and the Foreign Service; that embassies have to rely on the people provided by the Department system. In addition, I noted that CA had spent years trying to get Ambassadors and DCMs out of the visa process, insisting that it was a matter solely for consular officers; I noted that had I been able to review the visa issuances, I would have noticed that we were giving visas to people from outside of our consular jurisdiction. They sort of left me alone after that, at least on the official level, although, as I said, the rumors and gossip continued. The whole thing left me with a very bad taste in the mouth about the Foreign Service, and about how blowhards like BS can get away with bad stuff.

At the time I also was horrified that these two creeps had managed to blow a huge whole in our elaborate visa issuing system. I kept thinking what if they didn't just let in cooks, maids, and prostitutes? What other sorts of folks availed themselves of AC's facile visa stamp? In retrospect, of course, it all seems so penny-ante, so quaint, almost. We now have a misadministration in Washington that de facto has obliterated our immigration system in the continuing pursuit of irrevocably changing the very nature of our country. The southern border, for all intents, has been erased, and the US government is cooperating with the governments of Central America and Mexico in the sending of tens-of-thousands of illegal aliens in to the US with the full intention of having these people cared for by the American taxpayer and becoming Democrat voters. We are being told by spokesmen for Honduras, for example, and the always reliable New York Times, that suddenly the drug violence is so bad that tens-of-thousands of children are fleeing for the safety of the US and that the US has the responsibility to care for these "children" and make sure they are reunited with their families--reunited, that is, in the USA. All the talk about amnesty and the provision of generous federal benefits, of course, has nothing to do with this sudden surge.

What Obama and Holder have done makes the crimes of Long and AC look like child's play.