A freight broker from Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, was charged in a federal case with bribing two National Guard officials to acquire military transport contracts that were awarded to two Alabama carriers he represented. The contracts were worth $441,698.
In a four-count information filed in U.S. District Court, the defendant was charged with two counts of bribery and two counts of mail fraud in order to illegally obtain shipping contracts. He has entered an agreement with the government to plead guilty to the charges.
One of the two National Guard officials — a traffic management specialist for the Guard Bureau’s U.S. Property and Fiscal Office in South Carolina — pleaded guilty in June to three wire fraud counts and one count of accepting bribes to steer freight contracts to the Alabama broker. The broker is also charged with bribing a traffic management specialist for the Guard’s U.S. Property and Fiscal Office in Florida.
A traffic management specialist’s duties include procuring funding for and arranging the movement of personnel, items, and equipment. The defendants’ duties involved managing the transportation with their respective states, in coordination with the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, National Guard Bureau, and active duty installations.
The broker received total commissions of about $156,386 on the $441,698 in transportation contracts that the two Guard officials awarded to the two transport companies, according to the plea agreement. In exchange, he paid bribes of about $20,252 about $29,742 to each National Guard official respectively.
The brokering was accomplished, according to court records, through bypassing the government’s list of “Best Value Carriers” through manually selecting a company for a contract.
The broker admitted that payment to the National Guard official in South Carolina occurred through a check written by the broker’s wife to the traffic management specialist’s wife and sent through the U.S. Postal Service.
Source: jjkeller
