Different Spanks

July 7, 2022·42 min·3 clips

Navy reservist Blake Hertzinger describes how junior officers lost careers and went to prison while admirals 'got a mean letter in their record' and retired with full pensions.

Leonard Francis opens by describing the damage as total ruin, with businesses folded, families destroyed, and his own family caught in the collapse. He calls it deliberate financial ruin. The scene shifts to San Diego in 2013, where the man who had spent 30 years as the most powerful U.S. military contractor in the Pacific is finally brought down. He had believed himself untouchable. Instead, he is shackled inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego. Francis describes the intake process in brutal detail, from being stripped down to being made to squat and accept the humiliation of chains on his wrists and legs. He says incarceration turns a person into an animal. Bail is denied. The reason is not only the present case but his imprisonment almost three decades earlier for his part in an armed robbery in Penang. Prosecutors frame that old conviction as evidence that he is a threat to society. Francis bristles at the idea that something he did at 21 should still matter so much. He treats the prosecution’s argument as a misuse of time itself. The episode uses that tension to show how an old offense can return as leverage in a new and far larger scandal. The narrative then opens onto the Navy’s own crisis of credibility. Senator Elizabeth Warren confronts Admiral Fowler over a Washington Post report that he was allegedly offered a prostitute. Fowler answers in the careful language of institutional self-protection, citing ethics counselors, his wife, and his daughters as his personal benchmark. Warren does not let the point settle. She asks whether senior officers attended events where prostitutes and women in scantily clad outfits were expected to provide entertainment. She ties those events to a culture that fails women and tolerates harassment and assault across the services. Fowler insists he has always respected servicemen and women. The Navy later says it found insufficient evidence that he patronized a prostitute. A Pentagon spokeswoman tells the Post that he never solicited gifts, dinners, services, or items from GDMA and never attended an event without ethics clearance. Fowler retires in late October after the podcast begins airing. He is replaced by a female Army general. Francis closes by insisting that he still has a strong will to live. He says his doctors and nurses tell him people die when they give up. He argues that he still has more to do. He says he can build another business empire one day. The episode ends on that stubborn refusal to accept that the collapse is final.

As heard by us

A corruption story that narrows from one man's fall to the Navy culture around him.

San Diego, 2013, is where this story sharpens: Leonard Francis, long the most powerful U.S. military contractor in the Pacific, is in a cell, denied bail, and dragged back to the earlier Penang armed-robbery case prosecutors keep pointing to.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a scandal that jumps from a San Diego jail cell to a Senate hearing room.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Fat Leonard