But an attorney for Utahn Curtis Whiteford says the colonel was simply a "scalp" for the U.S. District Attorney's Office. Defense lawyer David Schroth noted that the jury acquitted Whiteford of most of the charges, and he promised to appeal the counts on which he was convicted.
Whiteford spent 22 years flying helicopters for the Utah Guard, ascending to the position of state aviation officer before auditors allegedly discovered that he had been padding his timesheets while serving during the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Although Whiteford left the Guard under fire - voluntarily leaving his post rather than facing a potential courts martial - he didn't resign his Army commission. That allowed him to transfer into a job with the Army Reserve's 91st Division.
A year later, he was in service in Iraq as the highest-ranking military official for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in al Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad. In that capacity, prosecutors said, Whiteford and others helped rig the bids on more than $8.6 million in contracts, trading his influence for promises of cash, cars, and future employment with American businessman Philip Bloom, who ran several companies doing business with the CPA.
Bloom testified that he laundered more than $2 million in currency that Whiteford and other co-conspirators stole from the CPA. The money had been intended for reconstruction projects at a time in which the U.S. was struggling to win the hearts and minds of Iraqi citizens.
Schroth said that Bloom's testimony - and that of other defendants who had reached plea agreements with the government - was compromised. Those witnesses, Schroth said "had everything to gain and nothing to lose."
"This was a flawed prosecution," Schroth said. "There's no doubt that what the government wanted was the scalp of the colonel."
Schroth said his client had passed three polygraph tests, but that the government was not interested in considering any potentially exonerating evidence. Such tests are inadmissible in court - as were potentially damning e-mails from Whiteford's wife, Carol, who appeared to be reminding her husband of the trouble caused by earlier alleged indiscretions in the Olympic pay scandal.
In response to his wife's concerns, according to court documents, Whiteford promised his spouse that he wouldn't use any unearned money again. But prosecutors allege that through much of the following year, Whiteford continued to help steer contracts to Bloom, worked to procure licenses for Bloom to open a new Baghdad airline and used U.S. funds to purchase weapons, including several rocket launchers, for the security company he planned to open, which was to be called Anaconda.
The "key objectives of the company," Whiteford allegedly wrote in an e-mail to the others involved in the case, "are making money while allowing us to look cool and have cool stuff."
Schroth dismissed the Olympic scandal as unproven and irrelevant. As to the more recent scandal, Schroth has argued that the CPA, which has been disbanded, was never a part of the U.S. government. As such, he and other defense attorneys have contended, the indicted persons were not acting as "public officials" as defined by federal statute, at the time of the alleged offenses. He promised to appeal on that basis.
Whiteford and co-defendant Lt. Col. Michael Wheeler are scheduled to be sentenced in February for conspiracy to commit bribery and interstate transportation of stolen property.
The case was investigated and prosecuted as part of an initiative to pursue contract fraud, particularly among those involved in reconstruction projects in Iraq.
