Army probe hits speed bump

Large net catches small fish in recruitment-bonus scheme

AGUAS BUENAS, Puerto Rico -- U.S. agents with body armor and assault rifles stormed a small house in this hillside town on a dark October night two years ago, intent on arresting a retired National Guard captain suspected of an elaborate scheme to defraud the military. But in a sign of larger problems to come in the investigation, they raided the wrong house. Twice.

That night, scores of agents from the mainland stormed houses all over the island, arresting at gunpoint 25 current and former National Guard soldiers whom authorities accused of claiming hundreds of referral bonuses for recruits they had never met. They included Angel Perales Munoz, the captain whose address they could not find. He eventually learned about the raids and turned himself in a few hours later.

"That they couldn't bother to correctly figure out where I live shows everything about this investigation," Perales said. "They never wanted to understand what was going on; they just wanted to show they were making arrests."

The raids in Puerto Rico were part of Task Force Raptor, a nationwide anti-fraud operation run by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command that has grown into one of the largest criminal investigations ever conducted in the military. The task force has looked into tens of thousands of current and former soldiers from Maine to Guam. More than 150 have been charged, while 540 more remain under investigation.

Five years after the task force formed, Guard members continue to be charged all over the country. In the coming weeks, several are headed to trial.

The government says it is hunting down scammers who took advantage of a now-defunct incentive program called the Guard Recruiting Assistance Program, which at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan paid soldiers a bonus for referring new Guard recruits. The Army says it paid out millions for referrals of recruits who actually enlisted of their own accord.

Initially, Task Force Raptor made headlines with a few big arrests, including a fraud ring in Texas involving 13 soldiers who pleaded guilty to bilking the Army out of $244,000. But then the investigation foundered, uncovering less fraud than originally estimated. In 2014, Army leaders told Congress they had identified $29 million in fraud, and said Raptor might find as much as $100 million. Years later, though, the Army has revised the number down to $6 million, according to an Army spokesman. The Army has recovered less than $3 million through the courts.

"Early on there were, in fact, cases of bad people doing bad things, and hopefully they got justice," said Doug O'Connell, a National Guard colonel and former U.S. prosecutor who, as a defense attorney, has represented more than a dozen soldiers accused of defrauding the incentive program. "But they kept going. Now we are down to the little guys, the average soldier, who if they did something wrong, they didn't know it."

Perales earned $226,000 for the 113 people he referred to the National Guard, but said he slipped into debt paying legal bills after his arrest. A recent law school graduate, he was unable to take the bar exam while under federal indictment.

"My father was a poor man who raised me to be honest in my work," Perales said. "Now he has to walk through town with his head down for something I didn't do."

He had been scheduled for a federal trial this year in which he faced up to 20 years in prison, but the case against him was dismissed in April.

According to affidavits submitted in court proceedings by the task force, investigators believed the fraud worked the same way all over the country: Professional recruiters whose job was to find potential recruits would illegally feed names and Social Security numbers to other soldiers, who would then collect referral payments for recruits they had never met. Soldiers and recruiters would then split the money.

The task force needed a quick way to find these scammers among tens of thousands of soldiers in the program, and decided to conduct thousands of scripted "triage" phone interviews with onetime recruits, an investigator said. Most of the interviews lasted no more than a few minutes. In each, investigators asked recruits if they knew the soldiers who had later collected referral payments. If recruits said no, the Army often referred the case for prosecution.

That is where problems started, O'Connell said, because a decade later, recruits, who may have talked only once to a soldier at a school career day or county fair, no longer remembered details of those interactions.

Dave Kleiber, a retired Special Forces major in Colorado, re-interviewed almost 50 recruits as a private investigator for defense lawyers in more than a dozen cases. "In nearly every case, what the Army said was incomplete or flat-out wrong," he said.

A Section on 05/29/2017

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