LAKEWOOD, WASH. — Capt. Michael Dung Nguyen had a profitable tour of duty in Iraq -- so profitable, in fact, that soon after returning to this working-class neighborhood near the Ft. Lewis Army base, he was parking a Hummer H3T outside his apartment.
Then a $70,000 BMW M3 showed up. People notice cars like that on a street filled mostly with pickups, old Chevys and low-end sport utility vehicles.
"I spent 10 years in the military, and I can tell you, nobody's giving me bailouts like that," said Mark Smith, who lives across the street.
The big-ticket cars raised eyebrows in more places than the neighborhood.
Federal investigators found Nguyen's $6,169-a-month Army paychecks lying untouched in the bank since his return from Iraq last June, while he somehow was paying credit card bills for three flat-screen TVs, two desktop computers, a laptop, several iPods, a PlayStation 3 and a dozen combat video games, a refrigerator, new living room and dining room furniture, a Nikon camera and two high-powered handguns.
In a federal indictment last month, prosecutors alleged that Nguyen managed to skim more than $690,000 in cash as the civil affairs officer overseeing millions of dollars intended for reconstruction projects and payments to private Iraqi security forces northeast of Baghdad. The 28-year-old West Point graduate is accused of packing cash into boxes and mailing them to his family's home in Beaverton, Ore.
His indictment is one of the latest in a wave of prosecutions emerging from the tangled and expensive reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Justice Department has secured more than three dozen bribery-related convictions in the awarding of reconstruction contracts; at least 25 theft probes are underway.
The prosecutions reveal the extent to which troops have been tempted by the Pentagon's "money as a weapon system" policy, which has left battlefields awash in cash.
"This was more cash than Donald Trump had ever seen in his life," said Robert J. Stein Jr., a Coalition Provisional Authority official in the Iraqi city of Hillah, who was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in a bribery, theft and money laundering case.
"When you work around money like that," he told investigators, "it becomes, 'So what, it's just paper.' "
Former Army Capt. David Gilliam was indicted in February on charges of stashing more than $400,000 in his luggage when he came home from his assignment as a disbursement officer in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
