Reporting from 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 a pair of 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 stacks of 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 already has secured more than three dozen bribery-related convictions in the awarding of reconstruction contracts; at least 25 theft investigations 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.' "
