Military Thefts

A retired Navy intelligence officer was sentenced Monday to a year in federal prison and a $10,000 fine after pleading guilty to illegally exporting military aircraft parts. George Charles Budenz II, 62, of Escondido was spared a longer sentence because of his cooperation in other cases, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said. Last month, Burns sentenced co-conspirator Ari Arif Durrani to 12 years after a trial in which testimony showed some of the parts had been bound for Iran.

A sailor accused of taking a Navy laptop containing classified information and peddling its contents to foreign governments is being held for possible court-martial, the Navy said Wednesday. The Navy said that Petty Officer 3rd Class Ariel J. Weinmann gave national defense data to a foreign government. Weinmann, 21, of Salem, Ore., was confined at Norfolk Naval Station, the Navy said.

A U.S. District judge Monday denied bail to a UCLA student accused of participating in a scheme to smuggle military information to the Chinese government. Yui "Billy" Mak, 26, was indicted in October on charges that he encrypted military data on disks that his parents, Tai Mak and Fuk Heung Li, allegedly tried to take to China.

Three airmen have been arrested in an alleged scheme to steal 35 bulletproof vests from Moody Air Force Base and sell them to drug dealers for $100 each. Eighteen of the vests, which typically sell for as much as $600, have been recovered, but others still might be on the street, Sheriff Ashley Paulk said in Valdosta. "You never want the bad guys to have all the tools that you've got to work with," Paulk said.

Prompted by the alleged theft by two sailors of items from a foreign merchant vessel in the Persian Gulf, Navy surface ships around the world have been ordered to take a one-day "stand-down" so that sailors can discuss ethics and their role as "their nation's ambassadors." The stand-down, to be done in the next 15 days, was ordered by Vice Adm. Timothy W. LaFleur, commander of Naval Surface Forces, in reaction to an incident aboard the guided missile destroyer Higgins.

Army commanders said Wednesday that American military personnel had removed about $12.3 million from huge caches of U.S. currency that were found by fellow soldiers in recent days in an exclusive neighborhood once home to senior Iraqi officials. Investigators have recovered all of the stolen money, officials said, and commanders have ordered soldiers not to search for more hidden cash in the area where they discovered about $656 million in boxes inside cottages on Friday.

In the months after an intruder stole a National Guard M-60 tank and went on a destructive rampage in San Diego, military brass from the Pentagon to Sacramento scrambled to order an exhaustive investigation of California National Guard security readiness. Conclusion: It was lousy then and not so hot now.