
Fat Leonard
How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy
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Narrated by:
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Dan Bittner
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By:
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Craig Whitlock
About this listen
#1 New York Times bestselling author Craig Whitlock’s masterful account of one of the biggest public corruption scandals in American history—exposing how a charismatic Malaysian defense contractor bribed scores of high-ranking military officers, defrauded the US Navy of tens of millions of dollars, and jeopardized our nation’s security.
All the admirals in the US Navy knew Leonard Glenn Francis—either personally or by his legendary reputation. He was the larger-than-life defense contractor who greeted them on the pier whenever they visited ports in Asia, ready to show them a good time after weeks at sea while his company resupplied their ships and submarines. He was famed throughout the fleet for the gluttonous parties he hosted for officers: $1,000-per-person dinners at Asia’s swankiest restaurants, featuring unlimited Dom Pérignon, Cuban cigars, and sexy young women.
On the surface, with his flawless American accent, he seemed like a true friend of the Navy. What the brass didn’t realize, until far too late, was that Francis had seduced them by exploiting their entitlement and hubris. While he was bribing them with gifts, lavish meals, and booze-fueled orgies, he was making himself obscenely wealthy by bilking American taxpayers. Worse, he was stealing military secrets from under the admirals’ noses and compromising national security.
Based on reams of confidential documents—including the blackmail files that Francis kept on Navy officers—Fat Leonard is the full, unvarnished story of a world-class con man and a captivating testament to the corrosive influence of greed within the ranks of the American military.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Craig Whitlock (P)2024 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"A vigorous investigation into the life of a con artist and swindler who had half the leadership of the U.S. Navy in his pocket....Maddening and astonishing in its revelations of a crime spree that cost taxpayers untold millions."—Kirkus Reviews
"[A] rollicking exposé....Drawing on troves of incriminating emails and Francis’s colorful testimony after his 2013 arrest, Whitlock’s vivid narrative is a whirl of blithe graft....It’s also an appalling indictment of an out-of-control Navy that ditched its ethos of duty and honor in favor of craven toadying, and then, when the scandal came out, shielded the top brass from accountability while lower ranks went to jail. The result is an entertaining picaresque about a magnetic rogue that also spotlights troubling rot in the U.S. military."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Explosive, brilliantly reported and meticulously documented, Craig Whitlock's Fat Leonard reads like a thriller but depicts one of the most sordid chapters in U.S. military history, a tale of brazen corruption that soiled the Navy and is an infuriating insult to the American taxpayer. You won't be able to put this book down, and you won't stop wondering how it could have happened.”—David E. Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal
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- A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth
- By: Dan McCrum
- Narrated by: Dan McCrum
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When investigative journalist Dan McCrum first came across Wirecard, the hot new tech company that looked poised to challenge Silicon Valley, it all looked a little too good to be true: offices were sprouting up all over the world, and they were reporting runaway growth. In the space of a few short years, the company had come from nowhere to overtake industry giants like Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank on the stock market. As McCrum began to dig deeper, he encountered a story stranger and more compelling than he could have imagined.
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Interesting book but…
- By Rock Climber on 06-11-23
By: Dan McCrum
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Unit X
- How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War
- By: Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins, Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought as profound as the invention of gunpowder or advent of the nuclear age is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites—all these and more are becoming part of America’s DIU-fast-tracked arsenal. Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation.
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Starts strong then goes political, common for left technocrats
- By Michael S. Rice on 05-24-25
By: Raj M. Shah, and others
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The Informant
- A True Story
- By: Kurt Eichenwald
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 24 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy, which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man.
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Great Story
- By Phil on 09-07-11
By: Kurt Eichenwald
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The Fund
- Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
- By: Rob Copeland
- Narrated by: Rob Copeland, Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Dalio does not want you to listen to this audiobook. Late last year, when the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet, announced that he was stepping down from the company he started out of his apartment nearly 50 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio cultivated an aura of international admiration and fame thanks to his company’s eye-popping success, coupled with a mystique he encouraged with frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles.
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Best finance book I've read in years
- By Aaron on 12-16-23
By: Rob Copeland
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Dark Wire
- The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever
- By: Joseph Cox
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in 2018, a powerful app for secure communications, called Anom, began to take root among drug dealers and other criminals. It had extraordinary safeguards to keep out prying eyes--the power to quickly wipe data, voice-masking technology, and more. It was better than other apps popular among organized crime syndicates, except for one thing: it was secretly run by law enforcement. Over the next few years, the FBI, along with law enforcement partners in Australia and parts of Europe, got a front row seat to the global criminal underworld.
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Amazing story
- By Katie W. on 06-08-24
By: Joseph Cox
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Billion Dollar Whale
- By: Bradley Hope, Tom Wright
- Narrated by: Will Collyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Now a number-one international best seller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude—one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.
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Couldn’t stop listening!
- By N Lane on 10-05-18
By: Bradley Hope, and others
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Black Edge
- Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
- By: Sheelah Kolhatkar
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Steven A. Cohen changed Wall Street. He and his fellow pioneers of the hedge fund industry didn’t lay railroads, build factories, or invent new technologies. Rather, they made their billions through financial speculation, by placing bets in the market that turned out to be right more often than not.
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Amazing book about trading that feels like an adventure novel
- By Tim S on 05-24-18
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Codename Nemo
- The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and the Elusive Enigma Machine
- By: Charles Lachman
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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On June 4, 1944, the course of World War II was forever changed. That day, a US Navy task force achieved the impossible—capturing a German U-Boat. Called Operation Nemo, it was the first seizure of an enemy ship in battle since the War of 1812, one of the greatest achievements of the US Navy and a victory that shortened the duration of the war. A deeply researched, fast-paced World War II narrative for the ages, Charles Lachman’s white-knuckled war saga and thrilling cat-and-mouse game is told through the eyes of the men on both sides of Operation Nemo.
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The writing drew me back in time the narration made it feel current
- By CE on 06-17-24
By: Charles Lachman
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Ghost Wars
- The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
- By: Steve Coll
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 26 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan. With the publication of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998.
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An Exceptional Accomplishment
- By Joe on 11-08-13
By: Steve Coll
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American Kingpin
- The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
- By: Nick Bilton
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free.
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An honest portrait of DPR
- By Victor on 05-18-17
By: Nick Bilton
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Skunk Works
- A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed
- By: Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, the never-before-told story behind America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies. Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of Cold War confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds.
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Ben Rich's life story...but not in that order
- By Allstar on 11-05-16
By: Ben R. Rich, and others
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The Death of Expertise (2nd Edition)
- The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
- By: Tom Nichols
- Narrated by: Tom Nichols
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Over the past several years, the rise of populism and conspiracy theories have taken this to new levels. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.
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Insightful
- By Lion on 05-11-25
By: Tom Nichols
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House of Huawei
- The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company
- By: Eva Dou
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.
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Excellent work
- By Suzi on 05-26-25
By: Eva Dou
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Barbarians at the Gate
- The Fall of RJR Nabisco
- By: Bryan Burrough, John Helyar
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A number-one New York Times best seller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco. An enduring masterpiece of investigative journalism by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, it includes a new afterword by the authors that brings this remarkable story of greed and double-dealings up to date 20 years after the famed deal.
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Good book but too dense
- By Andrew M. on 08-01-21
By: Bryan Burrough, and others
Incredible but true story.
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Disheartening and compelling
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WHAT?
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I was thinking this should be made into a movie, and I thought to myself who would play fat. Leonard, and I thought it would be a fun role for The Rock. And then it turns out that wild fat Leonard was talking to a journalist, he thought it should be developed into a movie and then The Rock should play him.
The truth is stranger than fiction.
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Simply WOW!
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Outstanding dive into a dark story for the Pacific Fleet
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Well researched book!
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Compelling
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Totally believable accounting of what happened. My respect for military officers left me in the 1908’s as I worked for Generals and had several eye opening instances. This book is very captivating and frustrating yet it was good to have closure of the incident. Now I’d like to hear a book about “Tail hook” another USN happening. This is long and so worth the investment of time.
Amazing story
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The Navy as a criminal organization
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