Leonard Glenn Francis, the Malaysian contractor at the center of the U.S. Navy’s worst-ever bribery and corruption scandal, has asked an appeals court to overturn his 15-year sentence, arguing a San Diego federal judge violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and ignored his poor health and several other factors that should have resulted in a shorter prison term.
The swaggering con man known as “Fat Leonard” because of his enormous size was sentenced in November in San Diego federal court on charges of bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery and conspiracy to defraud the United States out of at least $35 million. He was also sentenced for a conviction of failure to appear in connection with his 2022 escape from house arrest that sparked an international manhunt.
Francis, 60, initially filed his appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals under seal in April. It was unsealed Monday, though details about his health issues were redacted.
“Mr. Francis’s 180-month sentence should be reversed because it is both procedurally and substantively unreasonable and was imposed in violation of Mr. Francis’s constitutional privilege against compelled self-incrimination,” Francis’ attorneys argued in an opening brief. “It fails to properly account for the significant sentencing disparities between Mr. Francis and other defendants who participated in similar conduct (and) puts Mr. Francis’s already ailing health at further risk with no apparent public safety rationale.”
Francis and his attorneys argued U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino “abused (her) discretion” in handing down a sentence that was 40 months longer than what prosecutors recommended and three years longer than any other co-defendant’s sentence.
“This Court should vacate Mr. Francis’s sentence and remand for a full resentencing,” the appeal brief asserts.
The government has not yet filed a brief responding to the appeal, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego declined to comment. Francis’ attorneys also declined to comment.
Given the time he has already spent in custody since his 2013 arrest, Francis has about six years left on his prison term, with an estimated release date in March 2031. But echoing an argument defense attorney Doug Sprague made during the sentencing hearing, his attorneys wrote in the appeal that those six years are “effectively a death sentence” for Francis given his ailing health.
Francis’ sentence stems from the decades he spent bribing a rotating cast of officers from the Navy’s 7th Fleet in the Western Pacific, showering them with lavish dinners, luxury hotel rooms, top-shelf liquor, prostitutes and cash. In turn, those officers steered ships to the Southeast Asian ports controlled by his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia. Francis then charged the Navy heavily inflated prices for his firm’s services, such as security, tugboats, food, water replenishment and trash removal.
Just weeks after his 2013 arrest during a sting operation at his San Diego hotel room, Francis began cooperating with the government and became the key witness in a massive investigation of some 1,000 Navy personnel and the federal prosecution of 36 total defendants, many of them Navy officers who had taken his bribes.
In his appeal, Francis argued that he was unjustly sentenced to a far longer prison term than any other defendant in the case, despite federal rules meant to limit large disparities when judges issue sentences in multi-defendant cases.
Francis’ 15-year sentence was three years longer than the 12-year prison term Sammartino gave a corrupt agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service; that agent later had his sentence reduced to nine years and seven months. Several officers who either pleaded guilty or were convicted by a jury for their role in the corruption scheme had their felony convictions tossed out in favor of misdemeanors amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Those officers faced no time in custody.
Francis argued that they “were in many ways as responsible, if not more responsible, for perpetrating corruption” because they accepted his bribes. He argued that Sammartino failed to consider or meaningfully weigh “why such a significant disparity in sentences was justified in light of the heightened culpability of the officers who betrayed their country and the reductions received by other cooperating defendants.”
He also argued in the appeal that while Sammartino acknowledged his “complex medical needs,” she wrongly broke with federal sentencing guidelines by failing to consider those needs.
“(The judge’s) failure to rationally and meaningfully contend with the assessment of Mr. Francis’s physicians that his complex medical conditions would most effectively be addressed in a non-custodial sentence renders the imposed 180-month sentence unreasonable,” the appeal asserts.
During the sentencing hearing, Sammartino expressed concerns about the lack of answers and accountability related to Francis absconding in 2022. The judge had released him from jail on a medical furlough in 2018 due to a cancer diagnosis and other medical issues. Just weeks before his first scheduled sentencing in September 2022, he cut off his GPS monitor, left the rented mansion where he’d been living and crossed the border into Tijuana. He was captured about two weeks later in Venezuela, where he was held until being brought back in a prisoner swap.
“Neither you nor the government have explained how that escape occurred,” Sammatino said during sentencing.
Francis and his attorneys argued in the appeal that this amounted to Sammartino holding “Francis’s perceived silence against him, in violation of (his) Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination.” The appeal asserted that Fifth Amendment protections extend to sentencing.
“A defendant’s guilty plea does not waive the right to remain silent at sentencing,” Francis’ attorneys argued.
Government attorneys have until July 28 to file their response arguing why Francis’ sentence should be upheld.
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