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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Graig Graziosi

Conman ‘Fat Leonard’ who swindled the Navy and fled US says ‘it wasn’t rocket science’

A conman known by the nickname “Fat Leonard” has told how he managed not only to embroil the U.S. Navy in a bribery and fraud scandal, but also elude federal law enforcement for more than a year.

“It wasn’t rocket science,” Leonard Glenn Francis, a 61-year-old Malaysian national, told the Washington Post from prison when asked about his escape from house arrest in 2022. “There was a lot of negligence on the government’s part.”

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