LAKEWOOD, Wash — Capt. Michael Nguyen had a profitable tour of duty in Iraq — so profitable, in fact, that soon after returning to this working-class neighborhood near the Army’s Fort Lewis, he was parking a Hummer H3T outside his apartment.
Then a $70,000 BMW M-3 showed up. People notice cars like that on a street filled 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 untouched in the bank since his return from Iraq in June 2008, while he was paying credit-card bills for big-ticket electronics, appliances, furniture and guns.
In a federal indictment last month, prosecutors alleged that Nguyen skimmed more than $690,000 in cash while acting as the civil-affairs officer responsible for overseeing millions of dollars intended for reconstruction projects and payments to Iraqi security forces northeast of Baghdad.
Nguyen, 28, a U.S. Military Academy graduate, is accused of packing stacks of cash into boxes and mailing them to his family’s home.
His indictment is one of the latest in a wave of prosecutions emerging from the post-war reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Justice Department has secured more than three dozen bribery-related convictions in the awarding of reconstruction contracts; at least 25 theft investigations are underway.
“This was more cash than Donald Trump had ever seen in his life,” said Robert J. Stein, 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 complex bribery, theft and money-laundering case.
“When you work around money like that,” he told investigators, it becomes, ” ‘So what, it’s just paper.’ ”
Nguyen has pleaded not guilty. Neither he nor his attorney responded to requests for comment.
