(Washington Post) He was a career federal bureaucrat with a dark side, inflating government contracts by millions of dollars and then shaking down contractors for the proceeds.
The money funded a lavish and sordid lifestyle — a real estate empire in Northern Virginia, leased BMWs, Neiman Marcus shopping sprees, and mistresses in three states and the Philippines.
On Thursday, a federal judge sentenced Kerry F. Khan, the mastermind of a contracting scam of “historic proportions,” to nearly two decades behind bars.
It was even more than prosecutors had requested because of the “staggering” scope of the scheme. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said he also wanted to deter other would-be criminals in the billion-dollar world of federal contracting.
“You made history for the wrong reasons,” Sullivan told Khan, 55, a former Army Corps of Engineers program manager and the ringleader of a network of corrupt public officials and government contractors who stole more than $30 million through inflated billings and fake invoices.
U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. has called it the largest bribery and bid-rigging scheme in federal contracting history. . . (read more)
