The defense contracting business Brent Wilkes started and owned may have been a small one, but it ranked high in importance for former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, according to testimony at Wilkes' bribery trial yesterday.
Federal prosecutors spent another day presenting witnesses who detailed steps Cunningham took to secure contracts and funding from Pentagon programs to benefit ADCS Inc., Wilkes' Poway firm.
To prove bribery, the government has to show a pattern of gift-giving to Cunningham in exchange for a series of actions taken by Cunningham that favored Wilkes.
Wilkes has pleaded not guilty.
Cunningham, a Republican from Rancho Santa Fe, is serving an eight-year federal prison sentence for conspiracy and tax evasion.
This week, the testimony in Wilkes' trial in San Diego has largely focused on the second part of that equation – Cunningham's actions that prosecutors say assisted ADCS, which was awarded $85 million in government contracts between 1997 and 2004.
Yesterday Cunningham's former legislative director, Nancy Lifset, testified that Wilkes and another defense contractor, Mitchell Wade, got the lion's share of Cunningham's time and attention.
In an April 2000 memo shown to the jury, Cunningham ranked projects that would benefit ADCS as his highest legislative priority, Lifset said. The company's contracts outranked a program for San Diego-based telecom company Qualcomm and a $142 million project for ship depot maintenance, Lifset said.
Lifset, who worked as a congressional staffer for more than two decades, said the attention was unusual because Wilkes' company was a small defense contractor.
A former Pentagon program manager, Roy Reed, testified that Cunningham became upset in 2000 when $4 million he wanted to go to ADCS for converting paper documents to electronic form was blocked by a Pentagon official.
Cunningham turned up the pressure – threatening to have the official, Cheryl Roby, fired – and the issue became a “political hot potato,” Reed said.
Eventually the Pentagon found the money. Reed said it was stripped from a special anti-terrorism funding bill Congress passed after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Lou Kratz, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense at the Pentagon, testified that Wilkes acted as if he was “entitled” to a chunk of millions of dollars Congress appropriated in the 1999 defense budget for the document conversion program.
Cunningham intervened and pressured Kratz numerous times in 1999 and 2000 – once reaching him by telephone when Kratz was in Belgium for a NATO meeting, he said.
Eventually the Pentagon directed $10 million in contracts to Wilkes' company, Kratz said. “It was done to appease Congressman Cunningham.”
Prosecutors contend Wilkes plied Cunningham with gifts and bribes in exchange for Cunningham steering government contracts to his company.
Greg Moran: (619) 542-4586; greg.moran@uniontrib.com
