It’s official: the Virginia defense facility run — on taxpayer dollars — by one of the central felons in the Duke Cunningham scandal is closing Monday.
The news comes just days after the Pentagon announced it would not renew the contract for the Martinsville-based Foreign Supplier Assessment Center, which was created and sustained largely through earmarks from Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA). Goode received over $90,000 in contributions from Mitchell Wade, who’s spilling his guts to federal investigators in an attempt to dodge jail time.
Who’s it bad news for? Just about everyone involved. Goode’s getting slammed for bringing MZM to town, winning the company unusually generous financial perks and sending the bill to the city. “Rep. Goode forgot whom he should represent when he brokered a deal favorable to campaign contributors at the risk of his district,” the Roanoke (Va.) Times opined Saturday.
It’s bad news for MZM — now Athena Innovative Solutions. Sources tell me this is not the only one of their contracts getting cut. The Pentagon trimmed more than 30 positions from an Athena contract to provide employees to the Counterintelligence Field Activity office (CIFA), according to two former MZM employees who are in touch with current Athena staffers.
And it’s bad news for the burg of Martinsville, an “economically strapped city” which, by the terms of the deal brokered by Goode, will have to repay as much as $500,000 now due to state business development offices because MZM/Athena has broken its promise to hire 150 employees at the FSAC.
As a sad postscript to all this, the Waldo Jacquith blog turned up a video of the FSAC groundbreaking in 2003. The event featured all the clipart-style trappings of red-state patriotism: exhortations to God and country, a local high school Junior ROTC color guard, a Baptist minister — even an American flag which had flown over the U.S. Capitol and the U.S. Military HQ in Iraq.
The recording features one touch of unintentional dark humor: “[Mitchell Wade] is a very influential person who definitely has an impact on my future,” it shows MZM exec Richard Berglund saying. Berglund recently pleaded guilty to helping Wade commit fraud, and is now cooperating with the same investigators as Wade.
Aside from that, it’s just a sorry demonstration of how grateful a local community can be made to feel even as they’re being used as part of a larger scam — one that will eventually take them along with the other marks. Kind of like “The Music Man,” without the happy ending.
