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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A former Utah National Guard soldier who pleaded guilty in a scheme to pocket thousands of dollars in bogus recruitment bonuses was sentenced to five years' probation Thursday in an agreement with federal prosecutors.
Jesse Lee Howell was 19 when his supervisor, started feeding him recruits' information so he could collect and share bonuses worth a total of $10,000 between 2007 and 2009, according to prosecutors.
The charges came as part of a national investigation into what military authorities called widespread fraud involving hundreds of soldiers around the country who took advantage of the recruitment-bonus program to take fraudulent payments and kickbacks. Two other Utah soldiers were also charged with defrauding the program in separate cases that are still ongoing.
"It was pretty rampant nationwide," said prosecutor Alicia Cook during a sentencing hearing in Salt Lake City on Thursday. Cook said Howell, now 26, cooperated with the investigation. In exchange for a guilty plea on a felony wire fraud charge, prosecutors dropped nine other fraud and theft charges.
U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby also ordered Howell to pay the Army $18,500 in restitution in a deal he called fair and reasonable.
"I'm confident this was a one-off event for you," he said. Howell didn't speak during the hearing Thursday, but attorney Darwin Overson said he was satisfied with the resolution.
Howell and his supervisor, recruiter James Keith Summers, were assigned to work in the recruitment office in Riverdale in 2007, when the National Guard was offering bonuses to soldiers who brought in new enlistees, according to charging documents.
Prosecutors say that Summers fed Howell information about seven people who came in to enlist on their own. Howell claimed that he'd recruited the new enlistees himself. He collected the recruitment bonuses and gave Summers cash, the charges allege.
Summers has pleaded not guilty to fraud and theft charges and is scheduled to make an appearance in his case May 4. His defense attorneys didn't immediately return messages seeking comment.
The recruitment program was put in place in 2005 to boost flagging enlistment during a crucial period of the Iraq War. Recruiters weren't eligible for the bonuses worth $2,000 to $7,500 per recruit, but many recruiters around the country worked around the prohibition, military investigators said last year.
In some cases, recruiting assistants eligible for the payments were coerced into splitting their bonuses with military recruiters. In other cases, military recruiters registered civilian assistants about the bonuses for the program without informing them, and then substituted their own bank information for that of the civilian assistants.
The army launched a recruitment-bonus fraud investigation last year that involved some 1,200 people across the country and cost the National Guard at least $29 million. The program was shut down in 2012.
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