Tommy K's Secrets

The Justice Department’s guilty plea with a Greek-born businessman and convicted felon who happened to be a friend of Randy “Duke” Cunningham is extreme even for an executive branch that is not known as a model of openness.

Thomas “Tommy K” Kontogiannis secretly entered a guilty plea on February 23, 2007. Tommy K ran a New York mortgage business (among other things) and admitted paying off Cunningham mortgages in Arlington, Virginia and Rancho Santa Fe, California with what he knew were illegal bribes from Duke and others.

Fairly straightforward, but…the transcript of that plea hearing has been sealed ever since and is the subject of an ongoing battle between prosecutors who want it to stay that way and Larry Burns, the judge in the case who thinks the public is entitled to know more.

This week, the dispute was the subject of a unusual closed-door hearing before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Prosecutors apparently didn’t like the way the winds were blowing in that hearing so they have agreed to release most of the transcripts at issue.

So what is going on here? There’s a lot of speculation in the blogosphere about a trip to Saudi Arabia that Cunningham made with Tommy K. But I think the truth is that all this secrecy has nothing to do with the Cunningham case.

The court documents help clear the fog a little bit. Following his guilty plea, Tommy K wasn’t fingerprinted for security reasons. (They already have them on file from Tommy K’s guilty plea years earlier to passport fraud)

More interesting, as part of the conditions setting his release, Tommy K was allowed to travel outside the United States in the company of “agents.” The court’s order setting release says: “Surrender passport to specific agents w/in 2 weeks. Dft can travel w/agents.”

Hmmm. There’s a lot of “specific agents” at a certain three-letter agency that does all its work (we hope) overseas. Bear in mind that while trying to keep the information about the plea secret, prosecutors invoked a law dealing with the handling of classified information, a law that almost always applies to CIA work. At least one transcript of a hearing was stamped “classified” by the government.

Given the extraordinary precautions in this case, it’s apparent that Tommy K had something to offer the U.S. intelligence community in this case. Since the intelligence community is all about rooting out terrorists, I would suspect that, unlikely as it may sound, he had something to offer in that department.

We’ll see what the transcripts say when they’re released. Judge Burns was out of town this week, so we’ll have to wait.

Eskimo defense contractors

The frozen, northernmost reaches of the United States are home to the Inupiat people, more commonly known as Ekimos. They subsist on fishing and the hunting of seals, walrus and whales. They also run a successful defense contracting firm providing services to the U.S. intelligence community. To that, they owe a debt to Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

TKC Communications LLC of Anchorage, Alaska, does work for the Department of Justice, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Center, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, and the National Security Agency, according to its Website. The company also contracts with all four branches of the military, including for work in Iraq, as well as the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State (which is sometimes a wink-wink way of saying the CIA).

TKC Communications is one of more than 150 Alaskan native-owned companies doing government work. Others include Alutiiq Management Services LLC which is renovating State Department offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Ahtna Technical Services Inc. is hiring cooks for a federal jail in Texas.

Government contractors like these companies because they are a quick, easy and legal method of awarding contracts of any value, and in 2004, the Alaskan native companies received more than $1 billion worth of government work, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Profits from these ventures are returned in the form of shares to the Inupiat.

Their special status allows them to receive contracts without any competition, so-called “sole source” contracts. There have been numerous problems with some of these sole-source contracts, which is how I came across this subject. TKC Communications’ $100 million, 10-year contract to provide office space for CIFA in Arlington, Va., not only cost too much but also may have violated the law. But that’s more the fault of the boobs at CIFA, who when told the contracts might violate the law, refused to halt them.

The Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 created the Alaskan native companies as a way of settling the Inupiat’s aboriginal land claims. The act divided nearly $1 billion and 44 million acres amongst Alaskan native peoples, and allowed construction of the Alaskan pipeline. The bill was introduced by Ted Stevens, then in his first term, and was subsequently ratified by the Inupiat. Stevens, now one of the Senate’s old bulls, had his home searched earlier this week in a widening criminal bribery probe.

In 2003, shortly before his 80th birthday, Stevens told a gathering of Alaskan natives:

“I have long been concerned about what will happen when I can no longer deliver the funds you need. I want to ensure, to the best of my ability, that we have built programs for the Native community that are sustainable well into the future. I have been working toward that end. “

That’s a worthy goal. Stevens may or may not be corrupt. He may be out-of-touch likening the Internet to “a series of tubes.” But he deserves our praise for giving the Inupiat a seat at the rich government contracting feast. There is no way that a group of walrus-hunters could have gotten there without help from the man who represents them. Compare that to Duke Cunningham, who gave favors away to people like Mitch Wade who couldn’t even vote for him.

Instead of ruining their Native lands by plopping a casino-resort in the middle of it (casinos aren’t allowed in Alaska), the Inupiat are creating a business venture and acquiring the skills that come with to the benefit of future generations. There’s the old saw about teaching a man to fish vs. giving him one. I suspect the Inupiat know all about that.