I spent 33 years in the military industrial complex on the industrial side. Between 20-30 years ago I was at the dinners where Army officers plowed through lobsters and an amazing number of mixed drinks and chipped in a dollar. I was there, I was told, to create the atmosphere that it was a party and so the company could pick up my tab. (Literally. That is how the Program Manager put it to me, because I did not want to attend.) I have seen some dirty and unseemly things, usually described laughingly over coffee by the people who did them. I asked one PM what was in his little black book. He flipped it over so I could see some entries and said, “I write down every time I supply a prostitute, to whom, the date, etc.” (He specifically dealt with Canada. Which, yes, does have a navy.)
Since then things have changed. The officers who arrive pay for their own dinners and if there is any drinking they pay for their own. The bribes are different now. I was on the way back with our director of manufacturing from an unsuccessful meeting with the Army PM. The director was in very good spirits as our part of the meeting had gone better than I expected. I mentioned how badly it had gone with the Army PM, who had yelled equally at all about our lousy hardware but awarded us more award fee than I expected. He told me that they had already agreed to hire the Army PM as director of Marketing and not to worry. The plan was the Army guy was 18 months from retirement and he was transferring to another post to meet the legal time limit for taking a job with a contractor. We had just gone through the acceptance testing and the other supplier was furious that most of the failures were attributed to them and few to us. I asked about that and the director told me, “He wanted to go to work for them and they turned him down.” Award fee is based on passing the test. The attribution of failures removes money from the pockets of executives for the penalized company. It could be millions of dollars. I have no idea how much the individual company officials got, but our company guys all bought a new car.
I understand how legal cases are built and the problem with me filing a complaint about any of this, is, it’s heresy. I would be labeled a disgruntled employee and fired. You can not make an anonymous complaint and have it taken seriously. Excuses and reasoning to plausibly explain suspicious circumstances would be drafted by people who knew the laws, rules and exceptions by heart. In the end the accuser is destroyed. And, the system is built this way on purpose to prevent innocent men from being railroaded by someone with an grudge towards them. I agree with the way the system is built.
The character, Havelock Pigeon, in my two novels linked below, suffers through incidents that I either experienced or were experienced by people I knew and sat with every day. Much of the plot, minus the briefcase and the high speed chase in the second book, is pretty much spot on in how the seamy underside really works. (Or, worked from about 1985 to 1997 when my job changed and I seldom interfaced directly with customers.)
“heresy” - hearsay.
Amazing story – and incredibly frustrating. I’ll add Havelock’s Inheritance to my endless reading list.