Amazing! This has happened before, and if this woman has been doing this since the mid-80’s the investigators need to keep digging and see if they missed her during the past investigations of the fraud involved with the largest public bond defaults in history, the Washington Public Power debacle.
I was an outside salesman for a Seattle Steel Processing and Valve Company back in the early ‘80’s. We sold pipe, valves and domestic rolled and cold forged steel.
The state of Washington had decided to build a series of nuclear reactors for power generation. It was called the Washington Public Power System or Whoops, for short.
The contracts called for us and every industrial supplier to provide domestically produced materials with independent lab certification. We had a crew that did nothing but prepare samples of inventory to metallurgical sampling for the WPPS buyers.
During this time, government construction was booming. WPPS, The Washington State Ferry system was building 8 or 9 new Evergreen Class ferries, Boeing was ramping up cruise missile and space craft assemblies and the Navy was building new everything at the 3 Harbor Island shipyards.
Domestic steel, pipe and valves were hard to get because of demand. So there were a few bad actors who started faking certs and actually painting or altering the appearance of imported products to match the domestic counterparts.
The WPPS failed resulting in the largest US Bond failure in American history. A whistleblower informed the Justice Department about the widespread fraud and the FBI swooped in and started looking for suspect lot numbers of steel and valve inventories.
The FBI took 20 tons of steel and valves to verify from my employer. We didn’t doctor any material. However, there were National steel and valve executives who did and if my memory serves me correctly, a senior Vice President of Familian Plumbing, I believe, actually did some time in the gray bar hotel.
Jail this SOB and throw away the key. I guarantee she remembers the time I just described.
Did she test for bridges, buildings too?