Recruiting fraud

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Mar/Apr 2001 by Harris, Byron

Enlistees in armed services coached to lie about diplomas

In the Navy, it's known as "the moment of truth" and it happens to all new enlistees within the first 48 hours after their arrival at boot camp. While the "moment of truth" is designed to determine the honesty of the recruits, a WFAA-TV investigation found it also says a lot about the Navy.

The young recruits are tired; they've gone without sleep for as much as a day, and their mental resistance is low. They're ushered into a classroom at Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago, where an officer sternly challenges them on their background.

"If any of you have any problems in your past you've lied to the Navy about, you'd better stand up now and tell us," the officer will say. "If you don't, and the Navy finds out, you'll be prosecuted."

The young men and women are bone-weary, scared and confused by their first encounter with military discipline. Many have been drilled by their recruiters back home not to open their mouths. But some inevitably "come clean" about drug use, criminal behavior or academic deficiencies. In so doing, they end their Navy careers.

The goal of a recruiter is to put young men and women in boot camp, or "butts on the bus" in the Navy vernacular. A WFAA-TV investigation found that recruiters supplied enlistees with hundreds of counterfeit high school diplomas and instructed them to lie about their academic background. At the time of our reports, the Armed Services wanted 95 percent of their enlistees to be high school graduates, because history shows high school grads have a better success rate in boot camp than those who don't complete high school.

Our investigation began in the spring of 1999 when a young woman called us about a young Marine recruit from East Texas. He was her boyfriend, and a ninth-grade dropout, who badly wanted to join the Marines. His recruiter told the youngster he'd need a high school degree to be accepted, and that for $300 he could acquire a diploma and successfully enlist. With the recruiter as a go-between, the $300 was paid to Living Christ Academy in Dallas, more than 100 miles from the young man's home. A "diploma" was issued in the young man's name, even though he never attended classes.

He enlisted and successfully completed boot camp. His troubles began when the Marines discovered the irregularities in his credentials and threatened to throw him out.

We told his story on the air, sending a WFAA-TV intern into Living Christ as part of the report. The school's proprietor told our intern that more than a hundred recruits from the Army, Navy and Air Force obtained diplomas from her school. When we aired the information about Living Christ, we got calls from three other recruits, also high school dropouts, who'd obtained counterfeit diplomas so they could join the Navy.

The Navy had a much more serious problem than the Marines. Navy recruiters had been systematically acquiring counterfeit diplomas for years through a man named John Reynolds who was a "friend" of the armed services. Reynolds, as he admitted when we confronted him in person, simply printed up the phony degrees on his home computer. His diploma-like documents were labeled "Lincoln Academic Academy." Our research showed sometimes he charged recruits $35 to $50 for his services, but that in other instances he simply gave them the diplomas - and fabricated transcripts - for the recruiters to insert in their files. The scheme worked because the Navy apparently never checked the credentials to see if they were authentic, and because the recruiters repeatedly coached the enlistees never to tell about their counterfeit degrees.

"If you don't tell the Navy," the recruiters said, "they'll never know." This finely tuned system broke down when new enlistees spilled the beans during the moment of truth. But the Navy may have found a way around this problem because of the prevalence of drugs in the past of many recruits.

According to the Navy, about a fifth of its recruits - roughly 10,000 young men and women - washed out of boot camp in the fiscal year closest to our reports. The Navy says the overwhelming majority, more than 95 percent, were expelled because of drug problems.

Coincidentally, the three enlistees who came to us also said they were told to lie about drug use. Two of the three said they were habitual marijuana users and told their recruiters about it. The recruiters put them on a regimen of medications intended to cleanse their systems, even giving them a preliminary urine test to determine if they'd pass the Navy's official urinalysis upon induction.

The case of the third recruit may illustrate the Navy's diploma strategy. She enlisted with phony high school credentials, purchased through her recruiter. She confessed to it during the moment of truth. When it came time for her release from the Navy, however, she discovered she was being expelled because of drug use. She did admit to pre-enlistment drug use in an interview after she'd already admitted she entered the Navy with a phony diploma.