U.S. Aide Accused of Graft in Iraq Had a Shadowy Past (NYT)

One of them dressed all in black, Johnny Cash style, even in the summer in Iraq, where the temperature often rose above 120 degrees. The other put up huge blue-and-white signs advertising one of his companies - GBG Logistics - that remain standing even now along the dangerous road to the Baghdad airport, after car bombs and firefights have destroyed nearly everything else around them.

This week these two Americans, Robert J. Stein Jr. and Philip H. Bloom, were charged in federal court with working together in a bribery and kickback scandal. Mr. Stein, the one who favored the black attire, worked for the American occupation authorities as a comptroller and financial officer and is accused of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to steer lucrative reconstruction contracts to Mr. Bloom's companies.

The work done for those contracts, amounting to at least $13 million in the area around the southern city of Hilla, was either never done or was of such poor quality as to make the results almost useless, according to reports by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Problems included computers that were never delivered, renovation work that was never carried out and buildings that began falling down almost as soon as they were built.

"It's the most shoddy work I've ever seen from a contractor," said a State Department official who was stationed in Hilla and inspected some of the work at first hand. "It's a disaster." The official requested anonymity to preserve his ability to continue to work in Iraq.


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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/international/middleeast/19reconstruct.html