Allegations of a kickback scheme in Aquidneck Island’s defense industry reverberate from Middletown

Allegations of a kickback scheme in Aquidneck Island’s defense industry reverberate from Middletown to Washington
By John E. Mulligan
Journal Washington Bureau
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 13, 2011

WASHINGTON — Charges of a $10-million kickback scheme inside the Navy’s premier submarine research plant have sent shockwaves from the tightly knit defense community on Aquidneck Island to Rhode Island’s congressional delegation on Capitol Hill, and beyond.

So far, the allegations involve only two men: Ralph M. Mariano, a senior program officer at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, and Anjan Dutta-Gupta, proprietor of Advanced Solutions for Tomorrow, which has a high-tech defense contracting office in Middletown. The bribery case encompasses a tiny fraction of the more than $1 billion that the Newport-based weapons industry generates every year for the state’s economy.

But last week’s criminal complaint against the pair has reverberated loudly through a Navy complex that, since the fleet left Narragansett Bay in the 1970s, has quietly pioneered generations of sophisticated weaponry — from the Tomahawk missiles that opened the attack on the Taliban after Sept. 11, 2001, to the array of experimental robot subs that loom so large for the underwater warfare and spycraft of the future.

Keith Stokes, executive director of the Economic Development Corporation, said, “I was speechless” after U.S. Attorney Peter F. Neronha announced the charges involving Advanced Solutions last Tuesday. Stokes said it’s hard to overestimate the importance of the submarine industry’s “high-end, high-skill, highly paid jobs” in the local economy — not to mention the industry’s role in the nation’s defense.

Counting the Navy’s civilian employees and the many outside contractors working there at any given time, the warfare center (also known as NUWC) employs several thousand. Dozens of contractors in Southeastern New England serve the submarine Navy.

this is fascinating.

i note the appearance of more 'surprised' people.