Third US Official Charged with stealing Iraqi Reconstruction money

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Washington -- Michael Brian Wheeler, 47, of Amherst Junction, Wis., is accused of participating in a bid-rigging scheme in which a contractor and a civilian official of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority were charged earlier. Wheeler was a civil-affairs officer in Hilla, Iraq, in 2003-04, and is the first member of the military to face criminal corruption charges connected to the rebuilding effort.

Robert Stein Jr., who was a comptroller in charge of disbursing $82 million in rebuilding funds in the region south of Baghdad, was charged two weeks ago with accepting $546,000 in illegal payments for steering more than $13 million in contracts to U.S. businessman Philip Bloom. Bloom, who was in Romania, was also charged.

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Congress appropriated more than $20 billion to help rebuild Iraq. Oversight of that spending was controversial from the start because many contracts were issued without full competition in the rush to repair the country's oil and electricity infrastructure. The charges against Wheeler grew out of an audit conducted by the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction.

The government charged that Wheeler and the others stole "hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash" from coalition funds and that he smuggled some of it back into the United States. He allegedly used $58,000 of $100,000 in cash he carried back into the country to buy a variety of "high-end tools" from a Wisconsin fire-alarm company.

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The affidavit also alleges that Wheeler used $69,620 in coalition funds to buy four dozen firearms, including grenade launchers and machine guns. The weapons were supposed to be shipped back to Iraq for the personal protection of coalition employees, but were not.

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Wheeler has been in the military since June 1979 and is a civil-affairs specialist, according to a spokesman for the Army Human Resources Command in St. Louis. He is assigned to the 84th Division in Milwaukee but is not currently on active duty, another Army official said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/02/MNGSNG1SPN1.DTL

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