A gavel rests on the judge’s bench in the courtroom of the 39th Air Base Wing legal office at Nov. 14, 2019, at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey. (Joshua Jospeh Magbanu/U.S. Air Force)
(Tribune News Service) — A former U.S. Navy officer has been sentenced for conspiring to steal over $850,000 in military gear and selling it to buyers in other countries, federal officials said.
Richard Allen, 53, pleaded guilty Aug. 29 to conspiracy and six counts of money laundering. Now, he’ll serve 18 months in prison followed by three years of federal supervised release, the United States Attorney’s Office said in a Nov. 21 news release.
Allen was also required to pay “$100,000 plus any sum obtained through forfeiture and directed to restitution.”
The maximum penalties Allen faced were 125 years in prison and a fine of $3.5 million, court documents said.
“Mr. Allen has unequivocally accepted responsibility for his actions. He realizes that he made very poor decisions,” Melissa Larsen, Allen’s attorney, said in court documents.
Allen — who served the U.S. Navy for more than 20 years before retiring — began the scheme while stationed at Naval Weapons Station in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he had “unfettered” access to warehouses, court documents stated.
Using his access, Allen stole $856,433 worth of Navy gear and supplies, including uniforms, winter gear, flame retardant shirts and pants, soft body armor, goggles, infrared flag patches, Navy SEAL Trident insignia and Small Arms Protective Insert plates, according to court records.
Then, Allen and his co-conspirators sold the military gear to buyers in over 50 countries, including Russia and China, authorities said.
Court documents revealed Allen used an email address hosted on a Russian server to communicate with buyers, even telling one buyer he could “make a wish list.”
He accessed military base police radio codes to monitor activity and make sure the thefts succeeded, authorities said.
“Allen was driven by greed to not only steal and attempt to profit from his crime, but to endanger the very national security he was sworn to uphold,” Special Agent Michael Krol said in the release.
Even after retiring, Allen kept directing the conspiracy and receiving payments for it, according to the release.
One of Allen’s co-conspirators, Matthew Thomas Deleo, was arrested in December 2015. He pleaded guilty to three charges in 2018 and was sentenced to “time served (approximately 19 months), 3 years of supervised release and ordered restitution in the amount of $866,582.97,” court documents said.
The scheme was investigated by Naval Criminal Investigative Service-Northeast Field Office; Defense Criminal Investigative Service-Northeast Field Office; Homeland Security Investigations; Department of Commerce, Office of Export Enforcement-Boston Field Office; and the FBI, according to court documents.
“While the ramifications of this conspiracy’s actions can never fully be known — what with official U.S. Navy gear disseminated to foreign nations — the sentence in this case communicates the gravity of Richard Allen’s betrayal to the country he once honorably served,” said U.S. attorney Zachary Cunha.
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