Orchard Park firm to pay fines and restitution, as owner avoids jail time, insists he did nothing wrong
http://www.buffalonews.com
Christopher J. Alf’s company was accused of cheating the government out of millions of dollars by falsely billing his best customer, the U.S. Defense Department.
But when Alf’s company, National Air Cargo of Orchard Park, is sentenced in the case, perhaps as soon as Thursday in U.S. District Court, neither Alf nor anyone in his company will go to jail.
Instead, National Air Cargo has agreed to pay fines and restitution totaling $28 million.
The company pleaded guilty in October to a single count of falsifying records to say that a military shipment arrived on time when it was late.
Alf will continue to make a fortune off a war half a world away.
And he will split time between his palatial $10.4 million home in Boca Raton, Fla., and his summer home — a $2 million lakefront mansion on Old Lake Shore Road in Hamburg.
Alf is one of the Americans who have been made wealthy by an Iraq War whose costs are now approaching $3 trillion.
How did he do it? How did Alf keep the government investigators away from himself and his employees?
He got the best lawyers money could buy.
Alf, 43, an Amherst native, put together a high-priced legal team after the Defense Department and the FBI confronted him with their investigation.
A whistle-blower who is a former company executive told agents that National Air Cargo had repeatedly overcharged the Defense Department for military shipments within the United States from early 1999 until April 2005.
The former executive said the company changed delivery dates on military shipments when it sought payment. The false records showed the goods arrived on time when they actually were late.
The government claimed the company was paid more than $13.8 million based on a series of false statements during a three-year period.
Alf, who with his wife, Lori, has given more than $140,000 in political contributions in recent years, knows his way around Washington, D.C.
To fight the accusations, two Washington attorneys familiar with defense issues were hired: F. Whitten Peters, who was secretary of the Air Force during the Clinton administration, and Terry O’Donnell, former general counsel for the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney’s personal lawyer.
In Buffalo, the city’s top lawyers were hired to represent the company, Alf and his key employees, including his wife, who is National Air Cargo’s former sales director.
An A-list of local lawyers — Paul J. Cambria, Terrance M. Connors, Joel L. Daniels and Rodney O. Personius — were flown to Washington in a private jet last year.
The strategy worked. Nobody at National Air Cargo was charged; no one will go to jail.
And the company will continue to do business with the federal government......
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