Senior Vice President of Defunct Rhode Island Naval Contracting Firm to Plead Guilty in Multi-Million-Dollar Kickback Scheme
| U.S. Attorney’s Office August 04, 2011 |
PROVIDENCE, RI—The senior vice president and director of contracts of now-defunct Advanced Solutions for Tomorrow (ASFT) of Middletown, Rhode Island, and Roswell, Georgia, has agreed to plead guilty to an information charging him with conspiracy to commit bribery, announced United States Attorney Peter F. Neronha.
Patrick Nagle, 50, of Marietta, Georgia, is scheduled to be arraigned in U.S. District Court on August 18, 2011, before Magistrate Judge Lincoln D. Almond.
According to an information and plea agreement filed with the U.S. District Court in Providence, Patrick Nagle served as the senior vice president and director of contracts for ASFT. In this role, he was responsible for the processing and payment of invoices submitted to ASFT. It is alleged that from 1999 through June 2010, the owner of ADQ Associates and then C&S Technology allegedly submitted invoices to Nagle that were false and inflated. Nagle allegedly made payment on these invoices, knowing that the work represented on the invoices had largely not been performed. It is alleged that the payments were made to funnel money to Ralph M. Mariano, a civilian program manager and senior systems engineer with the United States Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) in Newport, R.I and Washington, D.C., and individuals associated with Mariano.
Mariano and a co-defendant, Anjan Dutta-Gupta, of Roswell, GA, founder and president of ASFT, were charged in a Criminal Complaint in February 2010 in connection with an alleged kickback scheme involving approximately $10 million of naval funds. It is alleged that Mariano and Dutta-Gupta participated in a kickback and bribery scheme in which Dutta-Gupta funneled approximately $10 million dollars to Mariano, Mariano’s relatives, and Mariano’s associates in return for Mariano’s role in the funding of Naval contracts to ASFT.
An information is merely an allegation and is not evidence of guilt. A defendant is entitled to a fair trial in which it will be the government’s burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Dutta-Gupta pled guilty in April 2011 in federal court in Providence to one count of bribery of a public official, and is scheduled to be sentenced on December 9, 2011by U.S. District Court Chief Judge Mary M. Lisi; Ralph Mariano is awaiting trial.
The cases are being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew J. Reich, Lee H. Vilker and Dulce Donovan.
This matter is an ongoing, joint investigation being conducted by a team of agents from the DCIS Boston Resident Agency, Northeast Field Office; NCIS, Northeast Field Office; the FBI Providence Resident Agency; and the IRS-CID office in Rhode Island.