The Vegas sting: A cunning FBI trap set by a cocaine-addicted stool pigeon ensnared this British businessman and destroyed his life. The only problem? He was innocent

In the chill of a Nevada morning, David Painter left his Las Vegas hotel. Wearing a Hugo Boss suit and a blue Brooks Brothers shirt, a Rolex on his wrist, he bore the anonymous affluence of business travel. For a defence industry executive his first diary appointment was routine: a weapons demonstration at a training range just outside the city limits.

It was as his 4x4 arrived at the range that the FBI SWAT team appeared to take him down. Four hulking police commandos in body armour, jackboots, helmets and goggles thrust their semi-automatic rifles through his car door. ‘Shut up and get out,’ they ordered, the array of close combat weapons on their waist belts brooking no refusal.

The middle-aged Briton was handcuffed and led at gunpoint into a pastel two-storey classroom building. There on a desk he found a large cardboard box awaiting his briefcase and laptop, his telephone and wallet. On it was stapled his mug shot and a charge sheet. Across the top were the typewritten words ‘Armed and Dangerous’.

Painter was neither. He was the Surrey-based chief executive of 3S (Security Support Solutions Ltd), a company licensed and audited by the British Government to supply civilian armoured vehicles for use in conflict zones including Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. He was also, it was to emerge that day in Vegas, the victim of a huge, sleazy and ultimately doomed FBI operation known as The Africa Sting.

The project had been set up as a fake $15 million deal to arm the presidential guard of the Omar Bongo regime in the West African nation of Gabon. It had been created by the American Department of Justice (DoJ) and run by the FBI (unbeknown to Bongo). They designed it to be a deadly weapon in their arsenal against corruption but the biggest investigation of its type in DoJ-FBI history brought only humiliation, controversy and complete legal defeat.

David Painter’s liberty, home and business were the collateral damage. After his arrest in January 2010 he was jailed for five weeks.

Once bailed, he had to sell his much-loved £1.5 million Surrey home and liquidate shares and pensions to pay legal fees and costs amounting to £1 million. 3S has ceased trading.

In February this year the DoJ asked a judge to dismiss all charges made against him with prejudice, which means they can never be revisited. The same was true of his 21 co-accused. In the end, nobody ensnared by the fictitious Gabon deal was convicted.

Presiding Judge Richard Leon of Washington Federal District Court called the fiasco ‘the end of a long and sad chapter in the annals of white-collar criminal law enforcement’. He accused the DoJ of promulgating a ‘very, very aggressive conspiracy theory that was pushing its already generous elasticity to its outer limits’, adding ‘the elastic snapped in the absence of the necessary evidence to sustain it’. He was also obliged to chastise prosecutors for ‘sharp practices which have no place in a federal court room’.

All of which means The Africa Sting case raises troubling questions about the integrity of the American judicial system and the likely fortunes of British nationals extradited to face it.

Today Painter, 58, sits at a borrowed desk in a borrowed office, starting his career afresh. Home is a modest house in Surrey bought by his wife Judy.

It was, he says, ‘like having a bomb dropped on your life. There is a dark side to our world, a place beyond our control where governments and their agents can do what they want.

‘My life is the flotsam left in the wake of America’s obsession with policing the world. I have never contravened the rigorous controls and laws in my line of business,’ he states firmly.

‘The Gabon deal was drip-fed to me by someone who had worked for a blue-chip defence company and whose then wife was a former American Ambassador to the UN.

There was nothing to make a decent man walk away from the table. West Africa is a notoriously difficult area to do business with; bribery exists but over and over, with the complicity of the DoJ and FBI, I was told this deal had been approved by the US State Department.’

Ruefully he adds: ‘I was sceptical – but only because I was concerned it might not be big enough to be worth my while . . .’

Meeting him now, dapper and proper in an old-fashioned English way, it is hard to imagine his immersion into the American prison system.

There he slept on a concrete floor; was stripped naked, bent over and searched in public; shared an open latrine in a cell with two dozen inmates and was handcuffed, shackled and chained at the waist when he was moved.

He learned to block out the howling madness of 24-hour-a-day electric light and television with DIY ear plugs made from toilet roll and cling-film.

At home, he had enjoyed executive lunches and flew on British Airways. In America, he survived on stale baloney sandwiches and long-life milk and was transported on ‘Con Air’, the infamous aviation network that relocates inmates from one prison to another.

Cuffed to his own seat and shackled to the one in front, he remembers one flight where a fellow prisoner – an obvious informant – plied him for information to pass on to the guards. On another flight, his neighbour had a skeleton tattooed across his bald head.

Five weeks after his arrest when he was finally arraigned and bailed by a court in Washington DC, he was spat out of the prison system a stone-and-a-half lighter and with its standard welfare package: a twin pack of condoms, a list of homeless shelters and a bus ticket. He emerged late at night during a snow storm in XXXL jogging bottoms and canvas prison shoes.

‘That was a highlight,’ he grimaces. ‘I’d rank it alongside the morning I was transported from Las Vegas to San Bernadino in California chained into the back of a prison wagon with two noisy Mexican hookers and a man in a spit mask, a plastic hood that covered his whole head from the neck up [to prevent him spitting at the guards].

‘Or the time when I was being strip-searched in Washington and the huge bloke next to me turned out to be in possession of breasts and a penis.

‘There were moments of humour, but it was mostly a matter of survival. I was locked in cells with up to 90 other men, from Mafia types and Hispanic drug barons to fathers who’d committed mortgage fraud.

‘I learned not to ask to watch the news, not to snore, not to be embarrassed about my body and to zone out.

‘It was rough. I saw men being pepper-sprayed. I went hungry and thirsty and was perpetually cold. The whole experience is designed to make you feel precisely what you are: crushable.’

The question must be why did the DoJ and FBI wish to crush David Painter? And the answer lies in the recent history of its prosecutions under America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which makes it illegal for any individual or corporation with business in America to bribe a foreign official.

Investigations into household-name companies such as Siemens and BAE Systems had resulted in multiple non-prosecution agreements in which multi-million- dollar fines had been paid to the US government but no guilty executives put in the dock. It was starting to look unjust. Added to which, the department had suffered several well-publicised defeats in its prosecution of FCPA cases and was determined to reverse its fortunes.

In 2009 it concocted The Africa Sting which, according to the FBI’s PR machine, was designed to ‘play out with all the intrigue of a spy novel’. A Confidential Human Source – a stool pigeon – was to front a deal to arm the Gabonese presidential guard.

But the contracts, for everything from body armour to armoured cars, would be subject to a 20 per cent commission, half of which would go to the Gabonese Minister of Defence, Ali Bongo, son of the then president – and now president himself – and the other half to a sales agent. At least, that is what the FBI later claimed.

Anyone transacting the proposed contract would be in violation of the FCPA. However, the words bribe or kickback were never employed by the sting’s players. The payment was simply listed as a ‘commission’, its true nature concealed from the executives to whom it was offered. It led the foreman of the jury, which eventually tried six of David Painter’s co-accused, to reveal the underlying view of the jurors was that ‘the defendants had acted in good faith and the DoJ-FBI in bad faith’.

The sting was pitched to Painter by a man called Richard Bistrong whom he once considered a trusted associate and family friend. They first met in 2006, when Bistrong was the international vice-president of a major US defence company called Armor Holdings. Tall, tanned and urbane, he was then married to diplomat Nancy Soderberg, an American ambassador to the UN and a key aide to Bill Clinton.

But despite his polished appearance, Bistrong was in deep legal trouble having been caught violating the FCPA and other statutes while working for Armor Holdings. He had conspired to pay bribes to win a UN contract to supply body armour. In February 2009, the DoJ offered him a plea bargain whereby he would receive a maximum five-year jail term in return for an admission of guilt. (It is expected to be handed down to him by Judge Richard Leon on July 31.)

The DoJ insisted that, as part of the deal, he re-entered the defence industry on the FBI payroll as an informant. Bistrong indiscriminately targeted 22 people who were immediately nicknamed the ‘Catch 22’. Among them was David Painter. The victims included a former deputy director of the US Secret Service who had retired after a distinguished career.

Bistrong dangled a deal to supply $10,000 worth of night-vision goggles to Gabon. Painter passed the invitation to his American parent company, pointing out he was not licensed or qualified to sell them. Bistrong told him phase two of the tender could include armoured cars, his speciality. Painter was interested and, although he had signed nothing and funded nothing, Bistrong had done enough to put him in the FBI’s sights.

Next, the Bureau needed to choreograph a meeting of all The Africa Sting suspects to create a core charge of conspiracy. To coincide with a big Washington trade fair, which Painter was attending, Bistrong invited him and others to a ‘reception’ to meet the Gabonese agent brokering the deal – in reality an FBI man with a French accent likened in court to Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau.

At a restaurant in downtown Washington DC, Painter and the other victims ate canapes and drank beer. FBI agents mingled covertly among them reading from prepared scripts designed to entrap. Satisfied it had nailed the conspiracy, the FBI then moved to carry out its stunning military-style take down in Las Vegas.

‘After I was arrested I felt as if I’d just dropped off the radar of my real life, as though I’d disappeared into the American prison system and would never be discovered,’ says Painter now.

‘I had no access to an international telephone or money, no lawyer, no useful communication from my own government. I got one visit from a British consular official in Las Vegas who had come to check up on my medical welfare. He looked like Mr Bean.’

He was moved from Vegas to San Bernadino and from there on ‘Con Air’ to Oklahoma. From Oklahoma he was shuttled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from where he was driven to his arraignment and bail hearing in Washington DC on February 17.

Freed, but required to stay within a 25-mile radius of Washington city centre, his first thought was to be reunited with Judy, who immediately flew to his side.

‘I don’t think,’ he says allowing himself a smile, ‘the taxi driver who dropped her off quite knew where to put himself. It meant everything to be back together.’

In May 2010, with The Africa Sting case already generating legal controversy in America, a court permitted Painter to come home. Judy and the children, a son now 25 and a daughter now 22, met him at Heathrow. Painter then worked on his defence as he would a job. He had been fired by his parent company and faced a potential 25-year jail term. He declined to plea bargain.

‘After I was arrested I felt as if I’d just dropped off the radar of my real life, as though I’d disappeared into the American prison system and would never be discovered,' said David Painter

‘My dramatic arrest and the way I was treated in prison was to soften me up for a plea bargain. Ninety per cent of people in my situation accept one because of the almost insurmountable odds against fighting the limitless resources of the DoJ.

‘But I am not the kind of man to perjure myself in court. I could not confess to something I had not done. We sold our home and cashed up the fruits of a lifetime of work to fund the fight.’

Back in America, three Africa Sting defendants did accept the offer of a lesser sentence in return for a guilty plea. The subsequent dismissal of all charges against all defendants included their plea bargains. Their confessions were overturned by Judge Richard Leon.

The first four accused went to trial in May 2011. That hearing ended with a combination of dismissed charges and a mistrial being declared.

The second six defendants went to trial the following September and it was then that their nemesis Bistrong was unveiled as the FBI’s star witness.

Under cross-examination, Bistrong’s appetites for cocaine and alcohol and his predilection for prostitutes were exposed, as was his own history as a law breaker.

He admitted he had lied to the defendants and misled them. There was also the revelation of strings of seedy text messages about sex, cigars and sport between Bistrong and his FBI handlers, which fatally damaged what was left of his – and their – credibility.

That case ended in January 2012 without a single conviction but with a legally confused picture of dismissed charges (including the conspiracy charge at the heart of the DoJ’s case), three acquittals, and another mistrial.

Two weeks later, the DoJ admitted that ‘continued prosecution of this case is not warranted’ and requested the motion to dismiss, which was granted. David Painter was shopping in Waitrose at the time.

The DoJ won’t relent. ‘Our FCPA enforcement efforts are broader than one case,’ said a government spokeswoman.

‘We will continue to vigorously investigate and prosecute acts of foreign bribery covered by this important law and to hold accountable those businesses and individuals who seek to illegally obtain business through bribery of foreign officials.’

David and Judy Painter are, as they say, slowly ‘righting the ship’ but they were holed beneath their safe, English middle-class water line by the self-righteous cannons of American justice.

‘I tell the story of the Gabon deal and think, “You couldn’t make it up ......’ Painter says. ‘But, of course, they did.’

Original report




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