Federal offense: Fake war heroism

by John Crewdson

Dick Agnew, a retired Army major, was hunting for a parking place at Dallas Ft. Worth International Airport when something stopped him cold.

Agnew had just passed a car bearing a rare Legion of Valor license plate, an honor Texas reserves for its most exalted military heroes.

"I know everybody's car," said Agnew, the Legion's commander for north Texas who received the Distinguished Service Cross in Korea after killing an enemy sentry in hand-to-hand combat despite a broken ankle. "Nobody in our organization has a maroon 2001 Chevy."

Agnew also recalled spotting a paper cutout of the Navy Cross, the Navy's second-highest decoration for bravery after the Medal of Honor, taped to the inside of the rear window. With a little detective work, he determined that the car belonged to a screener for the Transportation Security Administration assigned to DFW airport.

Further checking showed the man wasn't a Legion member, did not hold the Navy Cross and had no right to be sporting the Legion's license plates.

In the view of many veterans and others, unauthorized use of the Legion's plates amounts to a slur against actual medal recipients, including some among the nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed and the more than 30,000 wounded in Iraq.

As the bogus Legion members may soon find out, such deceptions entail not only an insult, but a crime. A little-known federal statute imposes criminal penalties on those convicted of falsely claiming to have been awarded a medal of valor.

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The law was signed in December 2006, when Congress and President George W. Bush combined to enact what has become known as the "Stolen Valor Act."

Since then, those who in an earlier era might have been dismissed as barroom blowhards are being brought before the federal courts, convicted, fined and sentenced to prison after suspicious co-workers, former comrades-in-arms or jilted lovers alert authorities.

It had long been against the law to wear an unauthorized military decoration. Before the new law, however, prosecutions were difficult because a photograph of the alleged impostor wearing the medal was necessary for charges to be brought.

Under the new law, it is illegal not only to wear but to buy, sell, barter, trade or manufacture "any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the armed forces of the United States, or any of the service medals or badges awarded to the members of such forces."

No false claims permitted
For the first time, moreover, the law prohibits even a false claim, orally or in writing, to have been awarded any badge or medal authorized for the military by Congress.

The latter provision may present legal difficulties for anyone who, in a moment of misguided grandeur or for more nefarious reasons, awards himself an unearned decoration for heroism while composing a résumé or filling out a biographical questionnaire.

The recent law imposes a maximum penalty of $10,000 and 1 year in prison for offenses involving the Medal of Honor or one of the military's three other top decorations: the Army's Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross or the Air Force Cross.

One of the four is required for induction into the Legion of Valor, which has only about 800 members nationwide. Offenses involving lesser medals carry a maximum of 6 months in jail.

The Tribune counted about 20 prosecutions nationwide since the Stolen Valor law took effect early last year, but the number of cases appears to be rising as knowledge of the law spreads.

8 facing loss of plates
Agnew said his group intends to provide the names of the fabricators it unearths to the FBI for investigation of possible violations of the Stolen Valor Act.

When Agnew reported the screener to an FBI agent late last year, Agnew said he was "told to back off, that we'll handle it, it's a federal offense."

Agnew, who at 77 still works out five times a week, runs his own consulting business and is best described as feisty, did not back off. Instead, he prevailed on Phil Conran, a retired Air Force colonel who is the Legion's national adjutant, to obtain a list of everyone in Texas to whom Legion of Valor plates had been issued.

When the list was produced last fall, it contained 67 names for all of Texas; several were unfamiliar to Agnew.

"I'm going down this list and I said, 'Holy smoke, we don't have this many in Texas,' " he said.

Kim Sue Lia Perkes, a spokeswoman for the Texas vehicle licensing bureau, said that when Agnew asked the bureau to take another look at the TSA screener's application for his Legion of Valorplates, "we decided to start looking at all of our Legion of Valor plate holders."

In March, Perkes said, letters were sent to 11 individuals asking that they resubmit proof of their entitlement to use the plates "either because there was missing paperwork or we deemed the paperwork suspicious."

As a result of the letter, Perkes said, "we are in the process of canceling eight Legion of Valor license plate holders" who could not prove that they held one of the four qualifying medals.

Perkes said that the bureau intends to alert Texas state police "about any impostors we may find" and that "we will also be talking to the FBI."

Free parking
Apart from the silent tribute paid by the special plates, Dallas and other Texas cities allow drivers who display them to ignore parking meters and to park for free at state facilities, including airports such as DFW, where valet parking for travelers can run to $24 a day.

The Legion is by its nature one of the most exclusive organizations in the world. At least a half-dozen states, not including Illinois, offer special plates to Legion members. (Illinois does, however, offer 16 kinds of military license plates, including one for ex-prisoners of war, another for Medal of Honor recipients, and yet another for Pearl Harbor survivors.)

Conran, who holds the Air Force Cross, said his group is beginning to look for similar frauds in other states.

"I would suspect that there is abuse elsewhere," he said, "but until we started looking at Texas we didn't realize it was as significant as it is."

Agnew says his organization is not yet ready to name those who obtained the unauthorized plates. But the Tribune, using commercially available databases, identified six Texans registered as using Legion of Valor plates who, according to military records, do not hold any of the four qualifying medals.

Besides the TSA screener, they are two retired colonels, a private investigator, an employee of a pool-cleaning service and a Houston man whose occupation could not be determined.

Contacted by the Tribune, one of the men hung up the phone. Two others told convoluted tales of lesser medals that had supposedly been upgraded years after they were awarded, or of supporting documents that had been lost or stolen.

Last week, U.S. Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo.), who sponsored the Stolen Valor Act, announced that he had included a provision in a pending military authorization bill requiring the Pentagon to study the creation of a national database containing the names of all medal recipients.

Such a database would do much to reduce fraudulent claims for everything from license plates to Veterans Affairs benefits that are based on bogus citations for medals of valor.

False boasts a problem
The Stolen Valor Act's provision outlawing a mere claim to have been awarded a medal for bravery also spells trouble for those who go public with their false boasts, as recent prosecutions illustrate.

Michael Allan Fraser, from the northern California town of Oroville, became a local celebrity last summer after making a trip to Vietnam, where he claimed to have served as a Special Forces medic more than 30 years before and hoped to "bury a few ghosts."

Fraser's story captured the hearts of fellow residents after the local newspaper reported that he and two other Vietnam veterans planned to revisit Khe Sanh and other battlefields where they had fought and watched their fellow soldiers die.

Fraser recounted to the Oroville Mercury-Register that he had been wounded twice in Vietnam, receiving two Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars for valor. The two Vietnam vets who accompanied him were the real deal. But Fraser was a fraud. Although he had been in the Army, he had served not as a Green Beret medic but as a veterinary assistant in the Philippines who never set foot in Vietnam and had won no Bronze Stars or Purple Hearts.

In February, federal prosecutors convicted Fraser of Stolen Valor Act violations based entirely on his interviews with the Mercury-Register.

Another braggart hung by his own words was Xavier Alvarez, a Southern California water board official who falsely claimed to hold the Medal of Honor in an address, tape-recorded, to local government officials in the summer of 2007.

Alvarez argued after being charged that his claims, while untrue, were not a crime because they qualified as free speech under the 1st Amendment. Earlier this month, however, Alvarez abandoned that defense and pleaded guilty in federal court.

Prison sentences
So far, most Stolen Valor Act convictions have resulted in probation, fines and community service, but not all.

In February, a reserve Army major was sentenced to 5 months in prison by a federal court in Utah for having claimed a Silver Star he did not earn in hopes of hastening a promotion.

Last month, a Missouri man was sentenced to 6 months in federal prison for having lied when he claimed to be a Marine captain who earned the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart under fire in Iraq.

"This impostor received the maximum penalty for his dishonorable conduct," said the prosecutor in his case, according to news accounts. "Such disrespect for the brave men and women serving in our nation's forces won't be tolerated."