Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
2/5/2016
Three former Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) investigators have sent a letter to U.S. Attorney for New Mexico Damon Martinez asking for a renewed investigation into past corruption at the lab and the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a former LANL official.
The Feb. 2 letter from Charles Montaño, Glenn Walp, and Steve Doran calls for an investigation of the “questionable suicide” of Richard Burick, a onetime LANL deputy director, in 2002, and “procurement fraud at the Lab that could be related to Burick’s untimely death.” These circumstances were first discussed with Martinez’s predecessor, Kenneth Gonzales, in July 2012, the letter noted.
Walp and Doran, both law enforcement veterans, were investigating corruption at LANL over a decade ago – including the lab’s allegedly lax handling of employee theft – when they were “summarily fired without cause before we could conclude our investigations,” the letter said. Montaño was a LANL auditor who reported “accounting malpractice and abuses that he had witnessed for years,” it said. Montaño filed a lawsuit in 2005 alleging LANL retaliated against him for his internal report on accounting and fraudulent billing issues at the lab. A settlement in 2010 resulted in Montaño’s resignation from lab employment.
The letter speculated the “mysterious” suicide could be tied to corruption investigations at the time. While Walp and Doran investigated two lab employees for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of items from the lab, they discovered that Burick had planned to partner with one of the embezzlers – who had not yet been charged but was later imprisoned – to establish a cattle ranch. The three authors of the most recent letter also claimed the condition of the gun found at the scene of Burick’s death suggested it was unlikely to have been used in a suicide, having landed “with an open, undamaged chamber.”
DeWayne Williams, the now-retired Los Alamos Police Department detective who investigated and wrote the police report on the incident, told NS&D Monitor yesterday there is no reason to believe Burick’s death was anything other than suicide and that those challenging the official conclusion are doing so based on one small piece of evidence. Doran, however, maintained that it was impossible to call the death a suicide and that when he began investigating this case, he was told the location housing the full medical report had been set on fire.
The letter noted that last year, Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Rep. Ben Lujan (D-N.M.) referred the investigation request to Martinez’s office, requesting Department of Justice intervention. “To date we have received no response,” the letter said.
The three former LANL employees said a full investigation is necessary “to clean house” and prevent the reoccurrence of corruption on the heels of the upcoming contract competition for lab management in 2017. Without an investigation, they said, “it is possible that the LANL management contract will end up in the hands of those largely responsible for the cover-up of past mismanagement at the Los Alamos Lab, or even worse the possible obstruction of justice that occurred.”
Repeated phone calls to a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney of the District of New Mexico went unanswered.
