The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on Call Me Commander.
As a Navy
veteran, I was interested in Commander Bobby Thompson, a crook who operated a
fraudulent Navy veterans’ charity. His crime story is covered in Jeff Testerman
and Daniel Freed’s most interesting book, “Call Me Commander: A Former
Intelligence Officer and the Journalists Who Uncovered His Scheme to
Fleece America.”
I reached out to co-author Jeff Testerman and asked
him about Bobby Thompson.
“Bobby Thompson is the identity stolen by John Donald
Cody as he relocated to Tampa in 1997 and set up the elaborate hoax known
as the United States Navy Veterans Association. For the next decade, Cody called
himself “Commander Bobby Thompson,” and claimed he was the director of the
66,000-member veterans’ charity which used telemarketing companies to bring in
tens of millions of dollars from unsuspecting donors,” Jeff Testerman
replied.
“Cody succeeded in his scam for years, in part,
because he was highly educated, trained in military and intelligence matters
and adept in the art of persuasion. Cody joined the ROTC at the University
of Virginia, where he was a star on the debating team. He then earned a law
degree at Harvard and was promoted to captain in the U.S. Army Intelligence
corps. He also had connections to the CIA before launching a successful law
practice in Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he is remembered as the smartest guy
in town. Cody believed he could persuade anyone of anything, and most of the
time, he was right.”
Cody ingratiated himself with politicians from the
local mayor to the president of the United States with hefty campaign
contributions and promises of support from his supposedly huge veterans’
membership.
“He filed dozens and dozens of tax returns for his
charity and its state chapters, all falsified, but sufficient to pass muster
from an overworked and undermanned IRS,” Mr. Testerman explained. “And, if
anyone had questions about the history, membership or good works of the
Commander’s charity, all they had to do was dial up his website, an intricate
2,500-page site that included just enough truth to keep hesitant donors or
skeptical regulators guessing.”
Jeff Testerman was working on a St. Petersburg Times
story about a Tampa city councilman who claimed to have an exemplary Navy
career but served only for five weeks. He discovered the councilman had
received a $500 contribution from a group that he had never heard of.
“I thought I would seek out an official of this veteran’s
group and seek a quote or two about donating to a politician who had lied about
his Navy career. Lo and behold, a director of the charity, Commander Bobby
Thompson, lived a 15-minute drive from the newspaper office,” Mr. Testerman said.
“I drove out to see him. And here is where a
newspaperman’s instinct kicked in. Nothing seemed right. Thompson was living in
a dilapidated duplex. He had had a couple of beers by 10 in the morning when I
showed up. And he was downright hostile to the sudden appearance of a man he
knew from reading the papers was an investigative reporter.”
After
months of research, the newspaper published a series on the dubious charity and
Thompson disappeared.
You can read
the rest of the column via the below link:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/4/book-review-call-me-commander/
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