Call Me Commander; A Former Intelligence Officer and the Journalists Who Uncovered His Scheme to Fleece America

[x], 449, [5] pages. Publisher's ephemera laid in. Includes Prologue, Includes 27 chapters: Secrets behind a Duplex Door; Real Substance; Surviving the Flood; Pulling on a Thread; The Paper's Chase; When Pigs Fly; The Perfect Storm; Under the Radar; Homeless at the Helmsley; Under the Lightbulb; Jeopardy; To the Grave?; Trip to the Tribal Lands; The Independent; A Good Harbor; Celia's Home for Wayward Boys; The Slowest Follow; Unit 646; Mr. X; Creme de la Creme; Fish Out of Water; Stealing Away; For My Country; Veterans Day; Fall on the Guillotine; The Dark Period; and Tunneling to Freedom. Also includes photographs, Acknowledgments, notes, and index. Jeff Testerman is a retired investigative reporter who spent his career at the St. Petersburg Times, where he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize five times. He first knocked on the door of Bobby Thompson's run-down Tampa duplex in 2009. Following a brief but odd interaction with the Commander, he and a colleague spent seven months investigating the USNVA and eventually unmasked the scheme in a series of articles entitled "Under the Radar." His work on the project earned him the Investigative Reporters and Editors top award for public service. Daniel Freed is a senior producer and writer for CNBC's long-running white collar crime documentary series, American Greed. He covered John Cody's story for the show in 2014 and was the first to examine Cody's military records and his various CIA claims. His television and print work has been aired or published by PBS, Current TV, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. When Lt. Commander Bobby Thompson surfaced in Tampa in 1998, it was as if he had fallen from the sky, providing no hint of his past life. Eleven years later, St. Petersburg Times investigative reporter Jeff Testerman visited the rundown duplex Thompson used as his home and the epicenter of his 60,000-member charity, the U.S. Navy Veterans Association. But something was amiss. Thompson's charity's addresses were just maildrops, his members nonexistent and his past a black hole. Yet, somehow, the Commander had stood for photos with President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain, and other political luminaries. The USNVA, it turned out, was a phony charity where Thompson used pricey telemarketers, savvy lawyers, and political allies to swindle tens of millions from well-meaning donors. After Testerman's story revealed that the nonprofit was a sham, the Commander went on the run. U.S. Marshals took up the hunt in 2011 and found themselves searching for an unnamed identity thief who they likened to a real-life Jason Bourne. When finally captured in 2012, Thompson was carrying multiple IDs and a key to a locker that held nearly $1 million in cash. But, who was he? Eventually, investigators discovered he was John Donald Cody, a Harvard Law School graduate and former U.S. Army intelligence officer who had been wanted since the 1980s on theft charges and for questioning in an espionage probe. As Cody's decades as a fugitive came to an end, he claimed his charity was run at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. After reporting on the story for CNBC's American Greed in 2014, Daniel Freed dug into Cody's backstory-uncovering new information about his intelligence background and the evolution of his con.