The New York Times
November 18, 2007
Blowing the Whistle, Many Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
WHEN Cynthia Fitzgerald started out in pharmaceutical sales 20 years ago, she received ample training on the right and wrong ways to sell medical products. Right was selling on the merits. Wrong was luring customers with perks and freebies. It was O.K. to buy doctors lunch or dinner, for example, but tempting them with lavish gifts was taboo.
"There were pretty stringent rules back then," recalls Ms. Fitzgerald, now 50 and a grandmother living in Dallas. "It was really clinically driven."
But she says those early lessons didn't serve her so well when she went to work on the other side of the table in 1998, in health care purchasing. Going by the book, and expecting her colleagues and employer to do the same, cost her a job, most of her friendships and several years of her life, she says.
Eventually, Ms. Fitzgerald decided to file what could become one of the largest whistle-blower lawsuits on record. And her case, which names more than a dozen companies as defendants — some with well-known names like Johnson & Johnson, Becton Dickinson and Merck — offers a window onto a little-known world, where billions of dollars' worth of medical products are sold each year to institutional buyers like hospitals.
The suit, filed in 2003 in federal court in Dallas, and unsealed this year, argues that improper sales practices, together with erroneous accounting, are invisibly draining millions of dollars out of vital public programs like Medicare through overcharges or unauthorized uses. While whistle-blower cases typically involve, at most, a handful of companies, Ms. Fitzgerald's alleges systemic fraud across a whole network of companies and more than 7,000 health care institutions.
Her contentions are set against a complex backdrop: spiraling health care costs and debates about Medicare. State and federal authorities in Texas are investigating Ms. Fitzgerald's allegations, and any decision by them to join her case may give the suit momentum in the courts. But her corporate adversaries dispute her accusations.
"Cynthia Fitzgerald is rehashing old rumors and suspicions," said Jody Hatcher, senior vice president of Novation, the company in Irving, Tex., at the heart of her lawsuit. "These allegations have been examined in depth by a variety of different authorities, and no one has proven any of them to be true. The simple fact is that Ms. Fitzgerald's allegations are false."
For her part, Ms. Fitzgerald bristles at the idea that her lawsuit is without merit or, in response to common critiques of whistle-blower cases, about easy money. "I thought they were really nice people," she says. "I was so grateful and thankful to have a steady income again. I wouldn't have rocked the boat for any small thing to save my life."
So why did she rock the boat?
"It was wrong," she says of the behavior she asserts she has witnessed. "And I knew it was wrong."
NINE years ago, while still recovering from a financially ruinous divorce, Ms. Fitzgerald decided to move to Dallas from her native Omaha. She knew almost no one in her new city. She graduated from the University of Nebraska 13 years earlier with a communications degree, then worked in sales and marketing in the food, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
When she moved to Texas, she says, "It was pretty bleak." She adds, "I went from having Thanksgiving dinners in a house with my family to living in an apartment that was so small that every time I turned around I ran into myself."
More than anything, she said, she wanted stability — a steady job at a company where she could climb the ladder and work until she retired. After months of looking, she joined Novation. The company helped thousands of hospitals, rehabilitation centers, home health agencies and doctors' offices nationwide negotiate prices for medical supplies — a wide range of items as diverse as saline solution and huge imaging machines.
Novation assigned her a portfolio of medical and surgical products for which its member hospitals were spending an estimated $240 million a year: rubber gloves, surgical tools and so forth. The company sent her to a training class where, among other things, she says she learned once again about ethical purchasing procedures.
"I cannot overemphasize in the beginning how excited I was and really feeling blessed," she says. "I felt like I got a second chance. Even though it was on the other side of sales, it was still sales."
But as she settled in, she says, not everything in her new workplace squared with what she had been told in training, a situation that came to a head one day in 1998, when she was still just a few months into the job. According to her complaint, she and her boss met with a Johnson & Johnson sales team that was vying for an exclusive, three-year contract to sell $130 million worth of IV equipment to Novation's clients. It was a valuable contract, and Ms. Fitzgerald had the power to decide who would get it.
The bids were already in. Ms. Fitzgerald understood this to be a mandatory "silent period," when she was not supposed to meet privately with any of the bidding companies. All communications with vendors were supposed to be in writing, and if Ms. Fitzgerald disclosed any information to any bidder, she was required to tell them all.
In a deposition in a separate lawsuit filed against Novation by a medical supplier, a former Novation executive, John M. Burks, did not dispute that the Johnson & Johnson meeting took place. But he said that Ms. Fitzgerald misunderstood the rules, and that Novation permitted such meetings at that point. (When reached for comment, Mr. Burks said his views haven't changed since his deposition.)
Ms. Fitzgerald says she had a very different understanding of the meeting. Discussions behind closed doors, tipping off a company on how to structure a winning bid, naming her price — this could be a felony, she recalls thinking :bid-rigging.
"How much will it take to get the contract?" she says one of the salesmen asked her, according to her complaint. "Others before you have done it."
She says she chose not to do so. "Oh, no!" she recalls blurting out, bringing the meeting to a halt. "This is illegal, and I don't look good in orange."
A spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, Marc Monseau, said, "We vigorously deny the allegations and will defend ourselves against them in court."
Ms. Fitzgerald did not stop there. After the salesmen left, she says, she confronted her boss in the women's room. Shouldn't they report the incident to the legal department? Hadn't they just been told that someone at Novation had taken a bribe?
Her boss offered no satisfaction, Ms. Fitzgerald says in her complaint. Concerned about the integrity of a bidding process she was responsible for, she began pursuing the matter herself.
OVER the following weeks, she says, she scoured her portfolio for contracting anomalies. She told colleagues about what had happened; some confided that similar things had happened to them. Others left anonymous notes on her desk. She began to think that Johnson & Johnson should be excluded from the bidding as a penalty for what she considered a serious ethical breach.
She says she took her concerns to Novation's legal department, human resources and even the company's president. In his deposition, Mr. Burks confirmed her activities, but called her "an employee who doesn't simply understand that when a supplier asks an inappropriate question, you simply say no and move on."
Ms. Fitzgerald says she passed over Johnson & Johnson for the IV contract, awarding it instead to Becton Dickinson. She said Becton had a superior bid, which provided a number of opportunities for Novation and member hospitals to be rewarded with rebates and other payments.
Becton said it believes that Ms. Fitzgerald's accusations of improprieties in how contracts were awarded are baseless and that her complaint is "without merit."
She turned to the next contract, for trash bags — and the same thing started to happen, according to her complaint. When Ms. Fitzgerald told representatives of one vendor, Heritage Bag, that she was planning to put that contract up for bid, she says, one representative told her at dinner with several people that he would "take care of" her. Heritage Bag did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
Ms. Fitzgerald asked her supervisor if she could be taken off the trash-bag contract. Her supervisor agreed, but then gave her a negative performance review. It said that among other things, she was rude, unable to meet deadlines and kept trying to "overhaul" parts of Novation that were outside her job description, according to a copy of the review. Ms. Fitzgerald refused to sign it. Relations deteriorated, and 15 days later, she was fired for "nonperformance of duties that were clearly identified as part of her job description, " according to Mr. Burks's deposition.
Ms. Fitzgerald says she believes she was shown the door because she had stumbled onto illegal behavior involving hundreds of millions of dollars and had refused to look the other way.
"It's hilarious how stupid I was," she says. "I knew that it was wrong, but I thought that if I just went to the right people, they would correct it. I was very naïve. I didn't realize that it was systemic."
The False Claims Act is a federal law that allows private individuals to sue on behalf of the United States if they believe that they have inside knowledge of a fraud. Their lawsuits stay under court seal at first, to give federal and state investigators time to look into the accusations quietly and to decide whether to join the case. If the government recovers money, the whistle-blower gets 15 to 30 percent of the amount.
Though enacted to fight war profiteering, the False Claims Act has become a potent weapon in the battle against escalating health care costs. Of the 20 largest False Claims Act recoveries listed on the Web site of Taxpayers Against Fraud, a group that supports whistle-blowers and their lawyers, 19 involved health care companies. (The other involved municipal bonds.)
The size of recoveries has soared in recent years. All told, the government has recovered more than $20 billion since 1986, when the False Claims Act was last amended, with $5 billion of it in the last two years.
The biggest single whistle-blower settlement to date was the $900 million that Tenet Healthcare, a hospital company, paid last year to settle accusations of overbilling the Medicare program. That settlement is dwarfed by the $1.7 billion that HCA, another big hospital chain, paid between 2000 and 2003 to settle a number of fraud suits.
Companies and their lawyers say the growing caseload is a sign that the False Claims Act, with its promise of a payout for whistle-blowers, is motivating disgruntled employees to file nuisance suits that can tie up law-abiding companies for years.
Proponents of the law say that $20 billion of recoveries is proof that contracting fraud is real, and that offering whistle-blowers a percentage is a good way to compensate them for the near-certainty that they will be fired.
"Protection for people who are willing to risk their lives and livelihoods, their careers and reputations, is critical," said Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, in Senate hearings last year.
As Ms. Fitzgerald sees it, Medicare's losses grow out of the way that Novation and the vendor companies negotiate contracts.
When companies submitted bids to Novation, she recalled, they did not typically quote a simple price. Rather, they proposed package deals with opportunities for rebates, frequent-buyer discounts, "loyalty" rewards and baskets of products tied together. They might throw in free training for hospital staff, chances to participate in clinical trials, shares of stock, project sponsorships, sometimes even cash. The vendors also paid Novation for administering their contracts and for other services.
Ms. Fitzgerald says her compensation rewarded her for closing deals that maximized these payments — not for simply finding the lowest bid. Vendors preferred to combine higher upfront prices with rebates or other cash-back rewards, she says, because that obscured the net unit price of their products, making it harder for hospitals to comparison-shop.
But this also allowed millions of dollars to become "lost" in the system, she says. Novation passed on many of the payments to hospitals, she says, but not in a way that hospitals could accurately report them to the government. Thus they ended up overstating their supply costs, she says, and getting larger Medicare reimbursements than they were entitled to. The lawsuit does not contend that the hospitals did this deliberately, but that Novation knew it was happening.
A 2005 audit by Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, appears to bear her out. After studying the finances of three unnamed purchasing consortiums in response to repeated questions from Congress, federal agencies and the news media about their business practices, Mr. Levinson reported that their member hospitals "did not fully account" for such flows of money. In just five years, the discrepancies ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Novation said that there was no evidence that any underreporting was intentional. It cited the complexity of how hospitals are required to report costs and said it believed that hospitals met all legal requirements in how they reported Novation's distributions to them.
In the past, a prosecutor's decision whether or not to join a whistle-blower lawsuit could be a make-or-break moment. If the government became involved, defendants often settled right away. The announcement usually coincided with the unsealing of the whistle-blower' s complaint.
But now that the lawsuits have become so complex, and investigations so slow, judges have become impatient with sealed lawsuits moldering in their courts. Some are ordering the complaints unsealed before investigators finish examining the claims.
That is what happened in Ms. Fitzgerald's case. Last May, a federal judge in Dallas unsealed her suit, which had languished for four years. The assistant United States attorney for the Northern District of Texas , Sean R. McKenna, and the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, notified the court that they were still investigating and would decide later whether to join the case.
THAT leaves Ms. Fitzgerald on her own for now. After Novation fired her, she was contractually forbidden from disclosing information about the company or filing lawsuits against it for three years, she says. Once that period lapsed, she gradually became aware she was eligible to file a suit under the False Claims Act. That led her to Phillips & Cohen, a law firm involved in whistle-blower cases.
Her firing, meanwhile, left her unable to get another job in her field; word of her demise at Novation seemed to precede her wherever she went. Former colleagues stopped speaking to her. "I was probably at one of the lowest points in my life," she says.
She eventually founded her own business, Dimension Medical Supply. But she regrets the contentious departure from Novation, a company that made her feel as if she "was coming home" when it hired her. Deciding to speak out about the company's dealings was difficult, she says.
"I warred with myself," she says. "There weren't any blacks in upper management. I knew that there were opportunities there, and I could rise to those opportunities. "
She was tempted, she says, to follow the status quo at Novation. And a little voice in her head kept saying, "Why can't you just take the money and run? Buck up, girl, this is the system. You can take it and go places."
In the end, the place she decided to go was court.

US Gives Boeing contract for ‘ invisible fence’ border monitoringSep. 21, 2007Breitbart.com
The US government has awarded aerospace and defense conglomerate Boeing a contract to build a high-tech "invisible fence" to protect its northern and southern borders, the Department of Homeland Security announced. Boeing's surveillance system involves raising 1,800 towers equipped with cameras and movement detectors along the 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) of US land borders. Some US press reports have put the value of the deal at 2.5 billion dollars, though Homeland Security officials declined to give a figure. The fence, dubbed the SBInet (Secure Border Initiative) program, will provide Homeland Security officials "with the best possible solution to detect, identify, classify, respond to and resolve illegal entry attempts at our land borders with Mexico and Canada," the department said. The system that Boeing will set up "will integrate the latest technology and infrastructure to interdict illegal immigration and stop threats attempting to cross borders," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. In a press conference with Boeing Vice President James Albaugh, Chertoff described the system as a "21st-century virtual fence." Tens of thousands of people try to cross the US borders -- especially the border with Mexico -- each year, with some 472 deaths reported in 2005, mostly from people losing their way in the southwestern deserts. Boeing estimates it can set up the system in three years, starting at the region south of Tucson, Arizona, the busiest sector of the US-Mexico border.

Boeing's snooping on workers might have a Chinese accent

By David Brewster
Crosscut.com
News of the Great Nearby

Today's Post-Intelligencer has a fascinating story about the way Boeing allegedly spies on employees, reading private e-mails, tailing them, and monitoring keystrokes.

The story is framed with concerns about privacy or tracking down employees who might be whistle blowers who talk to the media. It's an important story, with a wholly legitimate concern about privacy and workers' rights.

But I wonder if the untold part of the story is another topic that Boeing would not want to talk about: Chinese espionage. Canada has recently raised the issue, citing suspected espionage about the way China may have been snooping on the maker of the Blackberry, in order to introduce its copycat Redberry.

Just yesterday, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its annual report to Congress that Chinese spying was a great threat to U.S. technology. The panel recommended counterintelligence efforts. The issue may find its way into the presidential campaigns, as well as discussions about how the U.S. Attorney's offices have been spending their time.

China denies any spying, but the American government contends that there is a broad effort by China to get new technology without spending money on research. Seattle, with its strong concentration of technology companies and defense concerns, is thought to be particularly crawling with spies. If so, Boeing is probably under pressure from the government to root them out. But it would be reluctant to say so, given what a big customer China is for jets.
Topics: Law / Justice, Federal Agencies, Workplace / Labor, Boeing, Business / Technology
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can also find some other blogger’s takes on this topic at:

http://www.evergreenpolitics.com/ep/2007/11/boeing-spies-on.html

and

http://www.americablog.com/2007/11/boeing-spying-on-workers.html

Senate Democratic Policy Committee Hearing
“An Oversight Hearing on Accountability for Contracting Abuses in Iraq”

Alan Grayson
Grayson & Kubli, P.C.

September 18, 2006

Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today, and to speak before this honorable committee. My name is Alan Grayson. I am an attorney, and I represent dozens of
whistleblowers in cases brought against contractors who have defrauded the Government.

The Civil False Claims Act allows whistleblowers to bring cases in the name of the Government, to help the taxpayers recover money from contractors who cheat the Government. Ms. McBride is one such whistleblower.

With this week marking three and a half years since the occupation of Iraq began, it is possible to conduct an appraisal of the role that contractors have played in Iraq. It is not a pretty picture. While U.S. forces are praised for their professionalism and discipline, there have been countless reports of government contractors in Iraq
undermining the mission, wasting money, and stealing money. Half of the $18 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds are unaccounted for. Senator Dorgan has said that there is an “orgy of greed” among contractors in Iraq, and there is ample evidence to back that up.
This Committee, a modern-day Truman Commission, has uncovered many
examples of this. So has the media.

What you will not hear about, however, are many
examples from False Claims Act whistleblowers, because the Bush Administration has systematically kept those cases out of the public eye. Out of all of the cases filed by whistleblowers regarding fraud in Iraq, only two of them have been litigated. The Bush Administration refused to participate in either one.

In the first case, a suit that I helped whistleblowers bring against Custer Battles, the company’s own internal audit report found the company guilty of criminal fraud. The U.S. Military suspended the defendants, finding adequate evidence of that fraud. Yet the
Bush Administration did literally nothing to recover the millions of dollars that the Defendants stole. We brought that case to trial, without the help of the Bush Administration, and won a jury verdict worth over $10 million for the taxpayers. But the judge ruled that the Bush Administration had messed up the contract paperwork, and now
the issue is on appeal.

The second case is Ms. McBride’s complaint against Halliburton. Her case was filed well over a year ago. The Bush Administration sat on it for that period, investigated only one of the five allegations of fraud in her complaint, and then – without explanation
– refused to participate.

In both the Custer Battles case and the Halliburton case, the defendants’ intimate connections with the Bush Administration are well-known.

As for all of the other whistleblower cases filed against contractors alleged to have defraud the U.S. Government in Iraq, after three and a half years the Bush Administration perpetuates the masquerade that it is “investigating” these cases. The False Claims Act provides that these cases must be brought under seal, and gives the Administration 60 days to investigate. That 60 days became 60 weeks, and is now
approaching three or more years in some cases. Obtaining one extension after another for these court-ordered seals permits the Bush Administration to keep these cases out of sight
indefinitely. The last thing that the Administration wants, it appears, is more bad news coming out of Iraq, and it is willing to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of
justice to prevent that.

As a result, the Bush Administration has not litigated a single case against a contractor alleged to have defrauded the U.S. Government in Iraq. It has obtained one guilty plea from a Halliburton employee, however – but for defrauding the company, not the U.S. Government.
As one reporter on this beat recently noted, the U.S. military has been spending over $1 billion a week in Iraq, but DoD’s Inspector General has had zero inspectors on the ground since at least October 2004.

A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal was kind enough to say that I am conducting a one-man war against contractor fraud against Iraq. I keep wondering when we will see reinforcements. President Bush twice took an oath of office to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Regarding fraud in Iraq, it is plain and simple – he has
violated that oath.

An earlier wartime President, Abraham Lincoln, had this to say about war profiteers, when he proposed enactment of the whistleblowers’ False Claims Act, seven score and three years ago:
“Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation, while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South, and their countrymen moldering the dust.”

As Lincoln himself said, in the Gettysburg Address, it is far above my poor power to add or detract from this. But let history note that as patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the Sunni Triangle, and as our countrymen lie moldering in the dust, some at
Halliburton, with their Super Bowl Parties and their stock options, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of this Nation while pretending nothing but loyalty to the flag.

Thank you.

The Wall Street Journal

Lawyer Uses Civil War-Era Law To Go After Firms for Corruption,
But Administration Won't Help

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN

April 19, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. -- From his home office in a pink-painted mansion here, lawyer Alan Grayson is waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.
Mr. Grayson has filed dozens of lawsuits against Iraq contractors on behalf of corporate whistle-blowers. He won a huge victory last month when a federal jury in Virginia ordered a security firm called Custer Battles LLC to return $10 million in ill-gotten funds to the government. The ruling marked the first time an American firm was held responsible for financial improprieties in Iraq. But it also highlighted the limits of the broader efforts to stem contractor abuses there.
The False Claims Act that Mr. Grayson used in the Custer Battles case is a Civil War-era statute allowing whistle-blowers to sue contractors suspected of defrauding the government and then keep a chunk of any recovered money. There are an estimated 50 such cases pending against Iraq contractors, including large firms like Halliburton Co.'s Kellogg Brown and Root subsidiary. A technicality in the statute, however, has allowed the Bush administration to prevent the other lawsuits from moving forward. Cases filed under the statute are automatically sealed, which means that they can't proceed to trial -- or even be publicly disclosed -- until the administration makes a formal decision about whether to join them.
The law says such decisions are supposed to be made within 60 days, but with the exception of the Custer Battles case, which it declined to join, the administration has yet to take a position on any of the suits, some of which were filed more than two years ago. The law allows the Justice Department to ask for extensions, which are almost always granted, for as long as it sees fit. The department has kept the other False Claims Act cases from proceeding by repeatedly asking for extensions in each one.
That has left the cases in legal limbo, with lawyers like Mr. Grayson unable to bring them to trial or detail them publicly.
Contracting experts say previous administrations often declined to join in False Claims Act lawsuits but that the Bush administration's refusal to unseal the cases is unprecedented. Justice Department spokesman Charles Wilson says he can't discuss sealed cases or comment on why the department has yet to act on them. "All of the cases are examined on their merits," Mr. Wilson says. With the Bush administration sitting on the sidelines, primary responsibility for pursuing the Iraq fraud cases rests with plaintiffs' lawyers like Mr. Grayson, a Harvard-educated lawyer who began his career defending federal contractors but now makes his living going after them.
FIGHT FOR IRAQ

See continuing coverage of developments in Iraq, including a look back at three years of war. Plus, see an interactive map of major insurgent attacks.
"With the sheriff asleep in the office, the only way you get justice is with private lawyers like Alan Grayson willing to step up and take down these fraudulent companies," says Patrick Burns, the spokesman for the advocacy group Taxpayers Against Fraud. "Alan Grayson showed that you can do that even without help from the government."
Though it is unclear when the cases will proceed to trial, Mr. Grayson is continuing to press ahead as best he can. He and other lawyers in his firm travel the country taking depositions, gathering documents and interviewing prospective witnesses for the dozens of currently pending lawsuits. Mr. Grayson says he also regularly passes information to the federal investigators probing the cases and the prosecutors deciding whether the government will participate in them.
A fierce critic of the war in Iraq, Mr. Grayson drives an aging Cadillac emblazoned with antiadministration bumper stickers such as "Bush Lied, People Died." He says the administration's botched handling of Iraq opened the door for corrupt contractors to improperly reap fortunes there. At a hearing in February 2005 held by Democratic senators, Mr. Grayson asserted that the administration had "not lifted a finger to recover tens of millions of dollars our whistle-blowers allege was stolen from the government."
His opinions on the matter haven't shifted since. "The Bush administration has made a conscious decision to sweep the cases under the rug for as long as possible," he says today. "And the more bad news that comes out of Iraq, the more motivation they have to do so."
For the contractors in his cross hairs, Mr. Grayson, 48, is a formidable opponent. He received his undergraduate, master's and law degrees from Harvard. He made millions during a two-year stint as the president of IDT Corp., a start-up that has since grown into one of the nation's largest providers of discount telecommunications services. Mr. Grayson says he has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal funds into his small eight-person law firm to help defray the costs of pursuing Iraq fraud cases that may not make it to trial for years. "I have deep enough pockets to subsidize the legal work," he says.
If he prevails, he might fill those deep pockets. Whistle-blowers generally receive 30% of any penalty, although the exact portion of every award is set by the judge in each case. Lawyers like Mr. Grayson, in turn, receive 30% to 50% of whatever the whistle-blowers get. "It's really a financial crapshoot," he says.
Mr. Grayson's firm switched its focus from working for contractors to representing individual whistle-blowers shortly after U.S. forces swept into Iraq in March 2003. He says the firm made the move because they began to be contacted by whistle-blowers who were referred by former clients and others.
Two of his first clients were William D. Baldwin, a former manager for Custer Battles, and Robert J. Isakson, a construction subcontractor who had worked with the firm. The company, run by a pair of politically connected military veterans, had won security contracts in Iraq worth more than $100 million. But the two men told Mr. Grayson that they had evidence the firm was substantially overcharging the U.S. occupation authority.
Mr. Grayson filed suit against the company under the False Claims Act in February 2004, but it languished under seal until that fall, when the Justice Department formally declined to join the case. The government never explained its decision. The case finally went before a judge in February.
After a contentious three-week trial, a federal jury on March 9 found the company's two founders, along with a business partner, guilty of using fake invoices from shell companies to overcharge the authorities by millions of dollars. The jury ordered the men to pay $10 million in penalties, with Mr. Grayson's clients standing to receive about $3 million of the money. Mr. Grayson declined to say how much money he will be paid. David Douglass, a lawyer for Custer Battles, says the company has appealed the verdict.
While waiting for the government to act on the other lawsuits, Mr. Grayson is weighing a career change. His congressional district is represented by a conservative Republican, and Mr. Grayson is strongly considering seeking the Democratic nomination to oppose him. He says his campaign, if he chooses to run, would center on the war in Iraq.
Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com

Mr. Grayson is running for the U.S. Congress in 2008. His is running for office in Florida’s 8th Congressional District.

http://www.graysonforcongress.com/