Inquiry Targets Online Sellers of Military Meals

A Barstow man who was selling military meals on EBay attracted a lot of interest -- from federal investigators who wanted to track down his supplier.

The man, one of a handful of people nationwide targeted for selling government-supplied Meals Ready to Eat, tried to implicate local Boy Scouts. Investigators, however, suspect the MREs may have been smuggled from the Ft. Irwin National Training Center down the road.

The four-month inquiry into people peddling the meals online stemmed from tips to a federal fraud and abuse hotline. Investigators chose Oct. 18 for a “snapshot” study, which identified eight people selling more than four cases of meals on the popular auction website EBay, according to a recent report by the federal Government Accountability Office. A case holds about a dozen meals.

“If you’re a taxpayer, you paid for them. It’s a waste of your money,” said Greg Kutz, managing director of the GAO’s investigative branch.

The Barstow man, whose name was not released, told investigators that he bought the meals from “local scouting and camping groups.” But they probably came from nearby Ft. Irwin, a massive desert-warfare training center in San Bernardino County, Kutz said.

Among the people snared in the investigation were two Hurricane Katrina victims who were legally given the meals at relief centers and tried to resell them online. Six other sellers were referred to the Defense Department’s inspector general, where investigators will try to determine where the MREs came from.

The sellers included a hurricane shelter coordinator in Murfreesboro, Tenn., who said he bought the meals at a Kentucky flea market, and a Marine in Albany, Ga., who admitted being investigated for swiping packages from a base trash bin.

The Defense Department buys the packaged meals for $52.57 per case, the report said. They’re not intended as civilian snacks -- in fact, each case is tagged with the warning that “commercial resale is unlawful.”

But military officials said the meals -- which can include beef, chicken, meatloaf, pears and oatmeal cookies -- taste better than previous offerings.

“They’ve come a long way since the days of the tin can,” said Kenneth Drylie, a Ft. Irwin spokesman.

And they’ve become rather popular online.

In 2002, the Defense Department essentially sent cease-and-desist e-mails to people selling the meals online, the report said. Sales “dropped off dramatically” -- but an EBay search Tuesday showed plenty of entrepreneurs pushing “genuine” and “military-issue” meals, with some bids as high as $66 a case.

In Barstow, the seller was described as a businessman who lives about 37 miles from Ft. Irwin.

The center runs two-week field training for 10 groups of about 5,000 soldiers each year, Drylie said. Participants typically get a packaged meal for lunch and are told to return anything they don’t eat.

“You don’t throw out anything,” he said. “Any dime wasted is a dime that can’t be spent on something important.”

The seller told investigators that during the last five years he had auctioned about 40 cases of meals for $34 each. Although his sources used to be military friends, he said the MREs now came from Boy Scouts and campers.

The businessman declined to tell investigators how they could check his story. Although the state Department of General Services is allowed to donate meals to the Boy Scouts, state officials said they had not done so, according to the report.

And Scouts prepare their own grub on camping trips and hikes, said Don Townsend, who’s in charge of the Boy Scout council that includes Riverside and San Bernardino counties.