Ex-Northrop Buyer Gets 3 Years for Kickback

A former buyer for Northrop Corp., who admitted accepting a $4,000 kickback in exchange for awarding subcontract work on the Stealth bomber program, was sentenced Monday in Los Angeles federal court to three years in prison.

In imposing the jail term on Ronald Emile Brousseau, 45, a former Buena Park resident now living in Colorado Springs, Colo., U.S. District Judge James M. Ideman said there is a growing public perception that the defense industry is fraught with “inefficiency, fraud and waste.”

Not sentencing Brousseau to prison “would be sending out the wrong message” to the public and those involved in defense work who might be tempted to take bribes, the judge said.

Besides the jail sentence, Brousseau, who worked as a procurement administrator for Advance Systems Division at Northrop’s plant in Pico Rivera, was ordered to pay $4,000 restitution and given five years’ probation.

The sentence is the stiffest handed out so far as a result of federal indictments returned April 24 against 10 men, including eight former employes of Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo. They were charged as part of a continuing federal investigation into bribes and kickbacks that authorities say have plagued the defense industry for years.

Four of the 10 have already received prison terms ranging from six months to two years.

Brousseau pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud and one count of receiving kickbacks on government contracts.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Fred D. Heather said Brousseau had met with a part-owner of a Chatsworth machine shop on various occasions in 1984 about payoffs in exchange for defense work for the shop, R. H. Manufacturing.

Brousseau met with the part-owner, Richard Haskell, and allegedly arranged for a $4,000 payoff in June, 1984, “as the first in what he believed would be a continuing series of bribes . . . which ultimately would finance the defendant’s early retirement,” Heather said.

(Haskell approached government authorities in January, 1984, and agreed to cooperate on kickback and bribery schemes in exchange for immunity from prosecution.)

Heather said that Brousseau allegedly engaged in “courtesy bidding,” in which suppliers would give him artificially high bids that would allow him to buy from a supplier willing to pay a kickback.

Brousseau’s attorney, David Unrot of Sherman Oaks, asked Ideman not to sentence his client to prison, saying he was “at the bottom of the defense totem pole.”

“He has shown no antisocial tendencies and has been a hard-working man,” he said.

Instead, Unrot asked the judge to sentence Brousseau to community service work and a fine in excess of $4,000.

But Ideman was unswayed and sentenced Brousseau to prison, pointing out that U.S. taxpayers are the ultimate victims of such illicit schemes in the defense industry.