Aircraft Parts Firm Under Federal Probe
A federal grand jury in Texas, assisted by the Air Force, is investigating whether a North Hollywood company produced faulty or bogus parts for the C-130 military transport or performed inferior maintenance on the plane, the Pentagon and other sources have disclosed.
The company, Donallco Inc., makes and supplies parts for the aircraft industry. Founded in 1950, the company is owned by William R. Allred and last year did $18 million in business with civilian and military customers who both buy its aircraft parts and rely on it for maintenance of the equipment.
“The Donallco case is (before a) grand jury,” said Technical Sgt. Michael L. Grinnell, a public affairs specialist in Washington for the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations.
He would not comment further.
The grand jury is meeting in San Antonio, the home of Kelly Air Force Base, a Donallco customer and a primary center for maintaining the C-130 transport’s four engines and warehousing its engine parts.
According to a Donallco employee who testified before the grand jury and other employees who have been questioned by Air Force investigators and the U.S. attorney’s office in San Antonio, the probe centers on whether Donallco sold inferior C-130 parts to the Air Force and whether any of these parts were stamped with the names of other companies while actually produced by Donallco.
LeRoy M. Jahn, the assistant U.S. attorney in San Antonio who is coordinating the investigation and presentation before the grand jury, would not comment on the probe. Nor would Air Force investigator Linda Phillips, who is based at Kelly and who has interviewed present and former Donallco employees in Los Angeles.
Allred, 55, could not be reached for comment but issued a statement Friday through an attorney, Mark Shaw, which that said he intended “to take appropriate legal action against all individuals who have slandered and made false statements about our company.
“I am very proud of Donallco and the work that we do. . . . I have complete faith in our company and in our loyal employees.”
A Donallco supervisor, in a sworn declaration filed Friday in Burbank Superior Court in an employee discrimination suit against Donallco, accused the firm of “counterfeiting of parts, buying surplus equipment which is broken down, modified, polished and machined to look like new and sold back to the government as new surplus.”
The declaration, by Wolfgang Marschall, said that in one case, a coupling for the C-130 was so badly machined it could “malfunction.”
Marschall, who resigned from Donallco effective Feb. 14, has testified before the San Antonio grand jury, according to Los Angeles attorney Ralph Fertig, who is handling the discrimination suit, which alleges that Latino employees do not have the same opportunities for pay and advancement as others.
Dale Brinkman, a public information specialist at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center in Georgia, another major C-130 maintenance base, said “the Air Force has not had a logistics-related accident in the past three years involving C-130 aircraft.”
Some present and former Donallco employees interviewed by The Times said they had been questioned about the quality of the Donallco parts sold to the Air Force and whether the parts had bogus labels.
‘Major Stocking Specialist’
In a brochure, Donallco, which is privately held, is described as a “major stocking specialist in aircraft and engine accessories and component parts.”
The firm, which has a one-story office and shop complex at 7240 Coldwater Canyon Ave., advertises that it “owns and maintains the largest on-the-shelf (aircraft) accessories inventory of any independent supplier anywhere in the world.”
According to federal court records, Donallco’s customers include both Kelly Air Force Base and the Warner Robins complex, as well as such civilian buyers as Frontier Airlines Inc. of Denver, Summa Corp. of Las Vegas, Sikorsky Aircraft of Stratford, Conn., and government-operated airlines in Canada and Mexico.
