A Whistle-Blower’s Tale : The Struggle Between the Urge to Do What Conscience Dictates and What Life Style and Pocketbook Require

The term whistle-blower doesn’t pass easily from David Navarette’s lips. Left to choose his own term for the role he has played at the U.S. government’s Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant here since 1985, he says, he would prefer informer .

What Navarette did was bring attention to what he says was a secret trinket factory run at government expense in a department supposed to concentrate on mock-ups of nuclear bombs, laser weapons and other top-secret projects.

The trinket factory, Navarette told Rockwell International Corp. (which runs the facility for the U.S. Department of Energy), the Justice Department and the FBI, improperly turned out tens of thousands of commemorative items and other goods that were distributed as rewards to government and corporate officials or diverted for private use by the factory’s manager.

Items Shipped Nationwide

The products were shipped all over the country--with the greatest volume apparently destined for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California--and the bounty included plaques, medals, coffee mugs, baseball hats and desk sets, in addition to grandfather clocks, a liquor still and souvenir maple foot massagers.

By exposing the factory, Navarette said, he was--and still is--placed in a form of professional solitary confinement, removed from the specialized weapons-drafting work he had found challenging since high school. And his personal toll was a marriage on the brink and a mind never at ease.

“It isn’t easy for me, a non-degreed type person, to walk out and find another job that paid as well,” Navarette, 49, said. “I think about that. You’re stuck. You’re caught. A lot of us were.

“You probably think about it more at night when you’re sitting at home talking to your kids about when they might have had a little problem of theft, or something like that. It goes through your mind. ‘Here I’m talking to my child about how wrong it is to steal . . . to take someone else’s property . . . and I’m involved in it. I’m doing it.’ You almost shut up, which I think I did.”

Although the local U.S. attorney’s office declined to bring criminal charges, Navarette has filed suit in U.S. District Court here alleging that the secret trinket factory involved the misspending of as much as $10 million.

Defendants Named

The suit, filed under provisions of a recently revised Civil War-era federal law that permits citizen whistle-blowers to share in money settlements in civil-fraud cases, names as defendants Rockwell, Livermore, former model shop manager Warren Rooker, Livermore’s associate director A. Carl Haussman and John Emmett, director of Livermore’s laser problems. Rockwell and the Department of Engergy would not comment on the case.

If he wins his lawsuit, Navarette stands to gain several hundred thousand dollars as a result of making public the questionable enterprise in which he participated. The court action was filed under seal May 22 and remained under seal until late July when a statutory 60-day secrecy period expired during which government attorneys were able to begin determining if they would join in Navarette’s court action. A final decision has not yet been made.

The lawsuit is also one of the first three actions brought under the False Claims Act, which could open a new era of disclosure of government waste and fraud, according to the prominent Los Angeles public-interest lawyer largely responsible for the new federal law and a companion California statute that goes into effect Jan. 1. The state law will apply to every government entity in California, irrespective of level.

The law will be, said attorney John Phillips who heads the West Los Angeles-based Center for Law in the Public Interest, the quintessential application of free-enterprise principles--in which citizen-bounty hunters are empowered to sue for billions of dollars in alleged waste without waiting for government bureaucracies to act.

It will also have the potential for chaos, Phillips said, because such litigious intensity is bound to bring with it a raft of frivolous, vengeful cases, as well as thousands of legitimate ones. Its success, he said, will depend on people whose motives and conduct may themselves not be pristine.

David Navarette is such a man. His story is one of conflict--personal and interpersonal--and of the pragmatically familiar struggle between the urge to do what conscience dictates and what life style and pocketbook require.

Navarette said without hesitation that he went along, quietly and for the most part willingly, with what was happening for more than a decade--and even returned to the trinket factory after once resigning.

Sitting in the kitchen of their home in the Denver suburb of Northglenn, Navarette and his second wife, Sonja, chain-smoked cigarettes and talked about how he got where he is today.

Marriage and Children

Navarette was born in El Paso and reared in Albuquerque, N.M. He grew up as one of five children of an oil company maintenance man. Marriage came on the heels of high school graduation. Children--five in all--began to follow soon after.

He found work in Albuquerque as a draftsman in a plant run by the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) that was attempting to develop a nuclear-powered engine. Early on, Navarette joined professionally with Rooker, now 56, and the two formed a working bond that was to last 30 years. Their personal relationship started much earlier than that, for Navarette’s parents had taken Rooker in as a youth, Navarette said.

Eventually, Rooker organized a mock-up and idea engineering group in Albuquerque and moved the unit to Denver in the early 1970s where it eventually became attached to Rockwell’s giant Rocky Flats facility.

Navarette followed, but quit and returned to Albuquerque, he said, after he came to resent what he describes as pressure by Rooker to do outside work--including drafting plans for a vacation home for Rooker--on company time paid by government contracts.

But by the mid-’70s, Navarette said, his job in Albuquerque was threatened by possible layoffs, so he decided to return to Rooker’s employ in Denver. His marriage broke up soon after.

After he returned, Navarette said, Rooker had started up--with the concurrence of higher officials in Rockwell and at Livermore--the trinket plant as a subsidiary of what was supposed to be a model shop specializing in prototype fabrication and dummy duplicates of nuclear bombs.

Navarette and court files also charge that there were personal jobs for Rooker including plans for at least two houses, a stairway for Rooker’s existing home, a liquor still, a jack to pull the engine from his converted bus motor home and the three grandfather clocks--only one of which was completed.

Rooker’s perception of all this is quite different. In a telephone interview, which he said was the first time he has publicly discussed the allegations against him, Rooker said that Navarette was attempting to exact retribution for episodes ranging from questionable expense accounts Navarette allegedly submitted to dashed hopes for promotion. Rooker denied the house-plan charges--saying Navarette developed drawings on his own time and not on Rooker’s orders--and also said Navarette insisted on fabricating the motor-home jack after he specifically ordered him not to. Rooker also said he knew nothing of the still--and that he has not consumed alcoholic beverages in 17 years.

25-Year-Old Practice

But Rooker also said that the trinket operation began and thrived because Department of Energy and other government officials came to expect a ready source of souvenirs for plant-openings, retirement and transfer parties and unveilings of laser and nuclear weapons. Rooker said he supplied a system that made ever greater demands for souvenir items that his model shop had been asked to provide as long as 25 years ago.

He defended the souvenir manufacturing business as expected by government and Rockwell officials and largely permitted under discretionary accounts and loopholes in government contracts and business practices that provide for commemorative items.

“If I go to a Department of Energy function and Rockwell’s vice president and general manager is there, and the assistant general manager is there and I’m there and all of these guys are giving this guy who got a big promotion all of these plaques,” he said sardonically, “do you mean to tell me that the general manager doesn’t know where all of that comes from?

“Give me a break. If you believe that, you believe in the stork, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”

Rooker lives in Loveland, Colo., drawing long-term disability benefits. He said he was fired by Rockwell in June, 1985, when Navarette first went to the FBI.

Navarette and Phillips acknowledge that Navarette’s disclosure of the trinket factory operation was motivated at least in large part by a longstanding mutual antipathy of Navarette and Rooker.

In 1979, David Navarette met Sonja--then a janitor at Rocky Flats--and the two were married a year later. Sonja brought two children of her own--Aaron, now 15, and Amy, 10--to the marriage. Both still live in the Northglenn house. Navarette’s own children, now grown, live in the Southwest.

Stoic and inwardly directed, Navarette told his new wife nothing about what he now says was a building source of frustration and anger. His silence on the subject lasted five years.

And finally--frustrated, he said, by new demands for a set of house plans from Rooker--when he went to the Rockwell personnel department to complain in 1985, he did so while Sonja was away on business. He told her after the fact, by phone, and when she returned home, he laid out the whole situation in detail.

Gossip at the Plant

Sonja, 37 and now a product manager at Rocky Flats, said an undercurrent of gossip about the operation had been prevalent in the plant, but that little was known about specifics among other employees.

“I was shocked,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that he had been going through this for that long and not doing something about it. He wanted to do something but he didn’t know what to do. He wanted some help, but he didn’t know where to go.

“He wanted to keep his job. He loved his job, but he didn’t know how he could stay in that job and tell what he had to tell.”

Navarette said he always had a problem with the extracurricular demands of the trinket manufacturing operation. “You can’t turn around and sign a disclosure statement that says you have witnessed no theft and abuse of government property and then turn around and do it. But then you get caught up in it.”

Navarette said he realized he had been in a trap. Without a degree and, by then, older than 40, he feared he could not compete for jobs in other firms that would match his Rockwell salary. He currently makes about $40,000 a year. Sonja Navarette earns about $30,000 in her position.

“I thought the system would take care of me,” Navarette said, “that we would be all right. (But in the end) I felt like I was finally doing my duty as a citizen of the United States. I kept wanting something to happen. But even then, I thought, ‘Why should I have to give up my career in order for something to be done?’ ”

His frustration continued to build even after he told his story, first to plant officials and almost immediately thereafter to the FBI. He said he was moved to a job where he was given almost nothing to do and was isolated from the other employees.

But, Navarette said, he still couldn’t bring himself to share with his wife his frustrations and depression over the situation.

“Twenty-four hours a day, he thought about it,” Sonja Navarette said. “We had no goals. We had no future. You couldn’t plan for tomorrow. We couldn’t go on vacation. There was nothing going on in his life,” except the simmering frustration.

Finally, the couple separated in the summer of 1986, staying apart for three months until marriage counseling convinced Navarette his communications skills had to improve. The relationship has recovered, but both agree that each day still presents something of a challenge.

‘I Was an Informer’

The term whistle-blower had not previously been in Navarette’s vocabulary. He still doesn’t like it--equating it with stool pigeon . “I guess at various times you pick up the newspaper and read about some guy in California or back East--it’s always someplace else--who blew the whistle on mismanagement of funds,” he said. “I can’t say where I first heard the term and I never really wanted it to apply to me. I always said I was an informer . It doesn’t sound so nasty.”

A Rockwell spokesman here said the company would not comment on the case, on the advice of counsel. “We are responding through appropriate legal channels,” the spokesman said.

Livermore--named in the court papers as the largest single client for items from the trinket operation, said through a spokeswoman that many items enumerated in the lawsuit were ordered. Livermore said, however, that the orders were allowed under provisions of various government contracts. And it produced purchase orders for two of the disputed items--a batch of 1,025 medals observing completion of development work on a laser weapon and 2,016 gold-trimmed coffee mugs ordered for distribution at an open house. It also produced an authorization letter dated in October, 1977, from the Department of Energy’s San Francisco office for the laser medal.

Rooker, insisting that the trinket scheme was created by top Department of Energy officials, said that the charges as they relate to Livermore are misdirected. “Lawrence Livermore, for whatever reason,” Rooker said, “has been accused of skimming. That’s not true. The people skimming were the Department of Energy higher-ups and (Rockwell) Rocky Flats security people.”

The FBI investigation--which included, an FBI spokesman confirmed, a search of Rooker’s home in which a motor home jack and other items were confiscated--resulted in no criminal charges. The Department of Energy inspector general’s office has initiated an investigation of its own but the department has refused to comment on the case--or officially confirm that its own inspector general’s case is still being developed.

And though Phillips said Navarette at least theoretically faces criminal charges, such an outcome seems unlikely, according to an FBI spokesman. Navarette testified before a federal grand jury investigating the affair but was neither offered immunity from prosecution, he said, nor warned he was a potential target.

Sort of Conflicts

In all, Phillips said, the Navarette affair typifies the sort of conflicts that occur when government waste and fraud are suspected. Phillips, who was a key force behind revisions of the federal law and enactment of the state statute, said whistle-blower situations seldom exemplify clear-cut ethical decision-making--especially by the person blowing the whistle.

“It is difficult for someone in (Navarette’s) position to risk everything, Phillips said. “It takes an act of courage.”

He said that the two new laws include guarantees against firings of workers who take their knowledge of questionable expenditures to investigators. The law requires that the government investigate within 60 days after an allegation is made and that if authorities confirm questionable expenditures, the government then joins the case. The worker would share in any monetary award in a successful suit but is liable for legal fees if the complaint is found to be frivolous or fabricated.

“Most (whistle-blowers attracted by the new laws) will not say initially that the money is a motivating factor,” Phillips said, “but in 90% of the cases, it is.” He said Navarette, who spoke out before the federal revision bill was enacted, may be an exception to that rule.

Diverse Activities

The House environment, energy and natural resources subcommittee is also investigating the affair, and hearings--including testimony by Navarette--are expected to be conducted in Washington next month.

A congressional investigator, speaking on the condition he not be named, said the operation’s activities were so diverse and at times so convoluted that assembling the case “is a little bit like nailing Jell-O to a wall.”