Galvin: ‘That’s What I Do’ : Consummate Deal Maker Focus of Pentagon Probe

In the $150-billion-a-year defense industry, William M. Galvin considers himself a “quarterback”--a deal maker who huddles with key players in the military and political Establishment and devises stratagems that score huge projects for defense contractors.

“That’s what I do,” Galvin, a primary target of the Pentagon procurement investigation, explained in a sworn statement in a lawsuit a few years back. “I do it on the telephone. I do it on face-to-face visits. I do it with congressional assistants.”

Galvin’s playbook, which won him lucrative consulting contracts with at least a dozen of America’s largest military contractors during the nation’s decade-long defense buildup, has now subjected him to intense scrutiny by federal investigators.

The barrel-chested consultant--described by associates as glib, aggressive and shrewd--is suspected of paying off at least one Pentagon official in a scheme to market confidential data that could help his corporate clients win multimillion-dollar defense contracts, according to court filings in the probe.

Although he has been charged with no crime, court and other public records place Galvin, 57, at the center of the web of current and former Defense Department officials, consultants and defense industry executives named in the continuing investigation.

Northrop, Unisys, Martin Marietta, Hercules, United Technologies, LTV, Cubic and other companies that paid Galvin as much as $10,000 per month for his Washington insider’s expertise have been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., for information about his consulting activities on sensitive weapons and avionics systems.

The Brooklyn-born Galvin has drawn fire before in a 30-year business career that has taken him from Washington to California to Florida and back to the nation’s capital.

He has sold computer services, run a hospital diagnostic center and operated a travel agency. A rabbi’s grandson, he struck up a friendship with “born-again” Christian entertainer Anita Bryant and booked medical visits in Miami for a Latin American dictator.

Throughout, the gray-haired law school dropout--whose telephones were tapped by the FBI for more than 14 months and whose office in the Watergate complex was searched last month--prided himself on his salesmanship.

‘Wheeler and Dealer’

“Galvin was a wheeler and dealer of the first order,” said Christian L. Engelman, a retired Navy captain who served with Galvin on the board of a Miami computer services firm in the early 1970s.

Galvin sought to draw into his orbit anyone who could be of service--from maitre d’s to high-level Pentagon officials like Melvyn R. Paisley, the former assistant Navy secretary who also is a target of the federal investigation.

“What did Bill Galvin sell?” said the president of a San Diego defense contracting firm that purchased one of Galvin’s companies and briefly was in business with Galvin: “He sold that he knew everybody.”

Paisley’s home was searched by the FBI last month for evidence that he took payments from defense contractors while at the Navy Department and made payments to a former colleague after he left the government. Investigators also have alleged in court filings that Paisley provided contractors with classified and confidential data.

Brazen Boasts

And Paisley was the Pentagon connection Galvin boasted of most brazenly.

“Bill Galvin would go around saying: ‘I got Paisley in my hip pocket,’ ” a competing defense consultant recalled.

In December, 1985, Galvin, Paisley and their wives took a Virgin Islands trip on a jet chartered by Galvin, according to sources and records obtained by The Times. A few months later, the couples cruised home from the Farnborough, England, air show aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2--a trip Galvin arranged through one of his companies, according to records at the Pentagon and the Cunard Steam-Ship Co. Also in 1986, VAMO Inc., a consulting firm established by Galvin, compensated Paisley’s wife, Vicki, according to a federal financial disclosure report.

Melvyn Paisley, a former Boeing executive who had broad power in the Pentagon to structure and dispense the contracts dear to Galvin’s defense industry clients, was Galvin’s frequent dinner companion as well, said Stanley L. Sommer, a Washington representative for Northrop and longtime Galvin friend.

‘Everybody Knew Him’

They were so close, in fact, that when Galvin ushered a San Diego business associate into Paisley’s Pentagon office for a courtesy call, Galvin got the VIP treatment. “The secretary knew him,” the associate recalled. “Everybody knew him.”

E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., Paisley’s attorney, said Paisley paid for the boat trip, that Galvin had nothing to do with Vicki Paisley’s earnings from VAMO and that, in any event, “Paisley never made a decision at the Pentagon to assist or not assist a particular company simply because of Mr. Galvin.”

While Barcella acknowledged that Galvin and Paisley were occasional social companions, some of Galvin’s other boasts of powerful contacts have not always rung true.

Individuals he claimed to know well--from “The Tonight Show’s” Ed McMahon to Robert Hillyer, technical director of the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego--say they cannot remember ever meeting Galvin.

More than once he said he had been the driving force behind an expansion of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami, telling one friend it was he who arranged for then-President Richard M. Nixon to dedicate the medical center in 1974. In fact, hospital records say Galvin worked at Cedars for only one year, in late 1975 and 1976.

High Profile

Despite Galvin’s high profile--memberships in tony country clubs in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and Bethesda, Md., and frequent parties at his Watergate apartment in Washington and country home in Front Royal, Va.--he cloaked his business affairs in mystery.

“It used to be a joke in my family, what Bill did,” recalled Carol Galvin, who divorced the former Marine pilot in 1966 and now lives in the Virgin Islands.

“I never knew exactly what he did except that we were wined and dined an awful lot and we wined and dined a lot of contractors, particularly in the air industry,” she said. “He chose to label it lobbying, but some people would call it influence peddling.”

Galvin grew up on Long Island. His father, Jack, owned a fleet of trucks that carried cattle to a Brooklyn slaughterhouse. Galvin, an athletic 6-footer, majored in political science at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., served with the Marines in Korea and finished two years of study at the St. John’s University Law School before heading to Washington in 1959 to hang out his shingle as a defense consultant.

Collected Contacts

It was then, apparently, that Galvin began collecting contacts in the military.

According to a Los Angeles lawsuit that charged him with refusing to return $7,000 in mistaken payments from a New York avionics firm, Galvin dealt in the ‘60s with officials of the Air Force, Lockheed, the Aerospace Corp., North American Aviation, Martin Marietta and Ryan Aircraft.

After a protracted court battle with his ex-wife over the custody of their daughter, Joan--now an aide to Rep. Andy Ireland (R-Fla.)--Galvin took a marketing job in Los Angeles with Data Dynamics, a firm that provided computer services to the Defense Department.

By 1970, he was president of the publicly traded company, which had merged with a Miami firm and relocated to Florida. Other officials of Data Dynamics disapproved of Galvin’s business practices, however. One, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said he resigned from the firm’s board to record his disgust.

“I didn’t want my name in any way associated with Mr. Galvin,” the former corporate officer said.

Galvin was fired by Data Dynamics in 1972; according to published reports, the company accused him in a lawsuit of collecting thousands of dollars in unjustified expense reimbursements.

Met Anita Bryant

With his new wife, Evelyn, Galvin lived in an exclusive section of Miami Beach, where they met entertainer Anita Bryant. “They are very dear friends,” said Bryant. “As far as I know, he has great integrity. He’s a great family man, a Christian.”

Yet Galvin seems to have purposely sowed confusion about his business affairs in the late 1970s.

In a resume he provided to the San Diego company that purchased The Upshur Corp., his defense research and development firm, Galvin said he was president from 1974 to 1979 of General Health, a Miami company he said was responsible for the “design, installation and operations of multiphasic diagnostic center at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami.”

But when questioned in a deposition by attorneys for the San Diego company, which sued him for allegedly misrepresenting the financial condition of Upshur, Galvin said he was retired from 1975 to 1980.

Florida corporate records belie both stories. The hospital’s diagnostic center was already open in 1974, and General Health was dissolved in 1976. Cedars hospital personnel records, meantime, say Galvin was director of the diagnostic center from December, 1975, to December, 1976.

Travel Agency Partner

He left that job to become a partner in a travel agency that arranged for Latin American tourists--including Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez, then the dictator of Bolivia--to get a two-day diagnostic workup at Cedars after a visit to Disney World, according to Ricardo Vega, one of Galvin’s partners in Quality Tours.

“He’s very good at the social-public relations-salesman-marketing end of things,” said Vega, who traveled to Central and South America with Galvin and physicians from Cedars’ staff to promote the state-of-the-art diagnostic facility.

Vega remembers scratching his head at the correspondence Galvin received from aerospace companies. He wondered why a major aircraft company once invited Galvin to attend the Paris Air Show. His partner, Vega said, never talked about his background in the defense industry.

“I always thought it was all civilian,” Vega said.

But with President Jimmy Carter firing back up the stalled engine of defense spending, it seems Galvin, in the late ‘70s, was preparing to return to the consulting business he had left behind nearly 15 years before.

His resume omits his next job--that as Washington representative of Edmac, an Upstate New York defense manufacturing firm.

‘Almost a Ringknocker’

“He’s almost a ‘ringknocker’ ” (Navy argot for a high-powered insider), said Edward McDonald, Edmac’s founder, who hired Galvin in 1979. “Because he was a Marine pilot and because he’d been on carrier aircraft with the Navy, he could strike up a rapport with Navy people, particularly fliers, very easily.”

Paisley, a World War II Army ace, seemed to warm to Galvin’s patter. So did Paisley’s former Boeing colleague, Deputy Assistant Navy Secretary James E. Gaines, who often joined the two for lunch, according to Sommer. Gaines allegedly supplied classified and proprietary data to Paisley after he left the Pentagon, and federal investigators searched Paisley’s home for evidence that he and Galvin made payments to Gaines, according to court filings. Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci suspended Gaines from his Pentagon post last month.

Galvin left Edmac in 1981 to free-lance as a consultant and to go into the defense contracting business himself.

Classified Pact

According to records in the San Diego court case, Galvin’s new firm, Upshur, had a classified $85,000 pact with BDM International--the Virginia consulting firm that employed Vicki Paisley. FBI agents last month seized from the Paisleys’ McLean, Va., home a consulting contract between Galvin and BDM and a request from Galvin for a payment from BDM Vice President Charles R. Wasaff, understood to involve a naval counter-stealth program.

Robert S. Bennett, BDM’s attorney, declined to comment on the firm’s dealings with Galvin.

Another of Upshur’s contracts was a $100,000 award in July, 1982, from the Navy’s Joint Cruise Missile Program, whose executive director for acquisitions at the time was William L. Parkin.

A few months later, Parkin left the Pentagon to become a defense consultant, working part time for Galvin. During the next year, Upshur got an additional $221,900 in follow-up work to its original contract, according to Navy contract records.

Primary Target

Investigators have termed Parkin a primary target of the procurement investigation. An FBI affidavit made public in the investigation described him as “a middleman who paid government employees for inside information and sold it to contractors.” Upshur’s contracts with the cruise missile program are being scrutinized in the probe, Pentagon sources added.

Gerard F. Treanor, Parkin’s attorney, said Parkin’s superiors in the cruise missile program had authorized the contracts with Upshur, adding he was unsure what role Parkin had played. “We are aware of no allegations of improprieties in connection with Upshur’s relationship with the Joint Cruise Missile Program,” Treanor said.

Upshur, which was based in Arlington, Va., also obtained a $100,000 contract in 1983 from the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration to work on an avionics project called “Paved Pillar.’

A few months later, Galvin sold Upshur to the San Diego firm. But Air Force officials did not want to give a follow-up contract to the San Diego company. So Galvin, whose return from Upshur’s sale depended upon his success in landing work for the San Diego firm, called on his Washington contacts for help.

Air Force Contact

Among those from whom Galvin sought assistance, according to his testimony in the San Diego court case, was Victor D. Cohen, the deputy assistant Air Force secretary for tactical systems, whom Galvin described as “the fellow I have a dialogue with in the Air Force in the secretary’s office.”

Cohen--another of Galvin’s frequent luncheon companions, according to Sommer--has, like Parkin, been suspended from his Pentagon job. Federal agents searched and sealed his Pentagon office last month.

With the sale of Upshur in 1984, Galvin focused his attention almost exclusively on his increasingly lucrative consulting business. He established a string of Washington-area consulting companies--Athena Associates, Atlantic Industries, Sapphire Systems, Locus Ltd.--that defense firms paid to learn the ins and outs of Pentagon procurement.

“You hire consultants for either what they know and/or who they know,” explained Edmond J. Schneider, spokesman for Wilmington, Del.-based Hercules, one of the few firms willing to discuss its dealings with Galvin. “We relied on Mr. Galvin’s insight of the budgetary process.”

Refused Comment

Galvin has refused to comment on the investigation. But the combative, colorful deal maker--described by even his former wife as “an absolute charmer, a man’s man”--has insisted to confidants that he has done nothing illegal.

After watching the closed-circuit telecast at Washington’s Capitol Center of heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson’s first-round knockout of Michael Spinks last month, Galvin told Sommer he was confident he would not be counted out.

“He claims,” said Sommer, “that he’s home free.”

Contributing to this story were staff writers Mark Arax in Los Angeles, Greg Johnson in San Diego, John Hurst, Douglas Jehl and William C. Rempel in Washington and researcher Lorna Nones in Miami.