‘Something Was Terribly Wrong’ : How Concerned Workers Blew Whistle on Northrop
On her very first day at Northrop’s Western Services Department in El Monte, which produced guidance devices for nuclear-armed cruise missiles, Florence Castaneda said she knew that “something was terribly wrong.”
In an electronics “clean room,” Northrop employees were smoking cigarettes, boiling water for soup, eating lunch at their work stations and watching soap operas on a television set mounted on the supervisor’s desk, she recalled.
Castaneda noticed that instead of using industrial solvents to clean and prepare circuit boards for soldering, workers were using a jar of Tarn-X, a retail brand of polish for silverware.
“There was a price tag on it from Thrifty Drug Store,” she recalled. “I hadn’t seen this kind of work being done in the aerospace industry.”
A little more than three years after starting her job, Castaneda blew the whistle on Northrop and played an important role in helping other Northrop workers get in touch with Air Force officials.
As a result of their efforts, a federal indictment was filed earlier this week, charging their former supervisor, Charles Gonsalves, with criminal fraud. Tests were allegedly faked and in some cases not performed at all on cruise missile guidance systems and on stabilization systems for Marine Corps jet fighters, the indictment said.
Besides Gonsalves, criminal charges were filed against Northrop Corp. itself, two high-ranking executives and two other supervisors. Northrop has said the criminal charges against it and two current executives are “unwarranted,” but the firm has acknowledged that problems existed at the plant and that Gonsalves and three other employees have been fired.
In December, 1987, the company shut down the operation. It has since cooperated with federal investigators, according to Northrop spokesman Tony Cantafio.
Tiny Outpost
The El Monte plant was just a tiny Northrop outpost, employing about 30 workers and reporting to a parent organization in Newton, Mass. In the operation of the multibillion-dollar corporation, Western Services Department somehow fell between the cracks. Not only was the plant manager, Gonsalves, charged with fraud, but the factory’s quality assurance supervisor and its chief engineer were indicted.
“They tried to tell me that I was a small person and that nobody would listen to me,” Castaneda said in an interview this week. It was Castaneda and her fellow workers, Leocadio Barajas and Patricia Meyer, who alerted the government to conditions at Northrop’s Western Services Department.
Unlike many other defense industry whistle-blowers, Castaneda has no financial stake in any False Claims Act law suits, which individuals can bring on behalf of the government and share in the damages. She was motivated by a sense of concern over “those nuclear missiles out there” that she always worried “could be the start of World War III.”
The recent indictments and the Air Force’s examination of the missiles for potential flaws have left her with little sense of vindication. The battle with defense industry giant Northrop, she said, has left her alienated and has destroyed her faith in the aerospace industry.
Castaneda’s daughter contacted The Times last month, saying that somebody should tell the story of how much trouble her mother and other Northrop workers had in simply blowing the whistle.
“I called the FBI in November, 1986. They told me I sounded like a disgruntled employee and that it was a case of sour grapes,” Castaneda recalled. (Justice Department officials declined to comment on Castaneda.)
It was not until a nephew in the Air National Guard arranged a meeting with Air Force agents from the Office of Special Investigations that anybody would listen to her story.
In January, 1987, an OSI agent came to her home in Baldwin Park and met with Castaneda and fellow workers Barajas and Meyer. In an interview in August, 1987, Barajas confirmed that it was Castaneda who arranged the initial interview with Air Force officials.
“Florence had earlier attempted to contact Northrop, but nothing ever happened,” Barajas said. “Pat Meyer and Florence called back east to Precision Products Division (the corporate parent of Western Services Department) to say problems were going on. After that, absolutely nothing was done. It disgusted everybody. We knew that if we tried to complain, nothing would be done.”
Barajas said he wrote an anonymous letter to corporate executives at Northrop, but the letter eventually ended up back with Gonsalves. “He posted it on the bulletin board to tell everybody that it wouldn’t do any good to complain. He laughed at it. He said, ‘Whatever fool tried it didn’t get anywhere.’ ”
After the investigation was launched in 1987, however, government agents met with the employees once every other week at Barajas’ house. Barajas provided investigators with a computer tape used to falsify tests on cruise missile guidance systems built at the plant.
At one point in the spring of 1987, the FBI asked permission to wire Barajas for sound to collect evidence.
“I wasn’t too happy,” he recalled in the 1987 interview. “This tape recorder was really big and bulky and it showed through my shirt. I said, ‘This is the FBI’s modern technology?’ I wished I had gone to Radio Shack and bought my own tape recorder.”
He then went to Gonsalves and said he had told the FBI that the company was falsifying tests on the missile guidance units, Barajas said in the 1987 interview. On July 14, 1987, Barajas was fired.
Barajas and Meyer eventually allied themselves with attorney Herbert Hafif of Claremont and filed a suit against Northrop, charging that the firm had defrauded the government by improperly testing the missile components. The Justice Department joined that suit last month.
Meanwhile, Castaneda waged her own battle against Gonsalves and the company. She started her job at Northrop on Oct. 23, 1983, as a senior assembler/technician. She was certified by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for a variety of electronics work, including soldering and assembly. The certifications were granted by Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and by three defense contractors, Loral, Perkin-Elmer and Honeywell.
Everything about the El Monte operation was out of the mainstream of the aerospace industry, she said. For example, components such as wires did not have “date codes,” which are standard in the aerospace industry to provide for traceability.
“When I started to raise concerns,” Castaneda said, “Mr. Gonsalves told me that if I just did my work like everybody else, we would get along.
“If you were in with the crowd, you could do whatever you wanted,” she said. “That meant going out to the track to place bets at lunch, coming to work intoxicated or anything else you wanted to do.
“It was Mr. Gonsalves’ intent to keep everything quiet. It was his own operation, his own dynasty,” she added. “When DCAS (the Defense Contract Administration Service) would come in, Miss (Cheryl) Hannan would intimidate them.”
(Hannan was a quality assurance supervisor at the operation and was one of the former Northrop officials indicted earlier this week.)
When Northrop shut down the El Monte facility in December, 1987, it fired Gonsalves, Hannan and the two others. The company has acknowledged that the operation was not following company procedures. Gonsalves and Hannan could not be reached for comment this week.
In a hearing before the investigations panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee last year, Northrop Vice Chairman Frank W. Lynch testified that Gonsalves’ work “was inadequate or totally unsatisfactory and unacceptable management performance.”
Lynch testified that Northrop management learned of the problems at Western Services Department from the government, which had learned about them from the employees.
When asked why the employees went to the government instead of to Northrop management, Lynch testified: “Well, unfortunately, sir, the manager of the plant was involved in the decision to falsify or alter or not perform the tests. So, this was being done with the knowledge of and the direction of the manager.
“I don’t think I would--if I were in that situation--I don’t think I would go to that individual . . . “ he added.
In May, 1984, Castaneda was injured in a fall at work. While recovering, she began to complain about conditions at the plant to several Northrop officials. She said one official in the corporate medical department even came to her home to listen to some of her concerns.
Barajas and Castaneda tried to contact the parent organization of the El Monte operation, the Precision Products Division in Newton, Mass. But, as hourly production workers, they apparently did not know the right people to talk to, they said, or the officials they reached did not want to respond. Again, nothing resulted from their efforts, they said.
In April, 1985, Castaneda went on temporary disability, a result of reinjuring her back and of stress, she said. By then, Northrop had grown so concerned about her allegations that it assigned a psychologist to her case through its insurance adjuster, Industrial Indemnity, she said.
The psychologist, Cherry Ann Clark, visited her at home three times a week for two hours each time for several months.
“She told me to forgive Northrop and to forgive Mr. Gonsalves--to ask God to forgive them--and to just go back to work,” she said.
“She would take me to her home or take me to a nice restaurant. When I would cry, she would cry,” Castaneda said.
“She got very friendly with my family,” she said. “She sent my daughter birthday cards. She hired my son to do some work around her house.”
Clark, of San Marino, declined to comment on those statements, saying that her relationship with Castaneda was confidential. She confirmed, however, that she was assigned to some Northrop employee cases through Industrial Indemnity.
At one point, Clark also met with Barajas, Meyer and Castaneda together to give them the same message about forgiving the company, Castaneda said. Ultimately, Castaneda said, she grew disenchanted with the psychologist. One day, she recalled, while talking to Clark in the psychologist’s Lincoln Continental, she opened the door of the parked car and got out.
“She was crying, begging me to get back in,” Castaneda recalled. “I didn’t retain a lawyer until that October, when Northrop didn’t send me a (disability) check and I couldn’t pay the rent.” Northrop reinstated some of the disability benefits, after Castaneda’s attorney intervened.
For a time, Castaneda, a Potawatomi Indian, considered moving back to the reservation where she grew up. But she decided against it when her children insisted that she continue her battle to expose the problems at Northrop.
Castaneda left Northrop in April, 1987. Since then, she has attended a business school to study automated accounting and was graduated several weeks ago. She has begun to look for a job but has avoided the aerospace industry.
“When I can trust the system, I might try it again,” she said.
