2 Admit Defense Department Bid Bribe

Two former executives of Norden Systems today admitted that they conspired to obtain confidential Defense Department bid information on a lucrative Marine Corps contract.

James E. Rapinac, a former senior vice president, and C. J. Richardson, a former marketing official, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the government and convert government property.

The two acknowledged that they conspired in 1987 to pay defense consultant Thomas Muldoon $49,500 to obtain the information about the contract for a radar command and control system valued at up to $150 million.

Muldoon obtained the information from fellow defense consultant Mark Saunders.

Saunders, who has not been charged in the continuing investigation of Pentagon procurement fraud, is alleged to have obtained the bid information from former Navy procurement official George Stone.

The pleas by Rapinac and Richardson were accepted by U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton, who scheduled sentencing for March 9. Both defendants could receive up to five years’ imprisonment and be fined as much as $250,000.

Earlier in the day, Hilton sentenced two former executives of another defense firm, Whittaker Corp., on their guilty pleas to bribery charges in an unrelated scheme.

Scott M. Lamberth, 59, a former vice president of a Whittaker subsidiary, was ordered to serve 10 months in prison and fined $10,000 for his role in a scheme to funnel more than $80,000 to a Pentagon procurement official.

Also sentenced was John Franklin Van Tassel, a former Whittaker employee, who received a three-month term in a halfway house for his role in the scheme. Van Tassel, who headed the California-based defense firm’s Fayetteville, Ark., operation, was also fined $3,000.