Guilty Pleas in Aerospace Fastener Case
A Burbank company pleaded guilty Friday to five felony charges of selling substandard nuts and bolts used in the space shuttle and other aircraft, and it agreed to pay $625,000 in fines and restitution, authorities said.
Lawrence Engineering & Supply Inc. entered its pleas in federal court in San Jose, where in February a federal grand jury had indicted the company on 33 charges relating to fasteners--mainly nuts and bolts--that Lawrence sold primarily to the U.S. government from late 1983 through 1987. The other 28 charges were dismissed Friday.
In general, Lawrence pleaded guilty to “falsely certifying that aerospace fasteners it sold to the United States met all applicable government standards when, in fact, they did not,” Joseph P. Russoniello, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said in a statement.
Lawrence was one of several fastener producers that came under scrutiny in the past two years as part of a widespread federal investigation into sales of allegedly bogus aerospace parts.
The indictment of Lawrence alleged that the company routinely fabricated the results of safety tests on counterfeit nuts and bolts, then sold the fasteners to government agencies and private companies for use on the space shuttle, the Army’s Bradley fighting vehicle, Navy aircraft and United Airlines commercial jets, among other projects.
Two Lawrence executives also were indicted: Gary R. Davidson of Saugus, who was Lawrence’s quality control manager from 1978 until his departure in 1985, and Ramon Smith of Canyon Country, Lawrence’s former vice president and general manager.
Davidson pleaded guilty to two felony charges in February and was fined $25,000, said Leo P. Cunningham, assistant U.S. attorney, in San Jose. Smith, who pleaded innocent, is scheduled to go to trial on Jan. 16. Smith’s lawyer has said that Smith directed Lawrence’s sales and relied on others for quality control and proper certifications of the fasteners in question.
A federal investigation of Lawrence began in the summer of 1988 after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration replaced more than 350 of Lawrence’s bolts installed in the space shuttle Discovery before its successful launch in September, 1988.
NASA had been alerted earlier by one of its subcontractors that some Lawrence bolts might not meet safety standards, and NASA then found that the bolts did not meet strength requirements.
United Airlines also confirmed early this year that it had installed 1,000 of Lawrence’s allegedly bogus bolts in some of its planes but said that passengers were not at risk because the systems using the bolts had backups in the event of failure.
