Firm’s Ex-Leader Gets 3 Years for Falsifying Parts Tests

The former chairman of an Anaheim electronics company was sentenced Monday in federal court in Los Angeles to three years in prison for falsifying safety tests on certain parts installed in important military equipment, including the MX missile.

David Ross was further ordered to pay a $25,000 fine. His company--the now-defunct Calprotech--must pay $1 million in fines for covering up defects and submitting phony certificates of conformance on company circuit boards placed in a wide range of military hardware, including the Bell AH-1T Cobra helicopter and the M-1 Abrams tank.

In delivering the sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Dickran Tevrizian said Ross, an ex-Marine, had potentially threatened the lives of U.S. soldiers stationed in the Persian Gulf since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

“We have 250,000 troops ready to go to war with who knows how many Calprotech boards sitting in military equipment,” said Tevrizian. “There was a lot of fudging going on. There is an old saying, ‘Close enough for government work.’ That shouldn’t be.”

Ross, 50, was among seven Calprotech employees indicted last year in connection with the circuit-board scheme. He was found guilty in September of conspiracy and making false statements. The maximum jail sentence possible was five years.

Federal investigators charged Calprotech with a host of violations, including making cosmetic changes to hide manufacturing flaws. For instance, the company tried to repair short circuits on some boards using methods not allowed by military specifications.

What’s more, employees were told to keep testing different parts of a circuit board until they could find a section that would pass. And sometimes safety tests were switched so that a circuit board that was never tested--or that had flunked a test--might get shipped out bearing test results from a completely different board.

Federal prosecutor Mike Emmick told Tevrizian that about 90% of the company’s suspect circuit boards had failed to live up to military specifications. Ross’s defense attorney, Allan Stokke, maintained that nearly all the boards worked perfectly.

“We don’t need to be worrying about failures out in the field,” said Stokke. “We’re not going to see airplanes falling out of the sky or tanks blowing up.”

Ross apologized, saying that he was ready to serve whatever sentence the judge felt appropriate. “It’s been four years of hell, and I’m very sorry for any of the hurt I’ve caused the people,” he said.