Ex-Staffer Sues Hughes, Alleging He Was Set Up : Court: The low-level worker, convicted for selling classified documents, claims the company misled him.
Frank Caso, a former Hughes Aircraft budget analyst found guilty of illegal trafficking in classified documents in the federal Operation Uncover probe, charged in a civil suit Thursday that Hughes attorneys undermined his legal case so that the corporation could cut its own plea deal with government prosecutors.
Caso’s suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, charges that Hughes, a unit of General Motors, intentionally misled him in an effort to preempt him from cooperating with the Justice Department and disclose potentially damaging information about the firm and its management.
Hughes spokesman Richard Dore said the company had not received the complaint, but remarked, “we can’t see where there can be any merit to the claims.”
The Caso case appears significant because it raises new questions about how the government handled the eight-year Operation Uncover investigation and whether lower-level managers were left responsible for crimes that involved some officials higher up the corporate ladder.
Caso is among five low-level managers in the industry who were convicted or pleaded guilty in the Operation Uncover cases, but notably the massive federal probe failed to catch any executives even at the vice presidential level.
After GM cut its plea deal with the government, evidence emerged that a number of top Hughes Aircraft officials, including former Hughes Chairman Malcolm Currie, knew about Caso’s classified documents and had approved his actions, according to Caso’s suit.
When GM pleaded guilty in March, 1990, to trafficking in secret Pentagon budget documents and agreed to pay a $3.7-million fine, it obtained immunity for all of the firm’s employees and executives--except Caso, according to Caso’s attorneys, Phillip Benson and Herbert Hafif.
Caso claims in his suit that Hughes violated the terms of a contract in which Caso and the company agreed to have a joint legal defense in the federal case. As part of that agreement, either party was required to notify the other of any plea negotiations with the government.
But Caso asserts in his suit that GM never disclosed that it had entered plea negotiations with the Justice Department until after a plea agreement was signed on March 7, 1990. That came after Caso made substantial disclosures about his case to GM attorneys.
Indeed, one of GM’s top attorneys, Mike Milliken, told Caso just days before GM signed its plea agreement “that both he and the company had a good defense and that they would pursue the matter to the end,” the suit claims.
After Hughes’ guilty plea, Caso was indicted and went to trial.
In an effort to show that Currie knew and approved of Caso’s activities, Caso unsuccessfully attempted to subpoena Currie five times. During the trial, Currie was in Brazil, according to the suit. Meanwhile, two other senior Hughes executives invoked the Fifth Amendment during the Caso trial, according to the suit.
Caso was convicted and sentenced to six months in a correctional facility, which he is still waiting to serve.
“It appears to be a consistent practice by these defense corporations to leave the little guys dangling in the wind,” Benson said. “This should be a warning to other low-level defense employees what these joint defense agreements really mean.”
