Agent Called Key to Blast Case

When a phalanx of federal agents hit the front gates at Rocketdyne’s Canoga Park headquarters and Santa Susana Field Lab last summer, they knew exactly what they were looking for.

Lead FBI agent Michael Templin had told them.

With Templin’s guidance, they seized just 25 carefully chosen boxes of records and floppy disks--a fraction of the evidence often taken in such complex raids of huge government contractors.

And in the months that followed, Templin and U.S. prosecutors used it to build a case of unprecedented strength against Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne division.

The first phase of that case ended April 8 when Rocketdyne pleaded guilty to three environmental felonies and paid a record $6.5-million fine for the chemical explosion that killed two of its scientists in 1994.

The second phase, for Templin, will be the payoff: the investigation and possible prosecution of Rocketdyne employees.

“If you just go after the company, there’s not as much of a deterrent to them violating the law again,” said Templin. “Where the deterrent will take effect is that we are going to go after individuals.”

At 46, Templin is slight, quiet, even bookish.

An avid hiker and photographer who settled in his hometown of Camarillo, Templin looks every bit the part of a mild-mannered accountant.

Which is almost exactly what he is, fellow investigators say.

Except the typical CPA does not find himself in high demand by the U.S. attorney’s office over his instinct for ferreting hidden fraud out of Byzantine U.S. military contracts.

Nor are run-of-the-mill bean-counters as skilled as Templin at transforming thick files into crisp evidence, wary whistle-blowers into expert witnesses and dreary documents into a case powerful enough to win conviction in federal court.

“If it wasn’t for Mike, this case would not have been where it is today,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. William Carter, lead prosecutor in the Rocketdyne case. “It was Mike’s case, and Mike has put it together.”

Complex cases such as Rocketdyne’s require an agent to hunt through hundreds of boxes of documents for a precious few that will prove fraud, said Gary Auer, agent in charge of the FBI’s Ventura office and Templin’s boss.

The job means “not only finding the needle among the haystack of all these documents, but tracing the handling of a transaction through various corporate officials to establish who should be witnesses, who should be targets and whom we should attempt to develop as sources,” Auer said.

“And Mike has all those things,” Auer said. “[He’s] an individual who sees a big and complex case as all the more challenge to him.”

After the explosion of gun-propellant chemicals killed Rocketdyne physicists Otto K. Heiney and Larry A. Pugh, Templin said, “I received an allegation that instead of experimenting, they were burning off these . . . materials.”

He began to wonder--and then grill Rocketdyne officials.

How could two learned scientists be working with enough of the chemicals to get themselves killed?

Why did photos of the scene show empty cans of several different chemicals when Rocketdyne claimed initially that Pugh and Heiney were using only two?

Where were the test data from these supposed experiments?

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If Rocketdyne were telling the truth, Templin said, “They should be forthcoming with answers. Well, the answers that should have been available weren’t. When somebody can’t give you the answers that prove it’s legitimate, it is--by default--illegitimate.”

Templin quietly began interviewing Rocketdyne employees, but word that the FBI was on the case got out fast. No sooner had Templin begun his second interview than someone phoned the employee’s house.

Templin recalled the man muttering into the phone, “Yeah, they’re here.”

“And that interview disappeared,” Templin said.

Templin was no stranger to Rockwell International. Twice before he had caught the aerospace giant cheating the federal government.

In the early 1980s, the firm was building the Global-Positioning Satellite network for the government on a fixed-price contract, and the space shuttle on a contract that made allowances for overruns.

“With the GPS contract, they were in a position to lose money” if the work cost more than the fixed price, Templin recalled. “They started having employees overcharge the difference to the shuttle contract,” which had room for overages.

Between 1978 and 1982, he said, Rockwell used this scheme to take an estimated $5 million to $15 million from taxpayers.

When confronted with the charges based on the FBI’s analysis of its two big contracts, Rockwell came clean. The firm settled the case with a covenant decree, promising to change accounting practices and to never do it again.

Barely 12 months later came another Rockwell case: The FBI caught the company overbilling the Air Force on another contract, won a guilty plea from Rockwell and collected fines and restitution totaling nearly $8 million.

“In those days, the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, they believed they could stretch things and if the government didn’t find it, they’d get to keep [the money],” Templin said of the government contract frauds he investigated.

Of Rockwell, he said dryly, “I don’t dislike that company. But I’ve got three cases with them.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. Nathan Hochman came to appreciate Templin’s experience--and his methods--as the agent worked with prosecutors crafting the case that won Rocketdyne’s guilty plea.

“The best way to describe him is he’s thorough and he’s tenacious,” Hochman said. “He has the ability to analyze sort of a complex set of facts, to conduct thorough interviews and gather evidence to construct a cohesive theory of a case.”

For Templin, analysis and theory began with math classes and anthills in his native Ventura County.

He was born in Ventura, the son of a Point Mugu civil electrician and a homemaker, the middle child of three.

He spent his childhood in Camarillo, playing in grassy fields and the row upon row of dusty orange groves that covered the region in the pre-boom years of the 1950s. And he squeezed wrestling and basketball between studies at Camarillo High School before he went on to physics studies at Ventura College.

“I was always good at math,” said Templin, sitting in the modest home he now shares with two sons, 17 and 21, following his divorce three years ago. “In those days, I liked the orderliness of it. Everything was in its place, everything was logical.”

Bugs fascinated him. The frantic, bustling hierarchy of anthills kept an order of their own, almost luring him into serious study to become an entomologist--until a stint in the Army persuaded him to be more realistic about his future.

Templin served the bulk of his two-year tour stateside from 1968 to 1970 with the Army’s Old Guard, the ceremonial unit that conducts funerals at Arlington National Cemetery for fallen service personnel.

The Old Guard taught him the finicky rituals of military mourning, the precise order of escorting, saluting and laying to rest comrades slain in the Vietnam War.

When he emerged, Templin went straight to Cal State Northridge, earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration and got a job.

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He began at Litton Industries, auditing military contracts for a sort of government-run watchdog agency called the Defense Contractor Auditing Agency. The agency taught him about the vagaries of cross-charging and overbilling, the fiscal sleight-of-hand that allows some military defense contractors to fleece the government of millions.

When a friend told him the FBI was hiring accountants at considerably better pay, Templin jumped, visions of TV’s “The FBI” firmly in mind.

Joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation was “the best choice I’ve made in years,” he said.

Basic training at Quantico was tough, intimidating, hard on the body and mind: Law. Forensic science. White-collar crime. Firearms and physical agility.

“My confidence improved as I was going through it,” Templin said. He came to believe “that whatever course they put ahead of us, whatever challenge, it could be met.”

The bureau shipped him to El Paso, where he found himself the only FBI accountant in town, and assigned all the white-collar cases they could throw at him.

Templin ran down ex-GIs who were defrauding the Veterans Administration by getting a free ride on the college bill while taking only one class. He also sniffed out unscrupulous employers and “ghost employees” who did not work a lick to earn the money they were skimming off federal job-training programs.

After three years, he was transferred to the FBI’s Los Angeles headquarters in Westwood, where he first worked on the Rockwell cases.

Templin went on to join a broad probe of corruption at the federal detention center at Terminal Island. There, the FBI found that guards were shaking down inmates for drugs, selling furloughs--even selling escapes. That probe brought six convictions, and cost 13 more guards their jobs, he said.

In 1987, Templin broke his neck in a mountain-biking accident near his home in eastern Camarillo, and spent two months in the hospital. He still carries himself a bit stiffly and considers himself lucky to be alive.

But the bureau transferred him to the Ventura office so he could recover closer to home. He has stayed there ever since.

In Ventura, Templin has earned a reputation with colleagues, prosecutors and even fellow members of the FBI’s Evidence Gathering Team and the Ventura County Environmental Task Force as a smart, thorough, relentless investigator.

“He’s very methodical and precise in his work,” said Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Brose, a task force member who runs the D.A.’s environmental wing. “He just goes through it step by step by step by step. He literally leaves no stone unturned.”

Templin fleshed out a Cal/OSHA investigation of the 1994 Rocketdyne blast with interviews of his own “and went quite a bit further with it,” Brose said.

After interviewing numerous employees, Templin spent the months between September 1994 and July 1995 preparing to execute the search warrant.

On July 13, 1995, two teams of agents from the FBI, EPA, NASA and the U.S. Departments of Defense, Navy, Air Force and Energy swept down simultaneously on Rocketdyne.

The first team hit the front gate at the Santa Susana Field Lab, where a guard held them briefly while trying to verify their identity and warn Rocketdyne brass in Canoga Park, Templin recalled.

*

But the agents made their way inside the field lab’s complex of buildings and test stands, and began searching file cabinets and seizing evidence.

“Most of the [Rocketdyne] attorneys and people in security were on the way up to Santa Susana when we hit the front door at Canoga, and we encountered no resistance,” Templin said. “Most of our search was unimpeded.”

Once agents had brought all the evidence back to Ventura, Templin began to pick his way through it--for the most part, alone.

Nearly nine months later, Rocketdyne has paid the largest fine ever won in a California environmental case. Now, the probe is focusing on individual culpability at Rocketdyne.

Here, as Templin works on cultivating witnesses who can link employees to the crime, the case will hang heavily on his skills as an interviewer.

“I think he puts people at ease, and he won’t lose his temper when he’s interviewing witnesses who aren’t as forthright as they might be,” Carter said. “Eventually, he’ll get to the facts of the matter.”