A Virginia man who is a former employee of both the Department of Defense and Department of Justice will spend over seven years in prison for taking bribes in exchange for steering government work to an unqualified subcontractor at inflated prices.
Matthew Kekoa LumHo, 47, of Fairfax Station, was convicted in a scheme to funnel telecommunications contracts from the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General to a small Florida construction company. William Wilson, the company owner, bribed executives at a major firm, Level 3, to get subcontracting work, and then bribed LumHo to make sure contracts went to Level 3.
Roughly $8 million went to Wilson; prosecutors estimate that $1.5 million of that was because of LumHo’s illegal actions. Prosecutors found only about $41,000 that went to LumHo himself.
“The loss is really Mr. Wilson’s gain,” LumHo’s defense attorney Frank Salvato said at a Friday sentencing hearing in federal court in Alexandria. But Judge Liam O’Grady agreed with prosecutors that LumHo’s government role mattered more than the amount of money he received. LumHo “undermined the mission of the Inspector General — to fight waste, fraud, and abuse — from within the organization,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.
“You were a high-level decision-maker in a sensitive position, with a high-level security clearance,” the judge said. He sentenced LumHo to 90 months in prison.
The case began with an employee at Level 3, Stephen Bishop, who filed a suit...
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