LOS ANGELES – A brazen scheme to fleece the U.S. Navy out of over $9 million has landed a former sailor in hot water. Cory Taylor Wright, 49, of Columbus, Georgia, has agreed to plead guilty to a single count of wire fraud, admitting to years of deceit and illicit profit.
Wright, who served in the Navy from 1997 until his retirement in 2017, exploited his position within the Navy’s Mobile Utilities Support Equipment (Muse) division, based in Port Hueneme, California. Muse handles critical power systems for the Department of Defense, including those deployed to active combat zones. Instead of serving the country, Wright saw an opportunity to line his pockets, and he enlisted a co-conspirator to help.
That co-conspirator, identified only as “Co-Conspirator 1” in court documents, was a fellow Navy enlistee who held supervisory positions at Muse, giving him significant control over contract awards. The pair hatched a plan in late 2016 to create C&C Power Solutions LLC (CCP), a Georgia-based company, with Co-Conspirator 1 slated to become a 50% partner upon his own retirement in 2021. The agreement was simple: Co-Conspirator 1 would steer Navy contracts to CCP, and Wright would reward him with kickbacks and other benefits, including payments to a sporting club.
The scheme quickly escalated. Before CCP was even fully operational, Co-Conspirator 1 leveraged his influence to secure initial funding through fraudulent payments from prime contractors and subcontractors for goods and services CCP hadn’t delivered. Then, they engaged in blatant bid-rigging, submitting inflated bids from bogus companies to make CCP’s proposals appear more competitive – a $790,496 task order in 2017 is just one example. Wright further compounded the fraud by submitting false invoices claiming CCP had completed work it hadn’t, triggering Navy payments based on lies.
Their ambition didn’t stop at subcontracts. Starting in 2017, Wright and Co-Conspirator 1 actively conspired to win a prime contract with Muse, worth potentially tens of millions of dollars. They fabricated documents, including a fraudulent past performance questionnaire, and concealed Co-Conspirator 1’s ownership stake in CCP from Navy officials. The Navy awarded CCP the contract in July 2019, and the fraudulent activity continued unabated until late 2022 and early 2023 when the Navy finally terminated three task orders.
Wright now faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison. He has agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, likely hoping to lessen his sentence by turning over his accomplice. While the Navy attempts to recover the $9 million lost to this scheme, the case serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of government contracts to greed and corruption.
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Key Facts
- State: California
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: White Collar Crime
- Source: Official Source ↗
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