| "I DID IT" - ARMY RESERVE LTC ADMITS
SHE TOOK BRIBES IN IRAQ CONTRACT $CAM
DEBRA HARRISON PLEADS GUILTY - FACES
UP TO 20 YEARS IN PRISON AND $250,000 FINE
GOT CADILLAC ESCALADE AND BIG BUCKS
FOR HOME IMPROVEMENTS FOR HER ROLE
IN FRAUD - GREED DESTROYS OFFICER'S
ONCE TEFLON-COATED CAREER
There was a time everything she touched turned to roses. High-flying Army Reserve LTC Debra Harrison of Trenton, New Jersey truly had it made in the shade. Friends in her Norristown, Pa.-based civil affairs unit marveled at what they called her "teflon-coated" career.
The 49 year-old field grade officer came back to her $62,000 accountant civilian job from Iraq wearing the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. She had been in an IED attack, and some shattered glass had nicked her face. It got written up in a local newspaper and people regarded Harrison as some sort of hero.
Neighbors noticed she was seemingly flush with cash - tooling around town in a new $50,000 Cadillac Escalade. Workmen were as busy as bees doing home improvements - a new deck and hot tub for her abode - in one of the better sections of New Jersey's state capital.
What they didn't see or know about was the $300,000 in bribes funneled in her direction by fellow crook Philip Bloom, a corrupt contractor in Iraq who now is on his way to a long prison stay.
A FOOL-PROOF CRIME COMES UNDONE
It seemed so easy. Just a handful of officers were in on the scam to steal money designated for reconstruction projects in Iraq. "Dummy up" some documents and who'd be the wiser? It almost worked. But as we used to say in Vietnam, peeling dead VC off the perimeter wire: "Close, but no cigar."
Bloom, who supplied hot and cold water as well as booze and prostitutes from his fancy villa in Baghdad's "Green Zone," got tripped up and soon two other officers were nabbed in the money scheme. It didn't take long for them to "rat out" their female fellow conspirator.
During the first months after Harrison returned to the States in 2004, she was supremely confidant she'd never be caught. In an e-mail that authorities included in her federal indictment, she assured a nervous Bloom: "Don't worry about the State Department jerks. If there was any smoking guns, they would have been found months ago . . . "
Just sixty days later the FBI was ringing her doorbell.
Now the fat Army pension is gone, Harrison has lost her well-paying job with the city of Trenton, and it'll take all her loot and more to pay the stiff fines she faces now that the lieutenant colonel's career has come crashing to the ground.
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