Nashua Native Helps Shadowy Agency Hunt Government Cheats
WASHINGTON – – Don’t ask Special Agent Andrew Hodges where he’s been. Don’t ask him where he’s going. Odds are, he can’t tell you. Try to swindle the federal government, though, and you’ll likely be hearing from him.
Hodges, 30, a Nashua native, is a fraud sleuth in the Air Force’s shadowy and sometimes hated Office of Special Investigations (OSI). It’s the agency charged with hunting spies and tracking terrorists as well as rooting out criminals from inside the Air Force itself.
It’s also his job to ensure that the government gets what it pays for in the multibillion-dollar defense contracting industry. By Hodges’ own estimation, if you’ve never heard of him, he’s doing just fine.
“You say OSI and people think Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man,” Hodges said in a recent interview at OSI headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. He was referring to the 1970s television series starring Lee Majors as a bionic agent for the fictional Office of Strategic Investigations.
“That’s good in a lot of ways,” he added, cracking a smile. “We’d prefer to kind of stay in the shadows.”
Those who break the law would probably prefer it, too. Many soldiers maintain a stiff distance from Hodges and his fellow agents, who are in the prickly position of having to investigate their own.
“People have this image of OSI that we’re kind of the bad guys, the guys that kick down your door and take you away in handcuffs if you’re doing drugs,” he said. “You can kill a party real quick when you walk in.”
The image is not entirely false.
He recalled with distinct satisfaction watching one belligerent and particularly “pompous” senior airman and small-time Ecstasy dealer get “slam-dunked.”
Hodges’ detective work landed the fellow three years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. (“To see the expression on his face when they told him his sentence was kind of fun,” Hodges said.)
But after four years with the agency, Hodges has graduated from corralling drug dealers, rapists and thieves inside the Air Force to stalking those who would try to scam it from the outside.
“Basically it’s people that cheat the government,” he said. The problem dates at least to the Civil War, when the Union Army was flimflammed into buying boxes of ammunition that were full of sawdust.
And as military equipment gets more complex, Hodges said the stakes get proportionately higher. If, for example, contractors try to shave expenses by putting a cheap, flimsy grade of metal in a helicopter, not only are they stealing from the government, the results could be catastrophic.
There are “guys out there putting their lives on the line, putting their trust in the equipment that it will work as promised,” said Hodges, who has a master’s degree in economic crime from the University of Alabama.
Federal prosecutors sued TRW, a subsidiary of aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman, for billing the government for millions of dollars of work done on non-government space contracts during the 1990s. After almost ten years in court, Northrop agreed in June to pay a $111 million settlement. Hodges said such complex cases routinely drag on from five to 15 years.
Despite having to slog through mountains of documents and to coordinate complex investigations with dozens of other federal agencies, Hodges said the trick to nabbing government grifters really is “old-fashioned detective work.” And that runs in his blood: Hodges grandfather was one of the first OSI agents when the Air Force was created in 1948; his father, Robert, was a long-time detective and captain with the Nashua Police Department.
Hodges declined requests to interview his family and friends, or even to name them. His parents – his father is retired – now live in Wolfeboro. His brother, an Army Reservist based out of Londonderry, is in Iraq.
As fraud operations program manager, Hodges now spends more time facilitating investigations than he does actually sleuthing. It is, he begrudgingly acknowledged, a cushy desk job with “bankers’ hours.”
Still, like all soldiers, he must to be ready to deploy immediately to any number of “ugly” places when the call comes. It came four months ago, when Hodges was summoned to lead a security and counterintelligence detail out of the American Embassy in Pakistan. In the interview, he spoke in carefully guarded tones and uses almost incomprehensible jargon to describe his duty there: “threat collection,” “vulnerability assessment,” and so on.
But he softened at the memory of one specific encounter, with a fellow Granite Stater no less, on a steamy runway in Islamabad, Pakistan, in August. It was U.S. Sen. John Sununu, who was on a whirlwind tour of Central Asia and the Middle East with other senators.
The weary group emerged from the plane and Hodges’ detail “herded” them to a heavily defended motorcade.
Recognizing Sununu, Hodges jumped in to ride shotgun in his van.
“I mentioned I was from New Hampshire and he seemed kind of shocked to bump into somebody — a constituent, so to speak,” Hodges laughed, “much less one holding an M-4” assault rifle.
