Pasayten's Methow Valley Bulletin Board

.
The article says he was a 14 yr veteran of the Santa Monica FD.

Something still seems hinky about this, though. The couple of instances of fraud/alleged fraud by contractors - that I was on the periphery of - took MANY months to unwind. Federal agencies have their own contracting officers and law enforcement folks who deal with this stuff all the time. I can’t imagine calling in the other Law dogs right away….

It's a very bizarre twist, I'd note that the Calif IC was only on the job a matter of a couple of weeks. Hopefully an agency other than ICE will be doing the auditing.

I signed and approved many, many invoices for aircraft used on fires….sometimes running into many 10s of 1000s of $, per day, for one aircraft….and sometimes approving 9 or 10 equal sized invoices, daily, for weeks on end. I can testify that a couple hundred grand worth of false invoicing by contractors on a fire just wouldn’t be possible without the express collusion and participation of the government agent(s) approving the payments. There are several approval levels and reviews, always.

That story sounds so unlikely it is probably true.