{"id":54946,"date":"2025-11-15T21:54:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T21:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/54946\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T21:54:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T21:54:10","slug":"former-contractor-sentenced-in-spawar-corruption-scheme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/54946\/","title":{"rendered":"Former contractor sentenced in SPAWAR corruption scheme"},"content":{"rendered":"

DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO<\/p>\n

A former executive of a government contracting firm was sentenced Friday in San Diego federal court to 18 months in prison and one year of house arrest for his role bribing a civilian employee<\/a> from San Diego\u2019s Naval Information Warfare Center in exchange for millions of dollars in government contracts for his firm.<\/p>\n

Russell Thurston, a 53-year-old South Carolina resident, pleaded guilty in January to a federal bribery conspiracy charge. He admitted that between 2014 and 2019, he improperly provided expensive meals and other perks<\/a>, such as tickets to the 2018 MLB All-Star game, to James Soriano, a former Department of Defense civil engineer.<\/p>\n

U.S. District Judge Todd Robinson acknowledged that Thurston played a smaller role in the corruption scheme<\/a> than Soriano and others, but said a custody sentence was needed to deter other contractors from engaging in similar conduct. On top of the 18-month prison sentence, he ordered Thurston to serve three years on supervised release, with the first year on home confinement.<\/p>\n

Soriano, the man at the center of the wide-ranging corruption scheme, pleaded guilty last year to accepting bribes from Thurston and at least two other contractors while acting as a certified contracting officer representative at the Naval Information Warfare Center, which at the time was known as the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, or SPAWAR.<\/p>\n

As a contracting officer representative, Soriano was not able to approve defense contracts himself, but he had the ability to influence the awarding of contracts and was supposed to oversee those deals. He admitted that he used his position of authority to seek and accept improper benefits, including World Series and Super Bowl tickets.<\/p>\n

Thurston, an Army veteran, admitted to bribing Soriano while an executive at the East Coast defense firm Cambridge International Systems.<\/p>\n

Robinson sentenced Cambridge last year<\/a> to pay more than $4.1 million in fines and forfeitures. At sentencing, the company\u2019s founder and CEO said her company\u2019s guilty plea was the result of decisions by \u201ca few bad actors,\u201d referring to Thurston and other employees.<\/p>\n

Thurston\u2019s attorneys, on the other hand, argued Cambridge\u2019s owners \u201cwere fully aware of and supported\u201d Thurston\u2019s actions. They said Thurston was corrupted by Soriano, who by the time he met Thurston and began awarding contracts to Cambridge was already engaged in bribery schemes with other contractors, according to his plea agreement.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Thurston\u2019s initial dealings with Soriano were purely professional,\u201d defense attorney Jeremy Warren wrote in a sentencing memorandum. \u201cOver time, however, Soriano blurred ethical boundaries, and Mr. Thurston, unaware of the depth of Soriano\u2019s misconduct, succumbed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Swan acknowledged Soriano was the driving force of the corruption scheme, but said it was inaccurate to argue Thurston made a simple mistake or didn\u2019t realize the repercussions of his actions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile Soriano reached out his hand first, Mr. Thurston gladly took it,\u201d Swan told the judge.<\/p>\n

Soriano and three others involved in the corruption scheme, including another contractor, are scheduled to be sentenced early next year. A third contractor and his firm have pleaded not guilty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO A former executive of a government contracting firm was sentenced Friday in San Diego federal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,1312,138,181,23,1703,100,74,84,76,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-54946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-courts","10":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","11":"tag-latest-headlines","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-military","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-san-diego","16":"tag-san-diego-county","17":"tag-san-diego-headlines","18":"tag-san-diego-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}