Lighting a fuse
By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published October 22, 2006
The way Neil Lockhart tells it, if it hadn't been for a regular Barney Fife on the security foce at General Dynamics' gunpowder plant near St. Marks, he'd still be there, pulling down $70,000 a year, which is darned good pay in this flyspeck south of Tallahassee.
But an eager-beaver security guard got hold of some tracer shells Lockhart made as a favor for his boss. Instead of just telling Lockhart to quit using company property to make homemade ammo — which everyone had been doing forever — the guard told the sheriff, who called in the plant’s honchos from General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems’ headquarters in St. Petersburg.
Lockhart, who’d been at the plant 18 years and worked his way up to a job testing powder bound for the U.S. military, suddenly found himself on the hot seat. Demoted to maintenance, the guy who’d become a senior ballistics lab lead technician by keeping his mouth shut called General Dynamics’ employee hotline in July 2004 and let ’er rip.
Forget about small stuff like skimming off powder for a few hunting shells, he said. The big story at St. Marks Powder, Lockhart said on the phone and in a federal whistleblower lawsuit filed soon after, was that the plant routinely took shortcuts when testing gunpowder bound for the military, cheating the government and potentially endangering U.S. soldiers. Lockhart could swear to the fraud because he’d been doing it for years, having been initiated into the fine art of short-circuiting military specs by his predecessors at the 36-year-old plant.
“It was a very Masonic thing,’’ said Lockhart, 49, referring to the close-knit group of guys who allegedly showed him how to manipulate or omit quality testing required by the U.S. military for its powder. “There’s no way I could have come in off the street and invent this. I was taught how to do it. It was what you had to do to get product out the door.’’
Henry McDonald, who started with St. Marks when it opened in 1970 and was senior ballistics analyst when he helped train Lockhart, said such practices were engrained in the culture.
“I’m just surprised this didn’t come out a long time ago,’’ said McDonald, who was fired in 1995 on what he said were false charges of substance abuse. “The bosses wouldn’t flat out tell you to cheat, but there was a lot of pressure.’’
A spokesman for General Dynamics declined to comment on Lockhart’s allegations or operations at St. Marks.
St. Marks’ product, General Dynamics’ ball powder propellant, is loaded in 95 percent of the U.S. military’s small-caliber ammunition, according to the company’s Web site. During the first Gulf War and during the current Iraq war, the plant tucked off U.S. 98 in Crawfordville has been cranking at full speed, producing about 12-million pounds of gunpowder a year, most of it destined for the military.
The silvery gray flakes, made from nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin and coated in graphite, are trucked from the plant to the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Mo. There, machines put the pepper-like propellant with primers and projectiles in brass casings to make the ammo — live, blanks and tracers — used in M16 rifles, M4 carbines and the M2 .50-caliber machine gun.
Last year Lake City produced a record 1.3-billion rounds of ammunition for U.S. soldiers. In nearly every bullet were grains of gunpowder from St. Marks.
General Dynamics, a giant defense conglomerate based in Falls Church, Va., relies on a remote facility like St. Marks to be a reliable revenue stream in its $21-billion business. Last year the General Dynamics division of which the gunpowder plant is part contributed about one-quarter to total sales. Lockhart’s lawyer estimates that at an average price of $8 per pound for military gunpowder, the St. Marks plant generates $96-million a year.
General Dynamics’ motion to dismiss Lockhart’s case is pending in U.S. District Court in Tallahassee. Rather than deny Lockhart’s claims, General Dynamics argued that the company voluntarily disclosed his allegations to U.S. Defense Department officials before the suit was filed. Lockhart has no right to be a whistleblower, according to the motion, because the company had already blown the whistle on itself.
One technician blamed
In an agreement between General Dynamics’ St. Petersburg division and the Defense Department, signed four months after Lockhart filed his suit, the company said it voluntarily came forward with allegations of misconduct “to demonstrate its commitment to corporate integrity and self-governance.” It laid the blame for any wrongdoing on “a single technician in the ballistics laboratory.’’
General Dynamics’ response to Lockhart’s claims had echoes in the past. In 1994, when Olin Corp. owned what would become General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems, a similar issue arose at its plant in Marion, Ill., which made medium-caliber ammunition. One unidentified employee was discovered taking shortcuts during the inspection and testing process, the company said. The employee was fired and Olin paid the government an $8-million fine.
Lockhart said there was no crackdown at St. Marks after the incident at its sister plant in Marion. But the experience left its mark.
“When they started going after me, people were told if they kept their mouths shut, my head would be the only one to roll,’’ Lockhart said. “The bosses kept saying, 'We don’t want another Marion.’”
Lockhart started at St. Marks in 1986 as a basic technician. Within a few months, he was helping run tests on the military powder. Taking samples from every 64,800-pound lot, the technicians would make up hundreds of sample cartridges and fire the rounds in an indoor range.
If the samples passed, round-the-clock production continued and gunpowder was shipped on schedule. If the samples failed — which they seldom did — the whole multimillion-dollar manufacturing chain came to a halt.
“The boss would say, 'The truck (to Lake City) is coming in the morning,’’’ Lockhart recalled. “And you’d never sit back and say, 'Is this right?’ You’d say, 'I’ve got to get this out.’”
Lockhart said he learned from his bosses how to finesse certain tests and bypass others. To make sure blank cartridges didn’t have too much unburnt powder, test shells were supposed to be fired at brown paper. That never happened, Lockhart said.
“The same roll of brown paper sat in the corner for years,’’ he said.
Tracer rounds were supposed to be tested to ensure that at least 96 percent of the blast could be seen by the naked eye. Lockhart said the plant’s range was too short for proper testing and rounds often came in at only 50 to 75 percent visibility. But the powder was never rejected because the computer that registered results automatically defaulted to 100 percent, he said.
A third test, to make sure cartridges could withstand a required 45-pound minimum extraction force, was seldom done because of constant problems with the bullet pull machine, but paperwork was submitted to make it look like all samples had passed.
Although St. Marks had a full-time government inspector on site, Lockhart said the official rarely observed testing. “He’d just look at the final paperwork and sign off on the tests,’’ he said.
Lockhart and his lawyer, David Moye of Tallahassee, said it is impossible to say if soldiers were injured as a result of poor quality powder because too many variables are involved. His lawsuit seeks financial damages on the ground that General Dynamics sold gunpowder to the government with the guarantee that certain quality specs had been met, and they had not.Corporate culture“This lawsuit is about a corporate culture, not about fudging on tests,’’ Moye said. “Nobody makes money by rejecting stuff. And with the Department of Defense, it’s go along to get along.’’
For 18 years, Lockhart worked 60-hour weeks and received glowing job reviews. For his role in making St. Marks such a smooth-running link in the military’s munition supply chain, Lockhart got a $2,000 bonus in March 2004.
Although the U.S. Attorney’s office has declined to join his suit and the company is arguing to dismiss it, Lockhart knows his claims have had an impact.
“There used to be two people on the military testing team at the plant,’’ Lockhart said recently. “Now there are four because they’re having to do it right.’’
- Times staff photographer Mack Goethe contributed to this report. Kris Hundley can be reached at hundley@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2996.
What happened: Neil Lockhart, an 18-year employee at St. Marks Powder, filed a whistleblower lawsuit claiming the General Dynamics plant failed to perform quality assurance tests on gunpowder sold to the U.S. military.
What it means: Though poor quality gunpowder may have caused injuries to U.S. soldiers, such charges are difficult to prove. Lockhart’s lawsuit says General Dynamics owes the government money for making false claims about testing.
What’s next: General Dynamics has filed a motion to dismiss the case, which is pending before a federal judge in Tallahassee.