The Free-for-All in Iraq

I think we're going to hear a lot more stories like this:

Robert Stein Jr. could not have been clearer about his feelings toward the American businessman who was receiving millions of dollars in contracts from Stein to build a major police academy and other reconstruction projects in Iraq.
"I love to give you money," Stein wrote in an e-mail message to the businessman, Philip Bloom, on Jan. 3, 2004, just as the United States was attempting to ramp up its rebuilding program in Iraq.

As it turned out, Stein had the money to give. Despite a prior conviction on felony fraud that his Pentagon background check apparently missed, Stein was hired and put in charge of at least $82 million of reconstruction money in the south-central Iraqi city of Hilla by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led administration that was then running Iraq.

In a federal court on Thursday, the court papers indicate, Stein was expected to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy, bribery, money laundering, possession of a machine gun, and being a felon in possession of firearms. He is accused of giving millions of that money to Bloom, and taking millions more for himself.

Stein used some of his stolen money, the papers say, to buy items as wildly diverse as grenade launchers, machine guns, a Lexus, "an interest in one Porsche," a Cessna airplane, two plots of real estate in North Carolina, a Toshiba personal computer, 18 Breitling watches, a six-carat diamond ring and a collection of 2002 silver dollars.

The media might actually cover this one, too, because there's sex involved:

And if all of that were not enough reason for Stein to love giving money to his partner, the papers say, there was another: Bloom kept a villa in Baghdad where he provided women who gave sexual favors to officials he hoped to influence, including Stein. Bloom's lawyer, Robert Mintz, declined to comment on the case.

That's $2 million accounted for, then, out of the $8.8 billion dollars missing from the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Who's next on the docket?