How Department of Defense corruption really works:
The US Department of Defense (hereafter DOD) has put in place a ton of procedural protections to stave off corruption. And God knows they need protection: only in the DOD can you find a 20-something purchasing officer who knows nothing about the stuff he’s buying, who makes around $30k per year, and who is in charge of a half-billion-dollar budget.
For starters, low-paid people with large purchasing budgets are the easiest to corrupt outright. Find someone makes $30,000 per year but who has a $10m budget, and you have struck gold: it doesn’t even require outright bribery.
Just show up at their office and mention that you might have some product for them to take a look at. “Can you spare some time this weekend? I have tickets to the playoffs if you’re free. Whoa!? You’re a fisherman? Let’s forget about business: why not have the family come by the beach house? I just got a new boat and the stripers are running. We’ll talk business later.”
Take a guy living in a military-base trailer out fishing on a yacht or to courtside seats, take him on a golf weekend, or to front-row seats at an A-list concert, hell, even just take him and his lady to a swank restaurant, and you’ve made a new best friend. And if he happens to be in charge of a $10m budget, that lavish night might be about to pay for itself 100,000 times over.
And all that assumes that you did not actually have a stripper with a cell-phone camera waiting in the car after the concert. We haven’t even talked about blackmail, so why bring it up? Especially considering that these days, you don’t even have to blackmail someone to blackmail them. Just linking your pics to their facebook, or setting up a “my party with Joe Blow” web page can ruin their life without malice or legal consequence. We’re just posting our own party pics!