Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service, under the headline “A Massive Fraud Probe, a Botched Investigation, and the Thousands of Soldiers Who Paid.” Subscribe to their newsletter.
He lost his job and was kicked out of the Army. The stress cost him his marriage and relationship with his kids.
Luis Visalden, a former Army intelligence officer, was one of thousands of service members between 2012 and 2017 caught up in a massive fraud investigation of soldiers who received bonus payments for referring recruits to enlist in the National Guard and Army Reserves.
The scandal and now-discredited Army investigation exposed the far-reaching consequences of what’s known in the military justice system as “titling.”
It didn’t matter that Visalden was never convicted or even arrested. In the military, simply being under investigation leads to a black mark known as “titling” that shows up in civilian criminal background databases and can haunt veterans for years.
“I got treated like garbage after doing everything good for God and country,” the Iraq war veteran told The War Horse.
When he returned from Iraq, Visalden participated in one of two military recruiting programs known as G-RAP (Guard Recruiting Assistance Program) and AR-RAP (Army Reserve Recruiting Assistance Program) that paid soldiers to recruit new members. In 2012, after allegations of fraud within the program, the Army Criminal Investigation Division launched a probe.
The CID was “out to get scalps,” said Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s University School of Law, who wrote a journal article on the investigation, which he described as a “fiasco.” Ultimately, the Army spent approximately $28 million on the investigation, which uncovered roughly $2.5 million in fraud, according to the advocacy site Defend Our Protectors, returning less than $500,000 to the treasury.
In 2022, the Army reopened nearly a thousand cases and cleared many charges. During the records review, former director of the U.S. Army Criminal Division Gregory Ford acknowledged that CID “fell short in a large number of these investigations.”
After Army Lt. Lee Hughes was accused of fraud over his involvement with G-RAP, he was forced to take a new job with a $60,000 pay cut and spend thousands to hire a lawyer. The accusations left him with a “stigma” amongst his peers, said Hughes, who was cleared in 2022 and now works at the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.
“You’re kind of just outcast,” he said. “Nobody wants to be around the guy that’s got the pending charges.”
Visalden estimates he made about $14,000 in bonuses through AR-RAP. After the Army CID informed Visalden that he was under investigation for fraud, he was kicked out of the military with an other than honorable discharge in June 2015.
He quickly got a new job, but was fired after someone who knew about the recruiting fraud accusations reported him to his new employer.
This series of events took a toll on his marriage, he said, and the stress of supporting three kids overwhelmed them. Eventually, divorce papers were served. He relocated to Ohio to find work. Now, he rarely sees his boys.
In November 2022, he got a certified letter from the Army CID stating that the charges had been unfounded. He hired lawyer Doug O’Connell to represent him, and more than a year later, his discharge had been upgraded to honorable, and he was restored to his previous rank.
Vindication—but years too late.
“What’s that mean to me?” he asks.
He tries to stay positive—he has a great job, a girlfriend, and a house in Cookeville, Tennessee. But he gets headaches now, and he wears a mouth guard—too much grinding has cracked his teeth. He had PTSD from combat in Iraq from 2003-2004; the stress of being titled made it worse. The memory of it all keeps him awake at night.
Plus, his pension is gone—he was 22 months shy of the years of service required to collect.
“I walk around with a broken relationship with my children, partly because of this,” Visalden said. “I wish it was different for me.”
This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Rachel Fobar is a freelance investigative reporter and fact checker. Previously, she was a wildlife trade investigative reporter for National Geographic, and before that, she covered criminal justice and potentially wrongful convictions for The Medill Justice Project. She has also written for the Guardian, Popular Science, and ABC News. She has won several awards for her work, including the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
