Indicted execs allege vendetta, FBI racism

Executives of a Colorado Springs company who were indicted on mail and wire fraud charges this week vehemently denied the accusations Friday and accused prosecutors of conducting "a personal hate-filled vendetta" against them.

Two company officials, both of whom are African-American, also accused FBI agents of showing "a clear racial bias," during the February 2005 raid on the offices of IRP Solutions Corp., a software development company.

They claim that for about two hours of a daylong execution of a search warrant, all the African-American employees of the firm were corralled in a cafeteria, where they were searched individually.

Five of the six indicted executives are African-American. But the firm's lone white officer was not searched and was allowed to go home with his laptop and company documents, they said.

David A. Banks, the company's chief operating officer, also charged that during the raid an FBI agent asked him, "If a white woman applied for a position here, would you hire her?"

The raid thwarted negotiations that would have enabled the firm to land multimillion-dollar contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the New York City Police Department, IRP officials said.

The company was marketing software that law enforcement agencies could use to track investigations from the crime scene to prosecution, Banks said.

Jeff Dorschner, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office, had no comment on the allegations of racial bias but added that "ethnicity had nothing to do with the search warrant." He also denied that prosecutors have a vendetta against company officials.

IRP officials alleged that FBI agents went far beyond the scope of their search warrant and seized software programs, patent information and other intellectual property that had nothing to do with the payroll investigation.

Dorschner said that issue will be litigated in court. As to the company's claims that prosecutors were criminalizing a civil dispute, Dorschner noted that "a grand jury found probable cause that they committed a crime."

A federal grand jury this week issued a 25-count indictment against the six men, charging them with conspiracy, wire fraud and mail fraud.

The indictment alleges that the men, operating under a variety of different companies but all from the same Colorado Springs office, bilked 40 different temporary labor firms by persuading them to cover $5.3 million in payroll costs from October 2002 to February 2005.

They allegedly did this by providing false time card records and making false claims that their company had contracts with various federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, according to the indictment.