The Guard Recruiting Assistance Program (G-RAP) Scandal | A Personal Story

The Guard Recruiting Assistance Program (GRAP) remains one of the largest violations of civil rights regarding military personnel that we’ve experienced in recent times.

The investigation led to soldiers committing suicide, wrongful prosecution, lives destroyed and millions of taxpayer dollars wasted in an attempt to pin the mismanagement of a flawed government program on service members.

Still today, 15+ years after the program began, soldiers are receiving punitive action for their participation in the program, and I am here today to tell my story and hopefully bring light to something that completely changed my life and still haunts me today.

In the fall of  2005, I had just graduated from the Special Forces Qualification course in Ft. Bragg, NC, and returned to Colorado to join my Special Forces team in Ft. Carson. I was on top of the world having passed the Special Forces Course at the age of 21, and my entire career lay before me. I decided to go finish my degree at the University of Colorado while I awaited my participation in the Global War on Terrorism.

In 2005, the National Guard created a program called the Guard Recruiting Assistance Program or GRAP, as it’s often called today. The program was simple; a soldier like me could recommend someone to a recruiter, and if they joined, I would receive a $2,000 referral incentive from the National Guard.

The National Guard hired a company called Docupak, an Alabama based printing company, to manage the program. I will talk a lot more about Docupak later, but for now, just remember that Docupak is the company that managed a half a billion dollar program that the National Guard said led to the theft of millions of dollars by service members.  The contract was illegally awarded to them by the National Guard and yet they never sustained any punishment for their management of the program, in fact following their abysmal management of the GRAP program they just changed their name and continued on with business as usual.

To become an assistant recruiter was easy, it took 5 minutes to sign up, and soon after you were on your way to making $2,000 a pop for anyone you brought into the program… What could go wrong?

After signing up for the program I was inundated with marketing emails from Docupak about how to get more people to sign up (aka, “accessions” as they were later called by government officials). Docupak sent me marketing materials encouraging me to go to schools to meet potential applicants and to work with my local recruiter to get more people to sign up. The information they gave out never discussed what you couldn’t do to recruit someone, only what you could do.  The general vibe was, “get people in, we don’t care how you do it, just get them in so we can add to the current wars that our nation is battling”.  For every person that I brought into the National Guard, Docupak made $345. It was a killing, and for all intents and purposes, it seemed like a great program to help increase much-needed troop levels to support the Afghan and Iraqi war efforts.

Between 2005 and 2009 I made $13,000 and at the time it was a helpful supplemental income while I attended college and when I returned from combat in Iraq. In 2009, I brought in my last recruit and put GRAP in the rearview mirror as I continued my career.

Now, allow me to take a minute to tell you about myself… in 1995 my father, Peter Peelgrane, a helicopter pilot for 9 News in Denver, died from injuries he sustained in a catastrophic helicopter accident. Following his crash, I managed to have some great mentors who led me on the right path to success. Soon after, I joined Boy Scouts where I became an Eagle Scout. Soon after, I joined the Army National Guard at the age of 17. A year later, I attended the US Army Special Forces Assessment and Selection Course where I was selected to join the Special Forces Regiment. After my graduation in 2005, I attended college and eventually earned my degree while attending multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011 I began a retail business that I ran for almost 10 years. In addition, I created a media company that I still run to this day where I employ 15 people, most of whom are Veterans. Since my run-in with the Guard Recruiting Assistance Program I’ve been investigated for and obtained multiple security clearances. I’ve been polygraphed multiple times and each time found fit to carry out operations for the United States government. In short, I am not your model criminal, in fact, I am not a criminal at all.

However, on a cold February afternoon in 2014, GRAP once again came into my life when I received a call from my company commander…

“Luke, I received a call from CID yesterday that the Adam’s County District Attorney is issuing a warrant for your arrest on Monday.” “For what?” I asked, literally having no idea what I could be getting arrested for. “For your participation in GRAP” he answered. 

I left the call bewildered, afraid, and with no idea what to do. I called my family to notify them of the news and returned home where I began searching the internet for anything I could find to GRAP. Later that night I saw myself on the local and international news, my face plastered across the screen with the words, “Colorado Army National Guard soldier SFC Luke Peelgrane arrested for fraud.”

Unluckily for me, the GRAP program had reached congress which found out that the National Guard Bureau had spent almost half a billion dollars on the program. In a room far away, filled with people I’d never met, Congressional Representatives had decided that the half a billion dollars spent by the NG for GRAP needed scrutiny. On the same day of my arrest, they called for a congressional hearing where congress interviewed  Lt General Clyde A. Vaughn and National Guard Leadership about the program. Army leadership responded that they believed thousands of recruiting assistants had violated the program which led to millions of dollars of fraud. Before congress, CID vowed to pursue soldiers who’d violated the program and bring them to justice. It was then that I realized they had timed my arrest with the congressional hearing in order to use me as the poster child for blame.

After getting charged, the nightmare really began. The General of the Colorado Army National Guard was interviewed by the local news and, on camera, stated that the National Guard would pursue legal action against me and that my actions were not in line with the National Guard. Now, let’s pause for a minute because according to our judicial system everyone is innocent until proven guilty, yet here was the General of the Colorado Army National Guard giving an interview to the local media, labeling me as guilty. He didn’t vow to pursue justice and get to the bottom of it; nobody from the National Guard Headquarters called me to ensure I had legal representation or that I was able to legally defend myself against the alleged charges. I was immediately guilty and they were out to show how.

Days later I appeared before a judge to set my initial hearings. I drove to the courthouse with my family and awaited arraignment.

By now, you are probably wondering what I was charged with. Well, according to the District Attorney I was charged with theft and check forgery for my participation in the program. Days after charges were filed against me, I received discovery which includes all of the information that the prosecution has against me. They alleged that I had violated a handbook that Docupak produced outlining the requirements to become a recruiting assistant as well as requirements to receive $2000 for an accession. The documents alleged I had illegally recommended recruits into the program and violated the company handbook. I know I never received a handbook and so we began our first step in the investigation.

Now, here is a great example in which we have a glaring hole in the National Guard’s and CID’s prosecution. In 2009 a different recruiting assistant sued Docupak because he believed he should have been paid as a W2 employee rather than a 1099 contractor while working with GRAP. In court documents, Docupak stated that he was not a 1099 employee because he did not meet the standards required to be a W2 employee, including receiving a handbook. In an actual legal proceeding, they admitted to never providing a handbook, yet here we were years later looking at a handbook that magically appeared in my discovery that was used as the basis of all my charges. The handbook included specific guidelines for what could and couldn’t count as an accession—distinctions that formed the basis of my charges and those of thousands of others like me.

In one of the charges of theft brought against me, I had been contacted by a local recruiter who knew that I was in the Special Forces unit. He told me he had a recruit that wanted to join Special Forces and asked that I come to talk to him. I took a day off of school, drove to the station, spoke with the recruit, and helped convince them to join. After he joined, I kept in touch with the recruit and helped develop programs for him to use to prepare him for Special Forces Selection. In other words, I assisted in recruiting a soldier, I was a Recruiting Assistant, as the program so loosely defined it, and according to the recruiter, I deserved to place the individual into the GRAP program. However, in that handbook I never got to see, which was only produced years after my participation in the program, there was a note about the need for a recruit to connect with the RA before the recruiter. Because I violated this handbook, I was in violation of a crime.

CID called the recruit, spoke to them for only a few minutes, and simply asked if they knew me before they met the recruiter. When they said no, I was charged with $2,000 theft. It was that simple. This method of investigation was the modus operandi of CID. There are several instances with others charged under GRAP who received a fabricated witness statements

GRAP as a whole is extremely difficult to understand when you break down the overall legality of the program. In short, the program should never have existed in the first place, and its implementation led to soldiers paying the ultimate price.

To better explain it, let’s look at the program in the form of Nike. Let’s say Nike had issues recruiting people to work for them. So, Nike decided to use their W2 employees to help recruit potential applicants that could come and work for Nike. Instead of Nike running the referral program themselves, they hired an outside company to help run their recruiting program. Let’s call this company, Socupak. So Nike hires Sokupak to employ Nike employees as 1099 employees to get the Nike employees to recruit people to join Nike. When someone joins Nike, Nike pays Socupak $2500 for that person who joined, and then Socupak turns around and pays the W2 Nike employee who recommended the person to join $2000 but pays them as a 1099. Then when the program fails because Socupak didn’t manage the program properly, Nike decides to press charges against their W2 employees who participated in the program.

Sounds confusing? That’s because it is. Now, just replace Nike with the National Guard and replace Socupak with Docupak and you have yourself the Guard Recruiting Assistance Program.

Now let’s take a look at how Docupak came to get this lucrative multi-million dollar contract from the National Guard. Prior to 2005, Docupak had a small printing contract with the National Guard where they supplied the guard with various printing materials. When the guard decided to implement the program, they gave Docupak a sole source award for the contract. If you’re unfamiliar with how government contracting works I will provide a quick run-down. When the government wants anything, food, vehicles, services, etc. they are required to get 3 competitive bids from 3 different companies. After 3 companies bid on a project, the government chooses the best bid for the project and awards the company that contract. However, in the case of GRAP and Docupak, the National Guard simply gave Docupak the contract without receiving any competitive bids or actually implementing the contract legally.

Furthermore, the National Guard contract officer who awarded the bid to Docupak, ended up working for Docupak later on. Further, in later court documents it was found that there were even follow-on awards of the contract that didn’t lay out the actual relationship between Docupak and the National Guard, they basically just gave them money to run the contract. But wait… there’s more. It was later discovered that through all of this mismanagement of funds, Docupak never had to pay a dime back to the government. So all of these soldiers that were found guilty of fraudulently putting soldiers into the GRAP system had to pay back thousands of dollars of restitution, but Docupak never had to pay back any money from the mismanagement of the program. Even in cases where a soldier joined the National Guard through the GRAP program and their accession was found to be a blatant violation of the law, which did occur in a few cases, Docupak still got to keep the $345 they made from the deal, even though they facilitated the entire transaction. The program as a whole allegedly brought in 140,000 recruits. However, the total amount of money Docupak made off the program is up for debate. In the same court documents above, it states:

“The task order did not require the return of misused or unused funds. Additionally, Crane testified that in the event an RA broke some training protocol in recruiting potential airmen, Docupak would keep its $345 fee from the government. Further, there is evidence that Docupak knew that the RAs in this case falsely claimed to have been the first contact for some potential airmen, but that they paid the RAs anyway”

To put the above in terms that we can all understand, Crane (the President of Docupak) told Congress that in the event a RA (recruiting assistant) didn’t follow the rules or did something illegal, Docupak would still keep the $345.

One of the main crimes charged to GRAP Recruiting Assistants was if a Recruiting Assistant split the funds he or she made from recruiting someone with a recruiter. However, in addition, the courts found that the government didn’t even mandate that it was illegal for the Recruiter to split funds with Recruiting Assistants, only that it was a rule emplaced by Docupak. Therefore, even if a Recruiter split the funds with a Recruiting Assistant when they put someone in the system, it wasn’t completely illegal, just against the rules for Docupak. To make matters worse, Docupak wasn’t able to prove whether or not they even placed that rule into training documents in 2006. The final thing I will touch on here is that soldiers and airmen were promised that their participation in the GRAP program would not have any effect on their career. This was laid out in the same court documents above:

Under a section called “G-RAP and its relationship to the Air National Guard,” the materials made clear that the G-RAP program and the ANG were separate. (Id. at 8–9.) For example, it said, “G-RAP is not a required program and has no bearing on your status in the Air Guard or you military career. You act as an No. 16-6760 United States v. Osborne Page 17 independent contractor for Docupak,” “your performance as a Recruiting Assistant, whether successful or not, will not affect your career in the ANG,” “Your actions in a G-RAP capacity are independent of your role as a member of the Air National Guard and have no impact on your military status,” and “your actions in a G-RAP capacity are independent of your role as a member of the Air National Guard.”

What bothers me the most about this entire relationship between Docupak, the National Guard, and the individuals who participated in the program, is that with all of it, Docupak created this entire mess but never received any punishment. Think about it… Docupak could easily have managed this entire program to ensure we never found ourselves in this mess to begin with. When a Recruiting Assistant put a recruit into the GRAP program, Docupak could have called the recruit to verify that they were recruited by the Recruiting Assistant. They could have asked the recruit how they met the Recruiting Assistant and verified that it was in line with the information provided by the Recruiting Assistant.

That’s it. That simple 5-minute phone call would have fixed everything. They could have called me and asked how I met the recruit I put into the system. If I told them I met them through a recruiter they could have told me that was against the rules and not given me the money. They could have called the recruit as well to verify that I had met them in a manner that was in accordance with the guidelines provided by GRAP, but they didn’t because they wanted to make as much money as possible.

I’ll provide another example of one of my charges to help let that jaw drop a little lower to the floor. One day I was at my National Guard armory for a weekend drill. A civilian walked off the street and into the armory and asked for information about joining the National Guard. I gave them information and he later joined, I was paid $2000 for referring him to GRAP. However, after I put him in the system, Docupak actually called me. They asked how I met the recruit and we have phone records of the conversation. In the conversation, I told Docupak that I had met the recruit at the armory after he came in to get information about how to join. Docupak congratulated me on the accession and paid me $2000.

Now, in this mysterious handbook that they provided to base my entire criminal case on, it stated that there was a rule that you could not meet a recruit at an armory or military installation, that it had to be on the streets. So in this case, I actually spoke with Docupak and clearly stated that I met this person in a manner that violated their so-called handbook and they STILL let the accession go through. In that instance, Then and there, Docupak should have told me I violated this mysterious handbook if it actually existed, but they didn’t because that handbook wasn’t produced until after the fact. When I was building a defense case, I hired a counter investigator to reach out to the recruit I had placed into the system. When he called the recruit, the recruit told the investigator that CID had called him and asked him how he joined the national guard. He told the investigator that he had randomly gone into a guard armory and asked for information on how to join. The CID agent asked him if he knew a guy named Luke Peelgrane, that’s me, the recruit told him no and CID hung up and charged me with $2,000 for the accession.

However, when our counter investigator called the recruit he asked him to describe the situation further regarding what happened when he joined. He told our investigator that he walked into the armory and met a guy who gave him all the information on how to join. He remembers that person being a cadre, later on teaching him how to run and get ready for selection. That cadre member was me and the description of the person he talked to matched the description of me. In short, he talked to me, he met me, he just couldn’t remember my name. You might wonder why he couldn’t remember my name and it’s simple; my investigation took place in 2014, and the recruit met me in 2006, 8 years prior and only for a short amount of time. Think back to someone you met 8 years ago, a loan officer, a teacher, a car salesman, or even a coworker. Can you remember their name? I have teachers I took an entire college course with and I can’t remember their names either.

In another instance, our investigator reached out to one of the recruits who I placed in the system and received charges for their recruitment to ask him about his discussion with CID. The recruit told our investigator that CID never called him, nor did he ever give CID a statement about me and the GRAP program. However, CID had an entire witness statement from this recruit saying that he never met me. Ok now stop and pause for a second, let me say this again… CID, had a witness statement, that they used to press charges against me, from a person they never actually interviewed.

To make matters worse, when I received the affidavit from the CID agent who built the case against me, there was a blatant lie. In the affidavit, the CID agent stated that he had interviewed me, this was not true. I had never spoken with the CID agent or been interviewed by any CID agent at any time. I’d like to note that lying on an affidavit is perjury.

At this point I’d like to discuss CID a bit more in depth, because their investigation of the entire program is a blatant violation of human rights.  In order to investigate GRAP, CID created Task Force Raptor. The Task Force consisted of 200 CID agents whose sole purpose was to investigate the wrongdoing of GRAP. What’s sketchy about this is the vast majority of the agents brought into the Task Force were reserve CID agents, meaning they were given a job they wouldn’t otherwise have had. As long as the CID agents continued to find people guilty of their participation in the GRAP program, they were able to keep that job. Think about that for a second… Imagine if we told police officers that in order to keep their job they had to write speeding tickets. How many more speeding tickets would be handed out?  The moment they didn’t write a speeding ticket, they would lose their full-time jobs. This became a huge problem for the CID agents because they weren’t out to find justice, just find people guilty of wrongdoing. What’s worse, is these agents weren’t full-time highly-trained and experienced agents, it was their reserve job. These guys trained one weekend a month and two weeks a year to be CID agents and then all of the sudden were expected to run a massive investigation on a full-time status.

If we put the CID agent’s performance aside, we can look at the sheer cost of setting up the Task Force itself. In the end, National Guard leadership decided that the program led up to $100 million dollars in fraud and Task Force Raptor was created to get that money back. Let’s consider that the CID agents were brought on full-time active duty to investigate GRAP which means the government had to pay 200 reserve agents a full-time salary. If the average salary of a CID agent is $65,000, that means the government had to pay $13,000,000 a year just to pay for Task Force Raptor’s labor costs. We know the program lasted at least 5 years which means the cost to pay the agents for that time was around $65,000,000. This doesn’t include travel costs or other expenses that went along with the entire investigation. So the government spent $65,000,000+ to try and get back $100,000,000. In the end, out of the $100,000,000 they believe was stolen and the $65,000,000+ they spent to get it back, they made a grand total of $6 million dollars in restitution. So, financially it wasn’t any more of a success than it was a service to justice.

What’s difficult to understand with this is that had the government approached the individuals they felt did not deserve the money they earned through GRAP, they could easily have asked the soldiers to pay back the money or to go through a full investigation. I can tell you I would have happily paid back the $13,000 that they believe I did not receive according to the mysterious handbook just to avoid this entire mess I found myself in. Instead, they decided they wanted to prosecute thousands and thousands of soldiers… and for what?

If we look past the cost of Task Force Raptor there are even bigger costs that the entire program cost the government and taxpayers.

In my instance, I know that it cost the US Government over $1,000,000 just to put me through the Special Forces Qualification Course.  This doesn’t include hundreds of thousands of dollars spent continuing to train me throughout my 14-year career. However, once I went through the entire process of the GRAP investigation I decided to end my career and so did thousands of other soldiers. All of that investment in training, gone. CID and the National Guard leadership put honorable soldiers through hell, causing them to quit the National Guard, lose their reputations and jobs and even commit suicide.

Yes, soldiers actually committed suicide because of what happened to them with GRAP.

After being charged with theft, I spent months and months building my defense. Luckily for me, I had a well paying job at the time that allowed me to hire a solid defense attorney who immediately saw how flawed the system was and urged me to fight the charges. In addition, Liz Ulman, our family friend and investigative journalist assisted in finding some incredible information that aided in my defense. After an exhausting 6 months, I finally sat down with the District Attorney to show them some of my evidence and to explain my side of the story. After just an hour with the DA, they decided to drop all charges against me under what is called Mens Rea. When a DA drops charges under Mens Rea it is essentially them saying that they believe I did not have criminal intent. Which is true, at no point, did I ever think I was doing anything wrong or against the law. At no point did I ever purposefully steal money from anyone. I did what the program suggested, I helped recruit people and I paid a hefty price for it.

After the charges were dropped, I felt an immense sense of relief. But, it didn’t last long. Two weeks later CID sent my botched case to the US Army contracting office to have me debarred from government contracting. Basically, if you contract with the US government and mess up, they can bar you from contracting again for a period of time. CID did this to almost everyone who had been investigated as a way to show congress they were taking punitive action. Most soldiers didn’t contract with the government so the debarment didn’t really matter. At the time, I was contracting heavily with the government and a debarment would mean a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, so again I went back into the fight. For this iteration I had to hire a special debarment attorney out of DC that cost me $1400 an hour. I had to fly to Ft. Belvoir, VA to meet with the debarment board and again present my case. After another couple of hours of meeting with the debarment board and showing the evidence of my innocence, the case was dismissed. I even offered to pay back the $13,000 in a show of good faith and they told me it wasn’t necessary, I could hold onto what I made through my participation in GRAP.

In all, total legal fees cost me $130,000. The entire process cost me my reputation and caused me to leave the military after 14 years of service. Prior to the GRAP debacle, I loved my service to the nation and had no doubt I’d serve out my time to retirement. I remember going to Afghanistan soon after the case had ended, I was at the absolute lowest point I’d ever been in my life. I had lost my entire life savings to legal fees and I had lost the respect of so many. My fiance at the time had also left me saying that life had simply been too hard. I still remember the most pivotal moment, months after I returned to work overseas. It was a hot summer day in Afghanistan, the sand-ridden wind was pelting me in the face as I walked to the chow hall on base. All of the sudden, a loud thunderous warning sound blared over the speakers followed by a voice saying “incoming, incoming, incoming.”

Then, the Phalanx anti-rocket system shot a volley of rounds toward the incoming rocket that the Taliban had fired toward our base. I paused for a moment, hopeful that the Phalanx would miss and the rocket would impact my position so I could end this endless nightmare. When the rocket impacted in the distance, I continued on my slow, miserable walk to the chow hall. This was the cost of GRAP. This is what a flawed government program did to me. It took everything, and even though it was the National Guard leadership who implemented the program and Docupak who ran the program, I was the one that took the hit. It took over 16 months for my saga to finally end, but the GRAP program continued to rear its head even to this day. When you Google my name the charges brought against me still appear in news stories. A couple of years ago I received a letter from Chase Bank stating that they would not bank with me due to the fact that I had been charged with something that involved money.

After submitting my rebuttal they allowed me to continue banking with them but not after a large amount of humiliation. I was denied the ability to purchase a firearm because on my record it stated I had been arrested for a felony but that information was never removed from the database. I again had to send the Colorado Bureau of Investigation all of my information showing my case had been dismissed and expunged before I was able to once again purchase a firearm. I’ve had clients look up my name and see the news stories regarding my felony charges and then decide not to do business with us. Anytime I submitted information for a security clearance, I had to include my arrest records and subject myself to additional questioning.  When I was single and was dating I always had to eventually bring up why I had been arrested and explain the story to a would-be girlfriend as to why I am listed as a felon on the internet. Unfortunately for me, when the charges were dropped no news station opted to run a story about my innocence, because that didn’t make headline news. Nobody asked me what actually happened, nobody cared. Instead of righting the wrong, I just faded to black and did my best to return to a normal life.

So why am I bringing this back up 8 years later? I am still hearing of soldiers also fighting against the government for their participation in GRAP today. Most recently, US Army Captain De Leon, was denied a promotion to Major for his participation in the program. He was never arrested or even able to go before a board to clear his name. Only because he participated in the program, CID titled him as a criminal and prevented him from being able to move to Major. Because he can’t promote, he will most likely be forced to resign his commission. Captain De Leon is one of the thousands with the same story, still receiving punishment for a program they participated in years ago. In the case of Captain De Leon, his participation in the program ended in 2009. Here he is, 13 years later, punished for a crime he didn’t commit.

Through all of the mismanagement of government funds, investigations, and punitive action, Docupak and the leadership who put the program in place never received any punishment for their shortcomings. CID never received any punitive action for falsifying documents or fabricating witness statements. Nobody ever questioned the government for wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on first the program and then the investigation. Instead, the soldiers were the only ones that took the blame.