A Just Cause

When James H. Holzrichter, Sr. literally fell into a job with one of the country's largest defense contractors (and developer at the time of the Stealth Bomber), it appeared he had been given his second real break in life to leave behind a tortured childhood, a challenging youth, and the unstable work and constant moving he and his family had experienced for years. In spite of his absence of advanced degrees, his solid knowledge of electronics developed years before in a special program in the Coast Guard and his natural abilities to improve systems for tracking testing of high-tech parts and components led to rapid advancement. Add to this the additional life changing stint in rehab that also helped transform his life and that of his family, and it appeared he and they had been given a genuine shot at the American Dream.

What he did not know was that his very abilities to create more systematic tracking systems and his almost accidental expansion of duties in doing so would place his whole existence in jeopardy. As his work increasingly provided a view across normally strictly partitioned need-to-know only information on different projects and even stages of development, he inescapably discovered patterns of apparent mismanagement up to likely known fraud that resulted in mis-billing and over-billing the government and taxpayers of the United States to the tune of probably many millions to potentially billions of dollars per year. When his early distress over what to do and doubts over whom to trust left him nearly paralyzed in determining a plan of action, the arrival on the scene of federal DCIS agents demanding his aid as an essentially undercover secret federal informant genuinely presented a point of no return. The soon to be full on David and Goliath saga that was now in unstoppable full motion would take the next seventeen years to play out in high risk secret information gathering, humiliating family stays in homeless shelters, precedent setting legal battles, and barely disguised attempts on his life (and that of his children) along with the alleged murder by cancer causing poison of his co-complainant.