David Holthouse
BREAKING: A confidential military report sheds further light on rampant misdeeds within the Alaska National Guard.
A former pornography company owner and co-founder of an “end times” fundamentalist group who joined the Alaska National Guard in 2003 is now the guard’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Training, despite military investigators finding him directly responsible for empowering Alaska guard recruiters to sexually assault and harass female soldiers, recruits and civilians.
Lt. Col. Joseph R. Lawendowski, 46, was recommended for “other than honorable” discharge in a confidential report that military investigators submitted to high-ranking Alaska National Guard officers on March 3 of this year. The findings of this “AR 15-6” report were not released to the public. (AR 15-6 refers to Army Regulation 15-6, covering the investigation of misconduct by officers.)
The March 3 report finds that Lawendowski failed to act on multiple complaints of serious misconduct, including sexual assault, against four senior noncommissioned officers under his command. The report covers the period from November 2007 to May 2012 when Lawendowski was commander of the Alaska Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Battalion (RRB).
The four noncommissioned officers, or NCOs, are identified in the AR 15-6 report as Command Sergeant Major Brown, Master Sergeant Carson, Master Sergeant Nieves, and Sergeant First Class Tallant. National Guard investigators found that Lawendowski created a workplace climate of fear, intimidation and special treatment that emboldened those four NCOs to feel above the law, and that he was derelict in his duties by allowing the NCOs to retaliate against soldiers in the battalion who filed complaints.
The investigators also found that Lawendowski had condoned and furthered illegal steroid use by RRB personnel, and had violated National Guard codes of conduct on multiple occasions. These included using government vehicles for outings to strip clubs, and Lawendowski being publicly intoxicated at the 2012 Iron Dog Race after-party. (Lawendowski arranged for the Alaska National Guard to become the presenting sponsor of the Iron Dog snowmobile race beginning in 2010. According to the AR 15-6 report, he improperly exchanged more than 10,000 text messages with a female Iron Dog employee during sponsorship negotiations in April and May 2010.)
Furthermore, the March 3 report cites numerous suspect credit card purchases made by Lawendowski using government-issued credit cards. It recommends the National Guard open a separate investigation of Lawendowski for misuse of government funds.
The Press has obtained US Bank transaction records for Lawendowski’s government-issued credit card during the period in question. Purchases include plane tickets to Dubai and Sweden, payments to a luxury children’s clothing store in Paris, and $1,500 and $2,000 bar tabs in Anchorage and Juneau.
Top-ranking Alaska National Guard officers who received the March 3 report on Lawendowski included Maj. Gen. Thomas Katkus, who at the time was commander of the Alaska National Guard, and Brigadier Gen. Catherine Jorgensen, the Chief of Staff for the Alaska Army National Guard.
Katkus was forced to resign on September 4, the same day that a scathing “Report of Assessment” from the National Guard Bureau’s Office of Complex Investigations (OCI) was released to the public.
Jorgensen was fired last week by the acting commander of the Alaska National Guard, Brigadier Gen. Mike Bridges, but then rehired a day later at the insistence of Governor Sean Parnell.
The OCI assessment presented a sweeping criticism of Alaska National Guard leadership and workplace culture on a wide range of serious issues. They included mishandling sexual assault cases and widespread unethical behavior by guard officers, including fraud, specifically the inappropriate use of Government Purchase Cards.
Unlike the confidential AR 15-6 report, the OCI assessment does not name Lawendowski. However, it describes a “high level of misconduct” within the Recruiting and Retention Command during 2008 and 2009, when Lawendowski was commander of the R&R battalion.
“Several non-commissioned officers within this command were engaged in misuse of government vehicles, fraud, adultery, inappropriate relationships, and sexual assault,” the OCI assessment states.
The OCI report also reveals that, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, and the Anchorage Police Department, the Recruiting and Retention Command under Lawendowski was the subject of multiple criminal investigations for weapons smuggling, rape, and drug trafficking.
However, none of the criminal investigations resulted in prosecution “due to jurisdictional issues or lack of evidence.”
Furthermore, OCI investigators found that in a “deviation from the normal reporting chain,” Lawendowski reported directly to Katkus. This unusual arrangement, combined with the common knowledge within the Alaska National Guard that Lawendowski was a neighbor and personal friend of Katkus, created “a perception that this commander [Lawendowski] was invulnerable.”
According to a biography posted to the Alaska World Affairs Council website in advance of his appearing at a December 2007 forum on Iraq, Lawendowski began his military career in November 1985, when he joined the Massachusetts Army National Guard while studying civil engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was commissioned in 1989 and served until 1998, when he left active duty to “pursue a civilian career.”
Alaska state records show that in July 1999, Lawendowski formed a corporation named Kodiak Entertainment Group, Inc., using a UPS mail drop address on Huffman Road. He listed himself as the sole owner and officer.
For the next four years, Kodiak Entertainment Group operated at least seven pornography websites, including RoxysPantyRaid.com, 38DDBlonde.com, BlondAmateurs.com, and Noelle’s-HotBods. Several of the websites are still active.
Kodiak Entertainment was dissolved in October 2003, three months after Lawendowski joined the Alaska National Guard as a Battalion Operations Officer.
From February 2005 to March 2006, he served in Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a military advisor to the Mongolian Army. He returned to Alaska as Brigade Operations Officer for the Alaska National Guard in April 2006.
In November of the following year, the same month he was promoted to commander of the Recruiting and Retention Battalion, Lawendowski co-founded the Berean Watchmen, a fundamentalist Christian group “dedicated to the study and teaching of the events surrounding the end times.”
Lawendowski registered the Berean Watchmen website using his official Alaska National Guard mailing address. The Berean Watchmen site is now registered to co-founder J.R. Hall in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Hall told the Press that Lawendowski left the organization almost five years ago.
Lawendowski became Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations for Operations and Training in June 2012. But word of Katkus planning to promote his friend began to spread within the Alaska National Guard months earlier.
On February 3, 2012, the head chaplain for the Alaska National Guard, Lt. Col. Rick Koch, sent a pained email to Mike Nizich, chief of staff for Governor Sean Parnell.
For the past year-and-a-half, Lt. Col. Koch and at least five other active and retired Alaska National Guard officers had been sounding the alarm to Parnell about rampant misconduct within the Alaska National Guard. They had provided the governor’s office with detailed allegations, including accusations that Lawendowski was committing fraud and covering up sexual assaults. The email from Koch to Nizich was the second that day sent from the State Command Chaplain to the governor’s top aide.
“Sir,” it began. “Maybe I should have waited a day so that I don’t keep cluttering up your email, but things started turning viral and I just got wind of it today.” The chaplain was upset because he’d just learned that Lawendowski was going to become the new Deputy Chief of Staff.
“Our Recruiting and Retention Commander (R&R CMDR), [who was] mentioned in a previous email for the misuse of a government credit card to the tune of over $200,000…as well as leading a command known to have ties with the illegal drug trade and many of the sexual assaults our young women have endured, has just been given a plumb assignment as our senior operations officer as of June 1,” Koch informed the governor’s chief of staff.
The email continued: “Of course, this was orchestrated by MG Katkus, who has the documented proof of the credit card fraud sitting on his desk, so I’m told. As one officer put it, ‘We are now putting criminals in our senior positions.’” Four months later, Lawendowski was recognized as the new Deputy Chief of Staff in a traditional “passing of the colors” ceremony at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.
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