Alaska National Guard A Hotbed Of Rapey Recruiters Led By End-Times Porn Baron

Wonkette would like to give a hearty welcome to Lt. Col. Joseph R. Lawendowski, our daily (hourly?) "He seems nice" contestant.

Lt. Col. Lawendowski is a rough tough military man and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Training of the Alaska National Guard. Please note the use of present tense there, which is rather surprising, given that military investigators submitted a confidential report (an “AR 15-6" in military terms, not to be mistaken for the similarly named semiautomatic rifle) back in March and leaked to the  Anchorage Press.  

The Press says Lawendowski was found "directly responsible for empowering Alaska guard recruiters to sexually assault and harass female soldiers, recruits and civilians." The report recommended that he be given an "other than honorable" discharge for his role in allowing some seriously bizarre misbehavior by recruiters when he served as commander of the Alaska Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Battalion (RRB) from November 2007 to May 2012. Also, too, the growing scandal could very well spill over into the 2014 Alaska governor's race, since there are questions about Gov. Sean Parnell's knowledge of the mess -- the usual what did he know and when did he know it stuff.

Lawendowski himself appears to be the very model of a modern Bad Lieutenant Colonel. Just check his résumé! He is both a "former pornography company owner" and the "co-founder of an 'end times' fundamentalist group," which we suppose must leave local charities glad that he's not a Marine, lest the annual "Toys for Tots" drive include a bunch of items from this catalog. 

From 1999 to 2003, Lawendowski was sole owner and officer of a company called "Kodiak Entertainment Group," which ran "at least seven pornography websites, including RoxysPantyRaid.com, 38DDBlonde.com, BlondAmateurs.com, and Noelle's-HotBods. Several of the websites are still active." He dissolved the corporation in October 2003, three monthsafterjoining the Alaska National Guard. Fun times, and, we should note, very definitely protected by the First Amendment.

Lawendowski spent a stint in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, serving as -- and like everything else so far, we arenotmaking this up -- "a military advisor to the Mongolian Army." This no doubt was a happy benefit of his previous career, which afforded him plenty of valuable cultural immersion in that nation's rich tradition of clusterfucks.

After returning stateside, Lawendowski went on in 2007 to become the commander of the Alaska Guard's Recruiting and Retention Battalion. He clearly had put behind his sinful ways and found Jesus, because that same month, "co-founded the Berean Watchmen, a fundamentalist Christian group 'dedicated to the study and teaching of the events surrounding the end times.'" We took a quick look at the website -- it's your typical End Times site, with maybe a bit less bloody red flamey imagery than you might expect, but all the Signs-n-Portents typical of the genre -- Apple Pay is one more step toward the imminent Mark of the Beast, just like UPC codes were, for instance.

Still with us? Good, because we still are not making this up.

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.

Now, if Lawendowski seems like a real charmer, just get a load of the crew of recruiters whose rapey crimey funtimes he did absolutely nothing to stop: Three of the noncommissioned officers in Lawnedowski's recruiting brigade, Sgt. Jarrett Carson, Master Sgt. John Nieves, and Sgt. 1st Class Shannon Tallant, were known as the "Three-Headed Monster" because they pretty much terrorized everyone they worked with, as well as new recruits and even civilians. None have been charged for any crimes by either military or civilian law enforcement, although at the very least, they're no longer in the National Guard and the Alaska Guard has revamped its leadership in the recruiting offices.

Among other findings, the leaked document says all three men, who were married at the time, repeatedly violated regulations by doing consensual sexxytime with women they met while working as recruiters. Nieves reportedly raped the 19-year-old sister of a soldier he'd recruited into the guard, threatening to ruin the soldier's career if she didn't have sex with him. Tallant seems to be the worst of the bunch, with multiple skeevy incidents, like bragging that he'd had sex with a high school student, attempting to talk other high school girls into having sex with him, possibly raping three adult women (one of them 19), and attempting to lift another woman's shirt to look at her tattoo. She ran.

Not only did Lawendowski overlook all that misconduct -- and more; we haven't even touched on the allegations of credit-card fraud/embezzlement by Lawendowski, or the recruiters' involvement in black-market steroids, weapons smuggling, and use of military vehicles for sorties to strip clubs -- there's also the political dimension to the story. Gov. Parnell was informed in 2010 by three chaplains of "widespread misconduct with the Alaska National Guard," who kept extensive notes. According to the Anchorage Press:  

Parnell has refused to release public records showing what he knew about sexual assaults and other serious misconduct within the Alaska National Guard, when exactly he knew it, and what, if anything, he did about it. Last week the Alaska Dispatch News and Alaska Public Media sued Parnell, asking a judge to force the governor to release the records “that could help voters verify whether Parnell acted swiftly in dealing with numerous allegations about mishandled sexual assaults, harassment, fraud, favoritism and other misconduct, including abuse of power, within the Guard over the past several years."

So far, the only Alaska National Guard officer to lose his job over the mess has been Maj. Gen. Thomas Katkus, who resigned last month at the insistence of Gov. Parnell. Another general, Brigadier Gen. Catherine Jorgensen, was fired earlier in October by the Guard's acting commander, but was then rehired a day later at Parnell's request.

Keep an eye on this mess. We have a feeling we'll eventually be hearing that these guys were partying with the Palins.

[ Anchorage Press & Anchorage Press again via RawStory ]