Whistleblower Beating: Details Emerge

The phone recep­tion was awful on the con­fer­ence call describ­ing the assault on Los Alamos inves­ti­ga­tor Tommy Hook. But here’s the infor­ma­tion I pieced together, based on what I could hear his wife, his lawyer, and his part­ner say:
Last Friday, Los Alamos auditor-​​turned– whistle­blower Tommy Hook got a phone call at his Albuquerque home. It was late — past ten-​​thirty at night, and Tommy was get­ting ready to go to bed. He had had shoul­der surgery recently, and a stroke about a year-​​and-​​a-​​half before that. So he needed his rest.
But Tommy got up, any­way. The man on the other end of the call said he was an audi­tor, too, at Los Alamos. And he had infor­ma­tion that could cor­rob­o­rate Tommy’s upcom­ing tes­ti­mony before the House Energy Committee on finan­cial shenani­gans at Los Alamos. The two were sup­posed to meet ear­lier that day, but the audi­tor couldn’t make the appoint­ment. Could Tommy meet him now, he asked?
Tommy made the fifty-​​minute drive to Santa Fe, to a nudie bar called Cheeks. And there he waited, for over an hour. The audi­tor never showed. So finally, frus­trated, Tommy walked out, got into his car, and started it up.
Suddenly, he was yanked out of the car by four to six men. And “they began to beat him with their feet,” Tommy’s wife, Susan, said. Afterwards, “there were shoe marks on his face.” His jaw was frac­tured. At the hos­pi­tal, doc­tors wired it shut — and diag­nosed him with a her­ni­ated disk, too.
The men “didn’t take his wal­let or our car,” Susan added. But they “kept telling him,” accord­ing to Tommy’s lawyer, Bob Rothstein, “‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut.“
Now the assailants didn’t men­tion Los Alamos, or the University of California (UC), which runs the lab on behalf of the Energy Department. And Tommy’s tes­ti­mony — which had been resched­uled sev­eral times, because of an impend­ing fam­ily cruise — was not pub­licly known. Nobody on the con­fer­ence call accused the lab or UC of order­ing some sort of hit on Tommy.
But by bat­tling whistle­blow­ers in court, by retal­i­at­ing against them on the job, and by stretch­ing their cases out for years on end, UC “encour­aged an atmos­phere where whistle­blow­ers were per­ceived as ene­mies of the University,” Rothstein said.
The local police have been called in to inves­ti­gate the inci­dent. And “the FBI is with Tommy right now,” his wife said as the con­fer­ence call came to a close.

June 6th, 2005 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.