Jury orders Fort Jackson project manager to pay $3.4M to contractor in fraud scheme

A federal jury has awarded more than $3.4 million in damages to a general contractor who claimed it was defrauded by a local project manager it hired to manage various subcontractors’ work at the U.S. Army training base Fort Jackson.

The jury reached its verdict last week after a four-day trial in Columbia, where Fort Jackson is located.

The jury found that Agile Infrastructure Services, an Idaho-based company that does government construction and infrastructure work, was owed $2.8 million for its losses from Daniel Lee, Agile’s local project manager, and others associated with his scheme.

The jury also found that Lee owed Agile an additional $497,000 in what is called “disgorgement,” or repayment of ill-gotten gains, as well as an additional $199,995 in punitive damages.

Lee breached his duty of loyalty and his fiduciary duty to Agile, the jury found.

Attorneys for Lee and his company could not be reached for comment.

The fraud began when Lee conspired with others to orchestrate the unlawful shifting of money Lee had oversight over to his and others’ benefit, Agile’s lawsuit alleged.

The misappropriated money was supposed to go to various subcontractors. Instead, Lee would funnel money from Agile’s federal government contracts to a company owned and operated by his associates at “exponentially unreasonable prices” and would hire subcontractors to work at lower prices than stated in the contract, the lawsuit said.

Much of the misappropriated money was ultimately transferred to CLC Family Holdings, “a company owned by none other than Daniel Lee,” the lawsuit said.

Lee also “manipulated” Agile’s subcontractors into giving him quid pro quo kickbacks that included discounted construction and renovation work at his personal home, lake house and family homes, “all with the subcontractors’ expectation that they would continue to receive work on Agile’s contracts,” the lawsuit said.

Agile had hired Lee in 2013.

Five years later, in October 2018, Agile received ‘’a letter from an unidentified whistleblower” telling the company about Lee’s scheme, the lawsuit said. An internal investigation by Agile supported claims made in the letters, the lawsuit said.

In an opening statement to the jury last week, Lee’s attorney Matthew Williamson said that “all the work was done” and all the subcontractors were paid. The federal government, the party that wrote the checks — is not here “complaining about the defendants,” Williamson said.

In an opposing opening statement, Agile’s attorney Matthew Feinberg told the jury that Lee had abused the trust that Agile had placed in him to oversee projects at Fort Jackson and funneled millions of dollars to himself and others.

The defense put up no witnesses.

During the trial, Agile’s attorneys read to the jury statements from pretrial depositions of Lee and other alleged conspirators in which they repeatedly took the 5th Amendment, exercising their right not to testify on anything that might incriminate them in any potential criminal case.

Federal Judge Joe Anderson presided.

Fort Jackson, located just outside downtown Columbia, is the U.S. Army’s major basic combat training center. It trains more than 45,000 new soldiers a year and an additional 12,000 soldiers in advanced specialties.\