Former Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher sentenced to 5 years for trying to sell secrets

P. Leonardo Mascheroni, former researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has been sentenced to 5 years in prison. The physicist was convicted of attempting to pass classified nuclear weapons information to a Venezuelan agent.

The conviction appears to put to rest a case which has gone on since, at least, 2009. In the mind of the Mascheroni the case may have started in 1988 or even before.

Mascheroni immigrated to the United States from Argentina in 1963 and obtained a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. The scientist became a US citizen in 1972 and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1979 to 1988.

While at Los Alamos, Mascheroni became infatuated with the idea of using hydrogen fluoride lasers to generate nuclear fusion. In 1988 Mascheroni departed from Los Alamos. The laboratory claims that he was laid off in a normal ‘reduction of force’ cutback. The scientist claims that he was dismissed on “trumped up” security charges and because of differences on the question of laser fusion. After his contentious departure from the lab, the physicist unsuccessfully lobbied congress in an attempt to get funding for his idea.

In 2009 met with a man he believed to be a Venezuelan intelligence agent who was, in fact, an undercover FBI agent. In a recording of the conversation, Mascheroni told the agent that Venezuela could have an arsenal of nuclear weapons by 2020. He also said that once Venezuela had weapons one should be tested to make the world aware of the nuclear capability and then use “an electromagnetic pulse” to knock out all the power in New York City.

The FBI raided Mascheroni’s homein October, 2009 and charged him and his wife in 2010. Although he admitted to meeting with the agent and collecting $20 thousand, he argued that the papers he had actually turned over had been published by Congress and were widely available on the Internet.

Mascheroni claimed that he was deliberately misleading the fake Venezuelan agent and that his real goal wwas to pursue his theories on hydrogen-fluoride laser fusion energy, according to the Albuquerque Journal. In a recorded phone conversation with his wife, Mascheroni said he was “going to have money to move my thing. Real money, Marjorie, so I am going to be the boss with power, money and science.”

In 2012 the couple entered into a plea agreement and in August of last year, Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

In May of 2014 the court was informed that P. Leonardo Mascheroni intended to change his guilty plea, however the judge in the case ruled that there was no room for a change of plea under the agreed to plea agreement.

Last week federal District Judge William P. Johnson sentenced P. Leonardo Mascheroni to five years in prison minus time served plus three years of supervised probation. Mascheroni has been in prison since December 2013.

Federal public defender Stephen McCue, Mascheroni’s own layer, sated that his client was a “difficult and obnoxious individual who has only a tentative relationship with reality” and that “He is narcissistic, dishonest, insufferable, obsessive and a foreigner.” McCue did point out however that none of that is a basis for sentencing.

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