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John C. Beale, the former EPA official who convinced his bosses, friends and even his wife that he was a CIA spy, was sentenced to 32 months in prison Wednesday for defrauding the agency out of nearly $900,000 in unearned pay and bonuses.

Beale, 65, admitted to missing more than 2½ years of work at the EPA over the last decade, during which he claimed to work for the CIA on missions that kept him away from his job as a senior adviser in EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. His lies were uncovered because he continued to receive money for 18 months after his retirement, triggering an investigation by the agency’s inspector general’s office.

During his time away from the office when he claimed to be working for the CIA, he continued to be paid a full salary, plus bonuses to which he was not entitled that added another 25 percent to his salary. He also admitted to charging non-work travel back to the agency and spent exorbitant sums on first-class flights and lavish hotels.

Beale also claimed to have a lingering case of malaria from his service in Vietnam and obtained an $8,000-a-year handicapped parking space for free — though he never served in the Vietnam War. Beale’s co-workers even feted him at retirement party on a Potomac River cruise in 2011, but he did not technically retire until 2013.

Beale was sentenced to 32 months in prison, two years of supervised release and 100 hours of community service for each of those two years. There is no parole available for his federal crime.

Beale paid the government $886,186 in restitution before his September arraignment. Kern told the judge Beale expected to pay an additional $507,207 to the Justice Department within the next 30 days, a punitive criminal “forfeiture” set in Beale’s plea agreement.

The judge was curious about one perplexing question: What did Beale do with all that time off?

Not much, was the unsatisfying answer.

“I don’t play golf. I don’t take expensive vacations,” he said. He exercised, worked on his houses, and spent time reading.

“In hindsight I think, ‘How stupid could a person be?’” he said. “In my life I’ve never had much experience with the emotion of shame. But in the last year, it has been my constant companion,” he said.

At the hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday, Beale described his compulsion to lie as “something like an addiction,” but he added that he didn’t want it to sound like an excuse. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/epa-john-beale-fake-spy-cia-pris
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