Wilkes' home to go on auction block

By: WILLIAM FINN BENNETT - Staff Writer | Friday, April 13, 2007 10:34 PM PDT ∞

NORTH COUNTY -- The woes of troubled defense contractor Brent Wilkes continued to mount this week with the announcement that his home in a gated Poway community was going on the auction block.

The announcement follows his February indictment for alleged acts of corruption connected to the bribery scandal involving former U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

Wilkes recently defaulted on a $600,000-plus loan on his 5,325-square-foot home and now, according to an advertisement published this week in the Poway News Chieftain, lender Merrill Lynch Business Financial Services is auctioning the property "as is" to the highest bidder on May 2.

The man who once headed a multimillion-dollar defense company and flew around the country on a corporate jet has had a lot of bad news of late. In February, a federal grand jury in San Diego indicted Wilkes in two separate but related cases.

In one, he was charged with bribing Cunningham to win lucrative defense contracts in exchange for lavish vacations, money and evenings with prostitutes. In that indictment, Wilkes faces 25 criminal charges, including 17 counts of fraud, three counts of laundering more than $12 million, one count of bribery, one count of bribing a public official and three counts of unlawful monetary transactions.

A separate indictment charges Wilkes and the CIA's former No. 3 man, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, with fraud, conspiracy and illegal money transfers -- charges that stem from the same investigation that sent Cunningham to federal prison in early 2006 for eight years and four months.

Foggo, a childhood friend of Wilkes, allegedly used his position to funnel lucrative government contracts to Wilkes and supplied inside information to help him land tens of millions of dollars in defense contracts for his Poway-based ADCS Inc., according to the indictment.

Officials with the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego did not return phone calls seeking comment Friday, nor did Wilkes' attorney, Mark Geragos.

In January, after Wilkes defaulted on a $12 million loan on the 99,000-square-foot building that once served as his corporate headquarters, the lender scheduled an auction of the property. But before the auction could be held, the property was sold for an undisclosed amount.

The building was once the thriving center for Wilkes' corporate empire. Over a five-year period starting in 2000, ADCS received tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts. But those contracts began evaporating when Cunningham became the target of the federal investigation that eventually landed him in prison.

It was not clear Friday whether Wilkes' Poway home is one of the properties he is trying to use to secure the $2 million bond he must post to stay out of jail pending the outcome of the federal cases against him.

A spokesman for the county assessor's office said Friday that the four-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath home in the 13700 block of Paseo Valle Alto in Poway was built in the mid-1990s and has an assessed value of $1.6 million. The property is owned by the Brent and Regina Wilkes Family Trust.

At the time of his indictment, federal Judge Larry Alan Burnes stipulated a bond amount of $2 million for Wilkes to remain free pending the outcome of the cases against him. However, in a March 13 filing with the court, Geragos asked the judge to allow Wilkes to use $615,000 in property equity to secure the $2 million bond. But prosecutors insisted the amount of equity would need to be $1.5 million, court records show.

On April 2, Burns granted a defense request for more time to resolve the bond issue. The matter was scheduled to be resolved in an April 9 hearing. Then on April 6, Geragos asked for another extension and Thursday, Burns postponed the matter until April 23.

-- Contact staff writer William Finn Bennett at (760)740-5426, or wbennett@nctimes.com.

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