The mysterious director of a Navy veterans fundraising group that's under investigation in three states contributed $67,500 to the 2009 campaigns of key state officials.

Starting July 1, that group can resume soliciting money in Virginia under a state law that Gov. Bob McDonnell signed April 12, despite an unusual last-minute plea from its sponsor, Sen. Patsy Ticer, that he veto it.

Her office requested a veto after Ticer, D-Alexandria, became suspicious of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association and its former director Bobby Thompson.

Ticer had introduced the bill, SB 563, in January and it sailed through the Virginia House and Senate on unanimous votes.

That occurred after Thompson, a Florida-based director of the U.S. Navy Vets, personally contributed large sums to the 2009 campaigns of key Republican state officials, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, which tracks donations to state officeholders.

Those donations include $55,500 to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's campaign. That made Thompson's total contribution the second-largest by an individual to Cuccinelli's campaign.

He also gave $5,000 to McDonnell's campaign, and $7,000 divided among the campaign committees of four key Virginia lawmakers.

Thompson gave $1,000 to Ticer -- the only Democrat to receive such a contribution -- and $2,000 each to House Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford County, and Dels. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, and Tom Gear, R-Hampton.

Most of the elected officials deny ever hearing of Thompson before his donations, ever meeting him in person or ever soliciting him for funds. Nor did they know any details about the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, they said.

But that was not the case for Cuccinelli.

Thompson made contributions of $5,000 to Cuccinelli on June 16 and $500 on Aug. 19.

Thompson made a $50,000 contribution Aug. 31 after Cuccinelli spoke to him by phone and asked for another donation.

"I talked to him by phone one time asking for the biggest donation," Cuccinelli said Friday. He could not recall how much he asked Thompson to give.

"I have a hard time imagining I asked for that number," Cuccinelli said.

But referring to the earlier, unsolicited donations, the attorney general added: "This guy surprised us more than one time."

Strings attached?

Thompson's donations to the lawmakers started in May and continued through August.

Del. Chris Jones, who leads the House General Laws Committee, recalled that the May 14 donation to his campaign arrived with a letter from Thompson promising that Jones would be hearing from a representative of the U.S. Navy Vets.

Months later, Jones said, he received a letter from Samuel F. Wright, a Washington, D.C., lawyer representing the U.S. Navy Vets.

In the letter, Wright asked Jones to inquire about the ability of the veterans association to legally solicit funds in Virginia.

"They were taking some issue with the way they were being treated in Virginia," Jones said. "They were being told they could not solicit in Virginia."

Jones said he found that was true when he contacted the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which regulates fundraising charities in Virginia.

It had arrived at that determination after consulting with the attorney general's office.

Because the U.S. Navy Vets hadn't registered with the state, they were ineligible to solicit in Virginia.

In a Dec. 7 letter, Jones told Wright what he'd learned, and also noted that the U.S. Navy Vets' lawyer in Ohio, Helen Mac Murray, informed regulators that the association "has suspended all solicitation in Virginia."

It is unclear precisely when that suspension occurred.

A bill introduced

About a month later, Wright appeared in the office of Ticer, the Democratic senator who leads the Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee.

With him was Kenneth Klinge, a Northern Virginia lobbyist and longtime Republican operative, whom Ticer knew.

"I had never met this man [Wright] before," Ticer recalled. She recalls he wanted to raise money for his veterans group without going through the hassle of state registration.

"This little man seemed totally harmless," she said. "I didn't make any connection at all, with this particular group and that donation."

At Wright's request, she agreed to sponsor legislation that would exempt 501(c)19 veterans groups, such as the U.S. Navy Vets, from having to register to solicit in Virginia.

"It's kind of like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars," Ticer said. "You know, they're pretty darn harmless. And it never occurred to me that they [the U.S. Navy Vets] wouldn't be pretty darn harmless."

She introduced the bill Jan. 13. Klinge testified on its behalf before the Senate General Laws and Technology Committee, and the House General Laws Committee, Ticer said. It won unanimous approval in both.

It passed the full Senate 40-0 on Feb. 2 and the full House 100-0 on March 4.

And then it sat with other bills, awaiting the governor's signature.

Bobby Thompson

A cloud of suspicion

A few weeks later, however, Ticer said she found herself wishing she had never introduced the legislation.

Her legislative aide, Peggy Papp, said questions about Thompson and the U.S. Navy Vets arose in Ticer's office in late March or early April.

Those were sparked by a St. Petersburg Times investigation of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, which a reader in Florida e-mailed Ticer about.

The newspaper's March 21 story was the beginning of a series that followed six months of in-depth reporting by the newspaper.

It questions the veterans association's fundraising of millions of dollars annually; its expenditures on behalf of veterans, and whether the directors the U.S. Navy Vets list on its Web site even exist.

Despite extensive, nationwide database name searches, the Florida newspaper could not find 84 of the 85 U.S. Navy Vets national and state directors, including its national chairman, Jack Nimitz, or its Virginia director, Allan Rossellini. Almost every name the newspaper looked up was a dead end.

Many of the addresses the organization listed were mail drops at United Parcel Service stores across the country.

All of its phone numbers were voice-mail boxes with the same message, urging callers to visit the association's 1990s-era Web site, navyvets.org.

The St. Petersburg Times investigation found that much of the millions of dollars the U.S. Navy Vets raises annually comes through professional fundraising call centers that claim up to 60 percent of a donation as their fee.

Bobby Thompson was the only U.S. Navy Vets director the newspaper could find. And, according to the newspaper's report, he lived in a shabby duplex in a rundown section of Tampa, Fla., next door to a cigar factory. His landlord told the newspaper Thompson usually paid his rent in cash.

After the newspaper's reporter interviewed him at his home, Thompson moved out of the duplex and left no forwarding address. The organization told the newspaper he has resigned from the U.S. Navy Vets.

Sen. Patsy Ticer
D-Alexandria

'Withdraw the bill'

The story alarmed Papp. So she went to Ticer and recommended the senator withdraw the bill she had sponsored at the request of the U.S. Navy Vets.

But Ticer told her it was too late because it already had passed the House and the Senate. Ticer said she instead told Papp to contact McDonnell's office and ask him to veto the bill. Papp, in turn, called Klinge and outlined her concerns.

Klinge, the longtime GOP operative, said he got involved in the bill only at the request of Wright, who was an old friend whom Klinge bumped into in Richmond in January.

After reading the St. Petersburg Times' stories, Klinge said, "I frankly wasn't very happy about being involved with this." He contacted the governor's policy staff and even forwarded the St. Petersburg Times stories to the governor's office.

Next Papp called Eric Finkbeiner, the governor's senior policy advisor, and told him what she'd learned about the U.S. Navy Vets.

"We all agreed that this looked like the sort of thing where it might be a good thing to veto it," Papp said Thursday.

In the meantime, Ticer's office received a letter from Wright, the Washington lawyer and lobbyist for the U.S. Navy Vets.

"I am informed you have asked the governor to veto the legislation," Wright wrote in the April 11 letter. It called the allegations in the St. Petersburg Times story "scurrilous" and requested Ticer reconsider her veto request. She did not.

But, "the next thing I knew, somebody called me and said, 'Did you see he [McDonnell] signed the bill?' " Papp said.

That was on April 12.

Too late to veto

On Friday, Finkbeiner said the governor's office had allowed the bill to slip through amid a last-minute rush of legislation awaiting the governor's signature.

E-mails about SB 563 began coming in on the weekend of April 10, he said. The office received some from Klinge, and Ticer called after that.

But, "by the time we were tracking down the bill to flag it to see if we could do anything about it, it had already been signed because it was in a batch of other uncontested legislation. There were concerns, but by the time we heard them, the governor had already acted on the bill and it's as simple as that."

Finkbeiner added that it was "hard to say" if the governor would have vetoed it because the bill "does appear to benefit some legitimate organizations, but we likely would have at least amended it to address this concern."

McDonnell's office offered a list of veterans groups that could benefit from the bill. But all of those groups are already registered to solicit.

April 13 was the deadline for McDonnell to act on bills.

Finkbeiner said state regulators can ban the U.S. Navy Vets from soliciting in the state despite the legislation.

For this story, The Roanoke Times attempted to reach Bobby Thompson and the U.S. Navy Vets via telephone and e-mail. Those messages elicited no response.

Wright, the U.S. Navy Vets' Washington-based lobbyist, hung up the phone as soon as a reporter identified himself.

"I'm on another call -- have a great day," he said. Wright didn't respond to e-mails or other subsequent voice-mail messages.

Helen Mac Murray, a U.S. Navy Vets Ohio-based lawyer, agreed to "review" three questions e-mailed to her Thursday. On Friday, she declined to answer them.

"I'm sorry but I cannot comply with your deadline and I don't see how your questions are newsworthy," she wrote in response.

Investigation continues

The St. Petersburg Times continues to follow the U.S. Navy Vets story. In a May 6 update, it detailed why the New Mexico attorney general suspended fundraising in that state by the U.S. Navy Vets.

New Mexico has launched a formal investigation into the veterans organization, Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Korsmo said Friday.

Authorities in Florida and Missouri also are investigating, the paper has reported.

The newspaper has dug up $114,000 in other campaign contributions Thompson has made since 2000 to state and national campaign committees in Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York and Missouri.

But the $50,000 donation to Cuccinelli is more than three times the size of any other campaign donation Thompson has made in the past 10 years. (There is no limit on campaign contributions for state office campaigns in Virginia.)

Why did Thompson lavish so much money on Cuccinelli's campaign? There's no clear answer to that.

Cuccinelli said Thompson "was never specific about wanting anything in particular."

Thompson showed a keen interest in veterans issues and had detailed knowledge of veterans assistance services, Cuccinelli said. Cuccinelli was promoting military and veterans initiatives during his campaign.

Thompson was interested in "making sure veterans were taken care of," Cuccinelli said.

Cuccinelli said he had no reason to believe that Thompson was misrepresenting himself. His campaign made sure it got Thompson's employer information and other details for campaign finance reports, but did not probe any deeper into his background.

"There was nothing that raised a red flag," Cuccinelli said. "Unsolicited contributions don't even raise red flags, not even from out of state."

At this point, neither Thompson nor the U.S. Navy Vets has been charged with any crime.

Noah Wall, the Cuccinelli campaign political director, wrote in an e-mail last week that "If Mr. Thompson was convicted of wrongdoing relative to the misappropriation of funds, and contributions to our campaign came from money that was supposed to go to active duty military or veterans, we would donate those contributions to military support organizations here in Virginia."