Disgraced former FBI spy risks up to five years in prison Thursday for betraying America by exploiting its experience for the benefit of a Russian oligarch described as a “henchman” of President Vladimir Putin.
Charles McGonigal, the former special agent in charge of the New York Bureau of Counterintelligence, secretly used his job to compile a “Rolodex of thugs” to whom he could sell his services after his retirement, federal prosecutors wrote in court documents before his conviction.
“These duplicitous efforts began to bear fruit when he entered into a contract with Oleg Deripaska, a notorious henchman of Vladimir Putin,” they wrote.
McGonigal, 55, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in August to avoid trial on charges that landed him up to 80 years in prison.
He admitted to collecting “derogatory open source information” about a Deripaska rival, Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, to try to get him sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control.
In exchange, McGonigal’s 2021 deal with Deripaska paid him $51,280 up front and $41,790 per month.
“Although the FBI foiled McGonigal’s plan before he could reap significant benefits, the real damage had already been done: one of America’s most prestigious and important counterintelligence officials had betrayed his country and manipulated a sanctions regime vital to his national security,” prosecutors wrote. .
McGonigal became close to Deripaska through one of the oligarch’s friends, Yevgeniy Fokin, in the months before his retirement in 2018 and used his contacts with law enforcement to offer the daughter Fokin interned with the New York City Police Department, authorities said.
McGonigal, who was arrested in January and is free on $200,000 bail, is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by Judge Jennifer Rearden.
Prosecutors are seeking a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $200,000.
McGonigal too faces another five-year sentence in February for another guilty plea in Washington, D.C., for secretly accepting $225,000 from an Albanian government official while working for the FBI.
In court papers, defense attorney Seth DuCharme cited his work for the government in an effort to keep him out of prison, noting that he helped investigate the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 and on the terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.
“Here, especially considering the truly extraordinary service Mr. McGonigal provided to the United States throughout his distinguished 22-year career as a law enforcement and counterintelligence professional, a very low sentence is just,” he wrote.
