Almost immediately after Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate #11109-017 completed a 14-month sentence for using sensitive credit card data on his previous employer’s computer system to steal $70,000, he was hired by the Department of Veterans Affairs in a position that ultimately led to his present job — running an office racked with credit card fraud and bribery problems.
Braxton Linton is prosthetics service chief at the Caribbean Veterans Affairs hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Service chiefs are the top officials in each department in VA hospitals. VA prosthetics offices procure all assistive devices and use government credit cards so often that they are called “prosthetics purchase cards.”
Linton is at least the second convicted felon working in management at the federal hospital in San Juan. The civil service employees union local there recently got an employee reinstated despite her involvement in an armed robbery by arguing that she can’t be discriminated against since the hospital’s human resources manager remains on the job despite being a convicted sex offender.
Linton’s story began in 1998 when he was working as a night clerk in a dorm at the University of Florida and stole mail from freshman students, using their private information to apply for credit cards and racking up $70,000 in purchases.
Police said Linton used his position to prey on the students he victimized. “Not only would the person have to have access to personal information, they would have to have access to intercept the plastic,” an officer said in a front-page news article about the crime.
When credit-card offers came in the mail, he would apply for them using personal info, like Social Security numbers, taken from the college’s private database of students. When statements came showing the huge purchases, he would steal those pieces of mail, so the students never knew.
In addition to the prison time, Linton was placed on three years of supervised release and required to make restitution in the amount of $69,089, according to federal court records.
Now, at the VA, Linton has access to the personal and medical information of thousands of veterans, as well as to federal credit cards. He also oversees a large budget and a staff.
Criminal investigators with VA’s Inspector General received information in 2012 that Puerto Rico’s assistant prosthetics chief was steering contracts to a particular company in exchange for bribes, according to an investigative report reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.