By Alan Bean

Six devout and dedicated executives are serving hard time in a Colorado prison and their loved ones don’t understand why.  From the perspective of those who worked and worshiped with these men, the fingerprints of racial bias are visible to the naked eye.  FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors never saw this as a civil matter, a case of well-intentioned businessmen incurring business debt.  Instead, scores of federal officials concluded, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that a Colorado software development company had no prospects of success, no interest in success, and existed for the sole purpose of defrauding business partners.  Until you realize that five of the six men at the heart of this story, the public face of the company, are African American, nothing else makes sense.

This instance of wrongful prosecution didn’t just damage individuals, families and businesses, it partially explains why, after more than a decade of effort and the fruitless expenditure of more than a billion tax dollars, the security issues that left America vulnerable on 9-11 remain unresolved.  It explains why criminal investigators in Philadelphia and New York City continue to use typewriters and why FBI agents still crank out hard copies of their investigative reports.

IRP (The Investigative Resource Planning Company), an information tech (IT) firm headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado had the answers, but the federal government was asking the wrong questions. (more…)