Christopher Alf spent nearly $10 million on legal fees and research trying to clear his name.

That could be the best money he'll ever spend. It eventually led to him getting his job back.

Last year, Alf was debarre3d from his company, National Air Cargo. Under federal contracting law, debarment is a process in which contractors are precluded from bidding on or entering into contracts with the federal government. Rules also prohibit federal contractors from contracting with debarred businesses.

In a plea deal, the company continued its relationship with the U.S. military while paying a $28 million fine for pleading guilty to a corporate felony for overbilling the military. Alf, his wife Lori and three other employees were debarred.

Alf said then and now that he agreed to the deal in order to keep National Air Cargo in business.

He also maintained there had never been any wrongdoing.

To prove it, Alf commissioned an internal investigation and used the resulting analysis to file a countersuit last spring. The strategy worked: On Oct. 29, a federal judge lifted the debarment against him.

Now, Alf plans to return to the company he founded - perhaps as early as this week.

$28 million fine saves 400 jobs

Alf founded National Air Cargo in 1991 and built it into a company that, in 2008, after nearly six years of investigation initiated by former employee Mark Oehm, was convicted in U.S. District Court for the Western New York District of making a false material statement to federal officials. The charge resulted in National Air Cargo paying a $28 million fine, which included a $3.3 million whistleblower award to Oehm.

Alf said in a May 9, 2008, Business First interview that there were a number of reasons why he accepted the felony charge and massive fine. Challenging them, he said, would have resulted in an almost-certain indictment of himself and company officials that would have precluded it from any more government contracts. He also said he wanted to save the jobs of the company's 400 workers, including 55 at National Air Cargo's Orchard Park office on Windward Drive.

"If the Department of Justice went any further with an indictment, they would have shut down the business," Alf, 44, said during a telephone interview last week. "I didn't have a choice."

"Yes he did," interrupted his wife, Lori, stressing each word. Lori, 43, has been an emphatic defender of her husband. "He could have sent (the employees) home. I don't know too many people in Buffalo who would give up $28 million to save the jobs of 400 people."

Lori Alf was removed from the debarment last December. The other three employees remain debarred and, according to Lori, they have barely worked since then.

"If an employer does a (background search) on them, this is on there, and against them; they're unemployable, and that's the travesty of this whole thing," she said, adding that the Alfs covered their legal fees up to the point of a government-imposed agreement being signed by all parties, legally severing ties to National Air Cargo and the Alfs.

"If you consider the amount of error in this, imagine how (the debarred employees) feel," she said. "They just worked there."

Lori Alf said the three could contact the debarring official, Steven Shaw in Washington, D.C., to ask that they be reinstated, especially with the new information that allowed her husband's debarment to be lifted.

Did the Air Force misinterpret the law?

The facts that Christopher Alf relied on to fight his debarring were analyzed by retired Col. Glen Joerger, a former transportation executive with the U.S. Air Force whom the Alfs hired as a consultant.

Joerger pored over the Alfs' delivery statistics used in the government's original case.

He analyzed 45 shipping documents said to prove that National Air Cargo violated a defense transportation regulation, and determined that the company had complied with law. The company had signed a contract in 1997 allowing it to move freight by motor or air carrier. However, military staffers assumed that the rules applying to National Air Cargo were similar to those for air carriers, which can't move cargo by surface.

Not wanting to rely on his findings, Joerger shared them with other retired military transportation officials.

"We all concluded there were a complex series of laws and regulations, some of which, from the government's standpoint, were contradictory. While Alf had actually followed the laws and regulations, it was the government that misunderstood them," Joerger said.

His findings were then presented to the Air Force on Christopher Alf's behalf.

"I told them, ‘You have got it wrong. Christopher Alf should not have been debarred,' " Joerger said.

On Oct. 29, U.S. District Court Judge Hon. Ricardo Urbina in Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary injunction lifting the debarment. That decision has paved the way for Alf to contract with the government again.

Airline CEO led company in Alf's absence

While Christopher Alf was debarred, Preston Murray took over as CEO of National Air Cargo. Alf plans to return as chairman of the company.

Murray wouldn't disclose revenue figures for National Air Cargo, which handles, he says, about 60 percent of U.S. military freight shipments to Iran and Afghanistan. (Military contracts account for about 80 percent of National Air Cargo's business.) A 2008 Dun & Bradstreet Inc. report listed National Air Cargo's net sales at $36 million.

As for the Orchard Park office, which serves as the company's regional office for the Americas and employs about 50, Murray said, "It's actually been able to achieve a pretty substantial commercial, non-governmental business."

The Alfs plan to visit all of the company's offices, perhaps as early as this week, to thank employees for sticking with them through a tumultuous time.

"That kind of loyalty," said Lori Alf, "you can't replace."

Murray will remain as Nat'l Air Cargo CEO

-David Bertola