At a federal court hearing last month, we learned that Robert E. “Bob” Jones, the former CEO and president of El Paso’s National Center for Employment of the Disabled, was negotiating for a plea bargain to charges made against him in a 37-count indictment issued in October 2008.

A guilty plea by Jones would relieve the government of the need to mount a massive case for a trial on the charges that he masterminded a huge criminal scheme that made him rich while stealing tens of millions of dollars from NCED, a nonprofit since renamed ReadyOne Industries, and defrauding the federal government of hundreds of millions.

But it could also mean the complete story behind the biggest single scandal in El Paso’s history will go untold and that the complicity or incompetence of the federal agencies that were supposed to be watching over NCED and other charities involved in a $600 million program to employ severely disabled workers will remain untouched and unaccountable.

It all depends on the earnestness and reach of the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office and whether their investigation has traveled beyond El Paso to Washington and outward to other nonprofits that are part of the federal Javits Wagner O’Day Program.

So far, the federal investigators have not let El Paso down. Their public corruption investigation has gone where no other law enforcement agencies have dared in digging up corrupt officials and companies.

At this writing, there are new rumors going round and tips from old reliable sources coming in that dozens more indictments in the NCED case are on their way.

The question is whether that investigation will go as high up the ladder as it does wide into our community.

Jones was indicted last October along with Pat Woods, the former chairman of NCED’s board of directors, and the company’s former chief operating officer, Ernie Lopez. But they were hardly alone in knowing about and participating in NCED’s schemes.

Back in 2005, Jones was at the top of his game, a giant in business circles whose esteem and popularity sprang from huge contributions of NCED’s money to the city’s charities and community causes.

In October of that year, the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce named him Entrepreneur of the Year despite growing and persistent reports that something was terribly wrong at NCED. It is an award the chamber surely wishes it hadn’t made but one the city’s leading business organization has not retracted.

The same month, after a Senate committee hearing into the huge salaries going to executives running charities in the Javits Wagner O’Day Program, Jones was singled out as the worst offender for the $4.6 million NCED had paid in 2003 to JFT Management, which he owned.

NCED’s 2005 income tax return showed Jones received more than $9 million for running a nonprofit charity.

Flush with millions of dollars in compensation from the company and from deals he made with the charity’s money, Jones was generous to El Paso politicians, who were happy to accept his donations.

And why not? In his 12 years as CEO, he had taken NCED from a struggling nonprofit with 50 workers making government boxes under contracts to provide jobs to the severely disabled to a 4,000-employee empire with defense department contracts totaling more than $250 million.

In the run-up to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, NCED’s main product went from cardboard boxes to chemical warfare protective suits for soldiers. Once the shooting started, the set-aside, no-bid contracts kept on coming, getting bigger and bigger.

Although severely disabled workers were supposed to be doing 75 percent of the labor going into those high-tech, hard-to-make battle suits, they had to be free of defects, and they had to come off NCED’s assembly lines fast.

They did, under the flying hands of expert sewers whose jobs with Levi Strauss and other El Paso garment makers had gone south and left them behind. Could the equivalent of 3,000 severely disabled workers have managed NCED’s demanding production quotas?

Granted, the Javits Wagner O’Day Program’s definition of severely disabled differs from any conventional understanding and generally means any physical or mental disability that keeps someone from being able to find a job.

At NCED, that could mean being a disadvantaged Spanish-only speaker.

Many wondered how NCED was getting away with it and who was helping, but those questions were quietly swept away again and again.

Those sitting on Jones’ NCED board were mostly out-of-towners, including former generals who knew their way around the Pentagon and people with influence who knew their way around Washington and the JWOD Program.

Overseeing the JWOD Program was the Committee for Purchase from People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled, an independent federal agency whose members were all presidential appointees. A retired Air Force general headed the agency.

In May 2005, an anonymous letter to the Committee for Purchase from El Paso charged that fewer than 10 percent of NCED’s workers were actually disabled. That prompted a hasty and brief investigation in July in which a Committee for Purchase investigator, Lou Bartalot, found payroll records showing NCED had combined disabled and disadvantaged workers to reach the 75 percent ratio of work by severely disabled workers.

Bartalot’s finding showed NCED was flagrantly violating federal standards for the JWOD Program. But the investigation was closed in September after a review of the company’s records by NISH, a federally chartered nonprofit charged with the immediate oversight of JWOD contractors, gave NCED a clean bill of health.

A small agency, NISH is funded not by Congress but by a 4 percent fee based on the contract proceeds received by the nonprofits it is charged with overseeing. NCED, the crown jewel of the JWOD program, had more than $250 million in contracts in 2005. That meant more than $10 million to NISH, so what was a poor conflicted agency expected to do to that golden goose?

It took an El Paso Times article in November 2005 about NCED’s violations to start a new investigation that led NISH and the Committee for Purchase to conclude months later that NCED had purposefully violated the law for years and should be expelled from the JWOD program. It wasn’t.

As it happens, Bartalot had found the same problem at NCED – combining labor by disabled and disadvantaged workers – in 2000 but brushed it off as a minor misunderstanding of the JWOD regulations.

In the aftermath of the scandal at NCED, JWOD’s biggest contractor ever, about the only thing that changed in Washington was the program’s name. Soon after NCED changed its sullied name to ReadyOne, the Committee for Purchase changed JWOD’s name to AbilityOne.

If the FBI has opened an investigation of NISH, the Committee for Purchase, their officials and employees or executed warrants to search their offices, bank accounts or homes, or obtained indictments or guilty pleas, it has not been reported in the three years since the raid on NCED.

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To reach David Crowder, write to dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or call (915) 351-0605, ext. 30, or 630-6622.