Montaño’s new book is a sweeping tell-all about his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory and his unstinting take on the lab’s management practices.
The fraud Montaño alleges took place at LANL isn’t unique to the lab, the author insists. Rather, it’s the natural outgrowth of a culture that ties job security to employee silence in the face of fraud. “The largest frauds committed in society are committed by people who work in the highest levels of management,” he said. “There’s usually an emotional rationale. Perhaps they are sick or they feel they have been shortchanged in some way. But they have the trust and the ability to circumvent internal controls.”