Former Federal Employee Pleads Guilty to Receiving Unauthorized Compensation for Work He Was Supposed to Provide to the Public as Part of His Job

Greenbelt, Maryland – U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles B. Day today sentenced Gerald F. Luchansky, age 82, of Annapolis, Maryland, to four months of home detention as part of one year of probation and ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine, after Luchansky pleaded guilty to receipt of unauthorized compensation by a government employee.  Luchansky, a former employee of the National Archives and Records Administration, admitted that he accepted compensation from two different companies for work that he was supposed to provide to members of the public for free. 

The guilty plea was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert K. Hur and and Jason Metrick, Assistant Inspector General for Investigations, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Gerald Luchansky was an Archives Specialist with NARA from 1979, until his retirement in 2017, after receiving a lifetime achievement award for his work. 

According to his guilty plea, one of Luchansky’s job responsibilities was to pull archival aerial photographs of Allied bombing runs in World War II, digitize them, and make them available to researchers.  Starting in 2008, and without the knowledge or approval of NARA, Luchansky was hired and paid by a German company to do this very same work while he was employed at NARA.  Luchansky would scan NARA’s archival aerial photographs and provide them to the German company on thumb drives or CDs.  The Germany company paid Luchansky for the photographs, even though Luchansky was being paid by NARA to provide those same photographs to members of the public for free.

As detailed in his plea agreement, between 2004 and 2017, and without the knowledge or approval of NARA, Luchansky was paid $27,510 by a second company—this one in Maryland—to research NARA cartographic holdings and obtain rolls of NARA’s aerial film.  Luchansky provided the Maryland company with invoices for his work, even though as a NARA employee he was supposed to provide those services to the public for free.  Luchansky admitted that he deposited the payments from the Maryland company into his bank account.

United States Attorney Robert K. Hur commended the NARA Office of Inspector General for its work in the investigation.  Mr. Hur thanked Assistant U.S. Attorneys Leah B. Grossi and Thomas M. Sullivan, who prosecuted the federal case.

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