By Hailey Branson-Potts
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — A day after meeting a pretty young woman working at a karaoke club in the Philippines, Marc Napolitano started getting text messages from her, he said.
The woman, named Maui, wrote that she missed him, loved him and wanted to see him. Within days of their first meeting, Maui went to Napolitano’s hotel room, where they had sex, he said.
The room was paid for by American taxpayers, he said. So was the cellphone on which he got her messages, and so were the trips that took him to the Philippines.
Napolitano, an FBI agent, traveled to Manila several times in 2010 and 2011 while working on cases involving weapons trafficking from the Philippines to the United States. He was posing as a club patron while providing security for another undercover FBI agent.
On Friday, he testified in a federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles as part of a defense motion seeking to throw out criminal charges against three Filipino nationals charged with weapons smuggling.
