Posted on 05/03/2004 6:32:10 PM PDT by wagglebee
A month ago, Blackwater USA founder Erik D. Prince enjoyed a surprising level of anonymity.
Not many people knew just how big his Moyock, N.C.-based company was. Few knew how prevalent private security firms were in Iraq. Even fewer knew that the sandy-haired , blue-eyed 34-year-old hailed from one of the wealthiest and best-connected families in Michigan.
And Prince liked it that way.
All that changed on March 31, when the grisly images of four charred bodies of Blackwater employees flashed across television screens around the world.
Events of that day thrust Prince and Blackwater into the spotlight – where neither is comfortable , especially given the recent scrutiny of companies like his.
Prince would still prefer to stay under the radar. He declined repeated requests for interviews.
Former Blackwater executives say they signed confidentiality agreements prohibiting them from talking about him.
This much is known:
He left the security of the family nest in Holland, Mich., for the Navy SEALs. He started Blackwater when he probably didn’t need to work another day in his life.
And while his family is one of the most recognized in his hometown, most people wouldn’t know Prince if he walked by them on the street.
“He has a very close circle of family, congregation and friends, but he has not become known publicly in the community like his father,” said Mayor Albert H. “Al” McGeehan of Holland. “And that’s not a criticism of him.”
McGeehan, a former history teacher who taught Prince briefly, can’t recall what Prince is like either.
Holland is unabashedly conservative and dyed-in-the-wool Republican. It’s God first, followed by flag and family, McGeehan said.
Gary Bauer, a conservative activist and one-time presidential candidate, counted Edgar D. Prince – Erik’s father – among his inner circle. In 1988, Prince helped Bauer start the Family Research Council, a “pro-family” lobbying group.
“I cannot adequately describe here how much I have depended on his wisdom and counsel over the years,” Bauer once wrote in a letter to council members.
Edgar Prince and his wife, Elsa, are largely credited with making Holland what it is today. Edgar Prince started a small die-cast shop called Prince Corp. in 1965.
A few years later, he and a colleague came up with the idea for a car visor with a lighted mirror, and the company took off.
Prince Corp. became one of the largest auto parts suppliers, churning out 60,000 visors a day for automakers around the world. The company is still Holland’s largest employer, with about 4,000 workers.
One day in 1995, Edgar Prince stepped into an elevator at the company and died of a massive heart attack. He was 63. The family sold the company a year later for $1.4 billion in cash. They shared some of it with their employees, making several millionaires overnight, McGeehan said.
While Elsa Prince is still active in town, the most well-known family member is Erik’s sister, Betsy. She married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, is co-founder of Amway, owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team and No. 216 on Forbes’ most recent list of the world’s richest people , with a net worth estimated at $2.4 billion.
Betsy DeVos is a mover and shaker in her own right. She chaired the Michigan Republican Party for several years and personally collected millions of dollars from the Princes and DeVoses for her top cause: school vouchers. She declined to comment about her brother for this story.
Erik Prince went to private schools in Holland and attended the U.S. Naval Academy, but resigned before graduating.
While there he met and later married his wife, Joan, who died last year after a long struggle with cancer. They had four children .
After leaving the academy, Prince joined the Navy, earned a commission as a lieutenant and was deployed with a SEAL team.
A year after his father died, Prince returned home to run Prince Machine Corp., a subsidiary die-cast company with 225 employees. Later that year, he started Blackwater. Those who knew Prince during the early days of Blackwater say he spared no expense in building it. The 6,000 acres of land straddling Camden and Currituck counties was his field of dreams.
He outfitted it with a 1,200-yard firing range, one of the largest in the country.
The campus also features a lodge, bunkhouse and several small- arms ranges.
The hallmark of the campus is a simulated city block for training. From the start, it was to be more than a shooting school; it would train the military, law enforcement and civilian contractors for hostile situations.
The management lineup changed several times between 1996 and 2001, according to filings with the state of North Carolina.
Prince was always the backer, but stayed in the background, listing other executives as principals .
During the first years of Blackwater, Prince continued to buy and operate companies for the family business, The Prince Group. He continued investing in Blackwater, even though the business had not grown as Prince had hoped.
Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 . Prince seized the opportunity to expand the company. Seeing the possible need for air marshals, he built an airplane cabin on his campus.
“Before the events of Sept. 11, I was getting pretty cynical about how people felt about training,” Prince told The Virginian-Pilot shortly after the attacks. “Now the phone is ringing off the hook.”
Blackwater has been in high demand ever since. The company has more than 450 personnel in Iraq and millions of dollars worth of contracts, including one for $21 million to guard the top U.S. official there, L. Paul Bremer.
It owns two helicopters, which came in handy when Blackwater personnel fought off insurgents in Najaf, Iraq, and needed reinforcements. That incident put Blackwater back in the headlines – and did nothing to harm its reputation in the security field. But the March 31 images from Fallujah, Iraq, may continue to haunt Prince, and Blackwater. Many in Congress are questioning why contractors are doing such dangerous work overseas. They are talking about regulating the industry .
Currently, contractors have no oversight.
The government does not track how many are there or how many have died since fighting began. The Brookings Institution, a Washington -based think tank, estimates that there are about 15,000 contractors working in Iraq and that 30 to 50 have been killed in the fighting in the past year . Several more have been killed in non-combat situations.
In the days following the deaths of his employees, Prince briefed key members of Congress, including Sen. John Warner, R-Va .
Prince also hired Alexander Strategy Group, an influential Beltway firm known for its strong Republican ties, to represent Blackwater as it faces questions from Congress.
Prince’s family connections might not get him contracts, but they could help if Blackwater starts feeling the heat, said William Hartung, the president’s fellow at the New School’s World Policy Institute in New York City.
“These companies are under more scrutiny now,” said Hartung, an expert on military spending and contractors. “If he has political connections, he would be more inclined to use them now.”
Prince’s past as a Navy SEAL also has cache when it comes to getting contracts, Hartung said. But Prince has to make sure the company doesn’t expand beyond its means, especially now that Congress is watching, Hartung said.
“The challenge is making sure you hire quality people and you don’t overreach,” he said. “It’s not a contract for paper clips.”
Prince has even bigger plans for Blackwater. He is building a racetrack on the Moyock campus for teaching defensive driving techniques and hopes to establish another campus in Iraq, at the site of a former Iraqi air force base.
That will make it tougher than ever for Blackwater – and Prince – to stay under the radar.
Not...
Not...
And your definition of mercenary...
Leave it to the wimps to want regulate something else. Congress is one of the most protected classes of people in the world. They need to be regulated (out of office). What would they know about DANGEROUS WORK?
The man put up his own money to start the business and has worked his butt off to make it successful. We can't have any of that! /sarcasm
In addition a mercenary can be defined as one who works soley for monitary gain...if you choose to use that definition then we are all mercenaries.
The context in which 'mercenary' is thrown about in reference to the contractors hired by security companies is in the derogatory...almost as if it is a bad word. Who among you will do a job without expecting payment ?
If you define mercenaries as interested soley in monetary gain, then you will also have to label all truck drivers, all oil field workers, all engineers...etc as mercenaries...and that doesn't fit.
Companies like Blackwater are in business for profit, that is no big secret, the big difference is that they are not working for and would not work for country that is an enemy of the United States.
What Blackwater and other firms are doing is capitalism. They saw a need and filled it.
You have got to be kidding. It ain't quite DOT, but those guys have to answer for every hour they log onto their timesheets and for the damage to their trucks and cargo...to the government.
But what Constitutional authority does the government have over security contractors? Looks to me that this was contmeplated and already written about in the Constitution. Go for it, guys.
Then you responded:
oh sure. The Dems and the media would like to cripple our entire intelligence infrastructure over this - the CIA and their contractors, all of it. Next they will request that Khallid Sheik Mohammed and Zubayda be allowed to tell their stories, and perhaps be transferred to a Marriott hotel.
And then I responded:
You know oceanview sometimes its more than a party affiliation. Sometimes, just sometimes its about America has a whole. The media, nor the democratic party performed these actions, photographed them, and then gave them to the media. The media did what the media does. These actions were done by a group of selfish misguided individuals that has jeopardized things for the whole of America and our troops that are still on the ground in Iraq.
Whoever is responsible for these outlandish acts, they are also responsible for 100+ marines being killed last month. And in my judgement they need to be weeded out and held responsible.
By MATTHEW GUTMAN
BAGHDAD
April 3, 2004
Gliding his straight razor over a client's face, Ahmed Kadduri, of the Kadduri barber shop in the largely Sunni neighborhood of Adamiyeh, lifted his eyes long enough to spit out, "It was the Zionists and the foreign organizations that did it."
He was, of course, referring to Wednesday's murder of four and the mutilation of two American contractors in Fallujah.
The lynchings, referred to by many here as the "accident," remain a much-debated topic, slicing down the center of Iraq's political and ethnic divide and pitting Sunni against Shi'ite.
Despite the mutilations' denunciation of by some Fallujah clerics, over the weekend some Iraqis displayed a perplexing combination of denial and support for the attacks.
Suddenly a short man with a shiny bald pate popped up from his seat in front of Kadduri. "The Americans were mutilated because of the women detained at Abu Ghraib [a massive coalition prison complex near Fallujah that served as Saddam's depository of political dissidents and criminals].
They are kept naked and they are raped.
It was revenge for our women." Meet Col. Abdel Hadi Muhammad Ali (of the disbanded Iraqi army), said the barber, introducing the diminutive colonel.
Ali continued his harangue that "Iraqis are gracious hosts, but when you humiliate us we fight like lions." Soon the Fallujans will be called "the Lions of Fallujah" for their resistance, he said.
The others nodded. Ali said he had taken four bullets fighting the coalition's invasion last March. He proudly rolled up his sleeve to reveal two quarter-size scars, one on his forearm, the other on his biceps.
Coalition officials staunchly deny the claim of inhumane conditions in Abu Ghraib. The proliferation of rumors, it is said in coalition circles, has gotten the best of many Iraqis.
Kadduri's clients gabbed about the incident not so much stunned by the lynching's horrors but apprehensive of the American response. US administrator L. Paul Bremmer has said that those who killed the four Americans "will not go unpunished."
That a few said they saw nothing wrong with the attack highlighted the stark cleavage in culture between occupier and occupied.
Soon after the war, Ali observed that a soldier from a convoy of American armored personnel carriers "smiled and waved at a group of little girls. Had one of them been my daughter, I would have jumped on the tank and killed him."
American women might be treated "like animals or pieces of flesh, but we don't want Iraqi women to be like that."
Just above his head, a TV blared racy music videos on the Lebanese-based Zen satellite station. The hundreds of thousands of satellite dishes and receivers Iraqis have purchased since the war are jerry-rigged on rooftops, balconies, and tiny patches of grass all over this city.
Kadduri's young assistant blushed and turned from the television back to his seated client.
Dr. Gilan Mahmood Ramiz, a Princeton-trained Iraqi political scientist banished by Saddam in the early 1990s, observed that the people of Fallujah are "provincial and primitive. They are at base still a tribal society."
During an interview in his Baghdad home, he also blamed the lynching on the coalition's failure to establish a unifying provisional government.
Had it encouraged political activity among the intelligentsia and professional class, "city politics would have eliminated the tribal village politics of towns like Fallujah."
With Saddam gone and a "quisling" provisional government in his place, some Iraqis have reverted to the only mode available: arcane tribal politics guided by the principles of honor, shame, and ultimately revenge.
And on Friday, Fallujah's leaders almost admitted as much. "Fallujah is based on a tribal model which demands revenge. This led to the uncontrolled and severe reaction of the people," Muhammad al-Handani was quoted as saying by the daily Azzaman.
But support for the insurgency also depends somewhat on one's religious background. Sunnis tend to support the terrorist attacks, because with Saddam gone they feel "disenfranchised," said Ramiz. The Shi'ites, who tentatively support US efforts in Iraq and have born the brunt of the insurgency, have decried the lynchings as barbaric.
"These people give all Iraqis a bad name," said Faisal Abu Khalil, a Shi'ite physicist at al-Mustanseriyeh University of Baghdad and an occasional client of Kadduri's. The mutilation, he said, had shocked his family: "It is inhumane and simply un-Muslim."
"I wonder what the point of it all is," he asked. "Do they really feel they can defeat the Americans, to banish them, by desecrating their bodies?"
Well, some do. "In all I believe the attack on the Americans was OK," concluded Ali. "If America continues to lie to the Iraqi people, I assure you I will be first in line to join the resistance to oust the Americans."
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