Soldiers of Fortune 500

By Tom R. Arterburn

When local executives need protection, information or even intimidation, they turn to the toughest guys you’ve never heard of.

Marketing. Community Relations. Promotions. Mercenary Services? Are some of St. Louis’ largest corporations and most influential business leaders employing professional soldiers? Damn right, say two former mercs who’ve been getting executives and affluent families out of binds for more than 20 years.

Executive protection was probably the last thing “Mr. Principal” (the industry often refers to the client or protectee as the principal) expected to need on Christmas Eve, as he, his wife and two children sat comfortably in their southeast Missouri home—a welcome refuge from his hectic duties at a nearby lead plant. As an executive overseeing controversial, environmentally unfriendly operations, he wasn’t easily rattled. He expected occasional protests, threatening phone calls during contentious labor disputes, maybe even a finger in the face after a necessary firing. 

But he wasn’t expecting 14 rounds from an AK-47 to rip through the front of his house and burrow into the walls of his living room, kitchen and dining room.

Such a violent incident directed at one’s family is enough to make the most brazen of business leaders feel confused and helpless, but executive instinct told Mr. Principal to stay one step ahead of his adversaries (striking miners), or in this case, rain down on them with overwhelming and unexpected might—a deployment rivaling a top-notch Department of Defense rapid response team, courtesy of Michael Barbieri of PDI Investigations in Clayton, who has handled company-related kidnappings in Mexico, a coup in Indonesia and training of Special Forces troops on the Sinai Peninsula.

“We got the call from the company attorney at 9 p.m., so I scrambled a security team within 30 minutes,” Barbieri recalls. The team consisted of a retired St. Louis Metropolitan Police burglary detective, two mercenaries and ex-members of the Army Special Forces and Missouri Highway Patrol. They got the family to a safe house just in time for the kids to wake up Christmas morning and find a last-minute surprise from Santa: Six heavily armed PDI agents equipped with bulletproof vests and mini 14s (short-barrel M16 automatic weapons) striding ominously around the property.

“We looked into hundreds of personnel at the plant and the mine—did full background checks on some—and found at least 10 who had prior criminal histories, from resisting arrest to carrying concealed weapons,” Barbieri says. In the meantime, the executive was given around-the-clock protection, which meant a motorcade of sorts to and from the office, as well as agents who shadowed him on the job.

The outcome of the operation netted the shooter—a union miner—and put any other dangerous individuals on notice that their identities were known and that any future actions directed at the Principals would be returned in kind.

“That protective service detail went on for a year, and there were no more shooting incidents,” Barbieri boasts.

Corporate security professionals, executive protection specialists, bodyguards, henchmen—whatever you want to call them—trace their roots back to the mid-1800s, when a local cattlemen’s association decided to protect its ranches from rustlers by hiring a band of freelance gunslingers. Soon after, the railroads—traveling west from St. Louis—turned to “detectives” like gunslinger Bat Masterson and Allen Pinkerton, who went on to start the Pinkerton Detective Agency (still in business today), to protect their trains as they passed through barren and hostile lands. As late as the 1950s, these heavy-handed rail cops, or “bulls” as they were called, were hired for their hardened appearances and intimidating presence. They would just as soon knock trespassing hobos senseless with their billy clubs as question them.

While some in the industry dodge the connection, others embrace it. “In the 1960s, as corporations grew in complexity and size, they brought in-house security services with the leader usually being a retired law enforcement or military man,” says Patrick J. McCarthy of Special Services. “They generally were considered ‘corporate cops’.”

Quite obviously, if you had a corporate cop on staff, you could use him for matters such as stalker girlfriends, a cheating wife, jealous boyfriends/husbands, enemies you’d like to kick the crap out of, etc., for three very good reasons: 1) You could, 2) a refusal to do the work would mean putting their jobs in jeopardy and 3) you could justify the action as protecting corporate assets.

And when it comes to executive protection, investigation is a big part of the package. “Successful executive protection can only be achieved with the investigative tools of a P.I.,” says Joe Adams of Adams Investigations in St. Louis. “Advance party preparations, background checks, electronic countermeasures, surveillance of individuals, threat analysis and undercover agents are all intricate parts of an assignment. Protection is 90 percent detection.”

Because the executive protection industry is so clandestine and so covert in its work, it’s difficult to determine how often St. Louis executives find themselves in Mr. Principal’s situation, or how real the threats of blackmail, public embarrassment or personal harm are. Even those in the field seem to be in the dark on the issue. “The clients don’t want you to know what we do, or how often we do it,” Barbieri says.

The American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), the world’s largest organization of security practitioners, keeps no statistics on executive protection-related incidents, but one of the society’s trainers, Robert Oatman, says over the last four years, his executive protection seminars, which are held twice a year and typically accommodate up to 80 participants, have been maxed out.

A retired major from the Baltimore Police Department and author of The Art of Executive Protection, Oatman has conducted two executive protection training programs a year for the past 10 years in cooperation with ASIS, and is planning his first seminar to be held in Mexico City. “Attendees are all from top companies, who are providing some type of executive protection to the top tier of the corporation. But we’ll never hear about what they do, because these things are handled internally and never reported,” he says.

They must be doing a lot, though. Security industry analyst Jack Mallon, publisher of Mallon Security Investing in New York, says the global private security industry, of which executive protection is a part, has grown from $100 billion in 2000 to $150 billion in 2004. So for executives and celebrities with a need for prestige, or one less worry about protestors, problematic employees, unsavory neighbors or cheating spouses, personal protection is widely available.

The need in St. Louis certainly isn’t what it is in New York or L.A., but for St. Louis professionals in the business of sleuthing and strong-arming, business is good.

For instance, in the mid-’90s, St. Louis recruiters, benefiting from the dot-com explosion, recruited “killer” sales pros, software engineers and Web designers. But now that the time has come to bid some of these e-commandos farewell, security professionals like Barbieri are reaping the benefits. His most recent termination case involved the St. Louis branch of a national brokerage company, where a woman told colleagues if she was ever let go, she “would come back with a gun and shoot someone.”

Before the threat could be carried out, Barbieri led a team of six investigators (all either former government agents, state police officers or ex-military). Two were in a van armed with video equipment—”I don’t think we need to tell anybody any more about what we carry”—to record every move the woman made in the parking lot. He and three others moved everyone out of the building and waited to confront her in the lobby when she arrived. “We identified ourselves, let her know we were aware of a threat and requested to search her purse. This is because the team in the van saw her go into the glove compartment and radioed us about it. We were worried she may have slipped a weapon into her purse.”

Once the perpetrator—a middle-aged account executive who had quickly been transformed into a cowering victim—was scanned with metal detectors and discovered to be carrying not a gun but rather a notebook of personal gripes about her boss, she ended up in a small room with two company managers and four steely eyed PDI agents for what was to be her final farewell. She was escorted out of the building, told she wasn’t welcome on the property and informed that if she returned the police would be called and she would be arrested for trespassing.

And just for good measure, Barbieri did a two-day follow-up with a couple of drive-bys at her home, which Barbieri says “seemed to get the point across. She never returned, and I think we avoided a situation that could have turned out much like that at Beltservice Corp. in Earth City,” where, in October, a former employee walked into the conveyor belt factory and opened fire on workers as they were changing shifts. While the situation spooked some employees and created a somber mood around the office, “it didn’t end up on the news.”

In fact, most of what Barbieri does stays out of the papers. “Did you know we were the ones who cleaned all the gang bangers out of Union Station? No! Because the FBI and the DEA’s anti-gang unit don’t want you to know about it,” Barbieri says. “That’s why they call us in. We took our own drug dogs in there, identified the drug dealers, got up in their faces and gave them an ultimatum that they couldn’t refuse. It took us about two weeks, and when’s the last time you heard about a problem at Union Station?”

Barbieri flew under the radar on that op, but his friend Jim Scavatta of Black Diamond Investigations, who took part in the shakedown and was then asked to assume the role of security director for the Hyatt Hotel property of which Union Station is a part, ended up taking the heat. Scathing articles about his heavy-handed tactics in the mall followed his instatement, but didn’t even scratch the surface of his primary role: executive and celebrity protection.

“There are a lot of resources that are tapped into, and there really are no boundaries,” says Scavatta. “A lot of the stuff deals with informants, infiltration and networking. I, personally, deal very closely with the Secret Service, FBI, even the CIA when it comes to many of the events that go on here. Dealing with someone at their house is a lot different than protecting them at a public venue that’s on private property. I’d love to tell you what we do, but that’s like giving away trade secrets.”

“We’ve simply turned our mercenary and professional soldiering skills into a lucrative professional business,” explains Barbieri.

Sometimes, however, those soldiering skills are needed for more than protecting mall patrons. According to sources inside the 318th Psychological Operations Unit at Jefferson Barracks, three St. Louisans are pulling independent executive protection stretches in Iraq right now, courtesy of the infamous Blackwater Security Consulting in Moyock, N.C.

A source close to one of them says the job pays about $15,000 per month for first-timers with military experience and other training.

If the pay seems extreme, consider this: the job is every bit as dangerous as combat. One source claims the four “civilians” killed in Fallujah last April, who were dragged from their vehicles, burned and hung on a bridge, were Blackwater employees. Reportedly they’d been guided by trusted Iraqi locals who may have led them into an ambush. “Being shot, bombed, mortared, killed or wounded in Iraq is a bit like a bad lottery. I’ve seen very careful and professional soldiers killed for sleeping in the wrong room or walking in the wrong place on a secured base while some in risky missions come through without a scratch,” the source says.

According to Adams, while it may not pay what they’re making now, there’ll be plenty of work for the hired guns when they get home to St. Louis, much of it paid by the city’s most prominent families, for whom protection is a necessity. “There’s a lot of money here … old money. Many of the people around here, who have streets named after them, are the people I’m working for,” Adams says. “I’m under retainer for five families right now, to handle all of their security questions about kidnapping, travel, parties and advance work.”

For the companies, it can be 007 stuff like counter-surveillance, but when it comes to those who pose a threat to their employers, they’ll do “anything short of killing them,” Adams says. (“Yes, I get requests for assassinations,” he says.)

How sticky can it get for families and executives who appear to have it all? Michael Henderson of Phoenix Group knows. One of his clients was preparing to host a foreign dignitary as part of a business deal that included developing a partnership with one of his fiercest rivals—the son of whom trashed one of his stores just days before the arrangement was scheduled to take place. “If it got out, it would have blown the whole deal,” says Henderson, “because there was a videotape of the incident, which we secured before the police got their hands on it.” 

In order to squash the mishap as quickly as possible, Henderson had two agents surveil the son, find out he was “knee deep in drug sales” and pay a visit to the rival. “We timed it so the father and son would both be there, had local law enforcement stand out front to add legitimacy to the visit and were able to get inside and confront the son, who was in complete denial. But since my guys worked the streets prior to that, they knew who he was dealing with, and where he was hiding his drug money, which was in the house. So they went to it, found there to be over $80,000 in cash … the father is like ‘there’s no way my son has this kind of money.’ To make a long story short, he agreed to pay for damages, and the partnership meeting went on as planned.”

Executive protection isn’t always about lawyers, guns and money, as Warren Zevon sang. It can also mean exposing extramarital affairs, gathering information about powerful or potential enemies and protecting not just their clients’ lives, but their reputations.

“Any time you have the possibility of someone feeling that they’ve been wronged or harmed, there is a chance that they will seek retaliation,” says Dee Wayne Heil, a contractor with Seventrees North America in St. Louis. “They may not lay in the grass outside a CEO’s home with a shotgun, but they may want to humiliate or destroy an image.”

There’s a well-publicized group of anarchists in St. Louis that works to do just that. And it’s people like Michael Intravia of Allied Intelligence in Clayton who are paid well to see that they don’t succeed.

In the summer of 2003, by all accounts, Intravia did a first-class job of securing the World Agricultural Forum at the Hyatt Hotel downtown. A first-class job at Intravia’s level often means intimidating the media, as well as infiltrating activist/protest groups and/or surveilling their more problematic members in order to thwart any attacks directed at his clients, which in this case consisted of hundreds of high-ranking business leaders from all over the world.

“We did not conduct any surveillance or infiltrate any organizations,” insists Intravia, who illustrates why private security is so effective at eliminating threats, as well as scrutiny. Just as the federal government hires private contractors to “investigate” the enemy during wars, so do private security professionals themselves. It can mean contracting or coordinating with a mall security officer to videotape protestors demonstrating in a public park across the street, or slipping some college kids a few bucks to spy on activists—real CIA stuff.

This concerns Denise Lieberman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri, which is representing victims of alleged police misconduct during the event. “When the police investigate someone, they have to abide by the Constitution. That means they can’t search your house without a search warrant or your consent. They can’t search you without probable cause. But private individuals are not subject to the Constitution. A private investigator has no power to take away your rights and liberties—only the government can do that. But the nature of what they’re doing is very similar to law enforcement. And it can be a problem if they are subcontracting for, or working at the behest of the government.”

When asked how problematic it is for a corporation or an executive to hire a private investigator who then shares information with government officials as part of the security planning for a major event, Lieberman says that’s a much murkier question.

It’s a question that points to a grim reality—that protection at the highest level is more a privilege than a right. “This country is gravitating towards a system in which only the rich will be able to afford law enforcement by the time it’s all said and done,” says a retired suburban narcotics officer who has had his own run-ins with the law while enforcing it.

Here’s one local incident that illustrates the difference between law enforcement and private security intervention: When executives of a major power company were threatened by a terminated employee, Tim McGowan, a covert surveillance specialist in St. Louis, organized a 24-hour covert mobile surveillance on the suspect, who not only allegedly threatened to kill his managers but was feared to be capable of sabotaging power stations in the city. “If he headed for the plant or towards one of the executives’ homes, we were to notify local police,” says McGowan. But there isn’t always time for that, he adds. When the target was observed carrying a rifle from his home to his vehicle, “that’s when we had to put the screws on him … going from covert to overt mode. We dogged him and dogged him until he was doing U-turns in the middle of the street, and finally pulled over, borrowed a cell phone from a postal worker and called St. Louis County Police.”

Rolling slow and stone-faced in a dark sedan, armed to the teeth, with friends in high and low places, a pocket full of someone else’s money and very little accountability. It may be unscrupulous, excessive, even dangerous, but it’s damn cool … when you’re behind the shield.