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"When Local Executives need protection, information or even intimidation, they
turn to the toughest guys you've never heard of..."
Article by Tom R Arterburn
Photography by Eric Fogleman
St. Louis Magazine, March 2005
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-1S00s, 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.
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 or 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.
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 (AS IS), 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 SO participants, have been maxed out.
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.
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 ex-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 stay 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 operation.
"We've simply turned our mercenary and professional soldiering skills into a lucrative professional business," explains Barbieri. 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 had 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," Barbieri says.
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