Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Blackwater's Erik Prince Wrote A Book About How Much He Sucks

Episode Date: September 27, 2018

In Part Two about Erik Prince, Robert is joined again by Miles Gray (The Daily Zeitgeist) to discuss all the insane information from Erik's autobiography.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is again Behind the Bastards. This is part two of our episode on Eric Prince and with me in the studio today is Miles. How are you doing, Miles? I'm good, I am great.

And I'm itching to know more about Eric Prince because the first round, first episode, first part. Which was like six months ago. But I still remember most of it and it's a testament to the American spirit. That's a thing, it's a testament to that among other things. It's a testament to being born with hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, testament to all of that stuff. Well, what have you been up to in the last six months? Last six months.

I don't really care. Okay. What's your guess as to what Eric Prince has been getting up to? I'm going to, if I'm a gambling man and I like to gamble, I'll go with a safe bet and I'm just going to say crimes against humanity. Just in general. War crimes? Yes. Absolutely.

He has been a part of some more crimes that have been committed recently, which we'll talk about later. But more interestingly, I guess I should be more pointed. Do you want to guess as to what Eric Prince has bought since you and I talked about this? Okay, so last time he tried to make that his homemade fucking fighter jet. Yeah. That went, did not work out well. Did not work out well. So what's easier?

Probably bolts. Ding, ding, ding. I mean, knowing how Betsy DeVos loves her yachts, you know, it only makes sense that brother Eric is going to be like, let me turn this ship up. Just within the last few weeks, he purchased, or we'll get into what he did later, but he basically purchased, quote, Three high-speed catamarans armed with electronically aimed and fired machine guns and cannon, three trimorans armed with heavy machine guns and cannon, and drones which could be armed. They are equipped with military-grade surveillance radars and high-speed semi-rigid inflatable boats that can be used to launch commandos and boarding parties from the larger ships. Wow. Wait, what was the second kind of boat you said?

A trimoran? What is that? It's just, it's a boat of some sort, and it has a lot of guns on it. Right. I don't know much about boats. Okay. There are a few different kinds of boats with a shitload of guns on them. Can you show me a picture of a catamaran and a trimoran?

Sophie! Perfect. Just so I can wrap my head around, because what's a, isn't a catamaran, like, when I think of a catamaran, I don't think of, like, a war-faring boat. I assume there are armed, I mean, there are armed catamarans. I think it's by a basic, a broader definition. It's like a type of boat, and they just armored this one and put some guns on it. Yeah. Yeah, our Eric, yeah.

So, Eric Prince has a... Oh, okay, so it is a thing with, like, the three... Okay, because, yeah, the catamaran is, like, the two-piece thing where you see people that's like, we're in Saint-Tropez, and I'm laying on this net in between the... It's the boat equivalent of those spaceships in Cloud City in... Bespin. Bespin, thank you. Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's like that.

Right. I think, which is so funny, like, it's still very, like, waspy, like, old money, like, a catamaran except for war. Yeah. Well, he, in a little bit of defense to Eric, he didn't, he didn't just go buying armed catamarans. He bought the Navy of Mozambique. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, so...

Great rates over there. Well, yes, because their economy collapsed recently, because their entire country got taken in by a giant con scam thing. Basically, they wanted to modernize their tuna harvesting fleet and needed, like, a loan for $800 million, right? Okay. Which they got, and which the people of Mozambique were like, yeah, sure, modernize the tuna harvesting fleet, we'll all make more money. But the government, working with shadowy foreign interests, secretly took out an extra $1.2 billion in loans that they used to buy a Navy, and they lied about it. And so... Wait, an extra one?

Yeah. So the first thing is, we need $800 million for the tuna fleet. For the tuna fleet. And they were like... Which, you know, it's a sea-bound nation. Right. But then you buy, then you secretly borrow even more than what you tell... To buy a Navy.

What the fuck. Okay. So they bought this Navy secretly and lied about it, but once they'd bought it, they'd spent all of their money. So they didn't have enough money to man the Navy, which they were planning to... They were planning to lease the Navy to a private corporation that would then basically be a for-profit Navy based in Mozambique. So they wanted to... Air B&B, their fucking Navy. Yeah, that was the plan.

Yeah, just like getting the black on this thing. But they just didn't... they couldn't actually run the Navy, and the whole venture sort of collapsed, and somehow Eric Prince wound up in control of it. Now, it's weird because the first source I found this from was a website that's new to me called Spiked News, which builds itself as an outlet for stories that have been buried or crushed by the daily median noise. So I was a little bit like, is this some fake news bullshit? Right. So I looked around and I was able to find other sources on the article that were a little bit less direct than Spiked had been, but said basically the same thing. So I'm going to quote from this Bloomberg article called Eric Prince to Partner with Mozambique's Hidden Debt Companies, which... Okay.

That sounds above board. Hidden Debt Companies is one of... Those are the companies that helped members of the government of Mozambique take on more loans than the country could afford, which then bankrupted the nation. Yeah. Hidden Debt Company will always sound terrible. There's no way to make this happen. Yeah. And these are the people Eric is working with. So Blackwater Security founder Eric Prince will partner with at least one of the state-owned Mozambican companies at the center of a hidden loan scandal that resulted in the country defaulting on its debt this year.

Prince, chairman of the Hong Kong-based Frontier Services Group, is forming a joint venture with the tuna fishing company Imatum and may extend this to assisting the Southeast African nation with maritime security. Hmm. Yummy. I wonder if Eric Prince has a navy now. It sounds like it. It sure sounds like Eric Prince has a navy now. Yeah, at least renting a navy. Yeah, exactly.

He's like, I don't want to go that. I'm not doing that well. I'm leasing a navy. And he's doing some counter-terrorism stuff for the country. So it sounds like he has found a country... In fucking quotes, counter-terrorism, whatever that is. Yeah. He's doing something shady in Mozambique and really has a navy.

So that's good. That's really nice. Yeah. Anyway, we're all caught up other than the... He bought a fucking navy, dude. It's like we bought a zoo but with war machines. I know. He bought a catamaran and trimaran with...

No, six of them, I think. Six of them. Three catamarans and three trimarans. And plus drones, plus little skiffs so you can just have boarding parties. Commandos. Yeah. Because Eric Prince should have more commandos. Well, it worked well the last time.

He's the body's part he can figure out. It's the getting around the international laws that prohibit private people from owning military hardware. He's mastered. Yeah, he's... He's really... He's like... I...

He's focused. If anything. This is a man who said I will have some kind of my own military army air force. I want my own militaries. Right. He's got his ground goons. He's got that ground game worked out. Now he couldn't figure out the skies.

Now take him to the sea. Yep. So he's in the sea. Yeah. And that's where Eric Prince is now. So, now that we're all caught up, I would like to talk to you about the book that I just read this week. Oh, okay.

It's called Civilian Warriors, the Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror. Well, first of all, based on everything we were talking about last time, to call some of these people fucking unsung heroes, holy shit. Well, the people who saw their heroics couldn't sing because they were too busy screaming. Right. Because Blackwater was firing grenades into a crowd. Right.

And they were like, I'm sorry, man. I haven't let this thing off all day. Yeah. So, obviously the author of that book is Eric Prince. Mm-hmm. Well, and some other guy. Clearly, Eric Prince outlined it and some other dude filled out the writing, you know? Right.

Whoever the ghostwriter is. But he's credited as the author. It's exactly the kind of self-serving autobiography you would expect from a billionaire whose companies have been tied to more war crimes than several SS battalions. Mm-hmm. So, let's just dive into the introduction. Okay. This gives Eric a chance to lay out his beliefs on the war on terror in brief.

So, yeah, Western governments continue to struggle to find real solutions to these crises. They have spent trillions of dollars during that Cold War preparing the mightiest of hammers, but when you have a magnificent hammer, everything looks like a nail. So, this is the problem. Wow. He's accurately identified the problem the U.S. military has with counterinsurgency. Right, right. Because we do have a really great hammer and we're not dealing with nail problems.

Yeah. That's fair. You get a penis implant and you're like, how do I not fuck with this thing? Mm-hmm. Yeah, but then you wind up in the wall of the hall of penises. Yeah. And so, your penis is just useless. Yeah.

I guess so. Yeah. Gotta dust it off. That's the situation. Yeah. Current U.S. military strategy. We'll rock that. I mean, everything is a phallic.

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny to me that he's diagnosing the shortcoming and attributing it to the U.S. military, that their problem is that they have a great hammer and so everything looks like a nail, because all Eric has ever done in his entire life is build hammers. But he seems to think that what his people do is different and more suited to the war on terror than what the U.S. military does. Right, because they don't have rules.

Yeah. The hammer of traditional forces lacks the nimbleness and fiscal efficiency of either small active duty units or contracted special forces. Even more troubling, traditional forces can inflame the situation instead of pacifying it. Instead of pacifying it. Instead of pacifying it. What colorful language.

I love that. Yeah. And I love it because if there's one thing Blackwater absolutely has done everywhere it's operated, it's inflamed the situation. Oh, no. We pacified it. Well. That's what they always say, right?

Army Colonel Peter Mansour said this about Blackwater, if they push traffic off the roads or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious they may be operating within their contract but it is to the detriment of the mission which is to bring people over to our side. There's also another quote I found in a textbook called U.S. domestic and international regimes of security by Army Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters who said, arm contractors do harm counterinsurgency efforts, just ask the troops in Iraq. So, there's a lot of military people who have served alongside Blackwater who are like, these guys don't help the effort in any way.

It's just like that nepotism where suddenly your boss is like, nephew shows up to work and he's fucking useless but it's like, the boss had extra money, it's like, yeah, just give it to this guy, fuck it. Well, it's a mix of like the boss had extra money but also like, boy, we only have half as many troops as we need to do the job and these guys don't count as humans legally. We don't have to report that they exist or died, it's a whole mess. So Eric has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about the fact that he had to sell his company Blackwater and it had to be renamed and there were all those murders and massacres.

Here's how he sums that all up. After failing in their multi-year effort to win hearts and minds in Iraq, the bureaucrats decided a company that had repeatedly answered this government's pleas for help was suddenly more valuable as a scapegoat. I was strung up so the politicians could feign indignation and pretend my men hadn't done exactly what they paid us handsomely to do. Oh, wow. What a worldview.

I love it because like the major incident that led to him losing Blackwater was a bunch of his guys firing into a crowd. Right. And it was like a protest, right? No, it was just a traffic circle. One of them panicked and they just fired into a crowd. Right, and there was like no explanation. There was no explanation.

And there weren't really any weapons present. No incoming fire whatsoever. No, they just massacred 14 people and he's like, ah, it's the politicians trying to make me look bad. Maybe if your people hadn't shot four. And then there was that guy who drunkenly shot the vice president of Iraq's security guard in the green zone. There was a lot of stuff.

Those guys who crashed an armored vehicle because they were hammered. Right, because they were drunk. Right. It's just the party crew. Blackwater. Those do sound like some fun parties. I mean, in the scariest way where you're like, I mean, these guys know what they're doing with their guns, but I feel like it's going to get weird suddenly.

Yeah, they don't sound fun to drink with getting drunk and having an armored vehicle to tool around with. Yeah, sounds like a shitload of fun. But not in like an environment where there's the possibility that they would have to be like have some kind of like situational awareness around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway, if you're a company that makes armored vehicles, we're open for sponsorships. I would love to crash one drunkenly and just to get drunk in your bear cat and ride it

right into a fucking wall and show how strong it is, how sturdy that armor is. Yeah. So Prince's book is surprisingly anti-military. He's very careful about it because obviously he's a conservative dude and you can't say the military is not heroic, but he's picked specific officers who have said bad things about his soldiers and tries to discredit them. And he regularly talks about how often the US military screws up in jobs that Blackwater is also present at and usually will point out how much better the Blackwater contractors

are. Right, right, right. Like there's a picture in his book, I guess at some point John Kerry and some other congressmen were visiting Afghanistan and their helicopter was grounded on like a fucking mountain peak or some shit. The picture looks like they're on a mountain peak and they had to get rescued and the team that came in and got them was Blackwater stuff. And Eric Prince was like, but he thanked US soldiers and not Blackwater contractors.

It's like, well, he was probably thanking the US soldiers who guarded him up on the top of that mountain for hours. Yeah, right. Not the tow truck guys. Not the tow truck guys. Right. Whatever. Anyway, so yeah, Prince's book is surprisingly anti-military.

He also cites the failure in rebuilding Afghanistan and sort of ignores the fact that that effort to rebuild Afghanistan was mainly carried out by private companies. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah. Well, again. Yes. So here's a quote from his book on Afghanistan that I think is relevant considering some of his more recent plans for Afghanistan.

Witness the totally failed economic development of the Afghan economy after nearly 13 years of US special forces on the ground. The aid community spent billions and dead in boondoggles while ignoring the mineral and energy sectors that could make Afghanistan an independent nation instead of a welfare case. Oh, wow. What do you think about that? I mean, sounds like there was some stuff to pillage.

Oh, you are right on the money today. I mean, that's what that sounded like. He's like, guys, there's just fucking money in the ground. There's a lot of money in the ground in Afghanistan. It would be really great if there was some sort of outside document that we could look at that would give us a better idea of what Eric really meant when he started bringing up Afghanistan's mineral and energy wealth. Oh, hey.

There it is. It turns out he's been shopping his plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan around DC, and BuzzFeed actually got a copy of the PowerPoint presentation that Eric's using to try and sell his privatized the war in Afghanistan plan. Which is doing quite well, isn't it? Probably. From what I hear in the news constantly, it's like that's always on the horizon and always being promoted, at least from the Trump administration.

We'll talk about that. His slideshow is titled, An Exit Strategy for Afghanistan, a test case for the strategic economy of force. Why don't you just call it an exit plan for Afghanistan? Just give it to me. Well, there's a reason that he made sure the word economy was in there. Right, right, right. We're about to get into that.

It turns out there's a whole slide on this slideshow about the rare earth minerals that are present in the Helmand province. Eric makes a big point of the fact that there's an estimated $1 trillion in rare earth minerals in the ground in just this one province of Afghanistan. Wasn't there a lot of fighting in the Helmand province? You betcha. I feel like that's the one province you would have repeatedly referred to. I mean, it's possible.

Or at least that one portion of the administration. There's debate between what the US military says is controlled in Afghanistan and what the Taliban controls. There's debate between that, but there's a good chance they control some 60% of the country right now. So anyway. Yeah, that map looks pretty juicy. It's interesting that he's really specifying how many rare earth minerals are inside Helmand

province in this. I wonder what he intends to do with these minerals. Well in the slideshow, he states that under his plan, the military effort in Afghanistan will be quote, strategic mineral resource extraction funded. Prince believes that this will break the quote, negative security economic cycle of the war in Afghanistan. So we'll dig up the rare earth minerals and self fund while we just destroy the earth there.

Yeah. So Eric Prince essentially wants to make Afghanistan, take Afghanistan from an expensive peacekeeping operation by the United States to a profitable rare earth mineral selling corporate endeavor. There's no talk or hint about how this might make life better for African people. He's doing like rich war criminal, poor war criminal where it's like it's about passive income guys. Yeah. A Prince company spokesperson said to Buzzfeed when they asked them about this quote, what

is laid out in the slides is a model of an affordable way for the US to stabilize a failed state where we are presently wasting American youth and tens of billions of dollars annually. So they're basically climbing onto the fact that pretty much everyone is like, yeah, it's dumb that we're still in Afghanistan, super. And he's like saying people like, it's dumb that we're in Afghanistan, we should leave. He's saying, it's dumb that we're in Afghanistan, you should give it to me so that I can mine it. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. And then one, I can see like on the face of it, right? Because since the Iraq war in Afghanistan, like that has just been a money pit that has just been led to the accelerated decline of the American empire, right? Yeah. Like it's sort of these late. It's what Afghanistan does, baby.

Right. But it follows that trend of like all historical empires, like they get into these like glamour wars that end up bankrupting the country or whatever. More often than not, the war is in Afghanistan. Right. Jesus. Yeah. And I go, yeah, well, it is kind of a money pit and that's all money that could have been

spent in the U.S. on things like education. We could really use some bridges. Yeah, right. Oh, but you know, let him mine it. Yeah, let him mine it. He's in mining. He can find a guy. Yeah.

He'll find a guy. He has a fucking navy. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he can handle some mining. Hit up the homies at Rio Tinto. If he can make the sea his mistress. Right. So yeah, interestingly enough, Eric Prince's stated inspiration for his fucking sweet idea

seems to be the East India Tea Company. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Wall Street Journal let him write an opinion article in May of 2017. The article was titled the MacArthur Model for Afghanistan, but further into the article, he cites our favorite corporation, which if you haven't listened yet, we did an episode

on the East India Company. They conquered India in the 1700s and starved 20 or 30 million people to death through negligence. Yeah. And they also invaded Afghanistan, which is why they went bankrupt. Interesting stuff. Here's Eric, an East India Company approach would use cheaper private solutions to fill the gaps that plague the Afghan security forces, including reliable logistics and aviation support.

So bold, bold of Eric Prince to directly cite a company that was destroyed conquering Afghanistan. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe it'll be different this time.

Maybe it'll be different this time. Yeah. I know that. Okay. So, is there anything about Afghanistan that makes powerful, rich white men with armies stupid? I don't know. You tell me.

Like, is there like a magical effect that it has? I don't know. Because it keeps happening. Did they all know? Did the Soviets know the resources that were there back then? Yeah, but that's not even why they just got sucked involved in support of a government that was socialist. Right.

Like, they lost money there. We lost money there. The British Empire fought three or four wars there and bled itself dry there. Right. Like, nobody wins in Afghanistan. Afghanistan might just be like where God lives. You know what I mean? Where it's like, don't come in here, bro.

No, this is my house. Yeah. Like, watch this. Yeah. Who's next? I'll take all your money. Yeah. Anyway, according to the Atlantic, so Eric hasn't been forthcoming on most of the details

of his plan, but according to the Atlantic and some other sources, we know that he wants a viceroy to run the whole operation. He compares this person to a bankruptcy trustee who would have full control of her hiring and firing US personnel and country, mentors would be embedded into Afghan units. These would be men from any country, according to Prince, quote, with a good rugby team. So British, Australians. Any country with a good rugby team would have team captains or whatever. That's where he'll recruit his mercenaries from.

To mentors. Yeah. Wait, why the rugby team? I don't know. That's weird, right? Yeah. He's like, I love rugby union. Rugby guys are good at war.

Okay. So New Zealand, South Africa. Oh, New Zealand's super good at war, famously. Yeah. Yeah. And I think South Africa is probably one. Yeah. South Africa makes more sense.

He's going to get a lot of South African guys in there. Some crooks out of there. He's like, but they can also play rugby. Yeah. Now, interestingly enough, Eric Prince also wants a composite air wing to help the Afghan Air Force. In other words, this viceroy would have his own private air force working alongside the Afghan Air Force.

So with his proposal, if they were to be like, okay, here are the keys, then they would have, they would loosen laws to allow this viceroy to then finally have a fuss. It's part of the job. He's got to have an air force. Right. Right. Of course. Got to have air superiority.

And so Eric Prince would mine Afghanistan's minerals and use it to buy himself an air force, which he would then use to bomb the Afghan people. It's like a literal parasitic relationship. It's in, I'm, honestly, he's the most respectable person close in the orbit of the Trump administration right now. Because you got to give one thing to Eric Prince. He is persistent. Right.

He wants an air force, and he's really putting in the groundwork to do it. Yeah. He's just leasing that Navy just to get over the fucking, the void of his air force. It's just, even though I have that, it's about the air force. It's about having an air force. There's something not respectable, but like. No. I mean, I guess objective, if you removed all the actual details that made it about war

and killing and things like that, and you're just about one person who has a dream and the, you know, just whatever he has to overcome that he's going to do. Yeah. And that's something that, that's all I'll say. That is something. It is something. That is something at the core of his being. Yeah.

That makes him at least interesting. Well, you do have a great Eric Prince is my God T-shirt on right now. I wear that a lot, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't going to try and read into it too much. Different Eric Prince. Yeah.

Okay, cool. He's this guy that lives down the street from me, and I'm trying to. Anyway. He's really good at rugby. Let's bring some ads. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

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world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Ah, those were some great ads. Fantastic. Quality products, services, also pretty good. Anyway, let's get back to Eric Prince.

So yeah, when we last left Eric Prince, he's talking about turning Afghanistan into a rare minerals company that he runs via violence against the Afghan people. So that's fun. He's not the only guy in DC who's shopping around this idea. Stephen Feinberg, who runs Cerberus Capital and also the military contractor Dyncorp, has been pushing a similar plan around Washington. Feinberg is a close friend of President Trump. He was almost given a position overseeing an intelligence review this year, but the

Intel community recoiled because he has no background in Intel or the military. He doesn't know anything. Cerberus and fucking, what was the other one, Dyncorp? Dyncorp. Dyncorp is one of the military contractors that doesn't commit rampant war crimes like Blackwater. I'm sure they've got blood in their history, but they're more respectable than Blackwater, which is a low bar.

And then Cerberus. I'm like, oh yeah, that evokes really cool images. Cerberus Capital. Good guys. Yeah, exactly. We're a fucking mythical dog monster. Yeah. I do want to praise Eric on something real quickly, which is his acumen for this, he's

the perfect man to take advantage of this time in Republican politics. And my evidence for that is one of the slides in this doc that he put together, which again is a slideshow that's made for President Trump. In the slideshow, he builds the privatization of the war in Afghanistan as quote, the Wolmen ice rink moment of the Trump administration. That's the name of one of the slides, the Wolmen ice rink moment in the Trump administration. Do you have any idea what that's a reference to? No, but it's probably something very cool.

I guarantee you, this is one of the only things I could reference that President Trump would know about and you would not. And that's because back in the 1980s, the Wolmen ice rink in New York City stopped making ice or in the 70s, I guess. In 1980, the New York Parks Department started working to change that. They spent like six years and $13 million trying to fix this ice rink and basically had to announce at that point that they were going to have to start all over again. And so it was like this big famous story of government competence.

They spent millions of dollars. They can't get this ice rink going. So Trump starts publicly saying that he can do the job under budget and in less time than anybody else. And everybody assumes he's full of shit, but he gets the job and he actually does it under budget for like three million bucks in like a quarter of the time. It was like the one fucking time he did it. The thing that he said.

Yeah. He did the thing. He got the ice rink working again. It made ice. He didn't, I mean, he hired the people who did it, but like. When you say it made ice, like they just couldn't keep the rink at the temperature to keep the ice. Yeah, I don't know the exact.

Well, whatever. But yeah, this is like one of the. It just failed to actually have ice on the rink. Yeah, which is important for an ice rink. Yeah. And then you have a roller rink. So he managed the project that got it fixed and he did it under budget and in any way, it's a thing that Trump talked about often on the campaign trail when he was running

for president. He's smart, right? No, he's saying that, yeah, he's saying that Afghanistan is like that ice rink back in the 1980s. The government's just not smart enough to fix it. So he knows how to sell this plan to Donald Trump, right? And I suspect he'll be successful eventually. I mean, based on everything we read all the time in the news, it just seems like every

day or every story that comes out, we inch closer and closer to the privatization of that war. Yeah, which is not the right plan. Just leave. Yeah. Just admit it was a stupid idea. Right. Get the fuck out.

Right. Say you're sorry, offer the government some aid removing all the bombs we dropped. Exactly. Just get the fuck out, but I think we're probably going to go with Eric's plan. So let's get back into the book. This was a long digression because he talked about, I didn't realize that when this book was published back in like 2014, he already had this plan together. So this has clearly been on Eric's mind for a while.

Right. It's like his demo tape that he goes around to shows with. Yeah. And he has a real gift for spinning his career, running a mercenary empire into personal heroism. In the beginning of his book, he tries to present himself as a lifetime servant of both his country and of course of God. He says, since I first enrolled in the Naval Academy after high school, my life's mission has been to serve God, serve my family, and serve the United States with honor and integrity.

I did it first as a midshipman, then as a seal, then when personal tragedy called me home from the service as a contractor, providing solutions for some of the thorniest problems on earth. The business of war has never been pretty, but I did my job legally and I did it completely. Too well, perhaps, growing black water until it became something resembling its own branch of the military and other government agencies. It's like he's winking the whole time and says, and I did it legally. So we're going to have another digression now because I couldn't let the sentence too

well, perhaps. Yeah, too well. Wow. Okay. So I was worried when I started doing this because I was like, we talked about a lot of black waters, horrible negligence and the deaths associated with the last episode. And I was like, am I going to be able to find more examples of that for this episode with that repeating myself?

Turns out it just took about a second on Google because I just typed in a couple of key phrases and I found a 2005 Washington Post article about a crash of a plane in Afghanistan piloted by a firm that was a part of Blackwater, essentially, one of Eric Prince's aviation firms, killing all six on board. So the first Army report, which was released two weeks later, said that the plane, which again is essentially a Blackwater plane, was in violation of numerous government regulations and contract requirements. So basically they were breaking a bunch of rules.

Now Presidential Airways, which is the company that Prince owned under one of these big umbrella things, right? You guys got all these fuck up. Anyway, Presidential Airways was essentially accused of pairing pilots and co-pilots who both didn't have any experience flying in Afghanistan and then not training them properly for flying in Afghanistan and then not supplying them with communications equipment that they needed to properly fly in Afghanistan. So two of their guys and I think four US soldiers got killed in this crash.

And so the families sued Eric Prince. And Eric Prince gets sued by families quite a lot. Yeah. It's like, it's my middle name, Eric, getting sued by families. By families. You're almost always the bad guy if whole families are suing you. And also when your negligence is that, like, acutely criminal, you know? So an attorney for the families accused them of Presidential Airways of cutting corners.

If they're going to outsource to corporations services like flying personnel in Afghanistan, they must do it with corporations that put the safety of our men and women in uniform ahead of corporate profits. Sadly that wasn't done here. Seems like a reasonable statement. Presidential Airways followed with a common Eric Prince tactic, calling the Army lazy and incompetent. One of Prince's representatives said in essence that the Army review that made them look at

fault had been slapped to ash and was filled with errors. Everyone would need to wait until the National Safety Board report came out to really know what had gone wrong and if Presidential Airways had done anything wrong. So now I'm going to read a fun related excerpt from Jeremy Scahill's book Blackwater. In 2006, nearly two years after the Army investigators concluded the report, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a report of its own. The NTSB concluded that Blackwater's pilots were, quote, behaving unprofessionally and were deliberately flying the non-standard route low through the valley for fun.

Oh, yo, the fucking party gang coming back. Yeah, it's all, it's the same thing. They're just dumb fucking party boys getting people killed. What the fuck? I guess that is the one consistent, like with the culture of that company. It's sort of like, yeah, and also just fuck around, whatever you want, doesn't matter. It's guys who got frustrated at all the rules the Army has, some of which are dumb. You talk to anyone who's served in the Army and they'll be able to point out dumb things

the Army makes you do. But also part of the reason the Army has so many dumb rules is so that people don't go joyriding planes through the valley and killing six people. Expensive hardware. What's usually the background of a lot of the guys who end up in Blackwater? Are they retired? Are they discharged? They're usually people who got honorably discharged.

I mean, it's people who, a lot of people who were in special forces and then were like, I want to get paid. Which, yeah. Oh, so then they kind of leave? Yeah, yeah. This would be like, wait, there's a better check. Right, so, but it's usually people who are like seeing the checks that they're cutting over there.

Yeah, because they'll have a buddy who was in the service and then got out a year or two ago and then he's like, I made $300,000 in Iraq last year and we're doing the same shit. Right. And he's like, can we play this game with this fucking plane where a guy puts a fucking, puts a bottle on his head and we try and just knock it off in the valley. Some guys died last week, but it's still fun. Whatever, dude.

They didn't know what they were doing. Yeah. As you might have noticed from earlier on, Prince has a real bug up his ass about Blackwater not getting what he sees as the proper recognition that it's owed. He had a statement in his book that I found kind of funny. Government agencies don't want that spotlight being shown on their work, nor to applaud the greatest advantage Blackwater offered them, increased capability. They only want increased deniability.

Which is funny because that's the only reason why his company couldn't be fired from the war is because they needed deniable assets. Right. Yeah. Anyway, Eric Prince doesn't like being a deniable asset and has never not been in the business of providing them. Right. Jesus.

Yeah, that must frustrate him when he wants to be the star and he's like, I'm made to be the scapegoat. Yeah, man. That's what you're doing. That's your job. Exactly. Your job is to provide the soldiers that the government doesn't have to report to anyone who's right.

Right. And you're wasting life and money at the same time. That's your whole, the whole reason you're a billionaire, other than the fact that your dad was. Right. Yeah. Step one to being a billionaire. Step one to being a billionaire, rich dad.

Is your dad a billionaire? Almost 100% of the time. Yeah. No? Move on to square Z, where you die for. Yeah. Where you die for because you don't have enough, you can't afford insulin. Yeah, you can't afford insulin.

The price of insulin. Oh, it's like Oregon Trail. You broke your leg and you died. And you died. But Eric Prince gets a navy. Right. Fun world. Fun, fun world.

So Prince says in his book, quote, the true history of black water is exhilarating, rewarding, exasperating, and tragic. Don't disagree with that. It's the story of men taking bullets to protect the men who take all the credit. A tale of patriots whose names became known only when lawyers and politicians needed to blame somebody for something. Which again is funny because Eric is the epitome of the guy who takes all of the credit while other people get shot at.

Right. He's never taken a bullet in his life. His only job, basically his only job since he was 30, has been having other people fight for money that he pays them. Right. Yeah, he's always taking the credit. And I love that, his scorned attitude. He sounds like Ed Harris in The Rock, like General Hummel.

Yeah. He's like, they don't respect us. You just assumed General Hummel saw some shit. But he did. Yeah, and he did. At least. Bosnia, something like that? Wherever it was, I forget.

All I can think of his wife's tombstone that literally just said his wife next to it. It's like, wow, way to give her an identity. Barbara. One of the remarkable things about that to me is it was one of those few movies made in that era where if you needed to have a military character who'd seen some combat, you had to really stretch to figure out where they could have been. Right. It's like Grenada?

Grenada or Bosnia. Right, right, right. Now it's. It's like, where are you? Take your fucking pick. We're at war in like 30 countries. Well, at least the ones we acknowledge, you know what I mean, no one's going to be there and be like, oh, a Niger.

It's like, well, that's a movie 10 years from now, we'll see. It's Nea on the Ijone. Yeah. So at this point in Eric Prince's book, we're just now through the introduction. So chapter one opens with Eric claiming to have saved several women from a boat explosion when he was 13. Wait, fuck. I love how like the intro is just like, man, we were spit on, disrespected.

We are the ones doing the real. We're the real patriots. Chapter one. I'm fucking. Call out. I saved some ladies when a. Yeah, blew up. Yeah.

And he specifically notes at the end of this anecdote, I never did learn their names or what became of them. Ah, it's a shame. Oh, because you're like fucking Spider-Man. You just couldn't come through. You saved people like, sorry, I got to keep this moving. It's a lie. Yeah.

It's a lie. Is there a detail of what exactly happened? Yeah. Yeah. He taught like these ladies, they did something bad to their boat and its engine exploded and they like jumped in the water and he and his friend fished them out of the water and drove them to shore and then there was an ambulance waiting to take them away or something, which may be a boat, I feel like at least a big part of that story is bullshit.

Yeah. I have, you know, I can see that there were probably people who I think a better version is maybe some women who were stranded, maybe their boat ran out of gas or something. Something. They needed a ride to shore. Mm hmm. He provided it. You're in a boat explosion in somewhere time in the 80s and Eric Prince rescued you and

you're now a listener of this podcast. A very high chance. Drop us a line on Twitter at At Bastard's Pod. Let us know what really happened. Yeah. Let us know what really happened that day. It turns out it was his boat that exploded and the women saved him. Oh, that story is completely reversed.

Yeah. Man, I, whatever, if he saved some ladies on a boat and they reach out, I'll make a whole apology track for Eric Prince and the ladies he saved from an exploding boat. Anyway, Prince moves on to talk a little bit about his family history. He uses the story of his grandfather's untimely death as a justification for why welfare is bad. What? What?

When Peter died suddenly of a heart attack in 1943, my grandmother sought no government handouts, no charity from the church, not even money from family. Edgar, who had two sisters, his dad, was the man of the house now. He would provide for them. He was 12. Wait. Wait. I'm, I'm failing to, he, what is he trying to say that, I mean, how is he trying to connect

welfare to? He's trying to talk about how awesome his family is by pointing out that, oh, he just, oh, right. He's like, he didn't take a fucking penny. My grandma wouldn't take any money. She just made my 12 year old grandfather, dad, look, yeah, now he's, how cool is my family? Well, you're the man now, dog.

Sounds like your family's kind of abusive, Eric. Yeah. Sounds like she should have sought for some welfare school or 12 year old could finish grade school. Yes. That's a lie too. Yeah. Unless that's a lie too.

Who knows? Could you imagine like her grandma was like the OG welfare queen? The Missile Welfare. She's rolling around in a Bentley. Yeah. And that's how my dad became a billionaire. Yeah. So anyway, Eric portrays that as awesome.

It's worth noting that his dad didn't seem to view this as a good thing because he notes later in the book, quote, dad didn't let me hold a job during high school unlike his hard scrabble youth he wanted me to enjoy those years. So ups to Eric Prince's dad. He broke a cycle. Exactly. I mean, didn't turn out with a great kid, but. No.

No. Yeah. They're achieving something. I do feel like Eric missed maybe that lesson. Oh, absolutely. Which was children ought not to work. Yeah. Yeah.

Who knows? Maybe that wasn't his dad's lesson. I don't know the guy. I bet you're wondering about Betsy DeVos, Eric Prince's sister. He only mentions his sister by name once in his entire autobiography. I was hoping you're going to be like not one mention at all and I have a sister. He mentions her once to talk about the guy she married. Wow.

So she only comes up in the context of her husband? Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Typical. I think my sister is referenced a couple of times, but Betsy DeVos is only named once as he's introducing her husband. Is she his only sister?

I think so. Okay. That's okay. Maybe not. I'm not going to look at that. So why is he creaming his jeans for Mr. DeVos? Oh, just because he's a super rich guy. Right.

I don't remember the exact context. The dad. The dad. The family died recently. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think so anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. He's still in the Orlando Magic. He has three sisters. So the other times when he's referring to a sister, who knows what he's talking about. Who knows? It doesn't matter. There's Betsy and then the fucking other ones. Fucking other ones.

I didn't even check on the others, but he mentions Betsy DeVos once. Right. He's like, but hey, Betsy, the best one because she had a married guy. She married for fucking, I mean, they were already rich. He doesn't give us much detail at all about his childhood. But if you're game, I did find one anecdote that I want to kind of go down a conspiracy rabbit hole about. Oh, okay.

Eric's description of his favorite childhood hobby, quote, the first group of soldiers I ever assembled was made of solid lead, two inches high, standing in neat rows on my bedroom window sill. There were hundreds of them painted to match their real life British French and Continental Army counterparts. I created them from molds. I got them trips abroad and 40 pounds of lead dad and I melted down in a cast iron plumber's pot.

Wow. He's a little like war miniatures. In fairness, Eric, this makes I did. That's exactly what I did when I was a kid. I played fucking like Warhammer and I spent my whole childhood, but specifically building models. That was my whole child. I had a set of like Civil War dudes.

And I remember I went as far as buying like the fake grass to put, like to create like a battlefield scene and like fake trees. And I realized like, because I remember as a kid, like regular toys weren't quite scratching that itch of like what like, you know, like military should look like. So I was like, oh, you know what I'm gonna do this? It was too much work though. So I commend you for even being a hobby toy man. That's what I did as a child.

And I remember it's like the most poison you can expose your health to as a little kid because your hands are always covered in paints and God knows what's in them. Like this fucking cyan acrylic glue. I was always pulling it off of my fingers and stuff. But in Eric's case, he was melting lead. And I don't know how much lead exposure you get doing that thing, but we do have a lot of documentation on why lead exposure is really bad for children. I'm going to cite from a study made by the College of Family Physicians in Canada.

Lead is a developmental neurotoxin. Children are most commonly exposed and they are most vulnerable. Lead exposure has been associated with many cognitive and motor deficits as well as distractibility and other characteristics of attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Although children's blood lead levels have declined considerably over the past three decades with removal of lead from gasoline and paint, children can still be exposed to lead from lead paint in older homes, toys, and other sources because post-exposure treatment cannot reverse the cognitive effects of lead exposure, preventing lead exposure is essential.

One of the things lead exposure is most tied to is violence, violent crime. Lead exposure, we've seen crime drop for most of the last 30 years and one of the major theories behind it is that we got lead out of everything. And so people aren't being born exposed to lead because we know that it's one of the biggest correlators with violent crime. Does that align with women's ability to have an abortion too because I know it's another one like people would like to throw around as if that was another fact or two that people have control over that.

It's certainly a mix of things. But it's very credible that... Wait, but how do you fucking make your own lead? It's like a smelting? They just bought a shitload of lead and melted it in a pot. How do you... Wait, so I've never had the privilege to melt my own lead down, but what do you do? You just put a fucking stove top in?

I don't know. I never did that either because by the time I was collecting model soldiers, they were made out of plastic because they realized you shouldn't expose children to lead. Or cast iron. But it sounds like he was getting blocks of lead and melting it and pouring it... Into his own molds? Yeah. So he was...

Without any prior respiratory equipment, right? And exposing himself to lead fumes and everything. And I found a study in South Africa that correlates lead exposure to interest in firearms because they found that competitive shooters had higher aggression and much higher blood lead levels than competitive archers, which is an interesting group to compare it to. Right. So this is just a theory. But that's amazing too, because like lead bullets too?

Yeah. Like the bullet in lead? It's like a feedback loop? You're not going to... How often can you get lead bullets? I've been a shooter most of my life too. And number one, most of the bullets you're going to buy don't have exposed lead on them. Some of them do, but it's usually jacketed or something.

And number two, you're not getting a lot of lead exposure shooting because you're firing. But I imagine how often has the actual rounds themselves been protected for people from the lead itself? Oh, not very long. In fact, if you're looking at the Continental Times, the 1800s or whatnot, people are probably melting a lot of their own balls and stuff. Right, right, right. So yeah.

Or making with Pewter or whatever. Obvious. Like it's definitely fed into violence throughout centuries because we've been putting a lot of lead everywhere. I just think it's interesting that Eric Prince, we see in his childhood both this joy of making soldiers and also maybe the lead exposure that's led him to be such a fucking violent greed. Like literally making soldiers out of the thing that would, that leads to like additional

violent tendencies. It's almost poetic. Yeah. Speaking of poetic, these ads are poems for your wallet. Oh. Yeah. Go on. Here we go.

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in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And I'm going to do a free ad right now, one of these great unpaid ads, which are such a smart thing to do. I'm eating some Tapatio Doritos, and folks, I can't stand flaming hot Cheetos, I like

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paid for mine. If you do, everybody takes a photo with Doritos and use those hashtags and you do hashtag why I eat Doritos. Oh. Oh. So they see that and they're like, well, I mean, for somehow this guy has mobilized an army of Doritos eaters. You're like the Erik Prince of Doritos consumers.

That has always been my dream. Right. I was going to say. I was going to say, and you getting a Doritos sponsorship is your air force. Because I want Doritos to pay me to mine Doritos for more comics. Exactly. Yeah. Well, now I'm seeing a conspiracy here.

You heard of here first. This conspiracy has been going on since the show began. Yeah. Yeah. I've been consistent. I mean, it is a sincere brand loyalty. It is a sincere because I love me some Doritos. Yeah.

Oh, they're good. I'm going to trade these Tapetito Doritos and cook in some megas and see how that shit works out. Oh. Yeah. I'm excited for that. That almost seems sacrilegious, but a little bit. It is sacrilegious.

They're bullshit megas, but they're delicious. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, I'm the gabbachist. That actually does make me want Gaspacho, though. Just because the names are kind of, oh, I could go for some of that. Fucking cool.

You make a good Gaspacho? No, but I have a friend who makes a really good Gaspacho. Oh. I go camping with her every now and then, and it's the fucking best thing. And I only do it for the Gaspacho. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking woods.

You're like, hey, you bringing the Gaspacho? Yeah. Anyway, back to Eric Prince. So Eric portrays himself in his childhood as a quiet, boring kid. I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. Being an athlete gave me a social network, yet I didn't have many close friends growing up.

Maybe it's because you're an associate path. I don't know. Yeah. From little information we have about his school years, he sounds absolutely insufferable. He portrays himself as the living embodiment of one of those marines with an atheist professor in a college class, memes that circulates around the internet. You know the kind? Wait, what?

Have you ever, you run into one of those like, now it's gone around where most of the memes are mocking the original, but there would be like this email forward or whatever kind of story that your conservative relatives would send you and it's about like a college professor talks about how there is no God and the marine stands up and gives a speech about how he saw God on the battlefield, one of those kind of stories. Eric tells his version of that in this autobiography. Oh, okay. This is while he's in high school.

Once in class I challenged a teacher who called then President Ronald Reagan's Cold War military build up a waste of taxpayer dollars. I countered by rattling off every strategic defense initiative weapon system we needed to counter various Soviet threats. I'd analyzed Reagan's Star Wars the way my classmates picked apart the University of Michigan's football roster. Okay. Now, what's really fun about this to me is that it illustrates how bad Eric Prince is

at admitting when he's wrong because by the time Eric was 18 we knew that almost none of the weapons systems that had been talked about for the strategic defense initiative were ever going to work. And the few that would, the directed energy weapons that actually did have some potential in 1987 when Eric was 18, a government report was released saying that essentially these weapons would need to become between 100 and 1 million times more powerful and more energy efficient in order to have a chance at working. Wow.

Is the rail gun counted as one of those things? I don't think that started out as a statement. Okay. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. That's a futuristic weapon that I've always been obsessed with and now I've seen that the Chinese have been able to miniaturize an art. No, but those totally work.

Well, yeah. We've got those too. Those are cool as hell. Do you see the thing with the Chinese Navy, they've really figured out the rail gun though and they're loading them up. It looks scary. Yeah. It looks scary.

I want one. Oh, yeah. Ever since Eraser. Well, and I feel like the only thing that stops a bad guy with a rail gun is a good guy with a rail gun. And that's really the message of Eraser. It is, right. Yeah, which is a great film.

Good ad for rail guns. Yeah, yeah. But will they ever be that small? If Big Rail Gun wants to get on a sponsorship deal, I'll talk rail guns all day. That's what the R and the NRA is going to be changed to. Rail gun association. Yeah. Okay, so like nearly all people born into incredible wealth, Eric has managed to convince

himself that he never got any handouts. Quote, after the heart attack, my father's dad had a heart attack, but he survived the first one. My father was generous with his time, but never with handouts. He didn't want me relying on the family business. He made it clear that I had been given every advantage in life and that I had no excuse for not making something of myself. Independently, I would not be working for Prince Corporation after college, he said.

I would receive no trust fund. I had to make it on my own. Now, can we know how true that is? Well, he didn't go straight to work for Prince Corporation. Right. That part. Was there no trust fund? Was there no inherited wealth?

Oh, yeah, there was. Because after his dad dies a few pages later in the book, Eric writes this, just over a year after my father's death, my mother, sisters, and I sold the Prince Automotive unit to Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls Inc. for $1.35 billion, which was split between a number of dad's business partners, employee stockholders, and my mother, sisters, and me. Now, he puts himself last in both of those lists. Very deliberately.

I'm going to guess he might have gotten more money than his dad's employees, stockholders, probably. Oh, yeah. I like also the idea that his sister's got a bigger cut, and that's like, that's his pain, like with Betsy, he's like, fuck, she got such a beautiful sister to me. I hope so. I hope his dad hated him and cut him out of, but clearly not enough because he was boy. Yeah, we don't know how true it is, right, because if his dad was that actually much

of a hard ass, he's like, dude, don't expect to fucking work here. You've been given everything. There is a version. You see that? I doubt that, though. Yeah. We know he got, conservatively, a few hundred million dollars. Right.

And also, people who have grown up with privilege, I mean, if you want to live in denial about that, that is usually the first thing you say is like, okay, I know I may come from this family. I didn't get a fucking thing, though. Yeah. I also know that when he became a Navy SEAL, when he was going for the OCS class, or one of the classes he had to do before he became a Navy SEAL, the class was full and his dad pulled some strings to get him in at the last moment, so I'm going to bet that happened

to help get him into the Air Force Academy, too. Sure. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, you'll remember, Eric went to the academy for a hot minute. At least one instructor thinks he left because it wasn't conservative enough, but in Eric's book he blames something else, the movie Top Gun. It wasn't long before I realized the academy wasn't the right fit. It was just after Top Gun had come out and the environment was an uncomfortable mix of

tail hook-era frat boys on one hand and a nonsensical policing of political correctness on the other. I felt as if I was expected to learn from graduate student instructors who knew little more than the fact that they'd been there longer than I had. I quickly began to wonder whether the academy created great leaders, or if great leaders just enrolled there and dirt it and made it out on the other side. Eric did not endure it. He quit after a year, I guess.

That sounds like some real college dropout shit. He opted instead for Hillsdale. He remembers liking it because everyone there was the same kind of libertarian he was and because they were all rich kids, too. Probably less diverse than the Air Force. He does note proudly that the college offered him a full scholarship, I'm going to guess because his dad had been giving them some money, but we turned it down and his dad said leave it for someone who needs the money.

He portrays this as a good thing that he did rather than like, no, of course, if your dad is a billionaire, you don't take a free ride to college. That's the human thing to do. Way to pat yourself in the back for the bare minimum. I could have bought the school, but I couldn't take their scholarship. That could almost be the title for this autobiography. I think the working title for the episode is Eric Prince accidentally wrote a book about why he sucks, but the title for this book might as well be Eric Prince Does the Minimum

and Pretends That He's Here. And Gratulates Himself. It's spectacular. He tells stories like how when he was working as a volunteer firefighter, they thought he was just some rich kid at first, but then he kept showing up early and doing a real good job of cleaning and he earned their respect. It's like he's rewriting the script of his life. Again, if you worked in that firehouse and have anything to say about Eric Prince, positive

or negative, drop us a line. I'd love to hear from you. I can read you the quote. Yeah. Yeah. Now most Hillsdale students came from money. The Butcher's Painters. What do you mean by that?

He says it as if he's about to say he didn't come from, now most of them came from money. Not me. The Butcher's Painters and Slaughterhouse workers who volunteered or worked at the firehouse initially figured me for a snot-nosed college kid, but I showed up at the firehouse early to change the blades and the K-12 rescue saws and I stayed late to clean the pumps. I handled the heavy canvas hoses and carried the ladders. After a call, when the other volunteer sat back and cracked open a drink, I rolled the hoses.

Gradually, I earned their respect. They also sound like the equipment manager on a basketball team who sucks and the guys who are doing the real work are like, yeah, why don't you just fucking do that? And that is my suspicion is that maybe he didn't actually, maybe when there was a call, he was never called out because they're like, no, that's the fucking, that kid, you don't want that kid in a dangerous situation in your back. And we, there's hints of that in his Navy SEALs experience too, so we'll get to that. Whenever Eric is involved in anything sort of cool, personally, he writes about it at

length. Like he repeatedly mentions when Blackwater first showed up in Afghanistan, he was there and he actually did guard duty some times because they were so, so he did guard duty in Afghanistan. Nothing ever happened, but he did. In the green zone. He talks about it repeatedly that like, yeah, and I was there in Afghanistan doing guard duty.

Like, so when anything is that close to being cool, he talks about it at length, I'm gonna guess he didn't do anything cool as a firefighter. Maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm being an asshole here. He's like, I was the first one to discover the back draft phenomenon. It was around this time that Eric made the first political donation of his life, which we talked about in the first episode, the $15,000 he gave to the Republican Party.

Now in that episode, we speculated that this may have been an attempt by his parents to max out their political donations using their kids' funnels. According to Eric, that's not true. So he says that the money was his own and it came from, quote, investment income from stocks my parents had long ago bought for me. Okay, either way. So he didn't take any handouts, but his parents gave him enough stocks that he was able to donate $15,000 to the Republican Party at age 19.

I doubt that. No, 19. Just be real, that's how these wealthy, and I'm pretty sure we talked about that. It's like the standard tactic for wealthy people of just giving as much money. It's like, well, let me max out, make my dog a max out donor. It's like, if you're born rich and you're listening to the show, I'm sure someone is. Like, fine, just own it. Just be like, yeah, I'm a millionaire because my parents are rich.

Like, okay, just don't lie about it. Don't be like President Trump and be like, we got a small loan from my dad that was millions of dollars. Right. Yeah. You guys, you had it easier because you were rich. Yeah. Accept it.

That's fine. But you didn't ask to be born rich. No. You're just worse. No, it's like, yeah. Be grateful and honest. I have a lot easier because I've never had to deal with like a major chronic illness. Right.

Exactly. Makes my life easier than someone who has. We all have privileges in some way. We all have privilege. Just own it. Don't be a dick about it. Yeah. Like, Eric Prince.

Okay. So, yeah. You'll remember that after college, Eric wound up briefly interning for the George H.W. Bush White House. You'll recall that he wasn't happy there. He admits in his book that he didn't like the fact that President Bush was bargaining with people who wanted to weaken the safety, sanctity of marriage, raise taxes, and push environmental policies.

So, yeah. Push environmental policies. Yeah. He admits that he got chewed out by the deputy chief of staff, Andrew Card, because he wouldn't shut up about his thoughts on how the president ought to do things while he was an intern in the White House, which sounds like what would happen if you're being an insufferable dick. After five months, his internship was not renewed.

Of course. Of course not. And that brings you back to even the firehouse thing was like, actually, you guys should probably be cleaning it like this, like shut the fuck up, Eric, and he's like fine, I'll do it. I'll do it. Clean boy? Yeah.

Yeah, you do it, Eric. I'll do it. Fine. Let's all have beers since we just pulled people out of a fire. Yeah, exactly. Like, well, I'm going to switch the K-12 blades off the saws, whatever. Nobody else is cool enough to do it. Right.

We haven't used that saw in four years, Eric. Yeah. Probably the blade's fine. I don't know. I don't know. Saw blades. I'm sorry, firefighter. Yeah.

Anyway, so you probably remember also that Eric Prince became a Navy SEAL next, using a family connection to get into the school, but Prince did pass Hell Week on his own merits and that's impressive, and when he got back from becoming a Navy SEAL, this happened. My parents sent me an extraordinary gift, a bronze statue of a cowboy. The artist had inscribed, in the unwritten laws of the range, the work ethic still exists. When you sign for an outfit, you ride for their brand. True commitment takes no easy way out. Now, I think Eric mentioned this because he likes to see himself as a cowboy and like

he and his contractors as cowboys. I can't imagine a quote that does a worse job of describing Eric Prince's work ethic than that because every time he makes a commitment, he weasels out of it. Every single time. That's the one thing that is 100% true with Eric Prince. I think that's the case with most people who are very insecure with their identity. They try and project something that is the complete opposite of their own, their truth as a person.

So if you're a cowardly, sniveling little brat, you're going to act like the upstanding guy who's like, hey, first guy in the work, last one to leave. You get a ride for a brand. You ride for that brand. That's right. Unless it gets hard, then you leave because you had a disagreement. Unless it gets hard, in which case that brand was cheating and there was no point in committing to that brand to begin with.

Oh, Eric. Yeah. So Eric was an Navy SEAL for about two years. Now it costs, it's hard to say, probably somewhere around $300,000 to a half a million dollars just to train a Navy SEAL and as much as a million dollars a year to keep that SEAL active and trained up in the field while they're an active duty Navy SEAL. I'm going to guess that the government did not get its money's use out of Eric's brief stint in the Navy SEALs.

You're supposed to do that job more than two years if you commit to it. He says remarkably little about his time doing one of the coolest jobs in existence. I'm going to guess that's because he didn't do very much. There is one telling paragraph where Eric writes about his experience during the Yugoslavian Civil War. In it, he cleverly obscures the fact that he didn't experience any actual combat or real danger during his time there. I'm going to read to this quote.

Yeah, I was just about to ask. I'm like, what kind of action did he act on? I think you'll pick up on it. Then in late 1995, as Yugoslavia broke apart in the warring states, SEAL Team 8 deployed to Bosnia Herzgovina. The shattered buildings and war-torn streets were a far cry from the peaceful communities I'd once seen there with my wife. We SEALs were performing combat search and rescue for downed pilots or taking direct

action against radar sites. Not me, Eric Prince. We SEALs. We SEALs. Yeah. It's odd that he's able to be somewhat truthful in those instances, right, because it seems like he'll embellish anything. Because there's guys who serve with him that would be like Eric Prince Light about his

service. It's like the once third rail. Now, where are those SEALs? If you were a Navy SEAL in Yugoslavia and you served with Eric Prince and I got it wrong or I got it right, let me know. Do we know his BUDs class? I'm sure we could find that out. Yeah.

That's possible. FOIA? I don't know if that's company. You can probably just inquire, right? You can probably just public knowledge, because they don't keep it secret who a Navy SEAL is. Yeah. Or we should call, what's that guy who does the SEALs stolen Valor stuff, Don What's His Face?

Don Shipley? Oh, yeah. The guy who's like the fucking OG SEAL Hunter be like, hey, can you find his BUDs class? He was definitely a SEAL. No, of course. And he's not. But you want to hear... I do want to hear what his time as a SEAL was like.

Those guys who were probably like, dude, I was a SEAL for 15 years. This guy quit after two years. I would like to see what his time as a SEAL was like. Because again, every time he does something, he's directly involved in something cool. He talks about it. Right, right. And he weasels again here. Well, see, then you kind of see the part where he is intelligent enough to know how

far he can stretch the truth, because he's like, well, there are people who are going to be able to corroborate or basically debunk what I say. So let me just say, I was in the SEALs during that time, and that's what we SEALs do. Well, I was with the SEALs team, and members of this team did the we-seals did actions like this. I was on timeout because I stole a helicopter and tried to race it. Who knows what his situation was. Eric's time as a Navy SEAL was cut short.

He says it's because his wife got cancer at age 29, and he needed to take care of her and his children. And if you were a normal dude, of course that would be a good reason to stop being a Navy SEAL. Yeah, 100%. Of course, of course. And he says, my being gone was suddenly impossible. I requested my discharge from the Navy.

Now, here's the thing. Oh no. Here's the thing. He digs something up. Do you dig something up there? Well, it's just that almost as soon as he gets home from being a Navy SEAL, he starts Blackwater, and he's spending weekends and weeks away from his wife and children, hiking in the woods and shooting snakes and getting the land ready for this thing.

I don't know exactly how long he waited, but yeah. Well, you know, it's hard to speculate on that, but it doesn't seem like, did his wife survive? No. Oh no. So yeah, we're going to get into how he talks about his wife and some other stuff here. So at one point, he mentions that he and his wife gave half a million dollars to a clinic in Prague so they could fund experimental treatments to try on his wife.

In that passage, he praises his wife's courage and then says, and through it all, she seemed more concerned about my loss, my impending grief than her own death. Remember Eric, you can live without me as she would say, but you can't live without God. Now, Eric starts Blackwater, as I said, soon after leaving the SEALs and spending a shit load of time there. And after 2001, his business ramps up. He starts spending less and less time at home, even though that's why he left the Navy.

By 2000... Wait, so he left the SEALs when like 97, 98, 99, okay, and then... Yeah, 2000, 2001. But at that point, what was his wealth at? Hundreds of millions. You didn't need to work. You didn't need to work. Right, okay.

You didn't need to work, at least like 100 million. Well, right, from selling the automotive thing, right? Because his family and everyone, they split 1.3 billion. Got you. Okay. He did not need to work for money. Right. He could have just been a dad and been there with his wife in her last years.

He probably could have paid guys to like play war in front of him and actually kill themselves in front of him. Yeah, he could have been shooting every day if he'd wanted to. Right. He could have bought a ranch, whatever. I'm sure there are people listening right now who have lost spouses to diseases and would have loved to have just been able to not work and spend as much time with them as possible. That's not the strategy Eric took.

He started a very involved business and then after 2001, he starts going over and spending time in Afghanistan and the contracting business. And she's still battling cancer? Yeah, off and on, she's battling cancer. He goes in remission for a while, but then it comes back and in like 2003, it's really bad, quote, and not just that's bad, but the marriage is bad. By early 2003, my wife and I didn't have much time alone together to begin with and with those stresses, as well as the effects of cancer and surgery and chemotherapy, eliminated

most of the romance or intimacy when we did. I felt as if all I could do to keep things from spinning completely out of control. I felt as if it was all I could do to keep things from spinning completely out of control. And I found comfort in the arms of a woman named Joanna Hooke, who had worked as our nanny in Michigan. In mid 2002, when we all moved back to Virginia, she was hired to perform administrative functions at our Blackwater's Moac facilities. She became pregnant before Joanne died.

So now relationships are hard. If a friend who had had a spouse die came to me and confessed that they had cheated on their spouse while they were dying of cancer, I would not view that as a good thing. But I wouldn't take it as a condemnation of the person either. It's a nightmare. People have needs. We all fall short in difficult times. No, 100%.

I mean, I think it's always, it's hard to just judge someone's character solely based on that. It's an indication. But everything else. I mean, at the same time, based on his prior history, even leading up to that. Well, and he portrays himself as a moral paragon on every page of this book. But in my opinion, this cheating is not just a matter of Eric failing in the face of terrible sorrow and stress and grasping for a moment of joy.

It's yet another example of his complete inability to delay his own gratification. Because that's his thing. He keeps quitting stuff. He keeps leaving. He gets bored. He gets bored. He gets bored. Or he doesn't want to be told what to do or whatever.

Does he have any, like, regret or, like, does he talk about that in the book? In a way that feels believable? Okay. Well, I'm not going to say in a way that feels believable, but we'll just continue the story. I do, like, I think that that is a big through line, that he cannot stand. Eric left the Air Force Academy because it was hard and he didn't like being exposed to other people's points of view. He liked Hillsdale, his college, because it was full of people he agreed with.

He left the seals. And I'm going to guess part of that was because he didn't like being told what to do. I didn't go into it here, but he spends pages and pages of his book talking about everything he thought that was dumb about how seals had to train and, like, the way they had to travel and, like, he sets it up as, like, and this inspired me to create Blackwater, to create a better training environment for seals, but I feel like he's just, anyway. Yeah, you had two years and then you're the expert on it. Eric Prince does not have a good record of sticking to things.

Right. Now, here is the way he concludes his story about his wife's death and his infidelity. In March 2003, on a ski trip in Vale, Colorado, Joan wrote me a long letter. She left it on the dresser in our vacation home there. My wife understood it would likely be her last time visiting a place we both loved and that I would find the letter when I returned at Christmas time, nine months later, without her. It was the most caring, most awful thing I've ever read.

She knew everything about everything with Joanna. I had devastated her, yet in her final months Joan had found the strength to forgive me. There are no excuses for what happened. There's not a day that goes by that I don't regret the way I hurt her. After years of pain and treatments, on June 14, 2003, my beautiful wife surrendered her body to her creator and passed from this life. She was 36 years old. I cut out a small lock of her hair to keep and I asked the doctor for the chemotherapy

port that had been implanted in her upper chest. Really the doctor said, that thing was the bane of her existence. That's the closest thing to her heart, I said. I've got it to this day. So what do you think of that? Sophie looks grossed out. It's just so dark. It's dark that it's the thing that she hated.

I don't know. I'm not going to criticize the guy. It's hard. It's like the one part of this whole thing where it's hard for me to fully be like, oh, fuck you gross son of a... I'm sure it was awful. Everyone grieves in their own way and I don't wish for anyone to live through that kind of experience.

No, it seems like a nightmare. It's awful. If you've ever had to deal with that, it's an awful, awful experience. It's a soul-destroying thing and I don't think he had much of a soul to begin with. Yeah. He just thinks like, I don't know if he even really, if he's even really had a real relationship with other human beings. It's hard to say because there's some more gross stuff coming up.

So Eric married his former nanny and stayed with her for eight years. They divorced in 2012. In 2009... For the next nanny. Well, in 2009, two anonymous individuals who claimed to be ex-Blackwater workers filed sworn statements in federal court. One of these men claimed, quote, Mr. Prince knowingly hired two persons who were previously involved in the Kosovo sex trafficking ring to serve at relatively high levels within

his company. Mr. Prince's North Carolina operations had an ongoing wife swapping and sex ring which was participated in by many of Mr. Prince's top executives. XE, because his company was XE at this time, spokeswoman Stacey DeLuke denied this and called it obvious slander. Also it seems like Stacey is now Eric Prince's wife. So that seems... Oh, wow!

Eric Prince! Fuck! Kosovo sex ring, guys? I didn't even... There's more to dig into that one. I just didn't have... Because there's so much else to get into. There's also one of the other guys talked about how he's been having people assassinated

who knew dirt about his company and was willing to make a claim in federal court about it. I don't know. I have not gotten in all... Yeah, yeah, yeah. There will be more episodes about Eric Prince in the fucking future. Yeah. Well, never ending. There's just too much.

You can't... Yeah. And we're probably in like the second act of his life. We're in the second chapter of his book, right? Right. Right. Okay. So the first third of his book is a pretty straightforward autobiography covering, you

know, his life and the creation of Blackwater. But then it stops after... Around the time that the Iraq War starts, it stops being a normal autobiography and every chapter starts being just him defending himself and Blackwater against different allegations of Blackwaters' failures, crimes, and massacres and stuff. Wait, so how far are we in the book until this begins? About where we are, about a third of the way into the book. So one third of the book functions somewhat like a biography.

And then it's just him defending his company and his claims of horrible crimes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's the whole book. Eric Prince. Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh.

I didn't. I'm a hero, nuh-uh. I'm so good. Okay. So I'm not going to go through all of these chapters because we don't have days for this podcast. I'm going to talk about a couple of cases of him defending himself. And if you want to read the book yourselves, the bullshit tactics he uses and these will

be evident, but don't actually pay for the book. It's bad enough that I did. Yeah. Please steal a PDF. Or a torrent or something. He said that that's not Vasterd's Pod's official take on the matter. Oh, yeah. Sorry.

That's no one's take. I work in the media. It would be if it's possible to steal a copy of Eric Prince's book and a person out there in the world did that, I would not condemn them as a human being for that action, although I would not condone or support their decision. I will go a step further and say, go to www.piratebay.org. I thought you were going to say Lime Wire? Kaza.

Download Kaza. Download the Kaza app. You're going to love it. Oh boy, we are elderly men. Okay. No. Kaza, Lime Wire. Let's talk about how Eric Prince justifies, do you remember that fuck up in Fallujah where

four of his men got murdered and two of them got strung up by a bridge and it sparked the battle of Fallujah that killed tens of thousands or thousands? A lot of people. I don't know how many. I don't know. That was in the last episode. Listen to the last episode. It killed a lot of people.

Hold on. Let me listen to the last episode really quick. I'll be right back. And we're back. Oh my God. Okay. Yep. Fuck this guy, right?

Okay. Now, if you remember, Eric Prince had taken up a contract to deliver kitchen supplies or Blackwater Hat. Prince describes them as literally pots and pans in the book. Here's how he describes the sweet deal he made with the company to deliver their kitchen supplies. He agreed to provide a squad of 34 men to protect ESS's personnel and convoys, the convoys of kitchen supplies.

Regency was to pay my company $11 million for a year of work, just shy of a million dollars per month with an option to renew for a second year. Now, Eric describes Blackwater's mindset at the start of the war on terror as say yes first, iron out the details later. And when he said yes to this job, some of those missing details included the fact that his men didn't have enough armored vehicles, machine guns, or actual contractors to fulfill the mission. Details.

Somebody go to like Home Depot and be like, who has a military experience? If you've ever talked to a soldier who served in Iraq in the early 2000s, they'll all agree that armored vehicles are a pretty minor detail when you're driving through the streets of Egypt. Right. Who needs a little bit of armor? And machine guns? For what?

For what? Come on. It's kitchen equipment. It's nothing. Yeah, it's nothing. Nothing. And Eric notes with pride that his company got the cooking equipment contract after another private security firm refused due to the obvious risk of the route.

So a responsible company was like, we can't safely do this. I'm sorry. Like you're supposed to do. So Prince picked up the contract. He blames the fact. Fake it till you make it. Yeah. He blames the fact that they had to send in a smaller team than advertised without the

proper equipment to the actions of another security company that he says basically forced them to do the mission before they were ready. Because these guys contract, they ended it sooner than they should have ended it. So we just didn't have enough time to do it. He also claims that the extra men and armor and weapons wouldn't have made a difference because the ambush was so well set up. Oh, fuck off. Nothing could have stopped this from happening.

In other words, the fact that Blackwater's men weren't prepared and the escort was sent out unable to meet the company's own standards was not Eric's fault. There was no other way things could have gone. And obviously they couldn't have canceled the mission because that would have been really bad for them financially and those pots and pans they needed delivering. Anyway, here's a quote from the Prager Security International textbook, Shadow Force Private Security Contractors in Iraq, It was Blackwater management, not the State Department that reduced the preparation time for the ill-fated security details so that they were dropped

in place in their first day on the job. It was Blackwater management that decided to send out a four-man detail instead of the usual six. It was Blackwater that decided to send the detail in soft skin instead of armored vehicles. It was Blackwater that decided not to give the detailed machine guns as required by contract. Oh my gosh, you even reached the fucking guy, it's not just lazy, it's like you didn't even fucking follow through on that contract.

Yeah, I'm sure if there's one thing you could have definitely found in Iraq at that time, it was extra machine guns. There's a lot of them in the country. What do they mean by that, like mounted, like 50-cow or something? I don't think anything bigger than an M4, but I think that's all they were armed with. It was just four guys with personal weapons, which you don't want to roll through, it's kind of risky to roll through Felucia today with that. Yeah, oh my God, just because he's cheap.

Just because he's cheap. And he can't ever accept that something could be a failure like that. You might have to say, we can't do the mission right now, leave the pots and pans, maybe they get stolen, whatever. It can't go today. It's better than people losing their lives. You would think, if you were a human being, like, when you're looking at an 11 million dollar contract.

Clearly whoever was working with the other security company that said no was a human being and was like, no, people are going to get killed and it's not worth it for pots and pans. Because that's probably someone with functional warfare and experience, though, to be like, I've had to deal with that and that's not something I want to repeat. This is a bad idea. It cannot be responsibly done, so we will not do it. I have no battlefield experience and I would just be like, what are you talking about?

It seems like our own rules say armored vehicles are necessary. And these aren't. I don't even take risks when I play Sid Meier's Civilization, let alone with real people's lives. Oh boy. So a lot of Eric Prince's book actually serves as not very covert legal defenses against the families of the men who died in this attack, all of whom have since sued Blackwater for negligence.

Prince is very careful. He provides fawning hagiographies of how wonderful all of the guys who died were, even as he throws shade on the mission commander, a guy named Battleona, for deciding to go in. No one questioned Battleona's decision to accept the mission, especially since his insistence on shrinking the convoy showed that he was aware of the risks because he asked to transport fewer vehicles because there were so few men. But I'm going to guess Battleona got pressured by somebody to do the mission.

No shit. It was probably like, we'll give you another extra blah, blah, blah about it. Who knows what they said. They were all new to the job, so they wanted to prove that they were company men. Prince is unctuously kind to the families in his description of them. He visited all of them and invited them to do a thing at the Blackwater Ranch or whatever. He talks about how sad he was and he quotes from thank you letters that the families sent him before it became clear that negligence had been responsible for their loved ones

deaths and sued him. He quotes from the letters grieving what wives sent him in the immediate aftermath of this before they knew all the details. Oh, so he got ahead of it by being really nice to them, basically, to try and fucking gaslight them. Yeah, because they were just grateful that he was seemed so caring in this terrible moment because they knew there was danger and then they realized, oh, there was my family.

Oh wait, this is your guilt manifested, your kindness is manifested guilt. He makes a huge point about the fact that one of the men's last paychecks for $9,000 was held up because he was dead and his wife couldn't cash it. So Prince notes that the company cut her a check directly and says, quote, if the estate comes after us for the money, then so be it, reads one of our internal staff emails from the time. It's like the kids need the money. So he makes a big show about the fact that he made it slightly easier for them to get

$9,000 that they were owed, but then didn't fought the families in court over paying them out anything extra over the fact that they had sent their loved ones into a dangerous situation without the proper equipment. Without the equipment, their own company's rules said that was necessary. I think moments like these really reveal how little Eric Prince believes human beings ought to be expected to do for one another. That's one of the things that strikes out to me. To a normal person, this is the least gesture you would expect from a company who had gotten

one of your relatives killed, and he acts like it's a great humanizing anecdote for cold water. Right. He's from outer space. One of the funny through lines for this book is Eric's refusal to call his men mercenaries. He's continuously offended at the mere thought of that, and then he drops in lines like this about the men who died in Fallujah and the legal complications around that. So they weren't combatants, but they weren't non-combatants.

Catalona, Zovko, Helvinson, and Teague were civilians, but they were armed, ultimately at the behest of the Department of Defense, pursuing dangerous missions. The four fell into a glaring gray area of international law that experts in Geneva and beyond have continued to debate for years. What do you call civilians with guns in a war zone doing missions for money? If only there was a term for that! Fucking mercenary. What is that?

I've never heard of that. I'm sorry, Hessians. The only thing I would call a mission in high school would be to go to 7-Eleven for blunt wraps or something like that, like, yo, bust a mish, that's the only mission as a civilian. You bust it. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you'd carry guns in to get those blunt wraps, you would have been the same as these guys.

The valley was pretty safe, you know what I mean? Boy. Okay. So we're not going to take, again, we're not going to take a point-by-point look at every fucked up defense Eric puts together, but we're going to talk a little bit more about the Nisar Square Massacre. Now this is where several of Eric's employees fired machine guns and grenades into a crowd, killing 14 and wounding a shitload of people.

Their story and the story Prince tells is that they were taking heavy incoming fire. Prince repeatedly references incoming AK-47 fire and points out that a bullet damaged the coolant line of one of their vehicles. Now that doesn't gel with the testimony of Jeremy Ridgway, a Blackwater ex-employee who was at Nisar. I'm going to quote Fox News' summary of it, just so you know, I'm not picking out some lefty source to make these guys read that. Right, right.

So this is probably the most charitable version. Ridgway told a jury that he didn't see any Iraqis pointing guns in Nisar Square and that there were no telltale muzzle flashes in the distance, that there was no incoming fire and that there was no sound of AK-47 rounds going off, as would be the case if insurgents were shooting at the Blackwater guards from nearby. Now you'll remember maybe that a lot of these people were shot in the back. The civilians who died were found who have been shot in the back while they were running away as a normal person would say it.

Now, Eric Prince praises it as they were shot in the back, presumably mistaken for retreating insurgents. So the military looked over everything and their experts, who sure as shit had no vested interest in making it look like anyone had committed a war crime in Iraq, determined that this had been an excessive shooting. There had been no sign of incoming fire. Prince summarizes their view of the incident as a one-sided shooting rather than a massacre. Then he says, it's safe to say that my men and I disagree with that assessment.

Except for the one that literally disagreed with that assessment. Except for the guy who testified again. And a jury. Right. Whatever. Let's not get hung up on that. Let's not get hung up on that. Now, most of Eric's evidence seems to be that the investigators or that his own investigators

later found a bullet in the grill of one of Blackwater's trucks. He says that the vehicles had been shot up in all of the fighting, but that they had to... DoD rules said that all of the vehicles had to be in good repair, so we were acquired by contract to immediately repair the vehicles and that's why there wasn't... Oh, right, right. Right. They didn't take pictures either, but they were there. He says they took pictures.

He hasn't... But where they at? Where they at. Yeah. I don't know. It was... I'm going to guess if he had pictures that went to the Army and they did not find them compelling. Right.

They did find a bullet in the grill of one of Blackwater's trucks. But it was just a bullet. We don't know what type of bullet it was. It was damaged enough that they could not definitively tie it to any particular kind of weapon. And we know that Blackwater's men were shooting like crazy. Bullets ricochet. In a war zone where people were shooting, bullets wind up in weird fucking places.

It's entirely possible one of the rounds ricocheted and got embedded in the grill of this truck. No way to say one way or the other. A single bullet in the grill of this truck is thin evidence to hold against the Army when their investigators say nobody was shooting at you. Right. Yeah. Now, in 2014, four of Prince's men were convicted, three of them for manslaughter and one for

first-degree murder. But last August, 2017, a federal appeals court threw out the convictions for three of them in order to retrial. The man with the murder conviction, Nicholas Slaton, was a sniper who the government accused of having fired the first shots. But during the trial, another mercenary admitted to shooting first, so his conviction was dropped. The other two had their convictions thrown out because the prosecutors had used a U.S. law made to prosecute domestic criminals to give them extra long sentences since they

had committed the crime with machine guns. So basically, if you commit a crime in the U.S. with a machine gun, you get an additional sentence. Right. The prosecutors were saying, basically, look at all the people these guys killed. We owe it to those dead civilians to try and get these guys as much time as possible. So they used that law. But the jury, rightfully, was like, it was their job to carry machine guns.

It is bullshit to give them extra time for that. That's not what's wrong here. So they didn't get off the case because they were legitimately innocent. It was the prosecutor fucking out. Yeah, who were a little overzealous. Yeah, exactly. Now, Eric ends his book by talking about his charities and making it seem like he's enjoying the peaceful retirement of a true American hero, quote, it remains to be seen what my

future might hold. Tomorrow was one less day than I've got now, and only God knows how many more I'll have. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying a quieter life. I had a small hobie cat, which is a type of boat, delivered to our home in Abu Dhabi today, shortly after my family relocated. The kids are still learning their way around the fiberglass catamaran, the same way I once poked around with our Boston whaler back in Michigan. But most every day in Abu Dhabi is a good day to swim across the bay, catching the next

gust of wind and teaching my own children to feel at home on the water. Of course, while he was in Abu Dhabi writing this, he was also teaching an army of Colombian mercenaries to fight on behalf of the Emirati government. Dozens of those men and God knows how many other people are now dead in Yemen. Okay. And the catamaran's too, like little LinkedIn now. And now he's armed catamaran. So it's hard to say what the future's going to be for Eric Prince, his new navy, and the

new air force. I'm sure he's right around the corner from getting his hands on. I'm going to guess whatever that future is, it's going to involve a lot of body bags. Oh. Wow. Eric. Eric. I'm just living a quiet life now in Abu Dhabi.

Yeah. What the f- Training a small mercenary army for a repressive, theocratic regime. Exactly. Like you do. I'm like the guys at the end of Shawshank Redemption. But with a mercenary army that's going to be used to commit war crimes in Yemen. Hessians.

That's called a Hessians. Oh, well, I, it's so wild because he truly is like the physical manifestation of capitalism in the military industrial complex. Like all in one man. In one fucking man. It's amazing. Like the worst parts of all of those things just express themselves in the goo that turned into Eric Prince.

Yeah. It's like the military industrial complex had a baby. Yeah. With late-stage capitalism. With late-stage. And there it is. It's Eric fucking Prince. Wow.

One of the worst people who's ever lived. A true bastard. For sure. True fucking bastard. True fucking bastard. Yeah. In fact, I'm going to bump him above bastard and call him a real piece of shit. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Eric Prince, everybody. All right. Miles, you got some pluggables to plug. Oh, let's see. Well, yeah. Glade plugins.

Guys, they're available at most supermarkets right now. Please take that. Airwick also. Another pluggable I love. But if you're more interested. Love all the free ads on this podcast. Yeah, look, again. You know, GlaxoSmithKline, you know, S.C. Johnson Wax, please holler at us.

If you are looking for the more podcast route, I'm on The Daily Zeitgeist with Jack O'Brien. We do that every day, talking news and culture, whatever's in the z-geist, as it were. And you can find me on Twitter and Instagram, at Miles with Gray. That's about it. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find my book on Amazon, A Brief History of Vice. I recreate weird ancient drugs and damage my body. You can find this podcast on the internet, at BehindTheBastards.com, where you will find

all of the sources for this episode. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter, at AtBastardsPod. So check us out. Check us out on T-Public, where we have a store, you know, behind the bastards. You can buy our t-shirts there. And some of that money will go to me, and I will use that money to buy the liquor that I will use to drink myself and to forgetting that Erik Prince exists. So, help a brother out with buying t-shirts.

And also, let's get this Doritos campaign going. Yeah, yeah, tweet. Why did I decide on it? Why I eat Doritos. Right. Why I eat Doritos. Because, guys, what we're trying to do is connect an action from the consumer to a media source.

And this is the, this is how capitalism works. And in fairness, hundreds of you have already tweeted us the Doritos you bought. I'm so impressed when I see you guys social media and seeing the amount of people just like posing with Doritos. It's like dozens of weeks sometimes. Your to me gets really upset, though, that it's this free advertising with no, I mean, it's a good product. I am all right with that.

Look at the Stockholm syndrome. You're like, it's fine. One day they'll recognize me. And I do hope one day they will. These are delicious. Well, if anything we can say, you are the Erik Prince of Doritos. Thank you. Make me the Erik Prince of Doritos.

Tweet why I love Doritos and hashtag why I eat Doritos. Attach at the Doritos company at this podcast and see what happens. Yeah. Maybe, maybe I'll get my own catamaran. What? With a machine gun on it. I really hope so. You know what?

You know what's actually going to happen? Doritos is going to steal your hashtag and do an actual ad campaign for like themselves and put you in the cold. That's how this shit works. If that's what happens, that's what happens. And my hope is that they buy me a catamaran with a machine gun. Yeah. I mean, that's how this story actions like, Hey, look, sorry, we couldn't do that.

Even optically, we couldn't get in bed with you with the Doritos thing. Here's a catamaran with machine. It is a catamaran with a machine gun. Sorry. It's soft skinned. You know, we can't, we can't go all the way. I don't plan on delivering kitchen supplies. Much heavier when you have an armored catamaran.

All right, guys. I love about 40% of you and Brian, bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Do you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about

a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences and a life without parole? My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.