Grubstakers - Episode 31: Erik Prince feat. Gabriel Pacheco

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

This week we cover Erik Prince the mercenary from Holland Michigan. Listen as we risk our lives poking the bear who is linked to several people’s death. Sadly Yogi avoided saying, “Why’s it gotta be black?” during the entire episode. We are joined by the hilarious New York comedian Gabriel Pacheco. Enjoy!

Coming up on Grubstakers, we take a magical trip to the beautiful world of Holland, Michigan, where we profile billionaire, investor, Navy SEAL war hero, founder of Blackwater, and alleged murderer of state witnesses, Eric Prince. Coming up, right now. I think we disproportionately stop whites too much. I taught those kids lessons on product development and marketing, and they taught me what it was like growing up feeling targeted for your race. I am proud to be gay.

I am proud to be a Republican. You know, I went to a tough school in Queens, and they used to beat up the little Jewish boys. You know, I love having the support of real billionaires. Hello, and welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. Sean P. McCarthy here, joined as always by my friends... Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffers.

Yogi Poliwog. And this week, our guest, we're very excited to have him, a very funny comedian, co-host of The Katie Halper Show, host of the new podcast Eat, Pray, Judge. Gabe Pacheco is here. Hey, thrilled to be here. And thank you so much for being here, Gabe. And Gabe was actually the one who suggested we do this week's episode on Eric Prince.

And having done a bit of research on Eric Prince I'm so excited about the idea because this will be our first episode on a Metal Gear Solid boss battle this guy is insane he's a billionaire mercenary don't say

mercenary that's their n-word you can only civilian contractor and war hero Don't say mercenary. That's their N-word. You can only... Civilian contractor. And war hero. Really just in charge of security and transportation. He helped develop the Shagahod. And so, like, Eric Prince, if you Google his net worth, it's a few different websites put it at about $2.4 billion,

but Forbes, for their part, has not estimated his net worth. And there's probably a reason behind that, which is that he's been involved in illicit money laundering and shell companies. Allegedly. Let's get that out there. Don't worry. He's not going to sue us.

He's just going to kill us. But so, you know, it's hard to put an exact figure on his net worth, but I think we can all confidently say this guy is a billionaire. And again, former Navy SEAL, the founder of blackwater uh uh famous mercenary don't say that we could call him a sellsword no he would actually probably be into that it's like one of those turn of the century racial slurs it's uh that's my game of thrones nerd reference for you. The celestial in a long tradition, like the Pinkertons.

What is his sign? Yeah. But so I guess, and Eric Prince has actually been in the news this week because he's attempting to sell Donald Trump on privatizing the war in Afghanistan again. And so just to kind of go through that briefly, in 2017, he... So he wrote a thing. In 2017, he tried to get his plan for privatizing the Afghanistan war, which, if I can summarize what he said to Forbes, he says he wants to have about 6,000 of his contractors

supplemented by 2,000 U.S. special forces, you know, SEALs, Delta, these kinds of things. And they will essentially take over the entire U.S. operation in Afghanistan, and then the government will pay him like $10 billion a year or something like that. This is how we made the case for the American people. In 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into World War II,

a group of volunteer American aviators led by General Claire Chennault, known as the Flying Tigers, fought Japanese aggression in China. They were so successful that many people believe they were decisive in holding back Japan, eventually leading to its defeat. Although they

were paid volunteers rather than members of the American military, they were not denigrated as mercenaries. I did like, I watched John Stossel, the famous libertarian commentator, he did like a puff piece interview with Eric Prance to sell this privatizing of the war in Afghanistan, because of course, that's what, you know, libertarians believe in is a fucking mass murder with no accountability. But yes, no, he did this puff.

They're held accountable by the forces of the market. He did this puff piece, and they had video reel of the fucking flying tigers, so he's literally just parroting Prince's arguments about this. Look, at the last time we commodified violence and put it out there on the open market, we had these wonderful gallant aviators.

It's great that he doesn't. The last time we, we got the great result of creating mixed martial arts. But yeah. Oh yeah. The other thing from that Stossel interview is Eric Prince says, as one of the benefits of privatizing the Iraq war, that now when they want to call in drone strike,

or sorry, Afghanistan war. Now, when they want to call in drone strikes, they have to war. Now, when they want to call in drone strikes, they have to call up a lawyer in Dubai. And then if you just let him run the war, you won't have to do that anymore. So it's, you know, it's good that we're removing layers

to prevent civilian death. But so, yeah, just like a quick thing on this Afghan war. So he's been like this week in particular, he's been on Fox News a lot. Again, attempting to communicate directly with the president uh and um by this week sean means that week and a half ago yes uh uh but so um he uh he tried to pitch this plan in 2017 and he told forbes uh that trump would have gone with it but he says quote if it was not for the debacle of charlottesville and the lady that got killed and all the political blowback that fell on the president, I am almost sure he would not have made the decision against it.

So Charlottesville prevented the president from privatizing Afghanistan last year. But this year, Eric Prince is more confident, though, for his part, Defense Secretary James Mattis said, quote, good on Heather Heyer for stopping the privatization of the Afghanistan war James Mattis the defense secretary said quote when Americans put

their nation's credibility on the line privatizing it is probably not a wise idea so there's at least some pushback against this

but Trump and Steve Bannon are apparently interested in the idea so we'll see if it happens. So Charlottesville was a net good? Is that what you're telling me?

You had people in that group. Excuse me. Excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. I mean, like, technically speaking, we are avoiding war because Charlottesville was slightly— You know, and people say Antifa doesn't work. It kept Eric Prince out of running the Afghanistan war. And I think we'll get to...

It's also the only instance I can think of of someone just trying to buy a war. Yeah. Like, I'll just take this off your hands. It's really debt consolidation for the war. He buys the war with, like, its own debt. Slaps top of military command.

Like, this baby will... I'm going to take Afghanistan public. Oh, one other thing I forgot. So when he was pitching this in 2017, his idea was there would be a person in Afghanistan who was in charge of the war who reported back to the president. And in 2017, he called this person the, quote, viceroy.

And then apparently somebody told him about the history of colonialism in that time. And he since does not refer to that person as the viceroy of Afghanistan anymore. But yes. But it's like they're the good guys from Star Wars Episode One. Here's some money. Go see a Star War. But so I guess we'll kind of go loosely as we usually do chronological, but we'll get to the Blackwater experiment of privatized military in Iraq and why repeating that in Afghanistan might not be such a great idea. What? But I guess just to kind of start from the beginning.

We take a magical trip. Hey, guys. Peter from Candy here. Hey, I'm down here on the main street in Holland, Michigan. Pretty cool little town. Let's go check it out. To Holland, Michigan. This is where Eric Prince's father, Edgar Prince,

and, of course, he's also the father of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. He wasn't born there, but he moved there. Yeah, I think he moved there. I'm pretty sure he wasn't born there. Okay. Oh, wait. He was born there. He was. So he was born in Holland, Michigan, and he became, some people say, quote, like of holland michigan because he founded this uh automobile manufacturing group um basically he made it big and the reason we have betsy devos and eric prince is that if you're ever in a car and you pull down the sun visor and there's a little mirror with a lamp right he designed that lamp wow and that kick-started

the prince empire was the little sun visor lamp and cars man that's crazy i just like uh the idea of just how many people were murdered in suvs in iraq and their last thing before being murdered by blackwater was the invention of his father uh blinding their vision all right vanity mirror light lamps is the reason we have Betsy DeVos now? Yeah. I think we could have done without that. I really think that wasn't worth the sacrifice. Yeah, but what if you got to, like, fix your hair at night?

Comfort is the poison. And this is showing why it is. That's crazy. Yeah. So it was the Prince Corp was the overarching group that did this and some other types of stuff. And, but I had a, a wacky young doctor by the name of Eli Coates, who also happens to be my grandfather. Full disclosure. My grandpa was the Prince corporation,

one of their doctors in house. Now you know why we keep Andy on. Yeah. Cause of my, I, but it turns out he did not deliver DeVos and Prince. Yeah, interestingly enough, two of the five people

in this room have tertiary connections to Eric Prince. So, hopefully, it will be very difficult for him to find us after this comes out. But, yeah, Gabe,

you were saying the, I guess, an inspector general who we'll get to has links to Blackwater as well, and Gabe has a family relationship with them. I've known Joseph Schmitz for a long time. But this town of Holland, before Edgar was even in charge,

it was founded by some extremely hardworking and Spartan Calvinists. Oh, that's good. Protestants, I'm fiercely proud of it. Well, I'm glad that kind of thought died out. It was not heavily funded and injected into the American mainstream. And that's what Edgar was. He was one of these guys. These Calvinist psychopaths. That's right, that's right.

And they have the world's biggest tulip festival. Or at least America's biggest tulip festival. In Holland, Michigan? In Holland, Michigan. Well, it's nice that they celebrate the last time they destroyed the economy. Also, Eric Prince went to Holland Christian High School, which my mother did not go to. She went to the public high school,

but she says that during the town parades, they would heckle Holland Prince's little parade, or Holland Christian's little parade group. Blackwater mercenaries opened fire. Several residents were killed. Blackwater guys started by arming the kids from the sandlot. Mom, what was that tank doing there? Well, you know, the light intervisor.

Sorry, what were you saying, Andy? They just heckled the... Just that they heckled the Holland... So maybe my mom's heckled Eric Prince and more likely Betsy DeVos. She's a little older. Your mother created a monster. It's like the only way to get over my insecurity

is to deploy in war zones and commit atrocities um but yeah so uh he grew up essentially his dad was a billionaire or at least had a billion dollar company so i mean you know this is a hugely silver spoon kind of case it's and um and it wasn't like growing up and being a billionaire in manhattan where there's other billionaires like the prince family basically ran they were the heart and soul of this city this holland that must be nuts because you like everybody knows who you are like eric prince doesn't walk around and go get groceries in that groceries when he's growing up and people don't know who he is. Right. So you're just born being like, everyone is beneath me.

Yeah, there's no rival Bloomberg type. Right, right, right. Other families to ride your ponies with. You're it. You're it. In the town square, there's a statue of Edgar Prince. What? Yeah.

I don't know. Any time square there's a statue of edgar prince what yeah i don't know that's like anytime somebody that has a statue and they haven't like made society better they just own a lot of stuff part of me is like what where are our values they already have everything why do they need a statue as well yeah and and this is where like that i guess that sort of no government benevolent libertarian thing would come from is when you walk around a town and it's basically celebration from disney yeah yeah but you're you're like my family created this then what's uncle sam got to do with it right right right right i have just realized underneath the statue of edgar prince would be the perfect place to have a gay wedding But yeah, so Edgar Prince This Prince Corps automobile accessory manufacturer

Primarily billion dollar company So Betsy DeVos and Eric Prince both grew up in privilege And according to this Forbes article The family traveled wildly I like wildly They really went all out yeah they're on on wolves wildly traveled they had two mimosas um but so apparently they also went like behind the iron curtain you know eastern europe under communism and this infused according to forbes eric with

a fervent belief in the primacy of free market economics to the point where he would argue with his more liberal teachers about how great Reagan was and how evil communism is, this kind of stuff. Nothing like finding out a billionaire was a smartass as a kid. Oh, you mean that guy that owns nearly everything and is killing a whole bunch of people, also used to mouth out to authorities constantly as well? Right, like a young Monty Burns. Right.

Also visited Dachau where he learned what private industry can, different ways they can make money. But so Edgar Prince, we mentioned his conservatism. He's one of the founders of the Fundamentalist Family Research Council, which is a Christian anti-LGBT group. It's been called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others. In 99, this is from AmericanProgress.org, Family Research Council staffer wrote, quote, in 1999,

gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement. And the Catholic Church. children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement and the catholic church it really is like a see no evil hear no evil thing right comes to the catholic church like yeah fucking oh jesus now the the family research council uh that the other guy that's really important for that is uh james dobson right and uh he is uh and and they really they coined the term prayer warriors. And they they found ways to spread their insidious right wing messages in small church groups, which was like outside of the view of most mainstream news and political organizations. So it's like they they did it it they're like word of mouth internally yeah right right right which is also kind of like what uh dick devos was doing through amway because amway

has that similar uh evangelical cult like feel to it once you're part of it yeah so that like they're like here's the tupperware you got to sell also make sure you always vote republican spread the message yeah yeah i just like the idea of like the reason the government got so overbilled in um iraq was because all the contractors were using amway products cost like three times more than anything else right and they're like look just get three more people. Yeah. Oh, man. James Dobson's also fun.

A side note, if you like serial killer lore, he gave the last interview to Ted Bundy. Right. Really? Yeah, and he was a Ted Bundy apologist because Bundy flipped the script and changed the story right at the end. And this interview's on YouTube, but he blames murdering 30 plus young women on pornography as a child.

I mean, yeah, that sounds ridiculous, but that's why I did it. I don't know what's but the rise in pornography and the rise in mass shootings doesn't seem like a coincidence to me. I think you might be the next Family research council spokesperson Maybe Ted Bundy did it because the pornography Was too tame back then And as it got more hardcore We actually have less serial killings Yeah thanks to furry porn

He's like if I had that back in the day Your kids don't know How much killing you'd be doing without this porn Yeah that would have been the release valve I needed. They're just operationalizing the non-aggression principle that Prince would go on to learn about. Yeah, yeah. Dobson's trying to lead Bundy.

Bundy's like, yeah, the problem was porn. It wasn't hardcore enough. No, no, no. Dobson was a big mentor for a young Eric Prince. That's all. Right, yeah. I guess Elsa Prince was the mother as well. And she's been a big proponent of the anti-gay marriage campaign, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

The original anti-gay. Hated Will and Grace. Right. And so, as we mentioned, with Eric Prince's early life, he travels around a lot. Eventually, he goes to the Naval Academy, but he either drops out or transfers. There's conflicting reports of this. And he goes to Hillside College instead, and he gets a B.A. in economics from Hillside College. Hillside is known as one of the most conservative liberal arts colleges in the country.

It's extremely libertarian in its take. Where's Hillside is known as one of the most conservative liberal arts colleges in the country. It's extremely libertarian in its take. Where's Hillside? I think it's in Michigan. Okay. It's so conservative. They don't do puff, puff, pass. They just smoke the whole thing. They're like, no passing.

If you were strong enough, you'd take it. Also, why would you ask where Hillside is? It's right in the name. Or is it Hillsdale? Hillsidedale oh hillsdale boom oh yeah oh he was also he was a voluntary firefighter while he was at this college right so so is steve buscemi no one needs to know that, but now you do. Heroes, both of them. Yeah. They're fighting some fight. But so after college, in 1992, he gets this BA in economics. Then he briefly goes and he interns. This might have been while he was still in college. Excuse me.

He interns for George H.W. Bush in the early 90s, but by 92 he is disillusioned with George H.W. Bush and in fact supports Pat Buchanan's primary run against George H.W. Bush, which was of course based entirely around the idea that George H.W. Bush was not tough enough against abortion, gays, all these kinds of fundamentalist Christian issues. So this was kind of Eric Prince's early political genesis when he's around in his early 20s. Pat Buchanan, big fan of race wars. Love the Southern strategy. Made his bones during the Nixon administration. Yeah, he was a speechwriter for Nixon. Yeah, so just a villain.

And he's 22 when he's doing this, and he's like, George W. Bush, I mean, you know, he didn't drain the swamp. He's way too soft on these homosexuals. Is there someone who's a little bit more, like, skeletor that I can follow? Right, right. But yeah, so in 92, he has...

In 92, after he graduates, what he does is he enrolls in officer candidate school for the U.S. Navy. And it's from officer candidate school he goes on to become a Navy SEAL. And, of course, Navy SEALs go through this famously difficult training regimen with the Hell Week and stuff. And apparently, like, even today, Eric Prince does these kinds of, like, challenges for himself. Well, he'll go on, like, I don't know, 600-mile bike rides or that kind of bullshit. You know, he's very focused on that kind of, like, I mean, Calvinist self-discipline and self-punishment almost, you know, training, that kind of thing. That makes sense. He just likes tough mutters.

Yeah. Spiritual tough mutters yeah spiritual tough mutters right and so he's a navy seal uh from 92 to 95 during that time he apparently deploys in uh haiti the middle east and the balkans um and you know participates in operations there uh i would assume he does what the navy seals do which is redact it yeah i, I've seen the movie with Charlie Sheen in it. Hot Shards Part 2. But so in 95, his father, Edgar Prince, dies. And Edgar Prince, he has a heart attack in the elevator of his billion-dollar company.

And God calls him. It'd be great if he got up there and it's just like uh rock hudson at the pearly gates um but um i just imagine him on the floor of that elevator looking at the mirror on the side of the elevator and then looking at the lights at the top of the elevator and thinking it was worth it um but so edgar prince dies in 95 eric prince is about 26 years old at this time and he leaves the navy seals to go back manage his father's estate they eventually sell the prince corp for about 1.3 billion dollars which is split between his mother, his siblings, and himself. And then after this point, he founds Blackwater, basically.

Is Betsy older or younger than him? Older. She's about, I think, eight years older. Oh, she's eight years old. She's 34 when their dad dies, and she gets, what, a billion as well? Yeah. Well, I don't know, But she married Dick DeVos. DeVos, who was. The Amway guy, yeah.

He already was a billionaire. So right now you've got, like, the two most wealthy people in Michigan. And they're both super right wing. Right, right, right. Bonin. Just Calvinist. Yeah. Smash town. Just going hard. hard yeah eating butt and getting it done

yeah just grim faces the whole time though yeah of course right no no just like just like conning no expression yeah hey baby you ever do five billion dollars worth of fucking um but so uh eric prince uh 95 he walks away with this uh inheritance from the sale of his father's company and so what he does is um he uses a piece of this inheritance to found blackwater he buys about 6 000 in in 1997 he buys about 6 000 acres in uh north carolina to train people this is originally it was also the um he didn't actually come up with the idea himself it was one of his former mentors a guy by the name of al clark who um apparently spent 11 years as one of the um uh he was one of the top firearms trainers for

the navy seals and he kind of sketched out what blackwater would be. He did like the location plans and like all the details for creating Blackwater as it originally was, which was going to be a special forces training company. So he's like essentially building a training course to privatize for his own wing or? Well, it wasn't it wasn't originally set out to be a mercenary force it was set out to just be training for like uh you know elite um military units so i guess we'd privatize some of the training but it wasn't gotcha initially gonna be would it be open to like chill bros like me like if i wanted to go yeah yeah i think it would but like that's kind of the best way to build an army like it's like if you ever had a Sears driving school and they had Swerve. Swerve would pay more money, but you get more experience. But who's making more money from Swerve?

Or you know those chill defensive driving schools you can go to where you just learn how to do a 360 spin. Right, right, right. Tokyo float. Do a donut in a parking lot. Yeah, you're good enough. They've got a list of 20 YouTube clips from James Bond pick your favorite

so actually yeah Al Clark left Blackwater because it increasingly became just kind of a playground for Eric Prince and his rich buddies to play army rich fight club it is interesting and like

we haven't gotten into this yet but eric prince is you know a billionaire navy seal who i think essentially on some level is maybe addicted to combat you know where it's like you have that adrenaline high of being in a fucking war zone operating and then you're like perpetually trying to like seek that out where it's like we'll kind of get to his uh post blackwater career uh later but he's just that is it almost seems like more than the money he just wants to be a fucking soldier you know i blame the video game industry not not uh developing fast enough to get this dude, if he had Call of Duty when he was 10, 15,

he wouldn't have become like an ultra right-wing Christian, globe-trotting megalomaniac. This is as much on the doorstep of EA games as... I think someone should have introduced him to Vore at a young age. At least Nazi zombies. I feel like that would have

taken care of you know 30 of the rage eric prince is a story of the failings of the vr video game industry um but yeah so he founds uh blackwater in 97 he buys up these 6 000 acres in north carolina originally they're training special forces but after columbine they start training a lot of um uh police and SWAT teams and they actually set up a dummy high school called, like, Are You Ready or something? And that is like... The R backwards, like Toys R Us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was also wiped out by private equity. His private equity firm would wipe it out later. It was mistakenly bought by private equity. Now, actually, under DeVos it functions uh partially as a training center and uh partially as a charter school right for underprivileged students yeah they're like look you get free you get a free charter school education we paid for all the vouchers never the chow hall is fantastic but at any moment there might be a simulated terrorist

attack there are live rounds but the instructors are very well trained just sign these NDAs and these non-arbitration agreements the guns in school program that DeVos has been talking about almost works with

the Blackwatch, I mean not Blackwatch plan like oh if if that contract happened it'd go directly to Prince probably it almost works with the Black Watch, I mean, not Black Watch plan, like, oh, if... Black Water. Sorry, yeah. If that contract happened, it'd go directly through Prince, probably. Guns in schools? Oh, yeah, mercenaries in schools. Yeah, who would supply them.

Look, it's like a Teach for America program, but it's Mercs for America. Yes. The pitch would be like free education or some bullshit like that. You know what I mean? Like, it'd be like, no, no, we're giving schools

to kids who don't have schools also it is genuinely where terrorism is i mean we just have no troops nearby i mean it's not about the school's fault but i just like the hypocrisy of like betsy devos says we should teachers should be paid poorly but they should also be armed right right right right nothing likes a disgruntled person that's living in the margins with a weapon. Yeah. Hey, we can't give you a raise, but we are going to give you an A. You just described the United States of America.

Eventually all the teachers have, like, wraparound Oakleys and, like, a blue T-shirt and a backwards baseball cap. That was most of my teachers today. Yeah. But so, yeah, after Columbine, they're originally, like, training these SWAT teams and stuff to respond to school shootings. Then the USS Cole happens, the bombing. They start doing more anti-terrorism. But then it's like 9-11 is when Blackwater explodes just in terms of revenue and everything else. Which year?

2001. And Jeremy Scahill, the journalist for The Interception. There's connections to the 9-11 in the 70s, too, that we'll get into. Jeremy Scahill, the journalist who's written a lot about Eric Prince, has talked about how Eric Prince, just after 9-11, went on like Bill O'Reilly and talked about, you know, before 9-11, nobody really understood what I was doing out with Blackwater. But now my phone is ringing off the hook. And we've also just kind of talked a little bit about his consent his connection to conservative republican politics so i'm sure it didn't help or didn't hurt his business that his family was such a bank roller of all these different conservative politicians and conservative

movements and then suddenly you have a conservative government and george w bush and he has all these connections uh with the cia among other outfits so's like, it is just like what happens when you influence Petal with government, and then you set up a shop, and then suddenly your services are hugely in demand, and you are a favored contractor. Yeah, connections are rarely bad for business. That really seems to pan out most times. Also, at this point, he's been married to his first wife for 10 years. They got married in 91, and around this time she is diagnosed with cancer,

which two years later she will die, but not after he has had sex with the nanny, and she found out. Ooh. Yeah. They call it family values. At least they didn't get divorced, which is a sin to the Lord. Thank you. Yes. Maybe they got divorced. Yeah, it was

his first wife passed away of breast cancer in 2003, before which he had impregnated the man. Who he then married afterwards. Well, at least he made an honest woman. Exactly. At least you mean at most. I mean, that's required.

I mean, she married into a billionaire family. That's a win. Those kids are going to be taken care of regardless. That's all that needs to be taken care of. He takes the nanny aside and he's like, look, you can't get an abortion, but at 18 years old, I can have a team. Take this thing out.

Just don't get too close for it for the next two decades. I got good news for you and bad news. Boy, you're going on a mission. And you're probably not coming back. But so Blackwater is a huge beneficiary of the post-9-11 boom in private contracting. And then America decides to go again, to take the fight to the mastermind of 9-11, Saddam Hussein.

Yeah, the bathists. Always been the biggest problem for the United States. Oh. No question. The United States introduces a man who has the prestigious title of the biggest fuck-up of the Iraq War, Paul Bremer. Hell yeah.

He – The first thing he does is basically he privatizes everything in Iraq. They're national – They had a national oil company. They basically sell it to anyone who's buying. Then they also, the Iraqi army was basically, after they'd been defeated, they're like, okay, well, we're kind of waiting now for commands from the Americans. And he was like, no, you're all out of a job.

And so we put the army, like, he unemployed the Iraqi army. All these trained military men with their weapons. So they all had their weapons. And oddly, right after that, the insurgency started up. I do love, like, this is a slight digression, but I do think about this sometime, where it's like the British Empire, you know, say what you will about them morally, but they had a pretty... I can say some things about that they had a pretty clear strategy for colonialism that they managed to prop up for several hundred years which is go in and then prop up regional stakeholders who submit themselves to you and use uh local security forces and these kinds of things and i do just love that paul

bremer went in and is like now fuck all of that no we're not keeping this thing going a hundred years we're going two at most. It's like in The Wire when the Baltimore PD didn't want to solve the case, so they just put the most incompetent guy in charge. Yeah, if you want a perpetual war, just put a dummy in at the top. They also did debathification, basically unemploying everyone who uh was a member of the bath party do best move ever yeah so they basically like brought employment down to

like 25 or something like horrible and apparently at the end of brown was tenure some nine billion of uh iraqi reconstruction funds were unaccounted for yeah completely gone really nine billion nine billion wow what a pretty penny it's so fucked up so corrupt he got so many people killed and he's faced no consequences none whatsoever except for sometimes he did the right thing sometimes people on frontline interviews were a little mean to him yeah that is the extent of the punishment paul bremer is faced and there's this uh line from the New York Times about how that's in the Blackwater book. Shortly after Bremer took over in Baghdad, economist Jeff Madrick wrote in the New York Times, by almost any mainstream economist standard, the plan already approved by El Paul Bremer III,

the American in charge of the coalition provisional authority is extreme, in fact, stunning. It would immediately make Iraq's economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world and put it among the lowest tax in the world rich or poor the iraqi planners apparently including the bush administration seem to assume that they can simply wipe the slate clean uh maverick stated boldly that bremer's plan would allow for a handful of foreign banks to take over the domestic banking system and so then one other thing he did is instead of uh getting uh you know like a standard government security force he decided to hire a private force uh which eric prince was happy to provide right and so the iraq war in particular was a a bonanza of private contractors to the point where at various points in afghanistan and and Iraq, there were more private contractors on the ground than actual U.S. military personnel.

And, you know, we won't really have time, but KKR and Halliburton are the other two that are talked about a lot. And just like we mentioned the $9 billion unaccounted for, all of these corporate uh corpse were ripping off the u.s government to the tunes of billions of dollars and um uh gabe you were talking about the inspector general i guess who yeah supposed to look at this was connected to blackwater so uh joseph schmitz from washington dc his father was john schmitz who ran uh he was so right wing that he was kicked out of the John Birch Society. The Eisenhower was a communist society. Yeah, John Birch. Well, so John Schmitz, this guy,

he's a white nationalist, if not in name and in practice. They're like, you can say New World Order, but when you say Jews out loud, it kind of weirds people out. So I met John Schmitz as a child, and I was listening to Rage Against the

Machine in the car with him, and he said, you think this is revolutionary? You should listen to Screwdriver. That's revolutionary. Are you fucking kidding me? I swear to God, this 60-year-old man, 60-year-old white man looked down at me and told me I should listen to Screwdriver.

I was like 14 at the time. Just straight up literal neo-Nazi music. Right. Yes. So Google them if you don't know who those lunatics are. That's him. Safe for work. John Schmitz, I also met him on Martin Luther King Day, and he turned to me and said, Martin Luther King was a communist.

Which is just code for I'm racist and so that's him his daughter was Mary Kay Letourneau who you may know for sleeping with her 13 year old student and getting pregnant by him so Joseph Schmitz is his son

are you going to play some screwdriver for us if you play screwdriver you are really going to fuck up our suggested podcast on the algorithm. I know. We're either going to have way too many fans or no fans at all. All right, let's stop this. I've got to say good percussion and bass. So I met Joseph Schmitz, and he had a van, and the license on the van said Pro Vita

because he was ultra into pro-life stuff. But during the Iraqi— Oh, that was the PS Vita thing. He loved it. He loved it. Portable gaming. He is a very, very religious Catholic man who ended up being the inspector general at the Pentagonagon during the iraq war and his uh underlings stopped reporting to him when they found corruption because he was willfully turning a blind eye and ignoring all the graft

that was coming about because of blackwater just like basically siphoning money off of the U S government. And, um, after, uh, he resigned right before he could be prosecuted. And now he is a member of the Prince group. Yes. Sure.

He went on to work with Eric Prince's companies after helping Blackwater, among others, just steal billions of dollars from the U S government. But to just give you character, uh, like a character sketch for the type of person that affiliates himself with Eric Prince is just an ultra right-wing Catholic whose family has a history of being

on the wrong side of things, to say the least. Yeah, that's horrible. I mean, maybe he just likes screwdriver's punk attitude. You know what? He's just into free right. So continue. I mean, maybe he just liked Screwdriver's punk attitude. You know what? He's just into free speech. I get it. He's like telling you later, like, oh, no, I actually, I can't hear the lyrics. I really like the drums and the instruments.

And then also he's like, yeah, but you can say the N-word when you're singing along to Screwdriver. Can I tell you, too, before I left, he said, John Schmidt said, oh, you're a fan of history, Gabe. How about I give you this book I wrote the foreword to? And the book was called None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which you all can Google. But it's basically a book that states the thesis is that in an international cabal of Jewish financiers. Oh, no. of Jewish financiers is responsible for the Russian Revolution, the New Deal, World War I, World War II,

and the Holocaust. My assertion that he was kicked out of the John Birch Society for saying Jews instead of New World Order was actually probably true. Well, did you finish the book? I did. I sounded like a little precocious Alex P. Keaton slash Alex Jones for about four days.

You like history, Gabe. Well, I did this new translation of this book about the protocols of the elders of Zion. Yeah. Oh, it sounds like a gaming manual. Oh, it's a game, all right. You can win it if you play your cards right. Yeah, are we doing some RPGs after this? But so I want to continue with the story of Blackwater in Iraq.

And what happens there is Blackwater goes in, as well as these other companies. They're providing security services for Paul Bremer, for the State Department personnel, among others. But they're under the radar until 2004, which is the famous ambush and murder of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah. Though apparently their stock shot up.

As soon as they were protecting Bremer, apparently the cost of a contractor went from like $300 a day to 600 a day like immediately so they made but the thing is is it's kind of like you put a stalking horse out or some sort of target for everyone to hate and bremer by firing all of the public school teachers in iraq and all of their army became the most hated man in the country and now they are their now their job is to protect him right yeah yeah yeah you know yeah i mean that's the other thing is like we'll talk about this a little later but incentives like a private mercenary group their incentive is to increase

war because that's how they make their money so it's like you want to put black water other people have made this point but you want to put black Blackwater in charge of Afghanistan, it will go on forever because they have a $10 billion a year contract and as soon as the war ends, the contract ends. They're essentially the world star of war, basically, is what you're trying to say. But it's like, here, put this bulletproof vest on, made entirely out of hornets.

I thought it was that they make crazy videos. I mean, that too. Which they do. They filmed one of their massacres. Just one? They're crazy as... Well, according to... And we'll get to this in a second.

According to two anonymous former Blackwater employees, they filmed almost all of their operations, but they would check the tapes after, and in incidents where they just murdered civilians, they would do what is called hot washing, which is just deleting the tapes and destroying them. I like that there's a special term for corruption. You know, delete the tapes, hot washing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's call it that. Dude, check out our extreme GoPro videos extracting people. Right, GoPro videos are rarely the insurgency. It's always people on mountains doing cool tricks. But let's be honest, there's a lot of GoPro footage that's just murders hell yeah we're going into an intersection they destroy all the copies except for eric prince's private one that he masturbates to extreme he's just got one of those like projector rooms like hitler and man in the high castle where he just watches the...

Yeah, but his wasn't 4K. I mean, this is some high-grade stuff here. But so the murder of the four Blackwater contractors in 2004 in Fallujah, most people are familiar with the images of the burnt bodies being dragged through the streets and these kinds of things. And it's tragic because these people were killed entirely because of Blackwater greed and incompetence. I mean, you know, essentially the story, according to... They were basically recruited, told, you're going to be protecting Bremer. And they're like, you know, they're these former special forces guys who had fallen on hard times.

And so they're like, oh, cool, I can make some money. I get to protect, you know, this high profile guy. And, you know, I don't have to be there that long. And if I feel kind of weird, I can just leave. I'm like the military. Right, right. It was a pretty good deal. It was like the Lyft and Uber of driving a cab.

Yeah, yeah. It's flexible hours. I can get out whenever I need to, you know. I mean, I'm killing people. Earn up to $60,000. Yeah, right, right. But so the story of what happened on that day Is basically there were two squads And

By squad you mean two people Two pairs of people I'm a two man squad Yeah, so that's essentially what happened Is according to memos written at the time Is that a guy named Tom Powell Was the Blackwater site manager And he sent these groups out

Two men short each, so that he could keep two men at the base to just do bullshit. Also, instead of Brimmer they were protecting, they were going to pick up kitchen equipment. Right. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, that's part of the whole Amcor.

They need a Vitamix or something? Yeah. And so why that's relevant. Got a magic bullet? Why that's relevant is because you'd have these two. These were SUVs. That's the other thing. They were driving around in SUVs instead of armored vehicles.

You had two people in each vehicle, which was a driver and one person in the passenger seat. But the reason you usually do three is so you can have one person watching the rear. So these people, in the case of it was November 1 squad, it was Bravo 2 and November 1, they were ambushed from behind and murdered, of course, because they were deployed, again, with no armored vehicles, no rear gunner, and no maps. They had no maps, and they were sent straight through Fallujah, which was the most dangerous part. And Bravo 2 squad essentially came up to Fallujah and then decided, no, fuck that, we're not going through Fallujah. Whereas November one squad went through Fallujah and the four of them got killed and their bodies were dragged through the street. Also, apparently, uh, one, when the first car got shot up, the second one kind of slammed on the gas to try to get, uh,

away from the car. But they also have apparently, uh, Blackwater trains its men not to aid, uh, the other when, uh, one vehicle is hit in an ambush. They're taught to just get out of there. I call this the airlock philosophy.

It's like Battlestar Man. Right. The hull's been breached. Just get sucked off into space, bro. This is the leave everyone behind strategy. And also in Fallujah, they didn't know they were contractors. They thought they were CIA because they had dark shirts and the wraparound sunglasses and stuff. And they had shirts that said CIA.

We are from the CIA. Yeah. Well, this is an issue for OSHA. I mean, they're really... Well, it's a worker's issue as much as anything else, too. They just weren't... they were given a false they they uh took the contract under false premises that they were going to be taken care of and that the blackwater blackwater was going to follow the protocols known that that would happen with war i mean that's where protocols always followed you

know right well it's just like back to the profit motive it's like of course you're gonna fucking cut costs on having less people and uh you know uh not using suvs instead of armored fucking vehicles and all these kinds of little cost cutting things that get people killed um was eric still a billionaire because that's what's most important you know i people's lives being lost is one thing but but so it's it's so fascinating and so frustrating to me because at this point, the murder of these four contractors, even though it was entirely because of Blackwater incompetence, is good for business. Like, Andy, you have the drop, I think, of essentially in the 48 hours after these contractors were murdered, Blackwater goes into overdrive as far as lobbying goes. The Blackwater strategy worked very, very well. They went to Washington.

They stopped any investigations from taking place. And at the end of the day, as a result of their action, they were able to protect their business. Right, and that's from a documentary about private contracting in Iraq. They went out and they retained former high-ranking government officials. Kofor Black, who was a high-ranking official at the Central Intelligence Agency. Joseph Schmidt, who was the Inspector General at the Pentagon. Screwdriver fan.

His dad was a screwdriver fan. But so, yeah, so essentially Blackwater ends up with like several hundred million dollars in additional contracts after this, because, you know, this is when the U.S. military goes into overdrive against the insurgency, and of course it results in two different sieges of Fallujah, which were massive human rights violations. Several thousand civilians were killed. Yeah, but the point is essentially

the families of these four contractors sued Blackwater, and it's a horrifying story because essentially Blackwater had made these contractors sign arbitration clauses, which for those not familiar, essentially say you can't sue in regular court. You have to be forced into arbitration. Blackwater countersues the families saying that we have to force these claims into arbitration. A judge agrees the claims are forced into arbitration. So a lot of the material presented is all kept secret and this kind of stuff. And ultimately, the families have to settle with Blackwater because they run out of money.

And so it's tragic what happened. Yeah, Blackwater got like, they just kept hiring like elite law firm after elite law firm. Apparently, they fought to get the case dismissed on the grounds that because Blackwater is servicing the u.s military operations it cannot be sued for workers deaths or injuries and that all liability liability lies with the government they also try to make the argument that if blackwater is held liable it would jeopardize uh the ability of the united states to carry out its mission in Iraq, which is very telling. They've become too big to fail. Yeah, exactly.

And they also... I like how they're like, you can't sue us, you've got to sue the government, sorry. We're like, what? And then in January 2008, they sued one of their former law firms saying that they like poorly misrepresented them. Yeah. We should have lost that case that we were guilty for.

Well, they also did this thing. I didn't know if you were going to bring it up, but they would hire these soldiers and they'd have them sign contracts for like $4,000 a month or a week, which sounded great. That's why they signed up. And then they flew to Iraq. And like right before the plane would take off, they would hand them new contracts that in the fine print said, you're only going to make $1,000. Wow.

You know? So then they'd sign it. Fucking snakes. And then they'd land in the war zone and be like, wait a minute. So I'm only making $1,000? Yeah. Sorry. What are you going to do about it? And it's like, wait a minute, so I'm only making $1,000? Yeah, sorry. What are you going to do about it? And it's like, well, I don't want to be here.

Right, right. Well, you can pay for your own ticket out of Iraq if you can find a civilian flight to charter. You're like desperately calling Priceline.com. You're like Orbitz. I'm not really seeing results for Baghdad Airport here. Yeah. The suing the law firm thing sounds like a car is getting towed by a tow truck, and then you tow the tow truck as well because it's also in a no-park zone at that point.

Like, what? That's crazy. Yeah. But, yeah, so just for the end of the lawsuit story, and among others, they hired Ken Starr, the famous, Blackwater did, the famous Bill Clinton prosecutor, to defend them. And so the mother of one of the contractors killed, this is from Associated Press, said the families couldn't afford the litigation costs anymore in fear their case was finished. They eventually settled for Blackwater paid attorney's fees and a small death benefit to the families, and then all of this stuff is under seal. But I did just want to do a quote from one of the brothers of the one of the murdered

contractors. He says, quote, You just feel the injustice of this long enough and see that these people are just so evil. All you can do is pray to God that he'll take care of it because that's all you've got left. So that's the sad ending of the Black um getting four people killed because of their greed and incompetence turns out god's on air princess payrolls um but so i guess we can move on from that to just how black water behaved in iraq because their reputation was fine until 2007 which was the nisour square i might have pronounced that wrong but the massacre in 2007

where blackwater well even even before that there was um i mean that was the big one but there were also incidents uh like in 2004 there were people who were uh in what's the place called just a second iraq in iraq there were uh people protesting uh outside of i think think it was just a U.S. building in Najaf, Iraq. And there was just like a massive crowd of hundreds to thousands of people. And apparently, Blackwater people fired percussion rounds to kind of scare the protesters away. But that pissed them off understandably. And so then they just started firing rounds on the people protesting and then people who were protesting,

like some people got weapons and started firing back. How dare they? Just because they didn't like drums? Yeah. And so they started just like unleashing on them and there were like a couple Marines there. And apparently the Marines were, like, unleashing on them. And there were, like, a couple Marines there. And apparently the Marines were taking orders from the Blackwater guys. Someone took a video of it while they were doing it. And one of the Blackwater guys just, like, said the N-word, apropos of nothing, after he, like, killed a guy.

And basically people who— That's his catchphrase. Right, right, right. Oh, you haven't met Hard R Reggie before? That's just his catchphrase. The Hard R is not in the name Reggie? Oh, trust us. That's the least hard of his arts.

I like the idea of human resources taking my son. When you're killing civilians, you can't be using that word. We prefer more of like a yes queen they rebranded as woke water and let's see they said at the end of it there were hundreds of or at least one person observed there were probably hundreds of bodies but that was later um lower to like a few dozen and apparently also this is the puerto rico hurricane maria yeah yeah they use the same math yeah yeah and apparently one of the guys

who was there like was on a uh a mercenary message board and he said that like listen man we were in the midst of fire and like that guy who said the N-word, like he was not a racist. When that video got out, he started crying because he does not like being associated with that. Well, that's good to know. I mean, he uses the N-word, but he's not a racist. Yeah. He was like, I was quoting a screwdriver song. It's just, you know, it's just my workout music.

Yeah. I just really love this riff michael richards did anytime i murder yeah look it up so uh the the the story of blackwater in iraq is pretty horrifying and we'll just kind of go through some of the incidents here but there's a lawsuit uh filed in virginia later settled by susan l burke was a human rights attorney and she was representing survivors of one of the Iraqis killed during essentially a Blackwater mass murder operation. It's alleged that the Blackwater men,

some of them in the group known as Select, which is the most elite Blackwater unit, were doing what was called, quote, night hunting, which is basically where Blackwater, these people went out on Blackwater helicopters with night vision goggles and then just shot and killed any scores of innocent people under the assumption that anybody who was out after curfew must be a combatant, you know. And so they were just doing these kind of, you know, indiscriminate killings of civilians.

Oh, genocide. Yeah. And this kind of goes into a lawsuit that was filed. It was thrown out by a Reagan-appointed judge in 2010. Thank God. Two Blackwater employees testified. It wasn't done by government. It was not the problem.

Two Blackwater employees, John Doe 1, John Doe 2, they testified under penalty of perjury, and Jeremy Scahill has written about this in The Nation, essentially just a quote from one of these John Doe's uh Mr. Eric Prince intentionally uh he views himself as a crusade as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe to that end he intentionally deployed to iraq certain men who shared his vision of christian supremacy wow can i jump on that real quick okay so uh joseph schmidt and possibly eric prince are members of the knights of malta which is a lay catholic organization that was founded by crusaders coming back in the 11th century and their whole thing

was to protect and you can look up the knights of malta sign up for you oh it's great they've got their own passports their own it's really nice it's good stuff but they are their whole thing is a holy war may in protecting christendom from uh the hordes. Sure, yeah. Kind of like the Crusades. Oh, yeah, totally. No, it's still there, and he's down with that, and that's the brand of Catholicism that he's into. The second point I wanted to make very quickly is Chuck Colson was one of his mentors.

Chuck Colson was an aide to Richard Nixon. He went to jail, became a born-again Christian in jail. He loves faith-based prisons, and he would get money from Eric Prince for these things, and the whole point of faith-based prisons was to indoctrinate prisoners in the evangelical faith to combat

Islamic radicalism in prison. So, he definitely like hates uh muslims or sees that he's in war with them right right and so i think that's hate yes yeah i think you're okay there is hate yes he loves his enemies i love falafel but we do need to be war at these people let's be honest here yeah it's a militant hate yeah yes made by god-fearing christians right right right and yeah the john doe also alleges that these kind of christian supremacist soldiers including eric prince used call signs based on the knights of the templar

of course the warriors who fought in the crusades so it it makes sense that if he has this christian supremacist vision that they have this program to go out and just murder innocent Iraqis because they think they're fighting a holy war. Yeah, I mean, the money is just a sweet byproduct of following your passion. I mean, the sad truth is, though, is it must be historically written that the Crusades were profitable. And they're like, hey, we're just doing what we do. You know what I mean?

You know what's expensive? all these children we have around what if we could somehow add children to crusade i like your head with this unemployed children and there's this mus Muslim country trying to exist peacefully. You know how much Sunday school costs? Let's cut these costs down. You know, public schooling is just too much of a problem. Listen, my sister's handling the schools and it's a mess, but you know what's not a mess?

War. And yeah, the other allegations from John Doe 1 and 2 are horrifying. The brothers? Yes. Just to start, multiple people have alleged, of course under oath, that... They're the billionaires from the tractor company. That Eric Prince was smuggling illegal weapons and doing illegal arms sales in Iraq and smuggling these guns in on his private planes and hidden in dog food bags.

And these are like sil you know, silenced weapons and all sorts of other shit that he's just selling for profit. Well, dog food bags. Yeah, I guess like they're bringing dog food into fucking Iraq. They got no dogs in Iraq. What are they doing? Look, white people care more about dogs. It's true.

There are a lot. Look, all of these dead Iraqi civilians, they had pets. And now those pets don't have anybody taking care of them. There's going to be that, who's that chick singer that has them dog commercials? Lena Dunham? No. McLaughlin? What's her name?

They knew if anybody stopped their weapons plans, they could be like, look, there are some white people with dogs who need this food. They're going to do Sarah McLachlan commercials, and it's going to be like, you see this dog? His owner was killed by Eric Prince for just a dollar a day. You can make it so that more dogs would have white owners instead of Islamic owners. This dog was abandoned. I mean, that's the red flag. I don't know how true it is anymore, but brown countries usually don't have dog food in amounts where you can hide guns in them. You know what I mean?

If they've got food for animals, it's the scraps from what they've made. Not to insult their cultures. It's whatever's left over from the halal card at the end of the evening. It's very insulting. Dogs eat better than plenty of new yorkers that's that's true right and so in addition to illegal arms smuggling it's alleged he was um uh repeatedly um we mentioned the hot wash thing but i do just want to quote john doe one here it's uh all of these incidents of excessive force which were essentially just Blackwater people... Doing their jobs.

...wantonly murdering civilians, all of them... Wanton soup. ...were initially videotaped and voice recorded. Immediately after the day concluded, we would watch the video in a session called a hot wash. Immediately after the hot washing, the video was erased to prevent anyone other than Blackwater personnel seeing what had actually occurred. Oh, so they have snuff films, but they won't let the public see them. It's just an in-company viewing party yeah and then the next allegation is that on multiple occasions blackwater fired mental health professionals who would not clear uh blackwater employees to redeploy to iraq a lot of blackwater employees obviously had ptsd or they were fucked up on steroids or drug addictions. So mental health employees working for Blackwater would occasionally try to

pull these people and not send them into the field with lethal weapons. And of course, it's alleged by John Doe number two, that several of these mental health professionals were terminated because they wouldn't clear these people for combat, which is of course, profit motive in action right there. Because,

you know, you don't get as much money if you can't provide X number of mercenaries. Who all just look jacked up like the expendables on steroids. You get hard-R Reggie's case guns. It just fired three therapists. That's when he says the N-word. The N-word died in his arms.

But so, and then the last of these allegations by John Doe 1 and 2, and the most insane to me, is essentially John Doe, one of the John Does, alleges that Eric Prince and his associates personally either carried out or ordered the murder of somebody who was a witness cooperating with the federal government so this is why john doe one and two are john doe and yes their actual names why these former blackwater employees and associates uh swore under oath uh but anonymously

because they are rightly afraid that eric prince might fucking kill them so it is just like snitches get stitches yeah it is like when you're again for a billionaire already one of the most powerful people in the world but also a navy seal with your own private army it's understandable that it is difficult to to carry out a government prosecution against you you're a yeah oh go ahead i was just gonna say being a billionaire and a navy seal is like oh you're a sociopath who now has the skills yeah yeah you know i just want to say this podcast has been hosted by john doe three john doe five and gabe and eric prince's uh defense at his advanced age it's very hard to get an erection. And killing a witness with your bare hands.

Well, in light of the murder allegations, I would like to remind anyone who listens to this podcast and has malicious intentions to the host that we will stop for a million dollars. There is no need for any wet work. We're done. I'm tired of doing this anyways. Dude, I just want an all expenses paid like three week workshop at whatever the Z campus is. Can I just get like two weekends at Sandals?

Preferably not next to one another. That's all I want. I imagine it would like start as all expenses paid and then the... They wait until you get there and then they change the contract. You show up at Sandals in some war zone. I mean, you can do the... Hey, it's Sandals Sierra Leone. Trust me, I think it's going to be pretty good.

You can do the cheaper version, but there are occasionally accidents that happen on the range. It's just regular accidents that happen in this kind of work. You should wear this bulletproof vest made out of hornets. So to continue on from the allegations of murder to what was actually done about this, Obama essentially entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with Blackwater, which his administration... Good to know he treats war crimes like banks.

Look, a lot of people think I should, wait, defer the prosecution. But, so yes... These war crimes are very important to our economy, and I don't want to destabilize the war crimes. Some mercenaries are too big to fail. But yes, federal prosecutors would tell who worked on the case would tell Jeremy Scahill that essentially their case was kind of undermined because throughout Obama's early term, they were continuing to hire Blackwater-affiliated companies to do security in Iraq and Afghanistan while the federal prosecutors were attempting to prosecute Blackwater. So essentially, they settled for about $50 million in fines and the usual promise to not do anything again. nation, admitted to providing on numerous occasions during Prince's tenure, defense goods and services to foreign governments without the required State Department licensing, aka

illegal arms sales. In some cases they admitted to providing services even after failing to obtain a license from the State Department. So essentially lying to the government about what they were doing. Dude, I feel like I this sounds like the villains from the 1980s James Bond movie. Like who Timothy Dalton had to fight, you know?

Yeah. Just, ugh. All right, continues. Yeah. But so it is interesting because at this point during the Obama administration, Eric Prince is for a brief time actually afraid that he might end up going to prison. Leon Panetta at the CIA kind of throws him under the bus. Apparently he was running like a kill program out of Dick Cheney's office,

where like... Indy office? Where Eric Prince's Blackwater was working with Joint Special Operations Command, which is the body of the military that oversees the SEALs, Delta Force, etc., as well as the CIA, to essentially do kills and um just completely outside of

congressional oversight um so Eric Prince is worried about going to prison and uh he flees to Abu Dhabi in 2010 and he sells Blackwater in 2010 which is now called Academy or whatever for a little more than 100 million Abu Dhabi's were definitely not guilty, people go. Oh, and we would be remiss not to also mention the Nisar Skora massacre, which is where in an intersection they shot 14 civilians. Well, they killed 17.

They killed 17 people. And then, I mean, yeah, it was... But they said that three of them had it coming. Okay. It was the official verdict. And then one of them got sentenced to murder, a couple others manslaughter, and then Iraq banned Blackwater from their country as a result. Oh, you can ban Blackwater?

Yeah. And then they changed the name and they could come back. Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. So he moves to Abu Dhabi, though it is Abu Dhabi. In 2010, it's alleged that by the New York Times that he was trying to help assemble a secret army, quote, for the United Arab Emirates.

Of course, famously a repressive government over there. He's denied that. But in 2014, he co-founds what's called a frontier uh services group which um is the airline yeah um this is from the intercept it's a logistics and security business that trades on the hong kong stock exchange interestingly enough citic group which is a chinese state-owned conglomerate, is a major shareholder in it. Eric Prince would also be linked to Chinese intelligence. So essentially, his company, Frontier Service Group, that he's the co-founder and CEO of,

is heavily bankrolled by the Chinese government. And he says he spends more than 80% of his time there on Frontier Services Group, but it's described essentially as a logistics company. But according to this Intercept story, which I'll link to on the Tumblr, it's alleged that under the banner of Frontier Services Group, he was traveling to different nations and essentially saying he could provide them with Blackwater services. Like, you know, he's just he can't get out of the game essentially like you know frontier services group is uh it's supposed to be just a aviation and logistics firm uh again according to the intercept they specialize in shipping in africa and elsewhere they also do evacuations from uh conflict zones but none of their public they're publicly traded company they have no licenses for mercenary work arm sales private security this kind they have no licenses for mercenary work, arms sales, private security, this kind of shit.

Don't say mercenary. But under his leadership, he was going around and pitching these different plans. And among them was he pitched a plan to Libya in the aftermath, of course, of the NATO intervention there. And with the breakdown of security, it's kind of comical in that he like went over. You mean opening up the markets? He went over there and he was like trying to find somebody to pitch his services to, but he couldn't figure out who the actual government stakeholders were. Wow. You know, because there was a complete collapse.

But later he tried again. ISIS is like... So he tried again. And this time he tried to pitch to both Germany and Italy. I wonder why those two countries came up. Yeah, they weren't as interested. But what he tried to pitch to them was essentially a refugee capture force and um it's it's uh pretty fascinating where um essentially what they were saying is that hey we'll like

provide a mercenary force that like uh prevents refugees from getting to europe you know but um just from the intercept one person involved in prince's plan said the anti-migration force was seen as a vehicle for prince to build a quote back door for so-called kinetic or lethal operations in libya a kind of mercenary mission creep during the day you do interdiction of migrants not kinetic said the person but these routes are used by weapon smugglers and drug traffickers at night insurgents too eric's guys can then be offered to the libyans to help them with other problems and you know what we like doing anyway night hunting but it's essentially the idea where um you know he's uh going around ostensibly as a logistics company but pitching security to uh various repressive regimes and and then also in this intercept article it's alleged that to get funding for

this libya operation he he met with Chinese intelligence officials and they helped him set up a secret bank account in Macau or something to fund this Libyan. And again, this is all in Jeremy Scahill's Intercept stories. The dude's a straight warmonger. I mean, like, that's his job. Oh, also... And he's already a billionaire.

Like, that's what's crazy. He's not doing this, like, because he needs the money. Like, it's one thing to be like, I'm broke. I mean, have we ever covered someone who needs the money? Yeah. It is funny. Like Carl Icahn doesn't need the money, but he just loves laying people off. Whereas Eric Prince doesn't need the money, but he just likes laying people out.

So back to one thing I mentioned earlier. Also, like towards the end of his run with black water uh they couldn't get as many americans or americans were too expensive and so uh they started just getting people uh from like former torturers from the pinochet regime hell yeah like staff they're like look to your left do you see a south african police officer yes look to your right do you see somebody who like to give people helicopter rides oh yeah chilean pinochet secret police we're at like a buck 15 okay yeah and just like uh which is about what they paid the uh south american contractors dude they're like zetas that's what they are they're like the mexican cartels z They really are Rosettas, yeah. Yeah. Private army.

And so one other thing, the other company, the private equity firm is called Frontier Resource Group. And this is kind of insane because we've talked to death on this podcast about private equity. But essentially, it's a private equity group that deals with resources, particularly in like the Congo and other heavily distressed African nations. So you can imagine how a mercenary skill set would be valuable when dealing with resource mining in these areas. And of course, the connection to the Chinese intelligence is relevant as well, because China has famously made infrastructure investments in various African nations, which is not imperialism under the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. But that's neither here nor there.

But the point is essentially that if these Chinese firms and government have made these investments, they want people to protect their investments. So this is another place where a private mercenary like Eric Prince can make some money by... Broad communist investments. By protecting these kinds of investments.

Man, everyone wants to fuck Africa over. Everyone. He's working with Chinese people. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. Amnesties. is looking into eric prince eric prince has turned over some phones and shit and basically this is from a washington post story that eric prince traveled to the seychelles to help donald trump set up a backdoor channel to vladimir putin and uh you know whatever you think about that he he's lied about this or he said he didn't do this to congress so that's lying under oath so uh maybe it you know what well if there's one thing that takes down the rich and powerful, it's perjury. But so, yeah, maybe he will get caught up in the Mueller investigation. We will see. But as of today, he is still pitching his privatized Afghan war, and we will see if he ends up making it.

You know, fingers crossed. I mean, for a screwdriver's sake. Yeah. Oh, man. Oh, and side note, he's a huge fan of Yeah Oh man Oh and side note He's a huge fan of Ollie North Oh yeah So following another great American war hero's footsteps Yep

Oh and we forgot to mention But he donated a quarter of a million dollars To Donald Trump's campaign Even before it was apparent that Donald Trump would win So that's what a true believer does And I guess we will see If Eric Prince ends up it was apparent that Donald Trump would win. So that's what a true believer does. And I guess we will see if Eric Prince ends up the viceroy of Afghanistan. But until then, anything else we didn't get to?

I think we covered about all of it. Thank you to our guest, Gabe Pacheco. Again, co-host Katie Halper Show, Eat, Pray, Judge podcast. Note, I will be out next week. My Cal Ripken Jr. streak of 31 episodes will come to an end and Andy, Steve, and Yogi will be doing an episode without me and I'm so excited for you all to hear it because I will not listen to it.

Just kidding. You really aren't. I've got a long plane ride back. I'm glad that if you I've got a long plane ride back. Cool, cool. I'm glad that if you didn't have a long plane ride, you wouldn't support the podcast you're fucking on. Sean's going to Brazil.

Yes, I am. I don't want to be more specific because I have just given information to a man. I've just talked shit about a man with Latin American mercenary connections. Yes, there's no death squads in Brazil. We haven't seen Elite Force 1 and 2. But I will be... I saw the first

one. I really liked it. I know it's military. I will be back the following week, assuming I don't die of yellow fever or other hot wash circumstances. Oh, and I also want to give a quick shout out uh this last week i have been on the being jim davis podcast which is a podcast that reviews garfield

comic strips uh strip by strip uh in chronological order and they're gonna have another 38 plus years going wow and i thought our project was ambitious. I was curious. And apparently anyone can co-host if you just message them. Also for our listeners, I'm trying to get Steve Zahn on an episode. I've tweeted at him a few times. He lives in

Kentucky, so get the message out, ladies and gentlemen. We want Steve Zahn of national security fame. Alright, well uh thank you again so much to give a check our guests thank you to listen thank you for listening and we will see you in afghanistan bye