The Man Behind Blackwater

The Prince family gave heavily to GOP candidates. Erik donated his first $15,000 to the Republican Party when he was 19. (Though Prince has since given more than $250,000 to GOP candidates, he denies the money had any influence on Blackwater's obtaining government contracts.) In 1990 he got a six-month internship in George H.W. Bush's White House. Prince says the experience was an "eye opener," but declined to elaborate. At the time, he told the Grand Rapids Press, "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with— homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement [which raised taxes], the Clean Air Act [which was expensive for business] …" Back at Hillsdale, Prince was a volunteer firefighter who liked to dive into the icy waters of inland lakes looking for cars or snowmobiles that had fallen through the ice. In 1992, he joined the Navy SEALs.

There can be few more-grueling experiences, but Prince apparently thrived. Jack Lynch, president of a national SEALs association, says, "He was a good operator. Guys liked going in the water with him." Deployed to Haiti, Bosnia and the Middle East, Prince saw no actual combat, though, he says, "I've certainly been mortared and rocketed a few times" in war zones since then. Prince left the SEALs in 1996 after his father died and Prince needed to figure out what to do with the family company. (The family sold it for more than $1 billion.) Prince received a double shock when his wife, Joan, was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was pregnant with their second child.

One of Joan's close friends, who declined to be identified discussing private matters, tells NEWSWEEK a doctor recommended Joan terminate the pregnancy before the cancer could be fed by the further rush of estrogen. Joan, a devout Catholic, had the baby—and then had two more. She died of cancer in 2003. Prince, who remarried in 2004, converted to Roman Catholicism at Easter time in 1992. His family had been members of the Calvinist Dutch Reform Church, though with an evangelical bent. No one seems to have been shocked or upset by Prince's embrace of Rome. Several knowledgeable friends, who did not wish to be identified discussing private conversations, say Prince talked about his reverence for the continuity of the Catholic Church, his desire to go to mass every morning and his appreciation of confession.

With a portion of his inherited wealth, Prince bought some 6,000 acres of land in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina to create a state-of-the-art private training ground for shooters and security operators. Located near SEAL and Delta Force bases, the Blackwater (named after the swamp's peat-colored bogs) facilities are rented out to federal and local government agencies training soldiers and SWAT teams. (One testing ground: a mocked up "RU Ready High School" to simulate school shootings, complete with taped screams.) Business boomed after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the hook," Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly two weeks after the Qaeda attacks. Prince himself went to Afghanistan with Blackwater operators on a security contract with the CIA. According to some accounts, he sought to join the agency but stumbled during a polygraph test. "All I can tell you is I have a very high security clearance," Prince says. But did he want to join the CIA? "I think everybody wanted to help the U.S. government in some way after 9/11," says Prince. (A CIA spokesman would not comment.)

Prince has added some colorful characters to his executive suite. He hired Cofer Black, a former counterterror chief at the CIA (who promised to run down Qaeda leaders until there were "flies on their eyeballs"), and Joseph Schmitz, a former Pentagon inspector general who was so impressed with von Steuben's legacy that he put the Prussian general's family motto ("Always Under the Protection of the Almighty") on the IG's official seal. Since 9/11, Blackwater has reportedly scored $1 billion in government contracts (the figures are exaggerated, says Prince, though he acknowledges that the total "could add up" to a billion). He says Blackwater is thoroughly audited and that it does nothing without government authorization. Though diplomats complain about the cowboy tactics of Blackwater guards, it should be noted that Blackwater is only carrying out State Department orders to keep the roads clear for diplomats on the move.

Prince says his company is being hounded by "trial lawyers" working in cahoots with Democratic congressional staffers. In 2004, four Blackwater contractors were killed, and two were dismembered and burned, in Fallujah, Iraq. When evidence surfaced that their mission (prosaically, to pick up and deliver kitchen equipment) was underarmed and probably ill conceived, the families of the dead soldiers sued Blackwater. After the Fallujah slaughter, Prince reached out to some family members ("He's not a monster," one tells NEWSWEEK), but then Blackwater turned icily unresponsive. Prince has hired some heavy-duty defense lawyers, including former independent counsel Ken Starr, and countersued the families for $10 million.