Assessing threats his business
Bezos’ expert in the fight against Enquirer
Park Dietz recalled meeting Gavin de Becker in 1983, when Dietz was a young forensic psychiatrist researching the delusions of stalkers, and de Becker was an up-and-coming security consultant to Hollywood stars.
De Becker had fewer than two dozen celebrity clients, Dietz recalled, but thousands of deranged letters in storage bins at his home in the Los Angeles area. Dietz and his assistants spent the summer in a movie trailer set up in the driveway, sifting through recorded insanity. “It was extraordinary,” Dietz told The Washington Post.
Among the ramblings and threats of violence were live rifle cartridges, fake bombs and a tape of the sender “speaking to the celebrity in a halting manner with music in the background,” as Dietz recorded in his final report.
Thirty-two letter writers had sent poems. Four sent utility bills. One enclosed a dog’s head. “Nobody had ever studied such a thing before,” Dietz said. “And de Becker had gotten interested in this all on his own.”
In decades to come, de Becker’s collection of letters would grow to occupy a warehouse, and his client list would swell until he became arguably the world’s foremost expert on threatening messages.
Now he is also at the center of investigations into a different kind of threat — the National Enquirer’s alleged extortion attempt against Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, hired de Becker this year to find out how the Enquirer obtained private texts showing his relationship with former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez. On Thursday, the billionaire published emails that appear to show the tabloid threatening to publish intimate photos unless he ends de Becker’s probe.
The source of the tabloid’s fury, according to the emails, were reports about de Becker’s view that the Enquirer’s story was politically motivated and linked to associates of President Trump.
De Becker has spent decades investigating those trying to intimidate his clients in Hollywood and the business world.. Described by Bezos as “one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know,” the security guru emerged from a violent childhood to essentially create a new industry of threat prediction.
In his best-selling 1997 book “The Gift of Fear,” de Becker describes being physically abused for years by his mentally ill, drug-addicted mother. As a child, he wrote, he once watched as his 33-yearold mother repeatedly shot his stepfather. The man survived, but de Becker’s mother continued to beat him viciously, he told the Los Angeles Times in 2002, before she killed herself when he was 16.
This personal trauma merged with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which de Becker later told the Times “was the first world event that had any impact on me personally,” and left him fascinated with trying to keep public figures safe.
De Becker’s grandfather rented a Beverly Hills apartment so he could attend the local school district, where he made friends with future stars such as Carrie Fisher and made his first moves into celebrity protection. Rosemary Clooney invited him to move in after his mother’s death, and he became her “de facto road manager,” the Times reported. Clooney’s son, the actor Miguel Ferrer, later used de Becker as a model for his “Twin Peaks” character, FBI agent Albert Rosenfield. Soon he was working security for Elizabeth Taylor, Shaun Cassidy and Dean Martin’s ex-wife, Jeanne Martin. He founded his firm, Gavin de Becker and Associates, in 1978. Within a few years, de Becker’s research was acclaimed enough that President-elect Ronald Reagan hired him to protect guests at his first inauguration, the Times reported, and then invited him to join a Justice Department advisory board. By the end of the decade, he would count Robert Redford, Jane Fonda and Joan Rivers as clients.
He worked to sort the threats the celebrities faced into categories, from harmless superfans to legitimately dangerous characters. And the method he worked out blossomed into a unique tool: the MOSAIC threat assessment systems. He saw the program as a direct extension of the skills he had learned watching his mother — a systematic way to anticipate bloodshed.
“The way I broke down the individual elements of violence as a child became the way the most sophisticated artificial intuition systems predict violence today,” he wrote in “The Gift of Fear.”
In its early days, his programs were largely used by police to protect high-risk people such as politicians or judges, the Times reported in 1997.
De Becker later expanded MOSAIC to profile domestic abusers and to try to curb school violence. Now, MOSAIC is available as a free online questionnaire that can be used by anyone interested in obtaining “comprehensive assessments” of threats.