SHOW OF FORCE
A security empire deployed guards with violent pasts across the U.S. Some went on to rape, assault or kill
Philip Mayo cost himself a law enforcement career the day he helped shatter a prison inmate’s face and beat him until his back was broken.
But the fired Maryland corrections officer wasn’t out of uniform for long.
Within months, G4S, the largest private security company in the world, gave him a job 20 minutes up the road guarding an office building and its workers.
Coworkers said he raised more red flags almost immediately. They claimed he stalked a woman around the building. He adjusted security cameras to watch women enter the locker room. He groped a co-worker’s breast.
Mayo’s supervisor warned his bosses: Fire this guy before someone else gets hurt. They ignored him.
A police report details what happened next. One night on the graveyard shift, Mayo watched a cleaning lady push her cart down a darkened hallway. He waited until they were alone.
Then he pinned her from behind, slammed her head against the wall and ripped at her clothes. “Please don’t do this,” she begged.
“I do what I want,” he said. “I’m security.”
In marketing materials and contract bids, G4S sells itself as the world’s premier security company – a private army
of experienced guards ready and able to protect people at a fraction of the cost of police.
That pitch has been effective. The London-based company entered the U.S. marketplace in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and, by its height in 2014, had grown into the third largest private employer in the world, behind only Walmart and Foxconn. Its American operation, headquartered in Jupiter, Florida, has collected billions of dollars in private and public contracts to guard hospitals and banks, airports and gated communities. G4S guards drive prisoner transport vans and stand watch over sports fans, college students and grocery shoppers.
But the company’s efforts to penetrate the U.S. market with low-cost protection has repeatedly come at the expense of its own hiring and training standards. G4S has sometimes given power, authority and weapons to individuals who represent the very threat they are meant to guard against.
Documents show that the company’s American subsidiaries have hired or retained at least 300 employees with questionable records, including criminal convictions, allegations of violence and prior law enforcement careers that ended in disgrace. Some went on to rape, assault, or shoot people – including while on duty.
USA TODAY and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel spent more than a year investigating G4S, a global security empire that is largely unknown to the American public even though its guards are omnipresent in daily life.
Reporters reviewed thousands of police reports, court filings and internal company documents and matched guard rosters against criminal records and lists of decertified law enforcement officers. Then they interviewed current and former G4S employees around the country, as well as victims of the violence.
The reporting revealed a pattern of questionable hires often driven by low wages, high turnover and pressure to sign new contracts and bring on enough guards to meet the requirements. Some employees who raised safety concerns were ignored, punished or threatened while G4S executives cast the most serious incidents as aberrations.
The company’s most infamous guard, Omar Mateen, thrust G4S into the American spotlight after he gunned down 49 people and wounded 53 more in 2016 at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. Reports showed G4S didn’t consider Mateen dangerous despite warning signs, and Florida officials fined the company for hundreds of faulty psychological records, including Mateen’s.
And while Mayo and Mateen represent worst-case scenarios, reporters found examples around the country of guards slipping through the cracks at G4S.
Kimberly Horton, a former operations manager in Louisiana, testified in a 2016 discrimination lawsuit she filed that G4S pushed her to quickly hire guards regardless of their qualifications.
“Fill the post. Fill the post,’” Horton recalled her supervisor instructing her, in testimony that was unrelated to her central complaint. “’If they don’t fit the criteria, put them there anyway and we will weed them out and fire them later.’ ”
“They just hired anybody,” she said.
G4S hired ex-cops in Arizona who had been caught lying about their relationships with underage girls and hoarding stolen department ammunition. The company armed a 25-year-old in Colorado with a documented history of mental illness who used his G4S-issued gun to shoot his family and himself. An administrator at a G4S juvenile detention center in Florida discovered guards molesting kids, police said, and then hid it from state officials because she was worried about losing the contract.
With little oversight from state and federal officials, G4S is primarily held accountable when clients choose to cancel contracts. But that often doesn’t happen, in part because these incidents can appear isolated.
Prosecutors offered Mayo a plea deal for his 2009 attack on the janitor. To avoid a trial, they reduced his charges from attempted rape and he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. Afterward, Citicorp, whose offices Mayo was guarding, renewed its deal with G4S.
“Citi took appropriate action,” Drew Benson, a company spokesman, said in a statement. “The third-party guard was banned from the site.”
The janitor Mayo attacked suffered brain trauma in the incident and quit her job to avoid having to work the night shift alone again.
“My life has been hell,” she told reporters from her porch earlier this year. “If you can’t trust the guards, who can you trust?”
She sued both G4S and Citicorp and accused the companies of negligence in hiring Mayo and for ignoring warning signs before he attacked her. The companies denied the allegations and eventually settled for an undisclosed amount.
In a series of written statements, G4S spokeswoman Sabrina Rios said the company enforces strict policies to prevent hiring mistakes, including training for managers and a screening process that goes above and beyond what many clients and states require.
Rios said “G4S had no way of knowing” that Mayo and other guards “would be capable of criminal acts.” She added that they all passed the company’s screening procedures.
“Like all large employers,” Rios said in her statement, “there may occasionally be a very small number of employees who do not act in accordance with our procedures and policies.”
In many cases, the problems reporters found, including domestic violence injunctions, arrests and police misconduct allegations, would not show up on a typical background check. But the information was available in public records.
Rios acknowledged that G4S cannot access all of the criminal history information it would like to get.
The company is implementing a program that would continually track employee arrests, she said.
G4S has downsized from its 2014 peak and sold several subsidiaries plagued by reports of abuse and misconduct, including juvenile detention centers. Its two biggest competitors – Allied Universal and Securitas – have in recent years exceeded G4S’ overall employee count in the U.S.
However, G4S is the largest security company in the world by number of employees and has earned more money in federal contracts than Allied and Securitas combined since 2005. It also arms a greater share of its U.S. employees – 11%, compared with 3% at the main competitors.
Armed G4S guards have been paid as little as $11 per hour, according to a contract in Florida reporters reviewed. Just this month, the company posted an advertisement to hire armed guards in South Carolina who would be paid a minimum of $9.25 an hour.
Supervisors have employed people without required security licenses, overlooked deficiencies on job applications, understaffed posts, and overworked guards for up to 16 hours a day, according to state inspections, county audits and testimony from employees.
Michael Hodge, a former secret service agent who is now a private security consultant and an expert witness in legal cases concerning the industry, called G4S’ organizational problems “a total breach of public trust.”
“They are teaching management how to circumvent to get business as opposed to running a legitimate business,” said Hodge, who reviewed the journalists’ findings at their request.
“It’s scary because the company has tentacles into every type of industry.”
States failed to keep G4S in check
G4S grew into a global force that would help reshape the private security industry by making moves the business world and investors celebrated.
In 2000, a British security company merged with a century-old night watchmen firm from Denmark to become Group 4 Falck, which later renamed itself G4S. After the merger, then-CEO Nick Buckles pushed to buy dozens of smaller firms around the world.
The company entered the U.S. market in 2002 with its $570 million acquisition of The Wackenhut Corporation, a security firm founded in the 1950s by former FBI agents. It inherited Wackenhut’s lucrative government contracts to guard nuclear facilities and military bases, and salesmen fanned out to land new business.
The sales pitch – security at a discount – found a receptive audience in a post-9/11 America led by a White House pushing to make government more efficient by embracing privatization. And private businesses considered guards not just a visual deterrent to crime, but also a counter argument to litigant claims that they were negligent in protecting customers. Bank of America is now one of the company’s most well-known corporate clients. Gannett, which owns USA TODAY and the Journal Sentinel, has done business with multiple security companies, including G4S.
The company has collected more than $6 billion from taxpayers through federal contracts since 2005, according to government data, and G4S has worked for the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, Drug Enforcement Administration and Internal Revenue Service. Immigration and Customs Enforcement currently pays G4S about $20 million annually to transport detainees in California.
Tom Conley, president and CEO of The Conley Group, a security consulting firm in Des Moines, Iowa, said G4S’ expansion into the U.S. helped drive an industrywide trend of consolidation and scale. The handful of massive corporations dominating the industry prioritize landing as many contracts as possible “when they should be focused on customers and employing people adequately prepared to handle emergencies,” Conley said.
But state regulatory agencies tasked with overseeing G4S operations has not forced the company to make significant adjustments, even in the wake of serious missteps. A review of state licensing records shows that agencies have done little more than issue fines that pale in comparison to the company’s growing business.
For example, in 2013, New York regulators proposed a $117,500 penalty against G4S for nearly 400 violations that “demonstrated untrustworthiness and/or incompetency” in complying with regulations. The company negotiated to have the fine cut in half. It has earned at least $134 million in contracts with state and federal agencies in New York since 2005.
The largest fine a state licensing agency imposed against G4S appears to be from Florida after Mateen’s 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub. Mateen, who was fatally shot by police in the incident, was off duty and did not use a company weapon. G4S was not doing business with the nightclub.
After the shooting, reports revealed that Mateen had been on a terror watch list and had been questioned multiple times by the FBI. Rios, the G4S spokeswoman, said in her written statement that the FBI never informed G4S about its concerns with Mateen.
However, company officials shuffled Mateen from post to post due to problems with his co-workers and complaints from law enforcement about threatening behavior, investigations into the Pulse shooting revealed. Florida regulators also found that G4S had submitted more than 1,500 psychological questionnaires, including Mateen’s, purportedly signed by a psychologist who had stopped working with the company two years earlier. G4S has argued in court that the tests were valid even though they had the wrong evaluator’s name on them.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which regulates the private security industry, fined G4S $100 for each document, for a total of about $151,000.
The fine was dwarfed by at least $157 million in contracts G4S has made from Florida state agencies in the past 10 years, according to state contract data. Since the Pulse shooting, the company has won or renewed 200 contracts with the state.
‘Think image, not qualifications’
Robert Bobo, a G4S vice president in Colorado, told his recruiters he looked for a certain type of job candidate.
To win contracts, he instructed them to “think image, not qualifications” when it came to hiring guards, according to a complaint letter one of his subordinates sent to human resources in 2016. Bobo confronted another recruiter for “hiring terrorists” because the guards were of Middle Eastern descent, according to the complaint.
On paper, Robert Leiman, 25, fit the profile Bobo described. He was white, ex-military and willing to work graveyard shifts as an armed guard at an apartment complex and various office buildings around Denver.
Leiman, however, was not the ideal candidate. He had been discharged from the Army amid questions about his mental health and after threatening to kill a fellow soldier.
On Jan. 20, 2014, Leiman and his parents argued about his erratic behavior, according to police records. His parents told him it was time to move out of their home.
Instead, Leiman grabbed the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver G4S had issued him. He shot his stepmother dead, shot his father in the face and then sought out his stepsister, who hid in a closet and called police.
“My stepbrother Robbie started shooting,” she whispered to the 911 operator, trying to stifle her sobs. “I’m so scared.”
Leiman never got to her. He killed himself before police arrived.
Bobo, whose LinkedIn profile says he still works for G4S in a “semi-retired” capacity, did not respond to voicemails requesting an interview.
Chronic turnover has left the people responsible for filling empty guard posts with little choice but to hire whoever they can get, former G4S managers said in interviews, testimony and internal company complaints.
In 2013, G4S’ security contract was up for renewal at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia, a sprawling military manufacturing campus.
The company slashed its bid and then gutted employees’ wages and benefits, according to company emails, records from the internal investigation and interviews with two former supervisors.
Many of the existing guards quit, and those who remained said they had to work up to 18 hours on a single shift, or 100 hours a week. A security manager at BAE Systems, the defense contractor that hired G4S, wrote in a May 2013 email that the site was struggling to refill the positions.
“We still do not have a training program up and running, which is a huge concern to me,” he said in the email. “We have officers on patrol and post that do not really know what to do or the importance of their position because of lack of training.”
Former site supervisor J.L. McKinney said in an interview that recruiters simply hired guards who promised they could run a mile and do pushups. The goal was “just to get the bodies in,” said McKinney, who had a discrimination suit against G4S dismissed by a judge in 2016.
The company handed out guns to people who had beaten their wives and committed crimes, according to McKinney, who oversaw about 70 guards. In one case, G4S hired and armed a man who had recently left a psychiatric institution and wasn’t supposed to have a gun, he said.
“My God,” he recalled thinking. “What in the world are we doing?”