Company tried to evade federal law by cooperating with local sheriff

In late June, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) raided an armory at the headquarters of Blackwater, the nation’s largest private military contractor, in Moyock, N.C., and seized a cache of illegally owned automatic weapons.

Federal law prohibits individuals or private companies from owning automatic weapons, a law that Blackwater attempted to get around in a highly unusual manner. A few days before the raid, a report in a local newspaper documented how Blackwater, founded by a scion of one of Michigan’s most wealthy and powerful conservative families, had acquired the weapons and how the company attempted to find a loophole in the federal law by registering the weapons in the name of the local sheriff’s department — with the full cooperation of the sheriff himself.

Here’s how the arrangement worked: In 2005, Blackwater arranged to buy a sizable cache of automatic weapons, including 17 Romanian AK-47 rifles and 17 Bushmaster XM15 E2S automatic rifles, but did so under the name of the Camden County Sheriff’s Department. The company signed an agreement with Maj. John Worthington in the Sheriff’s Department that said the weapons would be stored at Blackwater’s armory but that the department would have access to use them whenever necessary. Worthington was also working as a firearms instructor for Blackwater at the time.

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It remains a mystery why the Sheriff’s Department in a county of just over 9,000 people that has had a total of two murders and three robberies in the last 10 years would need automatic weapons. Why the company would need more automatic weapons (34) than sheriff’s deputies (19) also remains a mystery. In fact, Sheriff Tony Perry told the News and Observer newspaper that not only was there no real use for the weapons, but none of his deputies was qualified to use them even if they did need them.

These facts appear to have convinced the BATFE that the arrangement was not legitimate. Two days after the newspaper reported the arrangement, federal agents raided the Blackwater armory and seized the weapons.

Blackwater denies any wrongdoing and says that the BATFE had known about these weapons since the agency performed an audit on the facility during an investigation of two former Blackwater employees for stealing weapons. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Raleigh, N.C., which would have jurisdiction over the case, refused to even confirm that there was an investigation going on and would not comment on reports that the federal agency had known about the weapons all along.

All of this comes just as Blackwater has announced a change in business plans. On Monday, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a native of Holland, Mich., announced that the company was reducing its security work and shifting its priorities to training, avionics and logistics. Blackwater currently operates in Iraq on a contract with the State Department to protect American diplomats and government officials, but in Afghanistan the company operates on a Pentagon contract to provide air support to the military. The company owns a fleet of airplanes and helicopters that are used to transport military personnel around the Afghani theater of operations as well as transport and drop supplies at military bases.

The company blames the media for this shift in focus, saying that the constant attention has made Blackwater a symbol of the entire private security industry. Prince told the Associated Press that the negative media coverage “would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk.” Blackwater president Gary Jackson, meanwhile, told the AP that security work is down to about 30 percent of its overall business and that he plans to get it down to 1 to 2 percent if he can. But, he added, “If you (the media) could get it right, we might stay in the business.”

The change in focus also comes just as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has begun to question the astonishing growth in the use of private military contractors by the Pentagon. AP reports that in a July 10 memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gates wrote: “In my mind, the fundamental question that remains unanswered is this: Why have we come to rely on private contractors to provide combat or combat-related security training for our forces? Further, are we comfortable with this practice, and do we fully understand the implications in terms of quality, responsiveness and sustainability?”

Gates is asking for answers to those questions, which appear to have been prompted by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. Webb, a former Secretary of the Navy himself, has been blocking the nomination of four civilian nominees to Defense Department positions while demanding that the Pentagon hold private contractors more accountable for their actions.

Prince’s sister, Betsy, is the wife Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune and a former Republican gubernatorial candidate. The Prince and DeVos families have combined to be an almost limitless source of funding for conservative causes in Michigan and around the country.