George R. Wackenhut

George R. Wackenhut (September 3, 1919 to December 31, 2004) founded the Wackenhut Corporation. He was born in Philadelphia, attended the University of Pennsylvania and West Chester State Teachers College, was drafted in 1941, and was an enlisted man in a combat engineer regiment in Hawaii during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He took a degree at the University of Hawaii and a commission in 1943. After the war he taught at the Haverford School, played professional soccer briefly, and from 1946 directed physical education and coached at Johns Hopkins University, where he took a master's degree in 1949. He was a special agent of the FBI in Atlanta and Indianapolis from 1951 to 1954, working counterfeiting and bad check cases.¹²

The Company

He went to Miami in 1954 as director of personnel, security, and safety for Giffen Industries, and after six months formed Special Agent Investigators, Inc., with three other former agents. By one account he ended a disagreement over the company's direction by knocking a partner, Ed Dubois, unconscious. He bought the partners out in 1958 and gave the company his name. The law firm of Senator George Smathers set up a subsidiary supplying only guards, which put it outside the federal statute of 1893 barring detective agencies from government work, and contracts followed at Cape Canaveral and the Nevada Test Site. Revenues were 10.8 million dollars in 1964, 23.7 million in 1966, and 48.4 million in 1969. The company opened nineteen offices in 1967 and twenty-one in 1968. In 1971 six executives of Wackenhut, Pinkerton, and Burns were convicted of bribing New York City policemen for confidential records on airline job applicants.¹³⁴

The Files

By 1971 the company held files on 2.5 million individuals. Part of them came from Karl Baarslag, a wartime Office of Naval Intelligence officer who had been a researcher for Senator Joseph McCarthy, the American Legion, and the Church League of America. The company published a monthly Wackenhut Security Review. Its library took its subscriptions to the publications it monitored under the names Carol Ascher and William Jones. The first twenty-seven folders of its surviving research files, headed "Subversive Activities," contain correspondence with federal intelligence agencies and material on protests against the war in Vietnam. Others cover the NAACP, the Highlander Folk School, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the John Birch Society, and the Minutemen. After the Fair Credit Reporting Act the company reduced its holdings to between 225,000 and 250,000 files, and in 1975 it gave many of them to the Church League, which, the archive's note observes, "was not bound by the legislation." The Church League, of Wheaton, Illinois, had been directed since the 1950s by the former Air Force intelligence officer Edgar Bundy. It dissolved in 1984. The files went to Liberty University, which gave them in 1992 to the Tamiment Library of New York University.⁵

The CIA and Florida

The CIA opened a file on Wackenhut in May 1960, granted him a covert security approval on November 21, 1961, and used the company to backstop the cover of its officers in Miami. In January 1967 the new governor of Florida, Claude Kirk, hired the company to conduct a "war on crime" that he promised would cost the taxpayers nothing. There were "anguished cries of 'Nazism!' and 'Dictatorship!'" At the end of the year the state owed the firm more than 300,000 dollars, and the legislature created a state law enforcement bureau to replace it. The agency rescinded the approval in April 1967, citing "the notoriety that Mr. Wackenhut had received in connection with his activities in Florida." Its science directorate recorded contract actions with the company from 1970 to 1975.⁶⁷

Later Years

The company's directors came to include Clarence M. Kelley, former director of the FBI, for whom a division was named; James J. Rowley, former director of the Secret Service; General Paul X. Kelley, former commandant of the Marine Corps; General Julius W. Becton Jr.; General Thomas P. Stafford; and, from 1993, Jorge Mas Canosa, chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation. Wackenhut told an interviewer in 1988 that the company guarded American embassies and had taken its first site behind the Iron Curtain, in Hungary. It moved from Coral Gables to Palm Beach Gardens. He sold it in 2002 to Group 4 Falck of Denmark for 570 million dollars. His son Richard Wackenhut remained chief executive. He died of heart failure on December 31, 2004.¹²⁸