Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [77]
The meltdown began in August 1999, when Richard Beckett left the company that bore his name. The company changed its name to S2i for a while, but staff defections and ill will among the remaining employees drove it to near-collapse. One morning in 2000, John Dodd got a call from a staffer at the company’s headquarters who was loyal to him. “John, they’re packing up boxes and shredding documents. You’d better get over here.”
Dodd rushed to the office, stopped the shredding, and as legal owner of the company, took control of the remaining computers, office equipment, and boxes of documents. He’s been mired in litigation of one sort or another since then, and he keeps the documents he secured that day in the storage unit in Easton. Dodd says he wasn’t able to rescue everything, and he suspects that records of many of Beckett Brown’s most sensitive activities were the first papers fed to the shredder.
Many of the key officers at Beckett Brown stayed in the corporate intelligence industry, setting up shops with similar business models, and staying close to the Chesapeake Bay area. Tim Ward, for example, today has his own security firm, Chesapeake Strategies. Joe Masonis works for another security firm, the Annapolis Group. And Richard Beckett runs yet another firm, Global Security Services.
As the legal wrangling over the fate of the company continued, Dodd read through the documents, piecing together what he could about what the company had been doing. He also began to contact the people and companies he saw as the victims of Beckett Brown’s operations. Dodd says he called Mars to let officials there know about Nestlé’s spying operation, and Mars sent a squadron of attorneys from the white-shoe law firm Williams and Connolly to the storage unit in Easton, where they spent several days reading and copying documents related to the corporate espionage against Mars. Dodd also reached out to others to let them know about what happened in each case. Finally, Dodd went to the press, inviting several reporters to the storage unit to dig into the Beckett Brown saga.
The clandestine operations carried out by Beckett Brown remained secret for almost a decade. But in the spring of 2008, the magazine Mother Jones disclosed some of the most elaborate episodes in the company’s history.
The exclusive for Mother Jones, written by a veteran Washington investigative reporter, James Ridgeway, revealed Beckett Brown’s extensive client list:
BBI engaged in “intelligence collection” for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; it handled “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in “information collection” for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted “surveillance,” and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.8
A follow-up story detailing an extensive undercover infiltration operation generated national headlines because Mother Jones revealed that an operative connected