Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

^{CHAPTER TWO} THE LITTLE PRINCE

THE STATELY mansion at 1057 South Shore Drive in Holland, Michigan, is about as far from Fallujah as one could imagine. The home where young Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA, grew up sits along the sleepy banks of Lake Macatawa, an inlet of Lake Michigan in the American Midwest. Trees shimmer along the edges of the driveway on a summer day; the sun glints peacefully off the lake. Occasionally, a car clips by or a boat motor starts, but otherwise the neighborhood is calm and quiet, the embodiment of affluent, postcard American society. Two middle-aged women power-walk past a man lazily riding his lawnmower. Other than that, the street is deserted. As they trot by, one of the women glances over to her companion, their sun visors almost colliding, and asks whether the Prince family still owns the mansion. The estate is well-known, the family more so. In Holland, Michigan, the Princes were indeed royalty, and Erik’s father, Edgar Prince, was the king.

Much like Blackwater’s compound in Moyock, North Carolina—a seven-thousand-acre peat bog with a constant rattle of machine-gun fire—is Erik Prince’s personal fiefdom, the idyllic Dutch hamlet of Holland was his father’s. A self-made industrialist, Edgar Prince employed nearly a quarter of the city. He shaped its institutions, planned and funded its downtown, and was among the biggest benefactors to its two colleges. A decade after Edgar’s sudden death in 1995, his presence and legacy still permeate the town. On the corner of two of the busiest streets in Holland’s soccer-mom-chic downtown, there is a monument to Ed Prince: seven bronze footsteps embedded in the ground lead to a raised platform upon which stand life-sized bronze statues of a trio of musicians—a tuxedoed cello player, a mustached violinist, and a young woman wearing a skirt who is blowing into her flute. Another statue depicts a little girl standing with her arms wrapped around a small boy, holding a book of music notes, their mouths frozen in song. On the pedestal below the group is a small plaque memorializing Edgar D. Prince: “We will always hear your footsteps,” it reads. “The People of Downtown Holland honor your extraordinary vision and generosity.”

If there was one lesson Edgar Prince was poised to impart to his children, it was how to build and maintain an empire based on strict Christian values, right-wing politics, and free-market economics. But while the landscape of Holland today is dotted with memorials to the Prince family legacy, Edgar was not the town’s original emperor. Dating back to the community’s founding, Holland had long been run by Christian patriarchs. In 1846, with a sea-weary clan of fifty-seven fellow Dutch refugees, Albertus Van Raalte came ashore in western Michigan. Prince’s predecessor had fled his home country because he had “undergone all manner of humiliation and persecution through his defiance of the religious restrictions imposed by the State church,” according to the city.¹

Van Raalte was a member of a sect of the Dutch Reform Church opposed by the Dutch monarchy at the time. After arriving in the United States aboard his vessel, the Southerner, Van Raalte led the clan to the shores of Lake Michigan, where he envisioned a community free to live and worship within the tenets of his brand of Dutch Reform, and without any outside influence. After some scouting he came upon a perfect spot, next to a lake that ran into Lake Michigan. On February 9, 1847, Van Raalte’s community was founded, on the site where Erik Prince would later spend his youth, perhaps some of it on the creaking dock that sneaks out into the Lake Michigan inlet. But Van Raalte’s perfect vision would not be realized quite as he expected, according to a biography produced by Hope College, which he founded and which has seen millions of dollars in donations from the Prince family: “[Van Raalte’s] goal of developing a Christian community governed by Christian principles was visionary but was shattered in 1850. Holland Township became the basic unit of government. Van Raalte’s ideal of Christian control was lost.”² But Van Raalte sought alternative means of establishing his Shangri-La in Holland. “His influence was felt because he became active in politics and he continued to own large tracts of land,” according to the biography. “Although many of the means to achieve a Christian community broke down, Van Raalte was still the pastor of the only church, member of the district school board, guiding light of the Academy, principal landowner, and a businessman with major property holdings.”³ Virtually the same description could be applied to Edgar Prince and, eventually, to Erik, born nearly a century after Van Raalte’s death.

The conservative Dutch Reform Church that provided the religious guidance for Van Raalte, and eventually the Prince family, based its beliefs on the teachings of a seventeenth-century minister, John Calvin. One of the main tenets of Calvinism is that of predestination—the belief that God has predestined some people for salvation and others for damnation. Calvinists believe that people have no business meddling or vainly trying to divine God’s decisions. The religion also teaches strict obedience and hard work, acting on the belief that God will steer followers but that they are responsible for the work. Calvinists have long taken pride in their work ethic. The town of Holland boasts that its villagers dug the canal to Lake Michigan—that would prove valuable for trade—with their own hands, and then set down their shovels and immediately constructed the bridge over their new channel.⁴

It was this famed work ethic that found Erik Prince’s grandfather Peter Prince, owner of the Tulip City Produce Company, on a truck heading to Grand Rapids, thirty miles away, for a business meeting in the early morning hours of May 21, 1943. Shortly into the trip, Prince complained of heartburn to his fellow wholesale produce dealer, and they pulled over for a few minutes. Soon, they continued on, and near Hudsonville, halfway through the trip, Prince slumped over against his colleague, who was driving. A doctor in the town pronounced him dead on arrival at the age of thirty-six.⁵ Peter’s son, Edgar, was eleven years old.

A decade later, Edgar Prince graduated from the University of Michigan with an engineering degree and met Elsa Zwiep, whose parents owned Zwiep’s Seed Store in Holland and who had just completed her studies in education and sociology at nearby Calvin College.⁶ The two married, and Edgar followed family tradition and joined the military, serving in the U.S. Air Force. The couple moved east and then west as Edgar was stationed at bases in South Carolina and Colorado. Though it’s unclear whether Peter Prince was a veteran—he came of age for the draft during the window between World War I and World War II—four of Peter’s five brothers were in the Army at the time of his death.⁷ Though Edgar Prince had traveled far and wide during college and the Air Force, his hometown of Holland beckoned him and Elsa back to Lake Michigan and to the strict religious and cultural traditions embraced by the Prince family. “We find Holland a very comfortable place to live,” Edgar Prince said in a book written about Holland’s downtown, which included three chapters on the family. “We have family here. We enjoy the recreational opportunities. We like the community’s heritage, which is based on the Dutch reputation for being neat, clean, orderly, and hard working. Their standard has always been excellence.”⁸

Upon returning to the town, Edgar rolled up his sleeves and started working in die-casting, rising to the position of chief engineer at Holland’s Buss Machine Works.⁹ But Edgar had much bigger ambitions and soon quit. In 1965, Prince and two fellow employees founded their own company that made die-cast machines for the auto industry.¹⁰ In 1969, he shipped a sixteen-hundred-ton machine capable of creating aluminum transmission cases every two minutes.¹¹ By 1973, Prince Corporation was a great success, with hundreds of people working for the company’s various Holland divisions.¹² That year, the company began production of what would become its signature product, an invention that would end up in virtually every car in the world and put Edgar Prince on his way to becoming a billionaire: the ubiquitous lighted sun visor.¹³

But while wealth and success were in abundance in the Prince family, the sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days had been taking their toll on Edgar, and in the early 1970s, he nearly fell to the same fate as his father when he suffered a serious heart attack.¹⁴ “It was then, while he lay in a hospital bed reflecting on what all his labor had won for him, that he committed himself anew to his faith in Jesus Christ,” recalled Prince’s friend Gary Bauer, one of the early leaders of the religious right and founder of the conservative Christian lobby group the Family Research Council. “Ed turned his future and the future of his business over to God. From that point forward, the Prince Corporation was blessed with unprecedented growth and financial success.”¹⁵ Edgar Prince recovered from the heart attack and steered his company toward amazing prosperity. Prince Corporation soon expanded into map lamps, visors that could open garage doors, consoles with ashtrays, and cup and change holders, among many other products.¹⁶ By 1980, the Prince empire boasted numerous plants and more than 550 employees.¹⁷ As Erik Prince later recalled, “My dad was a very successful entrepreneur. From scratch he started a company that first produced high-pressure die-cast machines and grew into a world-class automotive parts supplier in west Michigan. They developed and patented the first lighted car sun visor, developed the car digital compass/thermometer and the programmable garage door opener.”¹⁸ But, Prince said, “Not all their ideas were winners. Things like a sock-drawer light, an automated ham de-boning machine and a propeller-driven snowmobile didn’t work out so well for the company. My dad used them as examples of the need for perseverance and determination.”¹⁹

In that respect, it wasn’t the only way in which the product itself seemed of secondary importance to Prince. “People make the difference,” read the copy from an old Prince Corporation brochure. “It isn’t magic that brings excellence to a company; excellence is the result of commitment and hard work by dedicated people. Whether we’re talking about products or processes, no wizardry or easy formulas will solve the challenges of tomorrow. People will.”²⁰ Edgar Prince was fond of initiatives like one where executives stuck to a strict exercise regimen. Three days a week from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. the executives met at the Holland Tennis Club, which Prince also owned.²¹ In 1987, Prince opened a sprawling 550,000-square-foot facility spread over thirty-five acres, its fourth manufacturing center and home to many of its now fifteen hundred employees.²² The Prince “campus” centerpiece featured nearly five thousand feet of skylights and amenities like a basketball and volleyball court.²³ He never made employees work on Sundays and flew executives home from business trips promptly so they could be with their families on the Lord’s Day.²⁴

Detroit’s auto industry may have been suffering in the 1980s, “but you’d never know it from the Prince Corporation,” read the lead of a story in the Holland Sentinel.²⁵ “My family’s business was automotive supply—the most viciously competitive business in the world,” Erik Prince told author Robert Young Pelton. “My father was focused on quality, volume, and customer satisfaction. That’s what we talked around the dinner table.”²⁶ But Edgar Prince had more than the success of his business and his employees on his mind, and with the money flowing into Prince Corporation, he finally had the means to achieve the higher goals to which he aspired. That meant pouring serious money into conservative Christian causes. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” recalled Gary Bauer. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.”²⁷

In the 1980s, the Prince family merged with one of the most venerable conservative families in the United States when Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team.²⁸ Amway was a powerhouse distributor of home products and was regularly plagued by accusations that it was run like a cult and was nothing more than a sophisticated pyramid scheme.²⁹ The company would rise to become one of the greatest corporate contributors in the U.S. electoral process in the 1990s, mostly to Republican candidates and causes, and used its business infrastructure as a massive political organizing network.³⁰ “Amway relies heavily on the nearly fanatical—some say cultlike—devotion of its more than 500,000 U.S. ‘independent distributors.’ As they sell the company’s soaps, vitamins, detergents, and other household products, the distributors push the Amway philosophy,” reported Mother Jones magazine in a 1996 exposé on the company.³¹ “They tell you to always vote conservative no matter what. They say liberals support the homosexuals and let women get out of their place,” Karen Jones, a former Amway distributor, told the magazine. “They say we need to get things back to the way it’s supposed to be.”³² Amway leaders also reportedly used “voice-mail messages, along with company rallies and motivational tapes, to mobilize distributors into a potent domestic political force.”³³

Betsy and Dick’s union was the kind of alliance common among the families of monarchs in Europe. The DeVos family was one of the few in Michigan whose power and influence exceeded that of the Princes. They were one of the greatest bankrollers of far-right causes in U.S. history, and with their money they propelled extremist Christian politicians and activists to positions of prominence. For a time, Betsy and Dick lived down the street from the Prince family, including Erik, who is nine years younger than his sister.³⁴

In 1988, Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson began building what would become the Family Research Council (FRC), the crusading, influential, and staunchly conservative evangelical organization that has since taken the lead on issues ranging from banning gay marriage to promoting school vouchers for Christian schools to outlawing abortion and stem-cell research. To get it off the ground, though, they needed funding, and they turned to Edgar Prince. “[W]hen Jim Dobson and I decided that the financial resources weren’t available to launch FRC, Ed and his family stepped into the breach,” wrote Bauer. “I can say without hesitation that without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there simply would not be a Family Research Council.”³⁵ Young Erik would go on to become one of Bauer’s earliest interns at the FRC.³⁶ It was one of many right-wing causes that the Princes would join the DeVoses in bankrolling, leading to what would be known as the Republican Revolution in 1994, which brought Newt Gingrich and a radical right-wing agenda known as the Contract with America to power in Congress, wrestling control from the Democrats for the first time in forty years. To support the “revolution,” DeVos’s Amway gave some $2.5 million to the Republican Party in what was the single largest soft-money donation on record to any political party in history.³⁷ In 1996, Amway also donated $1.3 million to the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau to pay for Republican “infomercials” broadcast on Pat Robertson’s Family Channel during the RNC convention.³⁸

Erik’s sister Betsy DeVos would go on to chair Michigan’s Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and from 2003 to 2005; at times she flirted with running for the U.S. Senate.³⁹ She was also a George W. Bush “Pioneer” fundraiser, bringing in more than $100,000 for his campaign.⁴⁰ Her husband, Dick, was the GOP candidate for governor in 2006, a race that he ultimately lost.⁴¹ Seasoned observers of Michigan politics say it would be hard to overestimate the influence the DeVos family has on politics in the state. “Anyone who runs for a significant Republican office in Michigan has to check with the DeVos family,” said Calvin College political science professor Doug Koopman. “They are perceived within that community as being not only a source of funds but a judge of [a candidate’s] fitness.”⁴²

The Prince and DeVos clans were also a major driving force behind the Michigan Family Forum (MFF), the state’s chapter of Jim Dobson’s Focus on the Family.⁴³ Besides the tens of thousands of dollars that the Prince family poured into the MFF, another of Erik Prince’s sisters, Emilie Wierda, has served as its treasurer.⁴⁴ The MFF has mobilized voters in conservative churches to support legislators who have backed the Christian right’s agenda. Beginning in 1990, the MFF ran what was essentially a backdoor lobbying system, through the establishment of more than one thousand church-based Community Impact Committees (CICs), which operated under the radar, away from public scrutiny.⁴⁵ “The CICs offer advantages to political organizing that other Christian Right organizing doesn’t have,” Russ Bellant wrote in his 1996 book The Religious Right in Michigan Politics. “Because they are based in churches, their meetings are not visible in the world of politics. Since laypersons rather than pastors may run these groups, they may not have a high profile even in the church community outside the Family Forum network.”⁴⁶ The MFF also established the Michigan Prayer Network, which consisted of “prayer warriors” assigned to nearly every legislator in the state.⁴⁷ While the groups were prohibited from expressly lobbying, the effect of asking legislators to “pray” for issues like school choice and against gay rights made it, as one Michigan legislator put it, “just another lobbying gimmick.”⁴⁸

While opening his wallet to the Christian right, Edgar Prince also became a patron to the entire community of Holland, investing millions of dollars into Hope College, founded by Albert Van Raalte, and its equally devout rival Calvin College, Edgar’s wife’s alma mater.⁴⁹ He and Elsa almost single-handedly reengineered and brought a boom to Holland’s downtown, saving it from the fate hundreds of other small towns had suffered throughout the Midwest as they gradually slipped into economic oblivion due to poor urban planning coupled with outsourcing, downsizing, layoffs, and the overall decline of U.S. manufacturing. The Princes helped establish the Evergreen Commons, a popular senior center downtown, and lobbied hard for the preservation and restoration of historic landmarks in town.⁵⁰ They fought for a well-planned city that would exist and thrive for generations while maintaining what they saw as a necessary connection to its Dutch roots. They personally took on causes like saving an 1892 stone clock tower that had once been a cornerstone of downtown before falling into disrepair.⁵¹ Some of Edgar Prince’s ideas for maintaining a vibrant downtown seemed utterly insane. He envisioned and campaigned hard in the late 1980s for an underground system of heated pipes that would melt snow and ice throughout the downtown business district, ensuring that strollers could be pushed along the sidewalks even during western Michigan’s harsh winters.⁵² When the city balked at the $1.1 million plan, Prince ponied up a quarter of the funding himself.⁵³

All the while, Edgar Prince continued to balance his business and religious obligations, both to his local Dutch Reform Church and the Prince Corporation. “Ed was at his best and was most valuable to [the Family Research Council] during the dark and difficult times—during the confirmation battle over Clarence Thomas, following the bitter disappointment of the Supreme Court’s unexpected pro-abortion ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, through the anti-family shift in the Congress in 1992, and in recent months with the wave of efforts by some to redefine the traditional family and undermine marriage,” Gary Bauer wrote of Prince in 1995.⁵⁴ Prince Corporation continued to flourish, a “boom built on Biblical principles,” Bauer wrote.⁵⁵ In 1992, the company roster had grown to 2,250 employees.⁵⁶ By early 1995, it had ballooned to more than 4,000 employees and $400 million in annual sales.⁵⁷ Prince had also married his business acumen with his desire to see Holland thrive and had founded Lumir Corporation, which became Holland’s foremost downtown developer, responsible for projects like the $2.5 million Evergreen Commons Senior Center.⁵⁸ But tragedy would soon strike the Prince empire.

At about 1:00 p.m. on March 2, 1995, Edgar Prince had one of his usual chats with Prince Corporation president John Spoelhof,⁵⁹ a longtime friend with whom he had just gone skiing in Colorado a week earlier.⁶⁰ They said good-bye, and the sixty-three-year-old Prince stepped into the elevator at his company’s headquarters. Inside, he suffered a massive heart attack and was found on the floor fifteen minutes later.⁶¹ Despite CPR attempts by two Prince employees, Edgar was pronounced dead within the hour.⁶² “I saw him probably two minutes before he passed away,” Spoelhof said. “I looked at the expression of his face and the color of his face and Ed was Ed. I knew him so well all these years; if he would have been a little ashen, I would have noticed.”⁶³

As happens with the deaths of kings, patriarchs, and heads of state, the town of Holland entered a period of intense mourning. The flag flew at half-staff.⁶⁴ Every newspaper in the region ran front-page stories eulogizing Prince, accompanied with sidebars and pictures and timelines. More than one thousand people gathered at the Christ Memorial Reformed Church to hear evangelical leaders James Dobson and Gary Bauer, who referred to Edgar as his “mentor,” eulogize Prince.⁶⁵ Bauer remembered how Prince was adamant that the Family Research Council’s new headquarters in Washington, D.C., should have a cross atop it, to remind the President, members of the Supreme Court, and Congress “that this is one nation under God’s judgment.”⁶⁶ In the Grand Rapids Press Lakeshore supplement, the banner headline read “A Christian Man,” and the Rev. Ren Broekhuizen said, “Ed Prince was a gifted and developed individual who never took his eyes off the goal of honoring Jesus Christ in his life.”⁶⁷ That pastor, a friend of Prince’s for two decades, would marry Edgar’s widow Elsa five years later.⁶⁸

At the time of his father’s death, Erik Prince was a Navy SEAL serving a string of deployments in Bosnia, Haiti, and the Middle East.⁶⁹ Even still, he had happened to visit his father just a week before his death, when Edgar made the sign of the cross on Erik’s daughter’s forehead during her baptism. ⁷⁰ Erik remembered that his father had taught him never to say, “I can’t.”⁷¹ At the time of his death, Edgar had been married to Elsa for forty-one years, and they had raised three daughters in addition to Erik. “Dad was definitely the shepherd of his family, and he would bring the whole family together every chance he could. He’d make all the arrangements and take care of all the details,” Erik told the Holland Sentinel after Edgar’s death.⁷² Erik seemed elated that his father had been able to meet and baptize his first-born daughter, Sophia, but that elation was tinged with regret: “He loved her. That was the last time I saw him. My regret is my kids will never know him. I wanted them to be able to talk to him, to learn from him.”⁷³

Erik Prince adored his father and strived to follow in his footsteps from the time he was a child. Erik was an active youth, playing soccer, track, and basketball at the Holland Christian schools he attended as a primary and high schooler, and for which his family also provided financial support. Prince’s deeply religious high school featured pages upon pages of Bible quotations and incantations throughout its yearbooks. One year, the third page of his yearbook intoned: “In God’s Kingdom all of life is living out the meaning of the New Humanity in Christ. This takes all the inventiveness, creativity and discovering that we can do.” Gary Bauer recognized the special bond between Edgar and Erik: “Erik Prince, Ed and Elsa’s only son, and one of FRC’s first college interns, certainly did know him well.”⁷⁴ In addition to his work with the Family Research Council, Erik spent his college years increasingly taking up his father’s mantle. He entered the Naval Academy after high school intending to be a Navy pilot but resigned after three semesters to attend Hillsdale College, a Michigan Christian liberal arts school that preaches libertarian economics. The campus was rated the most conservative in the country in a 2006 Princeton Review poll.

“He was a smart guy, and pleasant to be around, and he’s well spoken,” said Erik’s professor Gary Wolfram. “What’s good about him, he understands the interrelationship between markets and the political system.”⁷⁵ Prince also had a thirst for adrenaline-pumping action and initially satiated it by becoming the first college student to join the Hillsdale Volunteer Fire Department. “When you’ve been on a fire an hour and a half and the crowd’s gone, some of the guys want to sit on bumpers and have a soft drink,” recalled firefighter Kevin Pauken. “Other guys will be rolling hoses and picking up equipment so you can get out of there. That was Erik.”⁷⁶

As he grew older, Erik became increasingly active in right-wing politics, landing a six-month internship at George H. W. Bush’s White House. It was during this internship that the nineteen-year-old Prince made his first political contribution, giving $15,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Since then, Prince and his late wife, Joan, and current wife, Joanna, have given $244,800 in contributions to federal campaigns, not a dime of it to Democrats.⁷⁷ He has supported Jesse Helms, Ollie North, Richard Pombo, Spencer Abraham, Dick Chrysler, Rick Santorum, Tom Coburn, Tom DeLay, Jim DeMint, Mike Pence, Duncan Hunter, and others.⁷⁸ Prince also worked for a stint in the office of Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.⁷⁹ In 1992, he became enthralled with the renegade presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, who challenged President Bush for the GOP nomination, running on an extreme anti-immigrant, antiabortion, antigay platform. Erik Prince’s backing of Buchanan led the then twenty-two-year-old into a feud of his own with his sister Betsy, who was working for Bush’s reelection as chairwoman of a local Republican district. ⁸⁰ Erik and Edgar, however, didn’t seem to care for Bush. “I interned with the Bush administration for six months,” Erik told the Grand Rapids Press in 1992. “I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with—homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.”⁸¹

Erik began coordinating Buchanan’s campaign at Hillsdale, and Edgar contributed to it. But Erik’s foray into public politics would be short-lived. The next year, he went back into the military, joining SEAL Team 8 through Officer Candidate School in1992⁸² and starting down the path that would bring him to Moyock, North Carolina. It was during his four years with SEAL Team 8 in Norfolk, Virginia, that he met many of the people who would found Blackwater.⁸³ Erik seemed happy as a SEAL, and his family seemed proud to have him be one. “[Edgar] always wanted his children to do what they wanted to do, not just what he experienced,” Elsa Prince said months after her husband’s death. “He wanted them to go where their preferences and talents took them.”⁸⁴

But during the months after Edgar Prince’s death, the future of the Prince Corporation was anything but clear. More than four thousand employees depended on what had largely been the vision of Edgar Prince. The company and many in the family felt that only the Prince family itself could ensure that the reputation of Prince Corporation outlived its founder. Elsa became chairman of the company’s board, and Erik came home to help get the company’s affairs in order, and to help his family. His wife, Joan Nicole, had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Being a full-time SEAL was no longer an option.

But the young Prince would not become the king of Prince Corporation. On July 22, 1996, little more than a year after Edgar’s death, the family, after much deliberation and many suitors, agreed to sell the corporation to Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion in cash. They sold under the condition that the Prince name would remain, as would the employees and the community atmosphere they had long fostered. The bevy of stories in the local press took on that same enthusiasm, liberally quoting Elsa Prince gushing over the deal: “The Lord opened the right doors at the right time in an answer to our prayer. His timing is always perfect.”⁸⁵ Beyond that, Elsa said the buyout would enable her husband’s company to have “an influence well beyond the United States.”⁸⁶ A few years later, that influence could really be felt in Holland, as hundreds of jobs started migrating to Mexico.⁸⁷ Johnson Controls eventually stripped the name off the company and shuttered some of the local factories.⁸⁸

Though the influence of industrialist Edgar Prince has steadily receded in Holland, the religious beliefs and politics he promoted, as well as the downtown he created, continue to grow. When Edgar was alive, the Prince family largely shied away from overt political involvement, preferring to let its money do the talking. In the years after her husband’s death, Elsa Prince became notably outspoken on behalf of a number of right-wing political causes, including those favored by her late husband. In 2004 she was the single largest donor to the successful campaign to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan, kicking in $75,000 of her own money.⁸⁹ She served on the boards of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family and was active in the Council for National Policy and a host of other right-wing religious organizations.⁹⁰ “My main thrust is to do things that Jesus would want you to do to further your knowledge of him and his ways,” she told the Holland Sentinel in 2003.⁹¹ Edgar, Elsa, and her new husband, Ren, cumulatively donated nearly $556,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees,⁹² along with untold millions to right-wing causes. Along with the DeVos family, the Princes remain major players in the conservative Christian movement in Michigan and nationally. One of their recent hard-fought but unsuccessful battles was to implement school vouchers in Michigan. The DeVos family itself spent upwards of $3 million in 2000 pushing the perennial conservative education ideal.⁹³

Erik Prince adopted his father’s behind-the-scenes demeanor, as well as his passion for right-wing religious causes, but with a twist. “Erik is a Roman Catholic,” said author Robert Young Pelton, who has had rare access to Prince. “A lot of people brand him in his father’s religion, but he converted to Roman Catholicism.”⁹⁴ Indeed, many of the executives who would later form the core of Prince’s Blackwater empire are also Catholics, and when Prince’s first wife, Joan, died, Catholic Mass was celebrated for her both near her hometown outside Schenectady, New York, and near where the family lived in McLean, Virginia.⁹⁵ In 1997, Lt. Erik Prince, U.S. Navy SEAL, blurbed a book called Christian Fatherhood: The Eight Commitments of St. Joseph’s Covenant Keepers, saying that it “provides men with the basic training they need to complete (their) mission.”⁹⁶ At the time, Prince himself had two young children. The book’s author, Stephen Wood, is the founder of Family Life Center International, a Catholic apologist organization specializing in providing “moral media… geared toward deepening a family’s love and knowledge of their faith and thus hopes to impact today’s society. We place a special focus on fatherhood and providing resources which aid fathers in fulfilling their vocation.” The “moral media” include books with titles like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality and Breast Cancer and the Pill, among many others.

Taking a cue from his father’s funding of right-wing evangelical Protestant causes, Prince became a major funder of extremist, fringe Catholic organizations. In 1999 he contributed $25,000 to Catholic Answers, a San Diego-based Catholic evangelical organization founded by the Catholic fundamentalist Karl Keating. Keating dedicated his life to apologetics and defending Catholicism at all costs. During the 2004 and 2006 elections, the group promoted a “Voters Guide for Serious Catholics,” which listed five “non-negotiable” issues that it said are never morally acceptable under Catholic teaching: abortion, homosexual marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, and human cloning.⁹⁷ Issues that were identified as “Not Non-Negotiable” included “the questions of when to go to war and when to apply the death penalty.”⁹⁸ When Prince’s wife was dying of cancer, he e-mailed Keating, who in turn asked his followers to pray for the Princes.⁹⁹ The following year, Prince provided funding to the right-wing Catholic monthly magazine Crisis.¹⁰⁰ He also gave generously to several Michigan churches, including $50,000 to Holy Family Oratory, a Kalamazoo Catholic Church, and $100,000 to St. Isidore Catholic Church and school in Grand Rapids, as well as Catholic churches in Virginia.¹⁰¹

But Erik Prince’s philanthropy has certainly not been limited to Catholic causes. The Prince family was deeply involved in the secretive Council for National Policy, described by the New York Times as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country [which has] met behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference” three times a year “to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”¹⁰² The Council was started in 1981 by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, one of the founders of the modern right-wing Christian movement in the United States and author of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels.¹⁰³ The idea was to build a Christian conservative alternative to the Council on Foreign Relations, which LaHaye considered too liberal. CNP membership is kept secret, and members are instructed that “The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting.”¹⁰⁴ While membership lists are not public, CNP meetings have been attended by a host of conservative luminaries like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and Ralph Reed. Holland H. Coors of the beer dynasty and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, Richard and Dick DeVos, and the likes of Oliver North, Grover Norquist, and Frank Gaffney are also affiliated with CNP.¹⁰⁵ Guests are allowed to attend “only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee.”¹⁰⁶ George W. Bush addressed the group in 1999, seeking support for his bid for the presidency.¹⁰⁷

The group also has played host to powerful players in the Bush administration. Shortly after the Iraq invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attended CNP meetings; in 2004 John Bolton briefed the group on U.S. plans for Iran; John Ashcroft has attended meetings; as did Dan Senor, the top aide to Paul Bremer, the original head of the Iraq occupation.¹⁰⁸ Former House majority leader Tom DeLay and several other prominent Republican politicians have also attended meetings.¹⁰⁹ Then-Senate majority leader Bill Frist was given the CNP’s Thomas Jefferson Award. In his acceptance speech, he told the gathering, “The destiny of our nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement.”¹¹⁰ Edgar Prince served a stint as vice president of the CNP from 1988 to 1989 and was CNP vice president at the time of his death.¹¹¹ Elsa Prince was also a member of the organization. The DeVos family has donated at least $100,000 to the CNP, and the Princes gave at least $20,000 over a two-year period in the 1990s.¹¹² While the lack of public records on the group makes it impossible to confirm that Erik Prince is a member, as his father was, the younger Prince has donated money to the CNP¹¹³ and has close relationships with many of its key players.

Erik Prince’s philanthropy and politics have also put him in bed with some of the most controversial political figures in recent U.S. history. Prince’s Freiheit Foundation, which is German for “liberty,” gave $500,000 to the Prison Fellowship in 2000.¹¹⁴ The Fellowship is a so-called prison reform organization that, among other things, advocates for “faith-based prisons.”¹¹⁵ It is the brainchild of Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles Colson.¹¹⁶ In 1969, Colson was appointed Nixon’s Special Counsel; he was seen by many as the “evil genius” in the administration. ¹¹⁷ In 1971, Colson wrote what later became known as Nixon’s Enemies List, a catalogue of the President’s political opponents, who would be targeted by the White House.¹¹⁸ Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the break-in to the psychiatrist’s office of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.¹¹⁹ Colson also allegedly tried to hire Teamsters thugs to beat up antiwar demonstrators and plotted to raid or firebomb the Brookings Institution. ¹²⁰ Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison and after leaving wrote the bestseller Born Again about his conversion, the proceeds from which he used to found the Prison Fellowship.

As of late 2006, some 22,308 Fellowship volunteers operated in more than eighteen hundred U.S. prison facilities, while upwards of 120,000 prisoners participated in its monthly Bible study and seminar programs.¹²¹ It boasted of “ministries” in more than one hundred countries.¹²² Colson’s Fellowship has become so widespread that it actually runs the daily lives of some prisoners, including two hundred in a Texas prison, courtesy of one George W. Bush. “I’ll never forget this,” Bush said at the First White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. “When I was the Governor of Texas, one of the early initiatives in my governorship, one of the faith-based initiatives, was to turn over a part of the prison unit to a faith program, Chuck Colson’s program. He convinced me that this would be a great opportunity to change lives. And it would be—it would be better than stamping license plates.”¹²³ Bush, whose administration held Colson’s work up numerous times as evidence of successful “faith-based initiatives,” went on to tell the story of a prisoner “whose life was changed and saved because of faith.”¹²⁴ From the first week that Bush took office in 2001, Colson has been a regular adviser to the President. The Texas prison Colson ran was in Sugar Land¹²⁵—the district represented by then-majority leader Tom DeLay.

In 2002, Colson gave a speech at Calvin College about his Texas prison: “My friend Erik Prince, who is here tonight, traveled with me recently to a prison in Texas that has been under Prison Fellowship administration for the past eighteen months. This is an extraordinary program because it is not just that men are coming to Christ and being redeemed, as wonderful as that is. They are creating an entire culture!”¹²⁶ A similar program at an Iowa prison was found unconstitutional in June 2006 because it used state funding, a judge said, for the indoctrination of “inmates into the Evangelical Christian belief system.” Colson has vowed to appeal the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court. He has suggested that his faith-based prison program is “the one really successful antidote” to what he termed “the largely unimpeded spread of radical Islam through our prisons.”¹²⁷ Colson predicted, “If, God forbid, an attack by home-grown Islamist radicals occurs on American soil, many, if not most, of the perpetrators will have converted to Islam while in prison.”¹²⁸ He suggested that opponents of his Prison Fellowship program are abetting terrorism and said the efforts to declare his program unconstitutional “leaves jihadists and other radical groups as the only game in town.”¹²⁹ In October 2006, Colson was given the Faith & Freedom Award by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, ¹³⁰ an organization to which Prince has donated at least $200,000.¹³¹ The Grand Rapids-based organization has Prince’s stepfather, Ren Broekhuizen, on its board of directors, and its president and founder is the Rev. Robert Sirico, who presided over the funeral of Erik Prince’s first wife.¹³² “Islam has a monolithic worldview, which sees just one thing: the destruction of infidels and the recovery of territories they’ve lost,” Colson declared at the Acton dinner. “We’re in a hundred-year war and it’s time to sober up, and Christians understand it because we understand our history, and we understand what makes the religious mind tick, and secular America doesn’t get it.” Colson said when Mohammed wrote the Koran, “I think he’d had too many tamales the night before.”¹³³

A few years earlier, in the 2002 speech in which Colson praised Erik Prince, the former Watergate conspirator talked extensively about the historical foundation and current necessity of a political and religious alliance of Catholics and evangelicals. Colson talked about his work, beginning in the mid-1980s, with famed conservative evangelical Protestant minister turned Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.”¹³⁴ The ECT document articulated the vision that would animate Blackwater’s corporate strategy and the politics practiced by Erik Prince—a marriage of the historical authority of the Catholic Church with the grassroots appeal of the modern conservative U.S. evangelical movement, bolstered by the cooperation of largely secular and Jewish neoconservatives. Author Damon Linker, who once edited Neuhaus’s journal, First Things, termed this phenomenon the rise of the “Theocons.”¹³⁵

The ECT document became the manifesto of the movement that Erik Prince would soon serve and bankroll. It declared that “The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.”¹³⁶ The signatories called for a unification of these religions in a common missionary cause, that “all people will come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.”¹³⁷ The document recognized the separation of church and state but “just as strongly protest[ed] the distortion of that principle to mean the separation of religion from public life…. The argument, increasingly voiced in sectors of our political culture, that religion should be excluded from the public square must be recognized as an assault upon the most elementary principles of democratic governance.”¹³⁸ But the ECT was not merely a philosophical document. Rather, it envisioned an agenda that would almost identically mirror that of the Bush administration a few years later, when Neuhaus would serve as a close adviser to Bush, beginning with the 2000 campaign.¹³⁹

The signers of the ECT document asserted that religion is “privileged and foundational in our legal order” and spelled out the need to defend “the moral truths of our constitutional order.”¹⁴⁰ The document was most passionate in its opposition to abortion, calling abortion on demand “a massive attack on the dignity, rights, and needs of women. Abortion is the leading edge of an encroaching culture of death.” It also called for “moral education” in schools, advocating for educational institutions “that transmit to coming generations our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the formative influence of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity.”¹⁴¹ The document forcefully defended neoliberal economic policies. “We contend for a free society, including a vibrant market economy,” the signers asserted. “We affirm the importance of a free economy not only because it is more efficient but because it accords with a Christian understanding of human freedom. Economic freedom, while subject to grave abuse, makes possible the patterns of creativity, cooperation, and accountability that contribute to the common good.”¹⁴² It called for a “renewed appreciation of Western culture,” saying, “We are keenly aware of, and grateful for, the role of Christianity in shaping and sustaining the Western culture of which we are part.” “Multiculturalism,” the signers declared, has most commonly come to mean “affirming all cultures but our own.” Therefore, the ECT signers claimed Western culture as their “legacy” and set for themselves the task of transmitting it “as a gift to future generations.”¹⁴³

“Nearly two thousand years after it began, and nearly five hundred years after the divisions of the Reformation era, the Christian mission to the world is vibrantly alive and assertive. We do not know, we cannot know, what the Lord of history has in store for the Third Millennium. It may be the springtime of world missions and great Christian expansion,” the lengthy document concluded. “We do know that this is a time of opportunity—and, if of opportunity, then of responsibility—for Evangelicals and Catholics to be Christians together in a way that helps prepare the world for the coming of him to whom belongs the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”¹⁴⁴ In addition to Neuhaus and Colson, the document was endorsed by one of the most powerful mainstream Catholic leaders in the United States, John Cardinal O’Connor of New York, as well as the Rev. Pat Robertson and Michael Novak of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.¹⁴⁵ The manifesto was years in the making and would greatly assist the unifying of the conservative movement that made George W. Bush’s rise to power possible. The ECT signers, according to Damon Linker—who worked for Neuhaus for years—“had not only forged a historic theological and political alliance. They had also provided a vision of America’s religious and political future. It would be a religious future in which upholding theological orthodoxy and moral traditionalism overrode doctrinal disagreements. And it would be a political future in which the most orthodox and traditionalist Christians set the public tone and policy agenda for the nation.”¹⁴⁶

Six years later, with Bush—the theocons’ President—in the White House, Chuck Colson was in Michigan with his buddy Erik Prince at Calvin College talking about his faith-based prisons. During the lecture, Colson played to the largely Protestant crowd’s heritage as he advocated his theoconservative movement based on Catholic/Evangelical unity. Colson quoted a nineteenth-century Calvinist scholar who said, “Rome is not an antagonist but stands on our side, inasmuch as she also recognizes and then maintains the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the Cross as an atoning sacrifice, the Scriptures of the Word of God, and the Ten Commandments as a divinely imposed rule of life. Therefore, let me ask, if Roman Catholic theologians take up the sword to do valiant and skillful battle against the same tendency that we ourselves mean to fight to the death, is it not part of wisdom to accept their valuable help?”¹⁴⁷ Erik Prince has been in the thick of this right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war—with Blackwater serving as a sort of armed wing of the movement. As Prince himself once envisioned the role of his mercenaries, “Everybody carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.”¹⁴⁸

In addition to his support for extremist Catholic organizations, Prince has continued to contribute heavily to the evangelical Christian causes that his parents supported, including large donations to a slew of Protestant schools and colleges. Prince has also donated at least $200,000 to the Haggai Institute in Atlanta, Georgia (to go along with the hundreds of thousands more from the broader Prince family).¹⁴⁹ Haggai, one of the leading Christian missionary organizations in the world, boasts that it has “trained” more than sixty thousand evangelical “leaders” around the globe, with a concentration on poor or developing countries.¹⁵⁰ Prince has also served on the board of directors of and donated to Christian Freedom International, formerly Christian Solidarity International, a crusading missionary group active operating everywhere from Somalia to Sudan to Afghanistan and Iraq. Its mission statement reads: “More Christians have been martyred in the past 100 years than in all prior 1900 years combined. And the persecution of Christians is growing. Today more Christians are oppressed for their faith than ever. In many nations—right now—Christians are harassed, tortured, imprisoned, and even martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ.”¹⁵¹ Jim Jacobson, a former aide to Gary Bauer in Ronald Reagan’s White House, runs the group, which has taken public positions against the work of the United Nations, calling some of its agencies “merchants of misery,”¹⁵² and has protested that Iraqi self-determination could harm Christians.¹⁵³ In calling for the United States to attack Afghanistan after 9/11, Jacobson declared, “Only unequivocal military strikes will express our commitment to world peace and the rule of law.”¹⁵⁴ The board of directors included Blackwater lobbyist Paul Behrends, former Republican Senator Don Nickles, and former Voice of America director Robert Reilly, who began his career as a Reagan White House propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras and worked briefly for war contractor SAIC on its ill-fated attempt to create a new Iraqi information ministry.¹⁵⁵

In 2000 Erik Prince was on hand for a Michigan benefit to raise money for one of his family’s (and the theoconservative movement’s) pet causes—school vouchers. At the event, Prince spoke to the Wall Street Journal, saying both his family and the DeVos clan believe in conservative, Christian, free-market ideals, and that his beloved father’s business—the one responsible for building up Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council—“was an engine that generated cash that he could use to do good things.”¹⁵⁶ He said his sister Betsy was using those “same energies.”¹⁵⁷ By that time, the thirty-year-old Prince had his own small cash-generating engine, on the brink of becoming much, much bigger. While Erik continued the Prince family tradition of supporting the right-wing Christian movement, his Blackwater empire was steadily growing in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. How fast it would grow wouldn’t become clear until two planes smashed into the World Trade Center a year later, in a horrible tragedy that would fuel Erik Prince’s meteoric rise to become head of one of the most powerful private armies in the world. Prince would soon draw on his father’s ideals and money to build up an army of soldiers who would serve on the front lines of a global battle, waged largely on Muslim lands, that an evangelical President Prince helped put in the White House would boldly define as a “crusade.”¹⁵⁸