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 Amer-
ican operation, headquartered in Jupiter, Florida, has
collected billions of dollars in private and public con-
tracts to guard hospitals and banks, airports and gated
communities. G4S guards drive prisoner transport
vans and stand watch over sports fans, college stu-
dents and grocery shoppers.
But the company’s efforts to penetrate the U.S. mar-
ket with low-cost protection has repeatedly come at
the expense of its own hiring and training standards.
G4S has sometimes given power, authority and weap-
ons 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 em-
ployees 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 Amer-
ican 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 warn-
ing 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 coun-
try 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 su-
pervisor instructing her, in testimony that was unre-
lated to her central complaint. “’If they don’t fit the cri-
teria, 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 compa-
ny armed a 25-year-old in Colorado with a document-
ed 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 dis-
covered 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 of-
fices Mayo was guarding, renewed its deal with G4S.
“Citi took appropriate action,” Drew Benson, a com-
pany spokesman, said in a statement. “The third-par-
ty 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 ignor-
ing warning signs before he attacked her. The compa-
nies denied the allegations and eventually settled for
an undisclosed amount.
In a series of written statements, G4S spokeswom-
an Sabrina Rios said the company enforces strict pol-
icies 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 screen-
ing procedures.
“Like all large employers,” Rios said in her state-
ment, “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, in-
cluding domestic violence injunctions, arrests and po-
lice 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 sev-
eral subsidiaries plagued by reports of abuse and
misconduct, including juvenile detention centers. Its
two biggest competitors – Allied Universal and Secur-
itas – have in recent years exceeded G4S’ overall em-
ployee 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 re-
viewed. Just this month, the company posted an ad-
vertisement to hire armed guards in South Carolina
who would be paid a minimum of $9.25 an hour.
Supervisors have employed people without re-
quired 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 checkG4S grew into a global force that would help re-
shape 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 Corpo-
ration, a security firm founded in the 1950s by former
FBI agents. It inherited Wackenhut’s lucrative govern-
ment 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 effi-
cient by embracing privatization. And private busi-
nesses 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 busi-
ness 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 En-
forcement Administration and Internal Revenue Ser-
vice. Immigration and Customs Enforcement current-
ly 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 in-
dustrywide trend of consolidation and scale. The
handful of massive corporations dominating the in-
dustry prioritize landing as many contracts as possible
“when they should be focused on customers and em-
ploying people adequately prepared to handle emer-
gencies,” Conley said.
But state regulatory agencies tasked with oversee-
ing G4S operations has not forced the company to
make significant adjustments, even in the wake of se-
rious 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 grow-
ing business.
For example, in 2013, New York regulators proposed
a $117,500 penalty against G4S for nearly 400 viola-
tions 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.Show of force
Continued from Page 1A
A janitor who accused G4S guard Philip Mayo of attacking her gave police a detailed written account
of what happened, including how he had threatened her on a previous occasion. When he attacked
her, she said she tried to run. But Mayo was too big. It wasn’t until another security guard came
knocking that he let her go.Kimberly Horton, an operations manager in Louisiana, testified in a 2016 lawsuit that G4S pushed her
to quickly hire guards regardless of their qualifications.A G4S guard stands in his post at the entrance to a
gated community in Miami.JASPER COLT/USA TODAYNumber of G4S employees
worldwideSOURCE G4S annual reports
RAMON PADILLA/USA TODAY0100,2001 2010 2019200,300,400,500,600,700,
546,See G4S, Page 3A2A z FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2019z USA TODAY NEWS
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