Special Report: Thugs in Uniform

Still on probation for two separate weapon and cocaine possession convictions in 1990, John Padilla, 20, was hired last July by the HSC Security company as a guard at Carle Place High School on New York’s Long Island. Now he is accused of firing 16 shots from a 9-mm gun, killing two young men and critically wounding three others as they sat in a parked Cadillac outside the school. HSC, which has since shut its operations, was required by law to submit Padilla’s fingerprints to the state within 24 hours. Instead, the company waited more than seven weeks. According to Padilla’s parents, their son is “mentally unstable.”

Members of his family say Michael Huston, 41, had been mentally disabled since the Vietnam War, which may explain why he blames “another person inside” him for setting a 1990 blaze that caused $25 million in damage to movie sets and property at Hollywood’s Universal Studios. In January, Huston admitted in a Los Angeles courtroom that he had tossed a cigarette lighter into a trash can full of papers at Universal, then reported the fire to a superior, apparently hoping to earn praise. Wearing the ubiquitous uniform of Burns International Security Services, the nation’s largest, Huston had been “guarding” the studio barely a month.

Marita Juse, 48, of Burbank, Calif., will be sentenced later this month for embezzling more than $1 million from Pinkerton’s, the oldest and second largest U.S. security firm. A fugitive on tax-fraud charges, Juse used an alias when Pinkerton’s accounting division hired her. Obtaining computer codes, she made wire transfers of cash from the company’s bank account. Juse faces up to 30 years in prison. Meanwhile, Pinkerton’s, the company that once stalked Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is pitching a job- applicant screening service to its clients, which include half the Fortune 500.

For companies that rely on the $15 billion security industry, “problems” like Padilla, Huston and Juse are all too common. While the majority of the estimated 1.1 million security guards in America do honest and capable work, a TIME investigation indicates that the industry, which has grown spectacularly in the past two decades, has become a virtual dumping ground for the unstable, the dishonest and the violent. Many use drugs or have criminal records. Many are hired off the street, given uniforms and assigned to posts within a day. The industry is fragmented, intensely competitive and unwilling to police itself adequately, yet it is governed by weak laws that are often ignored. Add mismanagement and inadequate pay to the mix, and crime thrives. “Our industry needs leadership,” says Robert McCrie, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “There’s a steady stream of horror stories.”

In 1971 a Rand Corp. report described the average security guard as an aging white male who was underscreened, undertrained, undersupervised, underpaid and underregulated. The only significant change in that profile, according to Hallcrest Systems of McLean, Va., which closely monitors the industry, is that today’s private guard is more likely to be much younger and black or Hispanic.

Few industries have expanded as rapidly. The number of security guards has grown since 1980 to nearly twice the size of the U.S. public law-enforcement community. Today there are 10,000 security companies in America, the vast majority operating on a shoestring and paying their guards $5 to $7 an hour. “The little mom-and-pops are often undercapitalized, cutting corners all over the place, opening and closing regularly under new names, even providing payoffs in exchange for work,” says Richard Rockwell, who runs Professional Security Bureau, a midsize guard company with offices stretching from Boston to Miami. Says industry consultant Francis Hamit: “Clients often don’t want to pay for training, and the security companies cannot really afford to. I’ve seen accounts lost to lowball bidders for 5 cents per man-hour.”

The industry’s largest companies all claim to screen and train their applicants rigorously. Yet just since last fall, guards for Burns, the industry leader, with more than $650 million in revenues, have been arrested for everything from setting fire to an abandoned building in Colorado (it took 42 fire fighters to put it out) to vacuuming thousands of dollars in change from public bus boxes in San Francisco, to stealing $13,000 in computer equipment from a client in Syracuse. After a five-month probe at New Jersey’s Meadowlands arena, a grand jury documented 20 cases in which Burns guards beat or otherwise abused patrons between 1987 and 1990. Burns has since been fired, and the grand jury has accused the arena’s management of a “gross error in judgment” for renewing a contract with the security firm in 1989.

A management-led leveraged buyout in 1987 by Borg-Warner has put tremendous pressure on Burns’ middle managers to produce revenue. Former employees say president Rodger Comstock’s intimidating management style and the firm’s alleged habit of breaking bonus promises have contributed to an exodus of managers, forcing Burns to recruit and train new ones, sometimes at the expense of clients’ needs.

“A guard service is really only as good as the supervision it provides,” says Michael Anesta, the director of personnel for Steinway & Sons, which stopped using Burns two years ago at its Queens, N.Y., piano-manufacturing plant. Former Burns official Gary Slodowski quit in 1990 after winning the company’s manager-of-the-year award. “With the LBO, the company started to deteriorate,” he says. “They’ve got away from the building blocks, such as service and visiting clients every day. Collecting cash became the main thing. With no one to pay attention to the other details, you’re going to have smoking guns like the Meadowlands.”

Such criticism is vigorously disputed by Charles Schneider, head of Borg- Warner’s Baker Industries, which controls Burns as well as fourth-ranked Wells Fargo. He calls Baker “the best security-guard company in the world.” Burns does provide high-quality service at roughly one-third of the nation’s – nuclear power plants, where government screening and training standards are extremely rigorous. But the company’s basic, lower-paid guard forces are another story.

A former Burns vice president says that when he quit in 1990, the firm was shooting for only “95% compliance” on its own internal screening rules, and that “this was broadly ignored, or only followed on a cursory basis.” Burns’ managers, for example, are required to mail three requests for written references for each guard applicant. “As long as you had copies of those requests in the file, no one cared whether you actually got them back,” he says. “It was documentation for the sake of compliance, as opposed to trying to really get at something.”

Van Nuys, Calif.-based Pinkerton’s (1991 revenues: $640 million) has also suffered from turnover and service problems following a leveraged merger four years ago with a firm called California Plant Protection (CPP). Mark Savage, a former award-winning Pinkerton’s manager, says he quit the company in 1990 in part because its management “was cutting corners and pushing people to their limits.” In terms of clients, he adds, “companies like Burns and Pinkerton’s always take for granted that they will lose business and that if they sell more than they lose, they’re still growing. They’re not as quality- conscious.”

Pinkerton’s has found it easier to grow by voraciously gobbling up smaller security firms — 14 in 1991 alone. But along the way, the company has also lost some big contracts. Wall Street’s Kidder, Peabody dropped the firm because “when Pinkerton’s was bought out by CPP, the service started falling apart,” says John Poppe, Kidder’s director of security. “There was constant turnover of guards.” In January, Smith Barney gave Pinkerton’s the pink slip as well. “Big security companies become apathetic,” complains an executive at the brokerage. “We’ve had guards who were unable to write, unable to answer phones.”

Pinkerton’s was involved in litigation in the 1980s that drove home the need for industry standards. A Pinkerton’s guard at Welsh Manufacturing, a former division of Textron in Rhode Island, admitted he took the job specifically to arrange the theft of gold he was supposed to be protecting. As a result, Welsh won punitive damages. The case, which led to an appellate decision in 1984, exposed Pinkerton’s inadequate screening and supervision of its employee. Management never bothered to contact any of the three character references the guard provided. And while Pinkerton’s contacted his former employers, it received no information on his honesty and trustworthiness.

A guard company’s failure to thoroughly screen applicants can often prove deadly. In the case of John Padilla (accused in the Carle Place killings), HSC Security was clearly not up to the task. Padilla actually tried to apply for a new job, with OCS Security, just two weeks before the Long Island bloodletting. “Obviously, it’s worth spending all the money we do on screening and training, because we nixed John right away,” says Brian Church, an official at OCS. “He was a job-jumper. He wasn’t an attractive job applicant. That’s probably the nicest way of putting it.” Moreover, Padilla was not licensed to carry a firearm.

Twenty years ago, according to the Rand report, half the nation’s private guards bore arms on the job. Today, 10% or fewer do so. But that still leaves 100,000 gun-toting guards — more than the combined police forces of the country’s 30 largest cities. Yet weapons training for this army is generally skimpy. A recent survey found that eight hours was about average, and that a large part of the training consists of the mechanics of shooting rather than preparation for the real-life situations guards are likely to encounter. The survey also found that 40% of armed guards claim to be self-taught in the use of their weapons.

While most national firms say they provide about eight hours of basic training (mostly showing films) for unarmed guards, Wackenhut, the third largest guard vendor, boasts that its minimum has been 16 hours since the 1970s. Yet two former executives who recently left the firm insist that the real figure was far lower. “Four hours was pretty much it,” says Frank Bisogno, who ran Wackenhut’s New York City office until he left in 1989. “If you were required by the customer, you would do more. But if the manager could avoid expending a nonbillable cost such as that, he would avoid it.”

Unfortunately, weak and piecemeal legislation enables many dubious practices to thrive. Only 17 states require guard companies to carry general liability insurance, and only 14 require any training for unarmed guards. Eighteen states have absolutely no training requirements — even for those who carry guns — and an astonishing 18 states allow convicted felons to be hired.

Some states restrict the access of guard companies to official criminal records, while others require fingerprint checks. In California nearly 20% of ! the applications for guard licenses are rejected each year because checks disclose prior criminal convictions. Yet even that kind of screening helps only to a degree. A 1989 study by the New York State Senate Committee on Crime and Correction found that 16% of guards were still hired despite such criminal backgrounds.

One key reason for the abundance of uniformed thugs is the inexcusable length of time it takes most states to check the fingerprints and report back to the security firms. Arizona and Arkansas, for example, can tell a company in less than two weeks whether it has just hired a Hillside Strangler (who, incidentally, worked for several private security firms after he had been rejected by some police departments). In Alaska and Oklahoma it can take six months for the same information. In states that do not scan the FBI’s national data bank, such as New York, it is impossible to know whether a guard applicant committed a crime elsewhere.

To eliminate long lag times, some of the industry’s better citizens are calling for direct access to FBI data banks. One major hurdle: California Congressman Don Edwards, the tough chairman of the House Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee (and a former FBI agent himself), who vigorously opposes such access on privacy grounds. “It’s a Catch-22,” argues a top industry lawyer, Clifford Ingber. “Security is either going to be a meaningless service, or you have got to give companies greater latitude, as you do law enforcement, to allow them to screen their people.”

Outspoken in his efforts to win information sharing from the Federal Government is Ira Lipman, president of Memphis-based Guardsmark, which many security experts consider the best national firm in the business. While the industry’s trade group, the Committee of National Security Companies (CONSCO), supports Lipman’s call for access, some of his competitors have effectively blocked legislation that might upgrade overall industry standards but would also increase costs and thus threaten profits. A bill they especially detest, recently introduced by Tennessee Senator Albert Gore Jr., would require minimum levels of screening and training for all guards hired by the Federal Government, as well as criminal-records checks and psychological testing. “Why the hell do we need the Federal Government in here?” explodes Pinkerton’s president Albert Berger. “It’s an invasion of what the states should be doing. Just because Lipman ((like Gore)) is in Tennessee ((the state Gore represents)) is the only reason why the bill exists.”

In New York, where even beauticians and real estate brokers are licensed, more than a dozen bills have been floated since 1976 to license or regulate security guards. Industry lobbyists helped kill them all. Last year the industry finally supported a watered-down bill, which died amid political infighting over how to spend the measly $3 million raised from application fees. “The reason there’s been no legislation is that no one’s been willing to continually fight for it,” says state senator Christopher Mega, the bill’s sponsor. “If they ((CONSCO)) are not easy to get along with, that’s their problem. It’s going to have to be done. It’s 15 years overdue.”

The disturbing aspect of the uneven regulation and management of the industry is the rate at which private firms are taking over responsibilities once assigned to police forces — ambulance services, parking regulations, neighborhood patrols, even background investigations for federal job applicants. In Kansas City the chief of police says he would like to contract with private firms to perform 22 tasks currently being done by the cops — at an estimated 37% savings in cost. These tasks include transporting prisoners, assisting stranded motorists and guarding crime scenes. Similarly, to save money, armed Wackenhut guards have replaced sheriff’s deputies on commuter trains in Miami and Palm Beach, Fla.

The risks in this trend are considerable: unlike sworn officers, most security guards are not required to inform suspects of their Miranda rights or to obey the Fourth Amendment’s restraint on searches. Moreover, the trend toward privatization raises important public-policy issues. “What ever happened to equal protection for all?” asks Harvard criminologist Mark Moore. “If public policing can be bought, then the rich will receive more than the poor. In the end, the public force will erode into a poor people’s force.” And unless the industry cleans up its own procedures, even rich clients may find themselves the victims of those they have hired to protect them.