One company just forced the state of Illinois to fork over $1.3 million for a detention center it never built, and boasts an armored car subsidiary that “lost track of” tens of millions of dollars in cash belonging to banks, businesses, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another recently won a $70 million contract from the state of Oregon to remove dead trees to mitigate wildfire risk—then ordered contractors to indiscriminately chop down tens of thousands of healthy trees. A third has been sued in Florida for allegedly orchestrating a sprawling insurance fraud ring that ended up screwing over hundreds of Hurricane Ida victims, stiffing the claim adjustors they hired, then suing its conspirator law firm for failing to make good on the 582 percent annualized return its partners had allegedly promised.
Still a fourth built a $22 million COVID-19 field hospital in New York that never ended up treating any patients because Andrew Cuomo thought nursing home residents could use some company and sent all the COVID patients to long-term care facilities—though, to be fair, a lot of stuff like that happened during the pandemic.
I speak of course of the bastions of free enterprise that converged upon a wildlife preserve south of Miami last month to build, in the miraculous space of eight days, a 3,000-bed nylon and barbed wire concentration camp for abusing and humiliating random people dragged from strip mall parking lots and park benches and tow yards. The air conditioners shut off chronically, but the interrogation lights never do; the floor is flooded with human waste from overflowing toilets; and the price tag now exceeding $600 million means there’s room for all the grifters to get a piece.
“It’s monumental, the wealth creation that’s being done,” Stephan Crétier, the billionaire founder and CEO of the Canadian security and surveillance conglomerate GardaWorld, gushed to Bloomberg from his home base in Dubai. Crétier wasn’t referencing the Alligator Alcatraz prison camp, which was likely just a footnote in Stephen Miller’s fascist run of show when he gave the interview back in November. But then again maybe he was; his company is staffing the camp now, after all. Like the journalist and critic Naomi Klein, Crétier and GardaWorld were born in Montreal, and reading about the company’s ascent into the world’s largest private security firm can give one the queasy suspicion he read Klein’s 2007 odyssey The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism as a “get rich quick” guide.
Eighteen years ago, The Shock Doctrine used the adventures of Blackwater during Hurricane Katrina to show how natural-disaster response across the globe was rapidly becoming carceralized, for ideological reasons and due to the overall post–Cold War slide into kleptocracy. Some of the contractors involved in Alligator Alcatraz have their roots in security: Crétier launched GardaWorld with a handful of friends from Montreal law enforcement. Others, like Miami’s CDR Maguire, Toronto’s Access Restoration Services (ARS), and Galveston, Texas’s SLSCO got their starts in disaster response, then moved into more punitive industries. But for most companies in the emergency response business these days, the distinctions between providing emergency assistance and intimidating/terrorizing the victims of said emergency have blurred.
The distinctions between providing emergency assistance and intimidating/terrorizing the victims of said emergency have blurred.
SLSCO got its start cleaning up flood and hurricane damage and later won more than $1 billion in contracts to erect and maintain the Texas border wall, which the company then staffed with armed security guards they illegally smuggled in from Mexico on a special pathway they built to breach the wall that was supposed to be “impenetrable,” according to a whistleblower lawsuit in which the Trump Justice Department declined to intervene; the case was settled out of court the following month. SLSCO also built the doomed field hospital in New York, and at Alligator Alcatraz it engaged in construction. ARS is a spin-off of a Toronto construction firm known for restoring homes damaged in hurricanes and fires, but it just nabbed $5.1 million in Alligator Alcatraz contracts to provide “armory systems” and “air operations” to the concentration camp (on top of a $19.6 million contract it obtained last month to send planes to Israel to evacuate hundreds of Floridians who got stuck there during the 12-day war with Iran).
By far, the most traditional, dyed-in-the-wool government contractor involved in Alligator Alcatraz is the CDR group of companies, whose founder Carlos Duart and his wife, both second-generation Cuban Americans affiliated with ardently free-market think tanks, have given nearly $2 million to campaign slush funds supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Florida Republicans and are regulars at charity balls and society events of that nature. CDR is an outgrowth of Duart’s eponymous Miami construction company that diversified into federal project management after the real estate crash of the early Obama years. During the pandemic, it administered tens of thousands of vaccines, and nowadays its most booming business seems to be disaster relief, but it also has a division that provides health care to prisons in three states, which is the one that nabbed the contract at Alligator Alcatraz.
In 2020, the company was hired to clear dead trees after two virulent wildfires burned through more than a million acres of northern Oregon, but CDR, eager to bill as quickly and liberally as possible, constantly expanded the “scope” of damage that warranted removal, and ultimately ordered unqualified, drug-using contractors to mow down tens of thousands of perfectly healthy trees, according to whistleblowers who testified before the Oregon state Senate. CDR, for its part, claims it was the target of a “misinformation” campaign drummed up by a Eugene environmental nonprofit, that it only removed trees that presented a fire hazard, and that it maintains a zero-drug-use policy. It was the only Alligator Alcatraz contractor that returned calls from the Prospect, though a spokesman apologetically said the state emergency services department had warned all contractors not to speak to the press.
It is probably safe to say competence isn’t the core competency of any of the contractors involved in the Florida concentration camp. ARS, the company providing “air operations” to the gulag, has been sued by roughly a dozen former employees who say the company’s owners Giuseppe and Domenico Gagliano used them as pawns in an audacious scheme to file hundreds of vastly inflated Louisiana hurricane damage claims against insurance companies, then refused to pay them for all the hours they worked. Before that, ARS had come under fire for littering immigrant assistance centers with glossy brochures promising bus tickets and relocation assistance to any migrant willing to supply ARS with an unusual amount of data and documentation on their situations.
GardaWorld has rolled up more than a dozen smaller companies with the help of junk debt and private equity backers over the past 20 years, but its decision in 2005 to diversify into the armored cash transport business dominated by Brinks courted disaster. Crétier spent nearly $400 million to acquire a family-owned Brinks competitor in California, and spent the next decade or so attempting to emerge from the balance-sheet hole while displaying a knack for losing track of customers’ cash on a scale that calls to mind Iraq reconstruction under L. Paul Bremer. In 2007, the company even lacked the cash—or the insurance policy—to pay off the kidnappers of four of its U.K.-born bodyguards who’d been taken hostage in Iraq by Iraqi police officers who belonged to an insurgent militia; they all died in a botched escape attempt even as GardaWorld continued to charge USAID $4,000 a day for their “services.”
A month or two after the kidnapping, Crétier allegedly threatened to have the company’s mercenaries assassinate the family of any executive who disclosed the company’s financial problems to outsiders. In a 2018 whistleblower complaint, a former executive of the cash transport business accused the company of hiring novice drivers, who often lacked valid driver’s licenses and were involved in an average of 100 collisions per month, to transport large sums of cash that often just went missing, then lying to customers (including the Federal Reserve) about how much cash they had on hand. “On a daily basis, Garda ‘robs’ Peter to pay Paul,” the complaint alleged. “Because not every customer will ever audit at the same time, Garda has been able to pull off the ‘perfect bank robbery’ and do so on a continuous basis.”
But Garda by that point had moved its headquarters to Boca Raton in a successful bid to ingratiate the company to then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott, and the Trump Justice Department declined to intervene in the case. In 2022, Cretier’s high-net-worth “private CIA” business Crisis24 inked a joint venture with Palantir; last year, he bought back a majority stake in GardaWorld from his old private equity backers in a transaction that somehow made him Canada’s newest billionaire. Hilariously, a prominent Canadian conservative earlier this year wrote a newspaper column advising the next prime minister to “emulate Trump and appoint a prominent CEO like Elon Musk—perhaps Garda World’s highly successful Stephan Crétier—to advise on inefficiency and waste in government.”
The forecasters of such things predicted last winter that “emergency management” will be nearly a trillion-dollar sector of the economy by 2030. And that was before Trump declared eight new national emergencies during his first week in office, then went about variously nuking and systematically dismantling every federal agency equipped to respond to emergencies. Disaster capitalism’s windfall could come a year or two early, so don’t let this lesson escape you. Those who fail to procure a no-bid contract to build the next concentration camp may be condemned to live in it. Or as Crétier himself put it in 2020: “I see the world in a very predatorial way. You’re either on the menu or you’re looking in the menu.”