Erik Prince shuns publicity

RALEIGH, N.C. – Since founding Blackwater USA a decade ago, Erik Prince has gone to great lengths to avoid attention, trying to prevent photographers from taking his picture and demanding that his contractors never speak with reporters.

The former Navy SEAL, a 38-year-old native of Holland, Mich., started Blackwater with a few commando buddies from the Navy, using millions of dollars he inherited from his family’s auto-parts fortune. For its headquarters, he chose a tiny community called Moyock, on a remote, empty stretch of North Carolina swampland.

A year after leaving the Navy in 1996, he founded Blackwater primarily as a training center for law enforcement.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Blackwater expanded to become the largest of the State Department’s three private security contractors. Since 2001, it has earned more than $1 billion in federal contracts.

The company first drew public attention in 2004, after four Blackwater contractors were killed while escorting a convoy through the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Photographs of the men’s mutilated bodies hanging from a bridge remain an indelible image of the war.

When in public, Prince often uses his hand to shield his face from cameras. Former and current colleagues demur when asked about him, not willing to betray Prince’s loyalty or annoy the secretive leader of the nation’s best-known private security company.

Prince’s family has long-standing ties to the GOP in Michigan, where his sister, Betsy DeVos, once served as chair of the state Republican Party, and her husband, Dick DeVos, unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2006.

Prince, who lives outside Washington, himself has given more than $200,000 to Republican causes since 1998.