1 2
VIPs
P ost Cadogan, I took a bit of time out. My brain was totally mashed because of what had happened in Somaliland. I'd seen another great opportunity wasted because I didn't have total control over what was going on. It wasn't that I thought that I was always right, that I was the all-singing, all-dancing know-it-all about security; I don't, and never would, say that. But there are certain things in life where you instinctively know what is the right way to do things and what is the wrong way. I was no different from any other professional person who had been taught by the best in their particular field.
So, in order to control my own destiny and to put into practice what I thought to be the best way, I set up on my own. With the money earned from the Somaliland job I set up shop in a small office in Curzon Street. Although the rates were pretty high, this being Mayfair, I was right in the centre of prospective clients who might need my skills the most, and who could pay for them.
My main strategy was to pursue the annual Arab family bodyguarding contracts. These amazingly wealthy people lived out of the big London hotels, such as the Intercontinental, the Hilton, the Mayfair and the Dorchester, for weeks on end during the summer months. That was where the money was, so that was where I pitched.
During the first weeks, I worked all hours getting my name around the circuit and establishing my credibility as an operator. Some nights I would catch the train back to my brother's house in North London, but most of the time I slept in the office. It wasn't the most comfortable of options, but then again, my life has never really been that cut and dried.
My first big break came when I was working on the security team for Prince Khalid, commander of the Arab forces during the Gulf War. He had recently rented, on a five-year lease, a large Georgian mansion in a very select area of London. It was rumoured to belong to the Queen Mother.
The BG team who went with him all over the world were all ex-US Secret Service or Special Forces guys, and good to work with. It was during their first trip over that the team leader asked if I could take on the static security of the house whilst they were away, and when the Prince came to visit, would I supply the extra qualified bodyguards, so his men could get a rest. This was to happen at least twice a year, for about four weeks each visit. Of course I could! It was the break I'd been looking for.
The Prince was an OK guy. He didn't say much but because of his military background he knew the score about security and looked after his bodyguards. It was the first time I'd experienced the vast wealth such people possess. This mansion cost several thousand pounds a day to rent, on a minimum five-year lease. That didn't include the security, the live-in butler and the house maid. On his first visit he had plans drawn up for a £20 million refit of the inside. The outside, as you would expect, was listed and couldn't be altered. It was certainly a good contract while it lasted.
As in a lot of these jobs, when your point of contact (in my case the Prince's head BG) changes, so do the people below him — as they say, a new brush sweeps clean — so my team of guys were replaced and the contract was then run in-house by the new operator. I wasn't too concerned at the time, since I had had a good few months and had earned well from it.
A year later, in 1995, I was working for his elder brother, the three ic of Saudi Arabia. I was part of a six-man team for his seven-week summer trip, working and living out of the Hyde Park Hotel, Kensington (as it then was — now it's called the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park). I really enjoyed working for the man. He was polite and never gave us any security problems.
By contrast, there are some clients who would just leave their room without warning, so the corridor security man would have to radio through quickly to the BG team. Then half of the team would crash down the corridor to pick up the client, whilst the other half would be running around the hotel securing the lifts on room level and ground level, calling up the drivers to get ready for a pick-up. Sometimes it would transpire that the client might only be going down to the hotel restaurant, so the BG tactics had to be changed, and the drivers stood down and someone then had to secure the restaurant. The usual form was that half the team got split, since most of the time orders sent by the BG via his radio transmissions as he descended in the lift came through broken up. With a good team you could usually pre-empt the client's move, but even so, it was always prone to a cock up or two.
However, we had no problems like that with this Prince. He would always tell us well in advance when and where he was going — not that he went anywhere much, but it was nice to give the team a bit of warning beforehand. When he did go out it was generally out for a walk in Hyde Park or to a high-class Lebanese restaurant. He never went shopping, never met with people outside the hotel. If people wanted to meet with him, they had to make an appointment through the Saudi Embassy and visit him in one of the rooms on the fourth floor of the hotel, which he took over for the duration of the seven-week stay.
To give you some idea of the wealth these people have, he spent over a million pounds just on the rooms and service alone. That's wealth! One of his small daily expenses was this. The Hyde Park Hotel's original front entrance was, in fact, its back, which faced onto the park. To have access in and out of the hotel's park side (commonly known as the Queen's Entrance) it cost £800 a day — just to have that door kept open. Another fascinating thing: every day, ten or so boxes of dates would be flown from his own date farm in Saudi. They were the best dates I've ever tasted, really sweet and gooey. I ate a ton of them on that job.
One day when I was stagging on in the corridor, the Prince's personal BG, a colonel in the Saudi Armed Forces, approached me in a slightly uneasy way, which struck me as odd since he was usually pretty up-front, with a do-as-I-tell-you attitude.
'Hello, Mr Steve. Please, I have a request.'
'Hello, Colonel'
'Mr Steve, the Prince wants two gazelles.'
'Two gazelles!' I stepped back in amazement.
What would the Prince want with two gazelles? Was he going to keep them as pets and fly them back with him to Saudi, to leap about in the desert with his camels? I didn't know.
'There is a party tonight and the Prince requires them for his guests.'
'Oh, OK, Colonel, now I understand — he wants to eat them.'
The Colonel looked at me, as if to say, What else would the Prince do with them, you stupid security man?
'Yes, there is to be a party tonight in the Royal Suite.'
'Leave it with me, sir, I've got a contact, I'm sure he'll help us out.'
This, of course, was complete bullshit on my part. I had trouble trying to hold back my laughter. I didn't have a clue what a gazelle actually looked like. Still, I'd have a go. I had no idea where to start but then I remembered a posh butcher's down on Mount Street which always had fancy game hanging in its window. They said that they were fresh out of gazelle that morning (I got the feeling that that they were taking the piss in a friendly sort of way) but they did put me on to a farm in Scotland. The long and short of it was within four hours the Prince's personal chef was preparing two juicy gazelles in the kitchens of the hotel.
After the party (it was six o'clock in the morning when the last guest left) the team was given the pick of the leftovers. Now that might come across as though we got the scraps, but that's not the case. It's a traditional Arab custom always to cook more than enough, so for ten guests they would sometimes cook as though for a party of 40. This derives from when they were Bedouin, living in the desert. Because they wouldn't see people for days, sometimes weeks, at a time, when a lone traveller did pass by, the host would cook a huge meal and the guest would stay for a couple of days to pig out on goat and rice. The amount of food served was generally an indication of the host's wealth. Well! For breakfast that morning I had my first taste of gazelle and a couple of sheep's testicles, washed down with Arabic coffee — a bit different from a 'Greasy Joe's' I know, but it had to be done!
As I said, in general, the job was problem
-free. There were no incidents and no attempted breaches of security. All in all, a good job which tipped extraordinarily well.
One morning the Prince got up and wanted to go for a picnic. He didn't know where , but he wanted to go for an hour's drive out of London, and he wanted to picnic in a park by a river. That was our brief. We assisted the Saudis in organising everything, from selecting the picnic location to sorting the food and the extra transport needed. He wanted a couple of special coaches for himself and his entourage. One guy on the team had a contact with a London coach company and got their best coach sent to the hotel, but when it arrived the Prince's aide-de-camp said that it wasn't good enough. I couldn't see the problem — it was the poshest coach I'd ever seen. It had everything: three TVs, videos, telephones, a fridge and freezer; and was fitted thoughout with leather and deep-pile carpet. It was the bollocks of a vehicle, but it didn't have a half-moon sofa on which the Prince could hold court, so it had to be sent back. The only coach then in the UK which met the Prince's specs was up in Birmingham, of all places. An amount of cash was agreed and the coach was driven down in time for the entourage's departure.
The chosen picnic site was a park not far outside London. We arrived just as the park was closing and it was getting dark. A £200 tip to the keeper was enough to keep the gates closed with us inside. The Prince ordered the vehicles, eight in all, to form a circle facing in and, with the aid of dipped headlights, the Prince and his party started to eat. The spread was typically Arabic, a huge carpet was thrown on the grass with everyone sitting cross-legged on it. The scoff was all piled up in the middle: the best cuts of lamb, China's rice ration for a day, lots of fresh salad and fruit and a ton of dates. Without any warning, the Prince called us over to come and join him, but we had to decline his invitation, we were after all his BGs, there to do a job. Then, in a calm and official tone, he demanded we join him, so who were we to object? Six of us sat down with the three ic of Saudi Arabia in a park on the outskirts of London whilst his own Saudi bodyguards stagged on.
A couple of summers ago I ran the BG contract for the Royal Family of Qatar during their stay in London. They were a bit late in arriving for various reasons. They'd decided to spend three extra weeks in Switzerland, and during this time a power struggle took place between the 'old man', who was out of the country, and his eldest son. Calling it a bloodless coup would have been too strong a word for it. However, the family flew to London nonetheless.
Unlike in our Western culture, Arab men are allowed more than one wife, and my client had three of them — though only two arrived on this trip. It was the general rule that they stayed in different hotels, out of sight of each other; watch out if ever the twain should meet, and all that. The split was between two local hotels, the Intercontinental Hotel on Park Lane and the Mayfair Hotel just around the corner, off Berkeley Square.
Because of this situation I divided the team of 12 BGs, six with me on the younger wife staying at the Mayfair, six with the First Wife. We also had four corridor men stagging on at the two locations, two on during the day, two at night. This gave us the ability to sanitise the floors which the family took over in the two hotels.
The BG team also stayed in the hotels and on the same floor, to be in a position to react, should an incident occur. We put a 24-hour cover on both wives for the duration of their trip, which was to last several weeks. Only rarely did I give them time off. It's expected on these types of jobs in order to keep the continuity of the team and not to give the 'principals' (the common name for the people BGs look after) an added cause for concern by having them see different faces every time they went walkabout.
Because of UK gun laws we weren't allowed to carry guns, and this applied to any other form of weapon: knives, stun guns or telescopic truncheons, for example. The only specialist pieces of kit we carried or legally had access to were our personal radios, explosive sniffers and metal detectors, the last two for use by the corridor men. No one — principal's guests, members of the entourage, not even the staff of the hotel — was allowed to enter our floor unless cleared through the corridor men first. Certainly no letters, packages or food entered the principal's room unless it had been given the once-over. That was usual SOPs.
We developed our own radio procedure and code names for every entrance, exit, bar, room and restaurant, and for every eventuality. We closed down all routes in and out of the floor, including dividing doors and service lifts. The fire escapes were the only exits we had to be aware of. Since we weren't allowed to seal them, for obvious reasons, we somehow had to cover them with the corridor men. The idea was to deny access to anyone who wasn't supposed to be on the floor but, in the same breath, not piss off the principal's daily routine with her own people and, more importantly, not interfere with the smooth running of the hotel and its staff. When working in a hotel environment, hearts and minds are a big part of the bodyguard's role. And just as the BG team was on standby 24 hours a day, the drivers of our four stretched Mercs, plus those of the backup vehicles, had to be as well, and were briefed about keeping a 24-hour watch on their vehicles.
One particular incident happened at the Hyde Park Hotel I mentioned earlier, but with a different client, a Yemeni businessman who thought he owed someone some money. That was the brief I got from my contact, but even when I pushed for a bit more info he wouldn't elaborate. We had to take the threat factor as fucking high, so a team of four guys was soon living in the hotel and working around the clock. The client was picking up the bill for everything, and that included three meals a day and as much tea, coffee and mineral water we could drink. Problem was, he had forgotten to organise the laundry. Just with the tea and coffee business, four guys lazing and standing about 24 hours day can easily rake up a bill of over £200, just for room service, so the usual form is for the team to chip in, buy a kettle and some brew kit, and brew up in our ops room (normally my bedroom) to save the client a couple of thousand. On this occasion, though, the client didn't want this to happen, for whatever reason. Now, because he was a very busy man and he was financially looking after us big style, I could hardly go up to him and say, 'Hey boss, the guys love the £250-a-night rooms, and have you eaten at Marco Polos yet? The steak is well tasty! But we got a problem — you haven't paid for our suits and shirts to be laundered!'
That would have gone down like a death at a birthday party. So I set up an arrangement with the in-house laundry man myself. He would do all our laundry for a 'ton' a week. Now that was a good deal. Everything came back just as clean, crisp, fresh and neatly individually packaged as they would have done if we were paying guests. But, of course, one guy had to rip the arse out of it. Unbeknownst to me and the other two guys, on his day off, he decided to bring in all his clobber and dump it on our laundry man — four binliners full! It was, of course, duly laundered and returned, but this time he had his own bill. He tried to back track and made the usual excuses: 'I thought it was OK.'
What a twat. Some guys just can't stop themselves from taking the piss out of a nice little arrangement. When he finally parted with six crisp nifties I kicked him off the job and then went to do some damage limitation and a hearts-and-minds job on the laundry chap. Though I won him over, things weren't the same, but he finally came around after the job when we invited him and a few of the hotel staff (the security people, the room service and floor staff) out for a drink to say thanks for their help. No doubt one of us might be staying in that hotel again in a couple of months' time. Doing little things like that goes a long way towards making the job run smoothly and thus giving you street cred with your client or principal.
As I've said before, you rarely ever get the true story of why someone like this requires such a level of protection; it's the nature of the game. On this occasion the job came to an abrupt end when the client simply came up to me a fortnight into it and said that he had 'sorted out his business, thank you very much, it was nice knowing you, you and your men did a great job'. Fundamentally, 'Thank you and goodbye.' Th
at's how a lot of these jobs finish. If you're lucky you may get 24-hours' notice. It's not an industry in which you can plan long term, that's for sure.
Contrary to popular belief, being a bodyguard in London is not as risky as it may seem. Certainly, crime in the West End (an area which we rarely worked outside) is pretty high, but the threat of our principal being taken out, or snatched by a terrorist organisation or a grudge merchant, was relatively low. Our main concerns were the tosspots, scumbags and wankers cutting about the streets, who all of us have to put up with in everyday life.
I've been involved in many an incident caused by these types. It's a big problem for the BG in London, especially when working with the Arabs. Every second I'm out with the principal I'm always waiting for that lone gunman, the 'shoot past' by a guy on a motor-bike, or the closet terrorist dressed up with a full-face veil to let rip — but, in reality, it's always the twat with a can full of extra-strength lager in his hand or some street vendor who makes a scene. They're probably quite innocent and mean no harm, but for some reason I just happen to attract these sorts.
I could be walking unobtrusively down Regent Street with my principal (no point in playing the big hard man, that's not doing the job; if you do, you're asking for someone to take a pop at you) when someone like the relentless beggar out of The Life of Brian tries to get in between us, or worse, tries to touch the principal, in a vain hope that they might be handed a slack handful of pound coins. The pavements are usually crowded as it is and I and my team have enough problems trying to assess the threat situation, and work out what shop the principal is heading towards, without these added interruptions.
It takes a very good BG with quite a few jobs under his or her belt to sense and disarm a situation like this. You have to turn it on its head. You don't say anything in front of the client, or anything which he or she may hear. Your job is to let them get on with whatever they want to do, without them feeling they're being BG'd. You speak only when you're spoken to, and never chew the fat with them. Arabs can be very strange people, they have different mannerisms and ways of doing things and addressing each other, sometimes in a tone that comes across as rather offensive to Westerners. Trying to get close to a principal to gain some 'brownie points' is not professional and generally gets you kicked off the job. If you're the chatty type, the BG game is not for you — trust me.
No Fear Page 23
