G4S Secure Solutions
 G4S Secure Solutions      | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Predecessor | • Wackenhut • Group 4 • Falck • Group 4 Falck |
| Parent organization | G4S, Group 4 Falck |
| Headquarters | London, Uk, Florida, United States |
| Membership | • John Connolly • Ashley Almanza • Michel van der Bel • Clare Chapman • Elisabeth Fleuriot • Adine Grate • Steve Mogford • John Ramsay • Barbara Thoralfsson • Tim Weller |
G4S is a British/American multinational security services company with deep ties to the US government and military. G4S is the world's largest security company measured by revenues. It has operations in more than 90 countries[1]. With over 570,000 employees[2], it is the world's third-largest private employer, and the largest European and African private employer.
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Corporate Name
In 2000, Group 4, a security firm formed in the 1960s, merged with Falck to form Group 4 Falck and by 2000 the company was described as "the world's largest private security systems company". In 2002 Group 4 Falck went on to buy The Wackenhut Corporation in the United States.
The Wackenhut Corporation
The Wackenhut Corporation was a US security company started in 1954. In 2002, it became a subsidiary of G4S.
Wackenhut has had a long history with the US government and military. In a 1992 SPY Magazine article[3], 18 year terrorism expert and CIA analyst, William Corbett, stated "For years, Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA and other intelligence organizations, including the Drug Enforcement Agency. Wackenhut would allow the CIA to occupy positions within the company [in order to carry out] clandestine operations." He went on to say Wackenhut provided the intelligence agencies with information and was paid in return "in a quid pro quo arrangement". This would explain in part the huge number of contracts awarded to Wackenhut in delicate areas of national security.
Surveillance of Dissidents
By 1965, Wackenhut was boasting to potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents—one in 46 American adults then living. In 1966, after acquiring the private files of Karl Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Wackenhut could confidently maintain that with more than 4 million names, it had the largest privately held file on suspected dissidents in America.
Leadership
Early boards of directors included such prominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, by the 1990s the board have included much of the country's national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci; former Defense Intelligence Agency director General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of President Bush's foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel.[4]
International
Wackenhut's right-wing politics have not been confined to supporting U.S. administrations. In 1977, Wackenhut obtained special permission to operate in Belgium; according to Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan[5], Wackenhut 'quickly got involved with right-wing terrorists who were themselves linked to state security agents." Wackenhut's local director in Brussels, Jean-Francis Calmette, was a rightist who had hired and given combat instruction to members of Westland New Post, a Belgian fascist group. Wackenhut left Belgium in the early 1980s, following accusations that its guards were luring immigrant children into basements and beating them.
Orlando Shooting
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, who worked at G4S from 2007 until his death, committed one of the largest mass shootings in United States history, in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
