Bouncers and Bodyguards (27 page)

Tunnels were always a problem, as you never knew who or what was waiting for you at the other end. Whenever a convoy was just about to enter a tunnel, the local Iraqi vehicles behind would suddenly slow right down to leave as much distance as possible between themselves and the convoy – just in case.

CRG lost one of their bodyguards while I was out there. He wasn’t on my team, but I knew him well. He was a team leader and was in a two-car convoy with the principal when his vehicle exploded. It had either gone over a landmine or someone had slipped an improvised explosive device under it at a junction. When it exploded, it threw the team leader through the front window. He lay dead on the ground with the left side of his face, his left arm and shoulders on fire. The rear vehicle pulled alongside to evacuate the principal. When the second in command looked into the rear of the exploded car, he saw the principal engulfed in flames, waving his arms frantically and screaming. The second in command didn’t know whether he should put him out of his misery with a single bullet to the head, but the principal soon stopped screaming and died. There was nothing left of the driver apart from a piece of leg and a bit of torso.

Texts and emails relating to the incident flew around the British bodyguard community. Some new recruits waiting in Jordan for their onward flight to Iraq turned around and went home and others who had been planning to come over never left the UK. Most of us were in Iraq for the money, but many of us had families, children, girlfriends and wives, and many people realised that the job simply wasn’t worth it.

Most bodyguards working for CRG now arrive on scheduled flights via Jordan. Iraqi Airways and Royal Jordanian Airways were two of the first airlines to operate regular international flights, and it was quite surreal sitting on a flight going into Baghdad and being served sandwiches and coffee by a pretty flight attendant. The ‘hosties’ were also in Iraq for the money. It is said that they earn hundreds of pounds per flight.

Take-off and landing from Baghdad is not for the faint-hearted. Flights use a ‘corkscrew manoeuvre’ to avoid coming into the range of small-arms fire and ground missiles, forcing you to hold on to your seat and hope for the best. The take-off is quick and the climb steep and dramatic – the objective is to get as high as possible as quickly as possible, and the reverse is true for landing, except it is even scarier.

I have since been offered contracts with other security companies, but from my experience CRG is still one of the best. They charge a lot to their clients, but the equipment they supply is excellent. CRG’s employees stay alive because of the money the company spends – many teams in non-armoured vehicles are dead now because a company refused to invest. Some bodyguard companies seem to lose more personnel than others, and the American companies seem to lose more than most. Blackwater, probably one of the biggest employers of bodyguards in Iraq, seem to lose personnel every week. It was even rumoured that one of their teams was found hanging from a bridge. Custer Battles – or ‘Cluster Fucks’ as they were nicknamed by the security community in Iraq – was another US firm that seemed to lose many of its personnel.

Contracts are ongoing and continuous until you resign. You are staggered with your team – on and off at the same time; rest and recreation at the same time – so you really form a close working relationship with your colleagues. Some companies don’t do this. They chop and change teams, and you never know who you might be working with from one contract to another, but CRG do their best to keep you in the same teams until your resignation.

After one more tour, I will have enough to pay my mortgage off and will come back to the UK and to my girlfriend and look for another job. The trouble is: what is there to do after the excitement of Iraq?

A
pair of bright eyes beneath an ill-fitting, wide-brimmed cap poked sheepishly out of a frosted-glass door. Autograph hunters of all ages and nationalities began to gather outside the door, situated beneath the walkway to the new Millennium Building, which replaced the old No. 1 Court and was officially opened by the Duke of Kent. The rumour of a big name’s imminent appearance was being eagerly passed around. Suddenly, the door burst open, and a stream of blue-and-yellow uniforms with a streak of white in their midst poured through. The lady in white was Maria Sharapova, who immediately set off a strobe effect of camera flashes, a surge from the crowd and an eruption of ecstatic cheering as the uniformed group barged their way through the throng and out to the main concourse. With the walkways between courts at Wimbledon being barely wide enough for single file, there were another two or three claustrophobic encounters with the excitable fans before the group finally made it to the assigned drop zone at Court 13.

Once Sharapova’s feet had touched the turf, the uniformed guards disappeared, fading into the background. They were scheduled to return to pick her up an hour later. In the meantime, you might have expected that they would keep a watchful eye on the crowd, attempting to identify potential threats to their charge. Not likely; instead, they sloped off to watch the tennis, sleep off the heavy night before or go hunting for food in the hospitality tents. If they remembered to get in position when Sharapova was ready to leave, she could count herself lucky.

When the threat to the biggest tennis stars (particularly female) was never so great, the protection that they could expect at the sport’s premier tournament was provided by lazy, opportunistic and untrained students looking to earn some pocket money during the summer. I know, because for two years I was one of them.

While I worked at Wimbledon, a security company was contracted with ensuring the highlight of the tennis calendar passed off safely. Along with the more typical responsibilities associated with a sporting event, including ensuring spectators got in and out of the complex as quickly and safely as possible, the company was charged with providing security for the players on their journeys between changing room and court. That meant that the positions filled by the company ranged from bag searchers and security guards to the job that I did: player escort.

Efficient and intelligent application of human resources should have made the staffing of these diverse roles a fairly straightforward task. Anyone with a brain and bit of training can perform basic crowd control or keep an eye open for sharp objects in picnic hampers. However, when it came to the protection of the players as they made their way around the complex, you might have thought that more would have been asked of the guards, especially in a job that required ‘access all areas’ security clearance, and that security professionals with bodyguard training would have been brought in to manage the potentially dangerous interface between the stars and their fans. You would have been wrong.

The shocking truth was that the recruitment process for these highly sensitive positions was arbitrary, unvetted and completely open to abuse. Amid an unprecedented climate of fear of terrorist attack, coupled with the ever-present danger of stalkers, people wandered in off the street and were given jobs – jobs that granted unfettered access to some of the biggest names in sport. My story is neither exceptional nor exaggerated.

Having applied for the job of security guard through a website, I received a tip-off from a friend who had worked at The Championships before. He claimed that if I followed up my application with a phone call stating that I was taller than six foot, I would be considered to join the player escort team. I was dubious, but given the stories I had heard about guards spending two weeks minding fire extinguishers or endlessly burrowing through hampers I made the call. It worked like a charm. On the first of our two induction days, both my friend and I were immediately informed that we had been selected to be player escorts.

Although I was pleased, I was slightly apprehensive about the prospect of extra training and perhaps having to go through a short course in the technicalities of guarding. I needn’t have worried. The only consequence of my new status was to be in a group that undertook the same generic training as all the other guards – a tour of the grounds, a lecture in basic customer satisfaction, and a pep talk on discipline and presentation by the self-appointed ringmaster of this ‘circus’.

So, with my references unchecked, completely bereft of experience and having just set foot on the Wimbledon turf for the very first time, I landed one of the top guarding jobs in the business solely on my physical appearance: six feet four and sixteen stone. The way in which I had eased my way from student to sentry came as a rather worrying surprise.

Fortunately, on the first day on the job, my fears were put at ease. ‘Remember, you are only getting £7 an hour for this. If someone comes at you with something nasty, then get out of the fucking way!’ The instructions from one of our managers left no room for interpretation. Having reputedly come by the job (also with no experience) after meeting one of the senior managers in a notorious Sunday drinking hole, he was neither willing nor able to offer any further guidance. Although I could see his point, this advice to abandon ship at the first sight of trouble was yet another twist to an already bizarre story. It was becoming clear that the job we were being asked to perform was purely role play. It was an act. With an access-all-areas pass and a lot of time on our hands, it was not long before the actors turned to clowns.

During the two years I worked as a player escort, there were countless incidents of incompetence, negligence and wilful disregard for the risks to players that we were supposed to eliminate. Having been informed by managers that we were a sham, and in many cases proving to be nothing more than a hindrance to the minor players who could otherwise move around without attracting attention, it was inevitable that liberties would be taken. First, there was the almost constant attempt to forage for food. The media centre was usually the place to begin in the mornings. A plentiful supply of coffee and croissants on the roof terrace made it an excellent alternative to the staff canteen. Sue Barker, John Inverdale and Alistair McGowan would routinely share our choice of venue, once more highlighting the limitless possibilities for a huge security incident that our all-area passes had given us.

Once play began, we would return to the escorts’ base, conveniently situated next to the female seeds’ changing room, to receive our list of jobs for the day. For me and my star-struck colleagues, the most important issue to be resolved at this stage was who would get the big-ticket escorts. Who would be accompanying the matches most likely to get us on TV or our face in the paper? Offers such as ‘I’ll swap you a Davenport for an Agassi’ could regularly be heard deep in the bowels of the players’ area. Occasionally, our boss would have an input, insisting on the ‘big meat’ being used to escort Anna Kournikova, who caused our only problems when she began to progress in both doubles competitions. This success resulted in regular visits to the outer courts through large excitable crowds. Unsurprisingly, there were no shortage of takers for this assignment, resulting in a chaotic scene of six or seven burly students trying to march a rather frightened young woman through throngs of people whilst paying most attention to trying to get noticed by nearby TV cameras. Jonas Björkman, her partner, would trot unaccompanied behind in tranquil amusement.

The other most interesting escorts were those of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. Serena was the only player to have her own permanent bodyguard, Darios, and it did not take a genius to work out what this ex-boxer from Brooklyn made of the spotty students charged with assisting him. ‘Amateurs!’ he raged after one escort back from a practice session had taken the Wimbledon champion on a five-minute detour of the hospitality tents. ‘Anything could have happened out there! If you guys don’t get the next one straight, then I might have to give you some training of my own!’ No one was under any illusions that this would be an hour’s study of the map of the complex.

Venus, on the other hand, was more than happy to let the escorts take care of her safety, and on one occasion she appeared in our waiting room and said, ‘So, which one of y’all is going to take me and my mom shopping?’ I was lucky enough to be conscious and uniformed at the right time and took on the task with another couple of eager opportunists. Sadly, the expedition was not as glamorous as we first imagined. In fact, the former champion just wanted to make an unscheduled visit to the Wimbledon shop, a ridiculous idea in itself, but made all the more farcical by three uniformed bumblers trying to force a path through what is one of the busiest spots on site at the best of times. Whilst Venus and her mum shopped for videos of herself (I kid you not), the shop eventually had to be shut to prevent a crush incident that a riot squad of fully trained personnel would have failed to control. The whole episode could so easily have ended in disaster.

It was not only the players who suffered as a result of our play-acting. All-areas pass aside, it is surprising what an unsuspecting public will let you get away with if you are wearing a uniform, walkie-talkie and earpiece. In teams of two, we would frequently amuse ourselves by heading down to the morning queue to pull people out and ‘scan’ them with our walkie-talkies. (We’d remove the aerial to make the device look more like a magnetic scanner.) Pushing the button to make the handset beep at unlikely places around the body, the challenge was to see what state of undress or distress you could get the unfortunate punter into before they cried foul.

Another classic ruse was to play out the
Trigger Happy TV
sketch by sending one guard over towards a distinctively dressed member of the public with his radio on full volume. The second guard would then put out a call over the escort signal to apprehend someone for beating up old ladies on the North Concourse, for example, describing the offender standing next to the first guard. Meanwhile, the poor victim would be listening in on the transmission in confused horror. In one case, an escort who was not in on the joke replied with a transmission saying that he had the described felon in his view. A cruel but inevitable reply to ‘take him down and ask questions later’ resulted in an ill-fated attempt at a citizen’s arrest and the end of one escort’s summer of fun.