Mr. Gottlieb said in an interview with the Journal that he found his press coverage unfair and wanted to fight back.
“I worked with this company to help me launch my new venture,” he said.
Status Labs interviewed Mr. Gottlieb on his interests and plans, and told him it would get him positive press coverage, according to a person familiar with the matter. He paid between $4,000 and $5,000 per month for the services.
The phone number for Medical Daily Times on its website rang at a pizzeria in Toronto. Until recently, the article’s author was listed as BJ Hetherington. The author couldn’t be reached for comment.
A black-and-white photo accompanied BJ Hetherington’s author page on Medical Daily Times. The photo is of a Canadian theater actor, Randy Hughson. A publicist for Mr. Hughson said he wasn’t aware his photo was being used with BJ Hetherington’s name until the Journal contacted him.
The information about Mr. Gottlieb’s donation is also inaccurate: An NYU spokeswoman said Mr. Gottlieb didn’t donate to that particular initiative, though he has donated to NYU on other occasions. Medical Daily Times didn’t check the information with Mr. Gottlieb, said a person familiar with the matter.
Medical Daily Times couldn’t be reached for comment…
Status Labs provided services to Ms. DeVos before she became U.S. education secretary to suppress Google search hits connecting her to her brother, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a person familiar with the matter said. Blackwater was a State Department contractor that was banned from Iraq after a deadly 2007 shootout of Iraqi civilians. Mr. Prince couldn’t be reached for comment.
One article touting her accomplishments as a “reformer” appeared on chemfindit.com, a site that briefly used the same IP address as a company affiliated with executives of Status Labs called Blue Land Partners, according to a Journal analysis of data from Farsight Security Inc.
Another article about her appeared online titled “Betsy DeVos Positive News Article.” The August 2017 article was on a website called “Enable Diversity,” which also featured Mr. Gottlieb. The website has since been removed.
‘Cause when you think you might be heading into a period of massive income inequality and strife, the Pinkerton’s record in the 19th century is REALLY the thing you should be trying to invoke, apparently.
Some key bits from the article:
The Pinkertons wanted me to picture myself in a scene of absolute devastation. “A hurricane just wipes out everything, and you need to feed your children,” Andres Paz Larach said. The power grid is down, shipments of food are cut off, the water is no longer potable — how do you get what you need to survive? What risks do you take?
…
Pinkerton began noticing a growing set of anxieties among its corporate clients about distinctly contemporary plagues — active shooters, political unrest, climate disasters
…
You’re going to turn to desperate measures,” he said. Everybody will. The other Pinkertons nodded.
…
He gave the example of a drought. “If a client has food and water and all the other stuff,” he said, “then they become a target.” López Portillo and Paz Larach uttered small words of consensus in Spanish, while scanning through email on their phones. “And if and when desperate people discovered that cache of water and food,” he continued, it was the Pinkertons’ job to protect it at whatever cost.
…
Later, after Paz Larach took his turn on the range — during which he emptied a Galil ACE assault rifle into a human-shaped cardboard cutout, then quickly drew his nine-millimeter, grouping four shots in the chest-cavity bull’s-eye — he offered the example of Hurricane Maria. On the day the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico in 2017, he received more than 30 calls from American businesses and multinationals. He wouldn’t go into detail but explained that many chief executives felt blind to the situation and effectively tendered a blank check if Pinkerton could provide security. Over the next few days, as the company deployed hundreds of agents to the island, some of them, Paz Larach claimed, reported seeing firearms brandished at gas stations. “We had to escort the cargo with real agents, have cars chase the main truck,” he said. “Those who did not have protection were having their cargo hijacked.”
Aware that he might end up sounding vampiric, Paz Larach hesitated, then eventually confessed what he’d wanted to say in the first place: The future looked pretty good for Pinkerton.
…
Paz Larach rattled off a suite of services that were not, strictly speaking, covered by that piece of paper: armed warehouse defense, executive extraction, 24-hour surveillance, chartered helicopters and planes, escorted cargo shipments. “If you abandon your property, you’re kind of just blindfolding yourself,” he said — checking news, hoping for the best. “We’re your eyes and ears on the ground.” During the 2017 hurricane season, the Pinkertons chartered half a dozen planes across the Caribbean, each of them full of food and under armed escort, to the tune of around $100,000 each. Ordinarily, Pinkerton bills on a relatively cheap hourly basis, but during a state of emergency, the rate soars, something Paz Larach compared to Uber’s surge pricing. By the end of the season, after Maria, Harvey and Irma, Paz Larach told me the company billed tens of millions of dollars.
…
Later, at the racetrack, we watched three young men suit up in ski masks to shoot paintballs at our S.U.V. Even among my Pinkerton handlers, the theater of exercise seemed to strain the reasonable connections between tactical response and climate change. Throughout my visit, I wondered whether I had caught Pinkerton in the midst of an awkward organizational transition, or if the company stood merely to capitalize on the world’s growing panic — and if the difference really mattered. They had, after all, taken me to fire automatic weapons, ostensibly as a training exercise against desperate, disaster-ravaged people. It was impossible to experience that and not project it into a future in which, in the absence of true climate policy or mitigation, capital felt free to protect itself from outside risks — whatever form they may take.
Take note of what they’re emphasizing as needing protection: cargo, goods, resources, executives. Wealth. They try to spin a wealthy person hoarding necessities like food and water as being someone in need of protection, rather than the desperate poor with no access to the essentials of life.
And more significantly, they make a point of selling potential and active customers on the idea that the people who will come after their hoards will be like paramilitary goons themselves, equipped with high-powered guns and numbers. They frame this hypothetical attack as being like an invading army has come for you, not starving refugees fleeing environmental disaster brought on by the policies of the same companies now hiring Pinkerton.
They want to scare their clients into believing they need to sit in fortified mansions atop stores of wealth while a private army protects them from the rabble.
