part 3
In 2002, he got his most high--profile bodyguard assignment yet. Police had reported pulling over a Jeep Grand Cherokee apparently driven by the protection detail for rapper Curtis Jackson, a.k.a. 50 Cent, outside the Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan. The New York Times story about the incident noted that police found two loaded handguns. Jackson’s attorney reportedly later claimed they belonged to Jackson’s bodyguard.
By that point, Shaw had founded Icon, in 1998, in Minnesota, where 50 Cent was playing soon. He’d been hired to work a show, but 50 Cent’s manager offered him the bodyguard position. “I like the way you move,” he remembered the manager telling him. If you were a bodyguard in the early aughts, 50 Cent was probably the most dangerous assignment in the business. The rapper was only a few years on from, famously, getting shot nine times at close range, including through the jaw. This was around the time federal investigators filed court papers alleging “an ongoing plot to kill” 50 Cent. Nevertheless, Shaw took the gig. “The bulletproof car he rapped about, that was my car.”
The job involved not just protecting the P but also navigating the complexity of that P’s entourage. Shaw got good at what he referred to as “verbal judo,” a de-escalation tactic that uses empathy, calmness, and deflection to defuse a confrontation. (Essentially, Hey, can I give you an important job? works a lot better than You can’t be in here.) And when Jackson, who was opening for Master P in those days, stage-dived into the crowd, it was Shaw, often armed and wearing many pounds of body armor, who went in after him and somehow got him back onstage.
50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ broke through that year, and Shaw managed to keep him alive. But he said that when Usher offered to make him his bodyguard—while working on his 2004 album Confessions at the Palms hotel’s Fantasy Tower—the choice was pretty easy. Shaw asked himself, “Do I really want to sleep in a bulletproof vest?”
If bodyguards seem to be in the news more lately, it’s not just because of violent attempts on their principals. It’s also for being witnesses or parties to their clients’ crimes and the lawsuits that result from their occasional fisticuffs with paparazzi. In his textbook An Introduction to Celebrity Protection and Touring, written with former Secret Service agent Dale June, Shaw explains that “some celebrities are always getting in trouble and usually you will know what kind of trouble they get into before you sign on with them.” At the same time, in a section on ethics in a subsequent book, Introduction to Executive Protection, Shaw (again with June) writes that “what you see and hear stays where you saw and heard it.”
In other words: It’s a conundrum. Bodyguards might sign nondisclosure agreements and follow their own code, but they don’t have anything like attorney-client privilege. For many protectors, the entry into elite circles can also become intoxicating in its own right. “In a social setting, everyone usually says the right thing,” Shaw explained of his students. “But if they spend time in this business, they will almost certainly end up with ethical dilemmas.”
Bodyguards were cited in R. Kelly’s conviction by the Eastern District of New York of running a criminal enterprise to recruit and traffic underage girls and were mentioned in testimony provided during Sean Combs’s trial last year. (He was subsequently found guilty of two counts of transportation for prostitution.)
Shaw has a rhetorical catchphrase he levels at students to warn them against thinking that cutting corners (say, punching a paparazzo, pocketing a bribe, looking the other way) won’t catch up with them: “How much does it cost to halfway do your job?”
During team exercises, every student is keenly aware that the class is, in fact, a job interview. Standouts are sometimes added to Shaw’s protection details across the country and around the world, with starting salaries of around $75,000 and experienced protectors earning upwards of $275,000. During lunch on day four, Shaw had the students team up to rough out the pickup of a principal at a hotel, then run him to a lunch spot, then a Harley-Davidson dealership, and finally to a private plane waiting at the jetport. Listening to them plan, it became clear to me that some students would take charge and others wait for instruction, not necessarily to the benefit of the operation. The students left the conference room to “run routes” (driving around the city and annotating the maps between destinations) and to do the advance work that would make the client’s experience feel seamless. Awkward situations like a VIP’s waiting for a table at a restaurant or, worse, getting shouted down by protesters while dining were to be avoided. Back doors needed to be located; restaurant staff needed to be consulted.
The advance is where the real work of protection happens. In a government context, you might picture Secret Service agents scanning rooms for listening devices or deploying bomb-sniffing dogs. For civilian protectors, the job is more modest but no less fastidious: familiarizing themselves with spaces, locating bathrooms and exit routes, checking sight lines, identifying where a threat might materialize and how to evacuate. “We always move from known to known” is one of Shaw’s favorite maxims. “The wins happen in preparation. Bad guys get to choose the time and place of the attack, so we’re already at a disadvantage.”
One former student who passed the test was Sam Alicea, now Shaw’s top lieutenant and known throughout Icon as the advance guy. Alicea, a serial entrepreneur who previously worked as a patrol officer in New Jersey, enrolled in the course in 2011. In class, wearing slacks and a sweater vest rather than the classic black suit and tie, he explained that he was dressed like a tech bro because, despite Shaw’s public association with celebrities, most of the company’s largest contracts were with big technology firms and old-money families who prize anonymity. (Shaw’s current main principal is once again a well-known musician.)
What earned Alicea his reputation was his knack for preparation. Early on, when Shaw was planning for a music tour, Alicea assembled a file on every venue on the itinerary: schematics, photos of surrounding neighborhoods, entry and exit points, notes on sight lines and choke points. Shaw had never seen anything like it before from a novice BG. “The advance is 90 percent of what we do, I’d say,” Alicea told me. “The average person thinks of bodyguarding as what they see in the movies: firearms and tactical maneuvers and self-defense. They don’t realize that a lot of what we do is prior to any of that happening.” That kind of pre-visualization, building protocols, and turn-by-turn driving directions is what separates an effective protector from a reactive one.
Shaw showed the class videos of incidents that might have been prevented with advance work: British politician Nigel Farage getting hit with a milkshake (for a second time), then having to wait for a taxi. Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, in Delhi, walking to a podium via a patch of turf that caught her heel and sent her sprawling. “There’s no ninjas dropping from the ceiling!” Shaw said. “Sometimes you’re looking for monsters in the room and you trip over the squeaky toy.”
Charlie Kirk’s murder has lit up the security community as a grimmer case study of advance work. Kirk’s head of security, Brian Harpole, gave an unusually candid interview to the podcaster Shawn Ryan after the shooting, walking through the advance work his team had done and the escape routes they’d practiced. It’s rare for a bodyguard at Harpole’s level to speak publicly, but he seemed to have grievances with local law enforcement. In the interview, Harpole said he had identified the roof above the venue as a serious threat and had texted Utah Valley University’s chief of police to coordinate coverage. “I was told students have access above us…. [I]f this is true, it would be nice to either have it controlled access or allow one of my guys to be there as well,” Harpole wrote. “I got you covered,” came the reply. (Citing the ongoing investigation and gag order, UVU police chief Jeff Long declined to comment except to say that “a limited portion of communications may have contributed to an incomplete or misleading narrative.”) The shots appeared to have been fired from an elevated position with a nearly 150-yard shooting lane. Harpole said his team reacted to the ambush immediately, but the damage was instantaneous. “It changed how I think about this work,” said Joseph Howell, 27, who grew up in Utah and told me he served two combat deployments with the Marines before founding Salt Lake City–based Kingsman Security Solutions. Reading about the event, he saw the idea circulating that some law enforcement believed it was impossible to secure open-air events. “I don’t believe in that statement. Everything is possible to be secured. It just depends on what level of resources you’re willing to put at it. I won’t work with clients who won’t respond to security suggestions. If I’m going to work with somebody now moving forward, there needs to be communication both ways about expectations and listening when things go critical.”
“A motivated attacker, especially one who’s willing to give his life, is going to win every time,” said Shaw. Analyzing the Kirk assassination for his class, he returned to the same point: “All of the things that could have defeated that attack happened in the advance.”
The unsettling thing about that lesson is that all it required was a set of eyes on the right place. Pre-visualization—studying a map before you arrive, noting the exits when you walk into a restaurant, keeping your back to the wall, knowing which direction you’d move if something went wrong ...
part 4 \ final
The final drill for Icon’s course is a red-carpet event, staged at the theater of a local community college. Alicea passed out armloads of thrift-store cameras from a box of props, and the students who weren’t walking the carpet shouted like paparazzi, requesting poses and booing when protectors lingered in the shot. Shaw demonstrated strategies for working the rope line: staying out of the frame while also being close enough to persuade admirers to back off so his P can keep moving.
The red-carpet event recalled a gentler time, before Rihanna’s and Drake’s homes were attacked, when bodyguards were mostly concerned with superfans fawning too hard. But even under those relatively tame circumstances, the gig still requires carefully heeded instincts and military-grade situational awareness. For most BGs, the biggest hazards are mundane: scuffles with aggressive paparazzi, crazed autograph seekers, and random bystanders trying to create a scene for their own clout. As social media crested, so, too, did incidents of bodyguards attempting to wrestle cameras from photographers, delete pictures, and deliver street justice. Today, the executive-protection industry spends considerable time training recruits not to take the bait. To take control of the situation without becoming the story, in front of dozens of witnesses and cameras. Shaw had a trick for us.
When a fake fan shook the hand of a fake celebrity and latched on with an iron grip, Shaw covered the handshake with one hand. From the outside, it looked like a gesture of plaintive empathy: I’m so sorry, but we must move on. From underneath, the overeager stan could feel one of Shaw’s fingers apply deep, convincing pressure to a single nail bed until they instinctively withdrew their hand. “Keep it YouTube friendly,” Shaw said, smiling. “Never show it on your face.”