In June 1997, ground was broken on the Blackwater compound, and in May 1998, the company officially opened for business.40 Though the company’s name sounds ominous, it actually was inspired by the black waters of the Great Dismal Swamp—a 111,000-acre peat bog stretching from south-eastern Virginia to northeastern North Carolina—close to where Blackwater was contructed. While many later accounts from company executives and others would portray the early days of Blackwater as slow going, its volume of “black” and confidential contracts makes that difficult to confirm. As Clark remembers it, the company hit the ground running. “The SEAL community came down, because we came from the SEAL community and they were aware of it. They came down at least for the shootouts and the ranges to run their training. It filtered into a lot of law enforcement; the FBI came down, as word got out. The facility was the initial draw to a lot of them because it was something new and big and close by,” Clark said.41 While Blackwater was constructed on a swamp, it was strategically located a half-hour from the largest naval base in the world, the forty-three-hundred-acre Norfolk Naval Station,42 and not far from the epicenter of the U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement communities. The facility would also provide various government agencies—federal, state, and local—with a remote and secure location to discreetly train forces. “A lot of the reason some of those agencies came down there was to get away from everybody else, get out of the public eye, for the press and the public,” Clark recalled. “Just because they’re wearing black outfits everybody want[ed] to come see what they’re doing.”43
Clark said Blackwater’s new training facility offered U.S. Special Operations forces another advantage over existing private shooting facilities, many of which were run by competitive “trophy shooters.” At Blackwater, Clark recalled, “the training that we exposed them to—mainly that I exposed them to while I was there—kind of gave them a breath of fresh air. You know, finally someone that’s not a competitive trophy shooter or some kind of action shooter.” Competitive shooting, Clark said, was “all about me, me, me. Second place for them is just a small trophy, but [for] tactical shooters, people who have to kick in doors or go to the desert, second place is not a very good place to be.”44
By 1998, Blackwater was doing a brisk business in training private and government customers in the use of a wide variety of weapons from pistols to precision rifles to machine guns. It was leasing out the facility to SEALs for their training. Police officers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Canada had enrolled in Blackwater training programs, and the company was starting to get inquiries from foreign governments. The Spanish government was interested in training security details that would protect presidential candidates, while Brazil expressed interest in counterterrorism training.45 “They are the best of the best… to come to a school where you are taught by the best in the world is great,” an early customer told the Virginian-Pilot in September 1998. “It is an honor to be here.”46
As word spread about Blackwater’s training, Prince and other executives wanted to make sure that Blackwater would earn a reputation as the premiere facility of its kind. “I was a retired Marine officer who had been in the hotel business for fifteen years, so they were looking for somebody that had that balance,” Masciangelo, the company’s first president, said in an interview. “Blackwater delivered more than training. The whole customer service issue and the ambiance and the setting and the facilities, that was the whole reason for them hiring me.”47 By late 1998, Blackwater boasted a nine-thousand-square-foot lodge with conference rooms, classrooms, lounge, pro shop, and dining hall. A wide variety of ranges including an urban street façade and a pond for water-to-land training were just some of the early offerings.48
Steve Waterman, a writer on assignment for Soldier of Fortune, visited Blackwater in 1999 and described the facility at Moyock in glowing terms. With “a great chow hall (I would describe it more as a cafeteria), satellite TV systems in the dorms and plenty of hot water in the showers, I would put Blackwater ahead of any of the civilian or military training sites I have visited,” Waterman wrote. “When you turn the last corner and are able to see the buildings, it quickly becomes obvious that the operators of this center are quite serious in their endeavors and nothing has been spared to make this a top notch facility. The buildings are brand new… and the place is well laid out and neat. Off to the right are the dorm facilities and the tactical house. Straight ahead is the main building which houses the classrooms, store, administrative offices, cafeteria, armory, and conference rooms, lounge, where tall tales may be spun and examples of taxidermy are displayed. A large black bear looms out at you over the fireplace and several other animals watch you through plastic eyes. The gun cleaning area is off to the side of the main building where there is room for more than a dozen people to clean weapons. The benches are chest high and there are compressed air nozzles for blowing dust and dirt out of weapons. The well-lighted rooms have four bunk beds in each with a spacious closet for each occupant. There are two heads (bathrooms to you landlubbers), each with several shower stalls. On both sides of the dorm building is a large room with a couch and several chairs. A TV in each lounge is fed by a satellite system. There is also a refrigerator and water cooler in each of these rooms. Magazines are there for the perusal of the guests.”49 In 1998 Blackwater hosted a police and military handgun competition, the first of many such events, later called the Shoot-Out at Blackwater, that would draw people from all over the world to Moyock. But Blackwater would soon demonstrate its powerful ability to capitalize on tragedy and fear. In fact, 1999 would kick off a string of almost annual high-profile violent incidents that would play out on international television and result in more business and growing profits for Blackwater.
On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris walked into their high school, Columbine High, in Littleton, Colorado, wearing black trench coats and armed to the teeth with semiautomatic weapons and shotguns. The two proceeded to go on a killing rampage that took the lives of twelve of their fellow students and one teacher. The incident would quickly be dubbed the “Columbine massacre.” Despite the fact that the number of school shootings had dropped from thirty-two during the 1992-1993 school year to nineteen during 1998-1999, the hype around Columbine encouraged a panic about such incidents that spread throughout the country.50 It also caused law enforcement agencies at all levels to review their ability to respond to such incidents. “Nobody thought that Columbine could have happened,” Ron Watson, a spokesman for the National Tactical Officer’s Association (NTOA), said at the time. “So Columbine has changed thinking. It has thrown a new wrinkle into training.”51
In September 1999, some four hundred SWAT team officers found their way to Moyock for exercises at Blackwater’s newly constructed “R U Ready High School.”52 The NTOA kicked in $50,000 to construct the fifteen-room, 14,746-square-foot mock school, but the project likely cost Blackwater much more.53 As with future projects, Prince had the means and the motivation to spend if he thought there would eventually be a payoff. “Erik had enough money to pay for whatever they needed up front, so he could get his money back, he had plenty of capital,” said Al Clark. “He probably inherited $500 million, so he had plenty of money to play with.”54 The mock school featured the sound effects of screaming students, blood spatters, gunshot wounds, and simunition (practice ammo). “You’re dealing with chaos—a tremendous amount of confusion,” said retired NYPD Emergency Service Unit commander Al Baker. “They are all young and all are unknowns in this large place. There is a tremendous amount of noise. You don’t know who the shooter is. We’re trying to teach them the techniques of clearing a hostile environment. There is a lot of bleeding. This is not something that can wait.”55