Gunman’s employer dealt another in a series of black eyes

By Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times News Service

Saturday, June 18, 2016 | 1:01 a.m.

The past few years have not gone smoothly for G4S, the giant security firm based in Britain that employed the Orlando nightclub killer, Omar Mateen.

Just before the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, the British government had to enlist its own troops during the first days of the games because the company initially could not provide enough security, which its chief executive at the time called a “humiliating shambles.”

The next year, a coroner’s inquest in Britain found that an Angolan father of five was “unlawfully killed” while in the custody of G4S guards, who held his head down during a deportation flight despite his crying out, “I can’t breathe.”

The guards were acquitted of manslaughter, but the company’s image was not aided by the disclosure of virulently racist and anti-immigrant texts on the guards’ phones.

And in 2015, another inquest revealed that a G4S subsidiary improperly vetted an employee with a criminal record who later was convicted in Iraq of killing two colleagues.

This week, the company has faced scrutiny over its handling of Mateen, who was employed by G4S for nine years and was most recently stationed at a guardhouse in a residential golfing community.

Shares of G4S stock have dropped 6 percent since Monday amid investor fears of another controversy calling into question the competence of the company, which, with more than 600,000 employees, is among the world’s largest private employers.

It now faces questions about its vetting practices — a paramount skill for a security company — with the disclosures that Mateen remained an employee after it learned in 2013 that he had been investigated by the FBI, and that a local sheriff that same year insisted on his removal from the courthouse where he was a contract security guard.

At a news conference Monday, James Comey, the FBI director, said Mateen alarmed his court co-workers in 2013 with claims of a connection to al-Qaida, assertions that he was a member of the Shiite militant organization Hezbollah, and statements that he hoped the police would raid his apartment and assault his family “so that he could martyr himself.”

What exactly took place in the courthouse is not clear. In a statement this week, the sheriff of St. Lucie County, Ken Mascara, said Mateen had been removed after “inflammatory” comments, and that his office requested the FBI investigation.

Mascara declined an interview request. But during a meeting Wednesday of residents of the golfing village where Mateen had been working, the sheriff said that after a deputy at the courthouse said something to Mateen about the Middle East, he threatened the deputy.

“Omar became very agitated and made a comment that he could have al-Qaida kill my employee and his family,” Mascara said, according to an account published on a local newspaper website, TCPalm. A sheriff’s spokesman, Bryan Beaty, confirmed that the sheriff made the comments at a homeowner’s meeting.

“If that wasn’t bad enough,” Mascara was quoted as saying, “he followed it up with very disturbing comments about women and followed it up with very disturbing comments about Jews and then went on to say that the Fort Hood shooter was justified in his actions.”

In 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and wounding more than 30.

Nigel Fairbrass, a spokesman for G4S, said that when courthouse officials sought Mateen’s removal they never told the company about specific terrorism-related comments. Instead, Fairbrass said, they said that his behavior was not conducive to a courthouse environment and that he had developed strained relationships with other workers.

But when the company interviewed Mateen about the situation, he acknowledged making inflammatory statements to courthouse workers, saying he did so only in anger because he had been continually harassed, Fairbrass said.

Mateen also told the company about being questioned by the FBI, but he said the agency had cleared him, Fairbrass said. This was the first time the company heard about the FBI interview, the company spokesman said.

Fred Burton, a former counterterrorism official with the State Department, said that if Mateen’s employer knew that he had made the sort of comments described by the sheriff, then it should have taken action.

“At minimum, that was a termination offense,” said Burton, the chief security officer at Stratfor, a political risk and security firm in Austin, Texas. “I know cases where security guards have been terminated for a heck of a lot less, just because they are not the right fit for that kind of job.”

G4S officials say Mateen, who was hired in 2007 into a subsidiary then known as Wackenhut, was subject to various checks in his years of employment, never with adverse findings, including a criminal-background check in October 2013, the same month courthouse officials requested his removal.

The Florida agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam, who oversees security officer licensing in the state, also said Mateen’s applications and examinations were in order.

“There was nothing in that record that would have disqualified this individual, who was a U.S. citizen, who had a clean criminal record, who underwent a background check and mental health screening, from receiving those licenses,” Putnam said in a statement.

But other Florida officials had seen red flags with Mateen before G4S hired him.

Records released late Friday by the State Department of Corrections, where Mateen trained as a prison guard, suggested that he was a poor trainee who, days before the April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech that left 33 people dead, suggested he might bring a weapon to the training academy.

A warden recommended firing Mateen, who repeatedly slept in class and had also been absent without leave.

“In light of recent tragic events at Virginia Tech, Officer Mateen’s inquiry about bringing a weapon to class is at best extremely disturbing,” the warden, Powell H. Skipper, wrote in a letter.