Blackwater: Erik Prince's Swamp Startup, Nisour Square and Academi

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In late 1996 former Navy SEAL Erik Prince and co-founder Al Clark started Blackwater, inspired by the way FedEx had disrupted the postal service. Prince bought about 7,000 acres in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, enough to keep stray bullets on the property, and named the company for the peat-colored water. The $6.5 million training facility opened in 1998 with artificial lakes, driving tracks and shooting ranges, but police departments had little budget to travel there, and a sister company selling shooting targets kept it afloat. After 2001 the market arrived: a CIA contract in 2002 to secure its Kabul station, then a $21 million contract in 2003 to guard Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. By 2004 Blackwater was handling diplomatic security for the State Department and eventually passed a billion dollars in government contracts.

In March 2004 four Blackwater contractors were killed in Fallujah, triggering a major U.S. offensive, and a month later in Najaf its helicopters flew in under fire to resupply a besieged compound and rescue a wounded Marine. Bremer's Order 17 had granted contractors immunity from Iraqi law. In September 2007 Blackwater guards escorting a State Department convoy opened fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and injuring 20. Prince defended his men before Congress, and the company hired public relations firms. It became Xe Services in 2009, was sold to investors in 2010, renamed Academi in 2011 and merged into Constellis in 2014. The convicted guards received a presidential pardon in 2020.

• Blackwater was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to protect facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
• In 2006 a drunk off-duty contractor killed a guard for the Iraqi vice president and was fired and flown home.
• In 2007 a Blackwater manager threatened the life of a State Department investigator reviewing the company.
• The Iraqi government moved to revoke Blackwater's license after Nisour Square.
• Anger over the shooting contributed to Iraq's refusal to let U.S. troops stay beyond 2011.