Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

A decade later, Edgar Prince graduated from the University of Michigan with an engineering degree and met Elsa Zwiep, whose parents owned Zwiep’s Seed Store in Holland and who had just completed her studies in education and sociology at nearby Calvin College. 6The two married, and Edgar followed family tradition and joined the military, serving in the U.S. Air Force. The couple moved east and then west as Edgar was stationed at bases in South Carolina and Colorado. Though it’s unclear whether Peter Prince was a veteran—he came of age for the draft during the window between World War I and World War II—four of Peter’s five brothers were in the Army at the time of his death. 7Though Edgar Prince had traveled far and wide during college and the Air Force, his hometown of Holland beckoned him and Elsa back to Lake Michigan and to the strict religious and cultural traditions embraced by the Prince family. “We find Holland a very comfortable place to live,” Edgar Prince said in a book written about Holland’s downtown, which included three chapters on the family. “We have family here. We enjoy the recreational opportunities. We like the community’s heritage, which is based on the Dutch reputation for being neat, clean, orderly, and hard working. Their standard has always been excellence.” 8

Upon returning to the town, Edgar rolled up his sleeves and started working in die-casting, rising to the position of chief engineer at Holland’s Buss Machine Works. 9But Edgar had much bigger ambitions and soon quit. In 1965, Prince and two fellow employees founded their own company that made die-cast machines for the auto industry. 10In 1969, he shipped a sixteen-hundred-ton machine capable of creating aluminum transmission cases every two minutes. 11By 1973, Prince Corporation was a great success, with hundreds of people working for the company’s various Holland divisions. 12That year, the company began production of what would become its signature product, an invention that would end up in virtually every car in the world and put Edgar Prince on his way to becoming a billionaire: the ubiquitous lighted sun visor. 13

But while wealth and success were in abundance in the Prince family, the sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days had been taking their toll on Edgar, and in the early 1970s, he nearly fell to the same fate as his father when he suffered a serious heart attack. 14“It was then, while he lay in a hospital bed reflecting on what all his labor had won for him, that he committed himself anew to his faith in Jesus Christ,” recalled Prince’s friend Gary Bauer, one of the early leaders of the religious right and founder of the conservative Christian lobby group the Family Research Council. “Ed turned his future and the future of his business over to God. From that point forward, the Prince Corporation was blessed with unprecedented growth and financial success.” 15Edgar Prince recovered from the heart attack and steered his company toward amazing prosperity. Prince Corporation soon expanded into map lamps, visors that could open garage doors, consoles with ashtrays, and cup and change holders, among many other products. 16By 1980, the Prince empire boasted numerous plants and more than 550 employees. 17As Erik Prince later recalled, “My dad was a very successful entrepreneur. From scratch he started a company that first produced high-pressure die-cast machines and grew into a world-class automotive parts supplier in west Michigan. They developed and patented the first lighted car sun visor, developed the car digital compass/thermometer and the programmable garage door opener.” 18But, Prince said, “Not all their ideas were winners. Things like a sock-drawer light, an automated ham de-boning machine and a propeller-driven snowmobile didn’t work out so well for the company. My dad used them as examples of the need for perseverance and determination.” 19

In that respect, it wasn’t the only way in which the product itself seemed of secondary importance to Prince. “People make the difference,” read the copy from an old Prince Corporation brochure. “It isn’t magic that brings excellence to a company; excellence is the result of commitment and hard work by dedicated people. Whether we’re talking about products or processes, no wizardry or easy formulas will solve the challenges of tomorrow. People will.” 20Edgar Prince was fond of initiatives like one where executives stuck to a strict exercise regimen. Three days a week from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. the executives met at the Holland Tennis Club, which Prince also owned. 21In 1987, Prince opened a sprawling 550,000-square-foot facility spread over thirty-five acres, its fourth manufacturing center and home to many of its now fifteen hundred employees. 22The Prince “campus” centerpiece featured nearly five thousand feet of skylights and amenities like a basketball and volleyball court. 23He never made employees work on Sundays and flew executives home from business trips promptly so they could be with their families on the Lord’s Day. 24

Detroit’s auto industry may have been suffering in the 1980s, “but you’d never know it from the Prince Corporation,” read the lead of a story in the Holland Sentinel . 25“My family’s business was automotive supply—the most viciously competitive business in the world,” Erik Prince told author Robert Young Pelton. “My father was focused on quality, volume, and customer satisfaction. That’s what we talked around the dinner table.” 26But Edgar Prince had more than the success of his business and his employees on his mind, and with the money flowing into Prince Corporation, he finally had the means to achieve the higher goals to which he aspired. That meant pouring serious money into conservative Christian causes. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” recalled Gary Bauer. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.” 27

In the 1980s, the Prince family merged with one of the most venerable conservative families in the United States when Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team. 28Amway was a powerhouse distributor of home products and was regularly plagued by accusations that it was run like a cult and was nothing more than a sophisticated pyramid scheme. 29The company would rise to become one of the greatest corporate contributors in the U.S. electoral process in the 1990s, mostly to Republican candidates and causes, and used its business infrastructure as a massive political organizing network. 30“Amway relies heavily on the nearly fanatical—some say cultlike—devotion of its more than 500,000 U.S. ‘independent distributors.’ As they sell the company’s soaps, vitamins, detergents, and other household products, the distributors push the Amway philosophy,” reported Mother Jones magazine in a 1996 exposé on the company. 31“They tell you to always vote conservative no matter what. They say liberals support the homosexuals and let women get out of their place,” Karen Jones, a former Amway distributor, told the magazine. “They say we need to get things back to the way it’s supposed to be.” 32Amway leaders also reportedly used “voice-mail messages, along with company rallies and motivational tapes, to mobilize distributors into a potent domestic political force.” 33

Betsy and Dick’s union was the kind of alliance common among the families of monarchs in Europe. The DeVos family was one of the few in Michigan whose power and influence exceeded that of the Princes. They were one of the greatest bankrollers of far-right causes in U.S. history, and with their money they propelled extremist Christian politicians and activists to positions of prominence. For a time, Betsy and Dick lived down the street from the Prince family, including Erik, who is nine years younger than his sister. 34