Erik Prince
Erik Prince is named in 20 events across the Capture Cascade Timeline, from 2004 to 2023.
Quick facts
| Full name | Erik Dean Prince |
| Born | June 6, 1969, Holland, Michigan |
| Family | Brother of Betsy (Prince) DeVos, U.S. Education Secretary 2017–2021; son of Edgar Prince, founder of auto-parts maker Prince Corporation (sold to Johnson Controls in 1996 for $1.35 billion) |
| Education | Attended U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis; transferred to and graduated from Hillsdale College (economics, 1992) |
| Military service | U.S. Navy SEAL — BUD/S Class 188 (1993), SEAL Team 8; left active duty 1995 |
| Religion | Raised in the Reformed Church in America (Dutch Calvinist); converted to Roman Catholicism in 1992 |
| Best known for | Founding Blackwater USA; the 2007 Nisour Square massacre; post-2017 push to privatize state military and paramilitary functions |
Key positions
| Role | Organization | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Founder and CEO | Blackwater USA (later Xe Services) | 1997–2009 |
| Founder | Frontier Resource Group (private-equity vehicle) | 2012–present |
| Deputy chairman, then executive director | Frontier Services Group (Hong Kong–listed; majority shareholder CITIC Group, a Chinese state-owned enterprise) | 2014–2021 |
| Principal | 2USV (private deportation-force proposal) | 2024–present |
| Founder / principal | Vectus Global (Haiti mercenary operations) | 2025–present |
| Informal advisor (no formal appointment) | Second Trump administration | 2025–present |
Biography
Erik Dean Prince was born June 6, 1969, in Holland, Michigan, the fourth child of Edgar Prince, founder of the West Michigan auto-parts manufacturer Prince Corporation. When Johnson Controls acquired Prince Corporation in 1996 for $1.35 billion in cash, the sale produced the family inheritance that financed both Erik’s founding of Blackwater and his sister Betsy DeVos’s career in education-privatization philanthropy and politics; she went on to serve as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education from 2017 to 2021. Prince attended the U.S. Naval Academy before transferring to Hillsdale College, a private Christian-conservative school known for refusing federal funding, where he graduated in economics in 1992. He completed Navy SEAL training (BUD/S Class 188) and deployed with SEAL Team 8 before leaving active duty in 1995. Raised in the Dutch Calvinist Reformed Church in America, Prince converted to Roman Catholicism in 1992, and Jeremy Scahill documented in his 2007 book Blackwater that Prince framed the company’s mission through a Christian-military lens.
Prince personally financed the formation of Blackwater USA in 1997 on a 7,000-acre site near Moyock, North Carolina, originally as a private firearms-training facility. After September 11, 2001, the company won State Department protective contracts and grew into a roughly $2-billion-a-year government-contracting operation deploying armed contractors in Iraq under State Department cover. On September 16, 2007, Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. Embassy convoy opened fire in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding 20; an FBI investigation concluded that 14 of the deaths were unjustified. Four contractors were convicted in 2014 — one of murder, three of manslaughter and weapons charges — and all four were pardoned by Donald Trump on December 22, 2020, a clemency that UN human-rights experts called an “affront to justice.” The company was rebranded Xe Services in 2009 and sold; it was later renamed Academi and absorbed into Constellis Holdings in 2014, transactions in which Prince no longer had a role.
After leaving Blackwater, Prince moved to Abu Dhabi, where, according to a May 2011 New York Times report, the United Arab Emirates signed a $529 million contract with a firm called Reflex Responses (R2) to build a foreign mercenary force; internal documents referred to Prince by the code name “Kingfish.” From 2014 to his resignation on April 13, 2021, he served as deputy chairman and executive director of Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong–listed security and logistics company whose majority shareholder was the Chinese state-owned enterprise CITIC Group. In 2017 the meeting Prince held in the Seychelles with a Russian official tied to Vladimir Putin’s orbit was examined in the Mueller Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Vol. 5; congressional Democrats later referred his House testimony to the Justice Department for possible perjury.
Since 2017, Prince has repeatedly proposed substituting private contractors for state military functions, beginning with a plan to privatize the Afghanistan war. Before Trump’s 2025 inauguration he circulated, through an entity called 2USV, a 26-page blueprint for a $25 billion private deportation operation. He has since pursued mercenary and security ventures across the hemisphere, including a March 2025 contract through Vectus Global with Haiti’s interim government; by August 2025 he had agreed to deploy nearly 200 mercenaries there, and Haitian authorities confirmed in January 2026 that Vectus Global personnel took part in anti-gang raids. CNN reported in March 2025 that Prince had regained access to Trump’s orbit through multiple visits to Mar-a-Lago and the White House, though as of June 2026 he holds no formal appointment and no confirmed federal contract.
Sources
- Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Nation Books, 2007 (tier 1) — biography, family, religious framing, Blackwater founding.
- Erik Prince, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater, Sentinel/Penguin, 2013 (tier 1) — Prince’s own account of his background and Blackwater.
- “Theocratic Mercenary Erik Prince and the Christian Right,” The Humanist, 2018 (tier 2) — religious background, Hillsdale, Catholic conversion.
- “The return of Erik Prince: How a notorious military contractor maneuvered his way back inside Trump’s orbit,” CNN, March 13, 2025 (tier 1) — current positions and informal-advisor role.
- “Trump Pardons Blackwater Guards Who Killed 14 Iraqi Civilians,” The New York Times, December 22, 2020 (tier 1) — Nisour Square convictions and pardons.
- Mueller Report Vol. I, U.S. Department of Justice, April 18, 2019 (tier 1) — Seychelles meeting documentation.