The Info Web

#Wackenhut

19 entries

People (14)

  • Bruce Berckmans Former CIA staff agent asked to resign in 1970 who became Wackenhut's director of international operations, threatened to sue the agency in June 1976, and instead offered himself as its contact.
  • Charles B. Flack Jr. Former FBI agent who merged his investigative firm into the Wackenhut Corporation in 1962 and ran its Philadelphia office for the Pennsylvania and New Jersey area.
  • Claude Kirk Governor of Florida from 1967 to 1971 who put George Wackenhut and his company's detectives in charge of a war on crime paid for by private donors, which the FBI refused to recognize.
  • Edward Wegmann New Orleans lawyer who with his brother William defended Clay Shaw against Jim Garrison, engaged Wackenhut and other firms of former federal agents, and sought guidance from the Justice Department on the CIA.
  • George R. Wackenhut FBI agent from 1951 to 1954 who founded the Wackenhut Corporation, kept files on 2.5 million people, held a CIA covert security approval, and ran Florida's privately financed war on crime in 1967.
  • Gerard John Schaefer Martin County, Florida, deputy sheriff convicted in 1973 of two murders and linked by recovered possessions to at least six missing women, and by one account a Wackenhut security guard in 1970.
  • Hank Messick Miami Herald crime reporter fed leads by the FBI, who joined Wackenhut's Florida crime war in December 1966 and quit after six weeks calling it a cruel hoax upon the people of Florida.
  • Howard Hunt CIA officer who ran propaganda for the 1954 Guatemala coup and politics for the Bay of Pigs, headed covert action in the Domestic Operations Division, joined the Mullen Company, and was convicted in Watergate.
  • Jimmy Hughes Former security director of the Cabazon tribe's casino and bingo operations, later a missionary in Honduras, charged in 2009 with the 1981 murders of Fred Alvarez, Ralph Boger and Patricia Castro; dismissed in 2010.
  • Justin Gleichauf Chief of the CIA Domestic Contact Service field offices in Miami and Dallas who ran the Wackenhut Corporation as a reporting source in 1970 and by 1974 worked for the company himself.
  • Karl Baarslag Naval intelligence officer and professional anticommunist researcher for Joseph McCarthy and the American Legion, whose name files passed to the Wackenhut Corporation and then to the Church League of America.
  • Norman Casper Former Wackenhut detective in Miami who became the paid informant TW-24 of the Internal Revenue Service's Operation Tradewinds and in 1972 approached the president of the Castle Bank in the Bahamas.
  • R.C. Horsch Philadelphia pornographic filmmaker, counterfeiter and fugitive who lived in New Zealand under a stolen identity, said he wiretapped for Wackenhut in the 1960s, and whose Olney house is the center of a 2026 missing-women investigation.
  • Stafford Sands Bahamian minister and lawyer who arranged casino exemptions for clients tied to Meyer Lansky, was disgraced by a 1967 royal commission, and was kept as a client by Wackenhut during its Florida war on crime.

Organizations (3)

  • Church League of America Illinois anticommunist organization founded in 1937, run from the 1950s by a former Air Force intelligence officer, which in 1975 took over the Wackenhut Corporation's name files after the Fair Credit Reporting Act made them a liability.
  • Southern Research Company Shreveport detective firm whose New Orleans office, run by a former associate of Guy Banister, investigated David Ferrie for Eastern Air Lines in 1963, and which the House assassinations committee in 1978 called the former name of Wackenhut.
  • Wackenhut Corporation Florida security company founded in 1954 by former FBI agents, which gave the CIA cover in Miami from 1961 to 1967, kept files on millions of Americans, and allegedly modified PROMIS at Cabazon.

Programs (1)

  • Project Azorian CIA operation of 1969 to 1974 that built the Hughes Glomar Explorer under Howard Hughes's name to raise a sunken Soviet missile submarine, and gave its name to the refusal to confirm or deny.

Places (1)

  • Coral Gables, Florida City adjoining Miami that was the headquarters of the Wackenhut Corporation and the site of an ITT public relations office about which the Watergate special prosecutor questioned the CIA in 1973.