Blackwater (company)

Academi, formerly known as Blackwater, is an American private military contractor founded on December 26, 1996, by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince. It was renamed Xe Services in 2009, and was again renamed to Academi in 2011, after it was acquired by a group of private investors. In 2014, Academi merged with Triple Canopy to form Constellis Holdings. Academi and its predecessors provide contract security services to the United States federal government. Since 2003, it has provided services to the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2013, its subsidiary, International Development Solutions, received an approximately $92 million contract for U.S. State Department security guards. In 2007, Blackwater received widespread notoriety for the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20. Four employees were convicted in the United States and later pardoned on December 22, 2020, by President Donald Trump. Blackwater USA was formed on December 26, 1996, by Al Clark and Erik Prince in North Carolina, to provide training support to military and law enforcement organizations. In explaining its purpose, Prince stated: "We are trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service." After working with SEAL and SWAT teams, Blackwater USA received its first government contract following the bombing of USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in October 2000. Prince purchased approximately of the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast swamp on the North Carolina–Virginia border that is now mostly a national wildlife refuge. "We needed 3,000 acres to make it safe," Prince told reporter Robert Young Pelton. There, he created his private training facility and his contracting company, Blackwater, which he named for the peat-colored water of the swamp. The Blackwater Lodge and Training Center officially opened on May 15, 1998, with a ,$6.5 million facility headed by Robert Anderson. It comprises several ranges: indoor, outdoor, urban reproductions; an artificial lake; and a driving track in Camden and Currituck counties.