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Few industries have expanded as rapidly. The number of security guards has grown since 1980 to nearly twice the size of the U.S. public law-enforcement community. Today there are 10,000 security companies in America, the vast majority operating on a shoestring and paying their guards $5 to $7 an hour. "The little mom-and-pops are often undercapitalized, cutting corners all over the place, opening and closing regularly under new names, even providing payoffs in exchange for work," says Richard Rockwell, who runs Professional Security Bureau, a midsize guard company with offices stretching from Boston to Miami. Says industry consultant Francis Hamit: "Clients often don't want to pay for training, and the security companies cannot really afford to. I've seen accounts lost to lowball bidders for 5 cents per man-hour."
The industry's largest companies all claim to screen and train their applicants rigorously. Yet just since last fall, guards for Burns, the industry leader, with more than $650 million in revenues, have been arrested for everything from setting fire to an abandoned building in Colorado (it took 42 fire fighters to put it out) to vacuuming thousands of dollars in change from public bus boxes in San Francisco, to stealing $13,000 in computer equipment from a client in Syracuse. After a five-month probe at New Jersey's Meadowlands arena, a grand jury documented 20 cases in which Burns guards beat or otherwise abused patrons between 1987 and 1990. Burns has since been fired, and the grand jury has accused the arena's management of a "gross error in judgment" for renewing a contract with the security firm in 1989.
A management-led leveraged buyout in 1987 by Borg-Warner has put tremendous pressure on Burns' middle managers to produce revenue. Former employees say president Rodger Comstock's intimidating management style and the firm's alleged habit of breaking bonus promises have contributed to an exodus of managers, forcing Burns to recruit and train new ones, sometimes at the expense of clients' needs.
"A guard service is really only as good as the supervision it provides," says Michael Anesta, the director of personnel for Steinway & Sons, which stopped using Burns two years ago at its Queens, N.Y., piano-manufacturing plant. Former Burns official Gary Slodowski quit in 1990 after winning the company's manager-of-the-year award. "With the LBO, the company started to deteriorate," he says. "They've got away from the building blocks, such as service and visiting clients every day. Collecting cash became the main thing. With no one to pay attention to the other details, you're going to have smoking guns like the Meadowlands."
Such criticism is vigorously disputed by Charles Schneider, head of Borg- Warner's Baker Industries, which controls Burns as well as fourth-ranked Wells Fargo. He calls Baker "the best security-guard company in the world." Burns does provide high-quality service at roughly one-third of the nation's - nuclear power plants, where government screening and training standards are extremely rigorous. But the company's basic, lower-paid guard forces are another story.