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A former Burns vice president says that when he quit in 1990, the firm was shooting for only "95% compliance" on its own internal screening rules, and that "this was broadly ignored, or only followed on a cursory basis." Burns' managers, for example, are required to mail three requests for written references for each guard applicant. "As long as you had copies of those requests in the file, no one cared whether you actually got them back," he says. "It was documentation for the sake of compliance, as opposed to trying to really get at something."
Van Nuys, Calif.-based Pinkerton's (1991 revenues: $640 million) has also suffered from turnover and service problems following a leveraged merger four years ago with a firm called California Plant Protection (CPP). Mark Savage, a former award-winning Pinkerton's manager, says he quit the company in 1990 in part because its management "was cutting corners and pushing people to their limits." In terms of clients, he adds, "companies like Burns and Pinkerton's always take for granted that they will lose business and that if they sell more than they lose, they're still growing. They're not as quality- conscious."
Pinkerton's has found it easier to grow by voraciously gobbling up smaller security firms -- 14 in 1991 alone. But along the way, the company has also lost some big contracts. Wall Street's Kidder, Peabody dropped the firm because "when Pinkerton's was bought out by CPP, the service started falling apart," says John Poppe, Kidder's director of security. "There was constant turnover of guards." In January, Smith Barney gave Pinkerton's the pink slip as well. "Big security companies become apathetic," complains an executive at the brokerage. "We've had guards who were unable to write, unable to answer phones."
Pinkerton's was involved in litigation in the 1980s that drove home the need for industry standards. A Pinkerton's guard at Welsh Manufacturing, a former division of Textron in Rhode Island, admitted he took the job specifically to arrange the theft of gold he was supposed to be protecting. As a result, Welsh won punitive damages. The case, which led to an appellate decision in 1984, exposed Pinkerton's inadequate screening and supervision of its employee. Management never bothered to contact any of the three character references the guard provided. And while Pinkerton's contacted his former employers, it received no information on his honesty and trustworthiness.
A guard company's failure to thoroughly screen applicants can often prove deadly. In the case of John Padilla (accused in the Carle Place killings), HSC Security was clearly not up to the task. Padilla actually tried to apply for a new job, with OCS Security, just two weeks before the Long Island bloodletting. "Obviously, it's worth spending all the money we do on screening and training, because we nixed John right away," says Brian Church, an official at OCS. "He was a job-jumper. He wasn't an attractive job applicant. That's probably the nicest way of putting it." Moreover, Padilla was not licensed to carry a firearm.