Patricia Cohen

But he is really selling only one thing: peace of mind.

For more than four decades, de Becker, 64, has counseled the U.S. government, law enforcement departments, thousands of celebrity clients and countless readers on how to ward off threats and stay safe in a scary world.

His most recent case was for Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, who asked him to find out how American Media Inc., which publishes The National Enquirer, had obtained private intimate pictures of Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.

In a blog post on Medium on Thursday, Bezos said David J. Pecker, chief executive of AMI, was trying to use the photos to blackmail him and deter him — and the news outlet he owns, The Washington Post — from investigating allegations that The Enquirer’s coverage of his affair was politically motivated.

Bezos said he had asked de Becker “to proceed with whatever budget he needed.” Those are words that could inspire any employee. But de Becker has made the security of others his life’s work.

His own childhood was full of the violence and fear that he is now paid to shield others from. De Becker has written that his mother, a heroin addict, regularly beat him and his sister, and shot his stepfather. She committed suicide when he was 16.

He then moved in with the family of a friend from Beverly Hills High School, Miguel Ferrer, the son of actor José Ferrer and singer Rosemary Clooney. Clooney later gave him a job as her road manager. He went on to work as Elizabeth Taylor’s assistant. (Another close friend was actress Carrie Fisher; he gave a eulogy at a memorial service in 2017 for Fisher and her actress mother, Debbie Reynolds, who died a day apart.)

In an interview with The New York Times in 1997, de Becker said his experience with Taylor had led him to understand the perils of celebrity and the “marketing of human beings.”

He has been enmeshed ever since. He has investigated stalkers for stars like Olivia Newton-John and Cher. He supervised security for public figures visiting President Ronald Reagan and his family at the White House. He worked with members of the family of Ronald L. Goldman when they sued O.J. Simpson over Goldman’s 1994 killing at the home of Simpson’s former wife. And he helped Bill and Camille Cosby when they received threatening letters after their son’s 1997 murder.

For most people seeking de Becker’s advice, they can buy peace of mind for a few dollars with a paperback copy of his best-seller, a book that Oprah Winfrey has gushed over, “The Gift of Fear.”

For those who can afford it, there is a more hands-on option. Private Suite, the royal blue refuge de Becker created for wealthy travelers going through Los Angeles International Airport, get their own private suites, bathrooms and bag screeners for a $4,500 annual fee.

“It typically takes 2,200 footsteps from car seat to plane seat,” the website boasts. “For members of the Private Suite, it’s 70 footsteps. And they are all peaceful footsteps.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/business/gavin-de-becker-jeff-bezos.html" id="2bf1b9c4-9047-3652-a0cd-550aaa9d21a6">The New York Times</a>.

Gavin de Becker, Jeff Bezos’ longtime security chief, may run his own consulting firm, write books, operate a private luxury terminal at Los Angeles International Airport and develop threat-assessment tools.

A Security Chief Who Is Selling Peace of Mind

<h1>But it also exposed a political vulnerability, leaving unclear what alternative strategy they are offering to encourage growth and create the thousands of jobs that Amazon promised to bring to the city.</h1>

The clash has consequences far beyond New York, going to the heart of a national debate that is likely to dominate the 2020 presidential race: What is the best way to spread prosperity?

As Gov. Andrew Cuomo fumed that some of his fellow Democrats put “the state’s economic future” at risk, others inside and outside the party saw the scuttled project as evidence that the left doesn’t understand how to generate growth. In a tweet, Lloyd Blankfein, senior chairman of Goldman Sachs, lashed out at progressive Democrats, labeling them as both “anti-progress” and “anti-Democratic.”

Those views feed into a powerful, long-held narrative popularized by Ronald Reagan that Democratic policymakers had — as then-Sen. Barack Obama put it in 2006 — become “more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie.”

For Republicans, Amazon’s retreat is an opportunity to revive beloved barbs and brand Democrats as “job killers” who are all too eager to “tax-and-spend.” Lower taxes for investors and business owners, they argue, is what spurs entrepreneurs to create jobs and spread the wealth.

For progressives, defeating a plan that handed tax incentives to a trillion-dollar tech titan is part of a broader effort to discredit what they see as bankrupt economic policies. They argue that workers and the government — two players that have been relegated to the background — should be treated as important engines of growth.

Many objections raised in New York by critics like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman congresswoman whose Queens district borders the neighborhood where Amazon was headed, align with economic critiques offered by Democratic presidential contenders.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for example, have frequently railed against the outsize power of corporations and lopsided tax cuts and incentives that favor the wealthy.

Warren called the state subsidies in the Amazon deal “taxpayer bribes,” while Sanders said, “This is what the rigged economy is all about.” New York was offering nearly $3 billion in subsidies to Amazon, a company that last year effectively paid half the 21 percent federal corporate tax rate.

At the same time, presidential hopefuls have supported policies that bolster workers and the middle class, like an increased minimum wage and rules that ensure overtime pay, as well as substantial public investment. Democrats on the left are also floating ambitious proposals like free college for all, a federal job guarantee, an industrial plan to retool the country’s energy use and higher taxes on the wealthy.

The groundwork for these ideas was prepared in recent years by a network of liberal economists, thinkers and activists at research organizations and universities interested in developing a set of policies to displace supply-side economics and trickle-down theory.

“The interaction between market and collective action is what leads to our prosperity,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prize winning economist who is coming out with a book about growing the economy in the 21st century. Advances in science and technology, for example, rest on basic research that was first funded by the government and then brought to market by the private sector.

Stiglitz argues this is the kind of alternative explanation of how growth occurs that the Democratic Party needs to offer more vocally. Souped-up competition, lower taxes on the wealthy and hands-off financial regulation, he maintains, have failed to deliver on their promise to supercharge the economy and broadly lift incomes.

Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist who was an early investor in Amazon and is now a progressive activist and writer, argues that trickle-down theory should be replaced with what he and Eric Liu, a former adviser in Bill Clinton’s administration, call “middle-out economics.”

“I believe capitalism is the greatest social technology ever created for generating wealth and prosperity,” he said, “but we’ve confused what’s good for the narrow-short-term interest of a few capitalists for what’s good for capitalism.”

The notion that tax cuts for the rich are what cause economic growth and create a thriving middle class is “both wrong and backwards,” Hanauer said. “The thriving middle class is the cause of economic growth.”

The ideas that are capturing attention, particularly in the run-up to the 2020 election, focus more directly on the fortunes of workers and give the government a much more central role in spurring economic growth and distributing wealth.

The approach reaches back to the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt for inspiration. The major effort to alter the course of climate change was purposely named the “Green New Deal” — after Roosevelt’s signature policy — precisely for that reason. Several versions of the program exist, but the one introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., includes “a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one."

During the recession’s grimmest months, Obama pushed to fast-track a multibillion-dollar stimulus package — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — aimed at creating jobs and spending money on transportation, technology and energy projects. Although the plan was smaller than several left-leaning Democrats wanted, it rested on a shared assumption that cranking up public investment would get the economy moving and put people back to work.

How such policies will play out at a time when the unemployment rate has settled in at a low 4 percent will be a source of tension among the party’s various factions. In the past, Democrats have pushed such stimulants during periods of economic weakness. And specific proposals offered by progressives, whether free college or a wealth tax, cause some Democrats to blanch.

Nonetheless, many Democrats acknowledge that political and business leaders have tended to focus too narrowly on the winners of pro-growth policies like free trade without paying sufficient attention to losers like laid-off factory workers. It’s a theme that President Donald Trump successfully pushed on the campaign trail in 2016.

“You organize the economy so workers have more power that allows them to get fair wages and safe living standards” so they’re not outgunned by corporate power, said Jacob Leibenluft, who led Hillary Clinton’s economic policy team during her presidential campaign and is now executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research institute.

Democratic centrists and self-described pragmatists now also widely subscribe to critiques of the dominant economic policies of the last couple of decades — particularly that tax policy has not produced vigorous growth. A consensus has also taken shape that the government needs to play a larger role in the economy, raising taxes, investing in public institutions and, to some degree, redistributing income.

Two pillars of the Democratic establishment — Lawrence Summers, Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and director of Obama’s National Economic Council, and Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration — have called for significant public spending on infrastructure, education, health care and more to address slow economic growth and sidelined workers.

“Government has to play an important role,” said Furman, who wrote an article with Summers last month about putting such policies ahead of reducing the deficit. “If you’re spending more, you have to tax more.”

For many Democrats, the shift to a more activist role is overdue. Yet it also comes at a time when the public’s trust in government has dropped to historic lows, according to a December 2017 report from the Pew Research Center.

Only 18 percent of Americans said they trust the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.”

Amazon's Exit Reignites a Debate Over Growth

The political opposition that prompted Amazon to walk away from building a corporate headquarters in New York City featured a touchstone of the progressives’ economic agenda: ending tax policies that unfairly reward and pamper the wealthy.

Amazon's exit reignites a debate over growth

At the same time, presidential hopefuls on the left have supported policies that bolster workers and the middle class, like an increased minimum wage and rules that ensure overtime pay, as well as substantial public investment. Democrats are also floating ambitious proposals like free college for all, a federal job guarantee, an industrial plan to retool the country’s energy use and higher taxes on the wealthy.

The notion that tax cuts for the rich is what causes economic growth and creates a thriving middle class is “both wrong and backwards,” Hanauer said. “The thriving middle class is the cause of economic growth.”

The approach reaches back to the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt for inspiration. The major effort to alter the course of climate change was purposely named the “Green New Deal” — after Roosevelt’s signature policy — precisely for that reason. Several versions of the program exist, but the one introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., includes “a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”

Failed Amazon Deal Revives a Fight Over Growth

Failed Amazon deal revives a fight over growth

<h1>Gavin de Becker, Jeff Bezos’ longtime security chief, may run his own consulting firm, write books, operate a private luxury terminal at Los Angeles International Airport and develop threat-assessment tools.</h1>

He then moved in with the family of a friend from Beverly Hills High School — Miguel Ferrer, the son of actor José Ferrer and singer Rosemary Clooney. Clooney later gave him a job as her road manager. He went on to work as Elizabeth Taylor’s assistant. (Another close friend was actress Carrie Fisher; he gave a eulogy at a memorial service in 2017 for Fisher and her actress mother, Debbie Reynolds, who died a day apart.)

He has been enmeshed ever since. He has investigated stalkers for stars like Olivia Newton-John and Cher. He headed security for public figures visiting President Ronald Reagan and his family at the White House. He worked with the family of Ronald L. Goldman when it sued O.J. Simpson over Goldman’s 1994 killing at the home of Simpson’s former wife.

For most people seeking de Becker’s advice, they can buy peace of mind for a few dollars with a paperback copy of his best-seller, “The Gift of Fear.”

For those who can afford it, there is a more hands-on option. As the website for Private Suite, the royal blue refuge de Becker created for wealthy travelers going through the Los Angeles airport, boasts: “It typically takes 2,200 footsteps from car seat to plane seat. For members of the Private Suite, it’s 70 footsteps. And they are all peaceful footsteps.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="7e690b86-46c2-46ee-bcee-ab4201f0a0c9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/business/gavin-de-becker-jeff-bezos.html">The New York Times</a>.

Bezos' security chief is a guardian to the stars

For more than four decades, de Becker, 64, has counseled the U.S. government, law enforcement departments, thousands of celebrity clients and countless readers on how to ward off threats and stay safe in a scary world.

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Patricia Cohen

Articles written by the author

A Security Chief Who Is Selling Peace of Mind

Amazon's exit reignites a debate over growth

Failed Amazon deal revives a fight over growth

Bezos' security chief is a guardian to the stars