Protests Are a Payday for Security Firms

The ultra-rich bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity executives of New York City have long enlisted private security firms to help safeguard them and their wealth. But as the mood on Main Street turns increasingly hostile, New York’s financial titans are cranking their security measures up to 11. For the high-end security firms that provide the moneyed elite with specialty services like around-the-clock bodyguards and elaborate home security systems, Occupy Wall Street has been a stimulus package all its own.

“We expect to more than double our revenue in New York this year,” said Paul M. Viollis, a co-founder of Risk Control Strategies, a firm that protects some of the top executives on Wall Street.

Another company, Insite Security, has gotten dozens of calls since the protests began and expects to increase its revenue at least 40 percent this year, according to Christopher Falkenberg, its chief executive. (In accordance with the industry’s code of secrecy, none of the security experts interviewed for this article provided client names.)

Executive protection, as the guard-the-rich industry is known, got an initial jolt from the financial crisis of 2008. Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, got permission from a local review board to build a six-foot-high security gate outside his Hamptons house in April 2008, the month after Bear Stearns collapsed. Lehman Brothers, another crisis casualty, had a bomb-sniffing Labrador retriever named Bella stationed at its headquarters. And in 2010, when the activist group the Yes Men encouraged its supporters to perform citizens’ arrests on John A. Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager, Mr. Paulson’s firm hired additional security guards to combat the threat, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. A spokesman for Mr. Paulson declined to comment.

But the most recent round of Main Street rage has raised the risk factor. Last week, when protesters picketed the homes of some of Manhattan’s richest residents, they made a stop at Mr. Paulson’s mansion, as well as the homes of Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Stephen A. Schwarzman, the billionaire co-founder of the Blackstone Group. One sign carried by protesters depicted Mr. Blankfein’s severed head on a stake.

Scenes like these are causing executives to supplement their internal security teams with the services of outside specialty firms. A chief financial officer of a major bank recently called Risk Control Strategies with the news that he had received a menacing e-mail from an anonymous sender.

“You filled your pockets, and now I’m going to fill mine, starting with your family,” the e-mail said, according to Mr. Viollis. The firm quickly dispatched a pair of guards to the client’s house.

Another client, a C-suite executive at a large Wall Street firm, recently asked Mr. Viollis to send undercover agents to Zuccotti Park to find out if the protesters were planning to harm him or his colleagues. (Mr. Viollis said he would probably decline the request.)

But as versions of Occupy Wall Street fan out across the country, even executives who aren’t recognizable to the general public are worried.

“If Zuccotti Park is tapping into resentment against wealthy people, that really changes the calculus,” said Mr. Falkenberg, a former Secret Service agent. “It’s not that far of a connection between what’s happening now in that park and a more focused, research-based kind of attack.”

The executive protection industry has existed as long as there have been executives, but it got a boost in 2003, when Edward S. Lampert, a Greenwich hedge fund manager, was kidnapped by four men on his way to his car. The men stuffed the billionaire into a Ford Expedition at gunpoint, took him to a motel and tied him up in the bathroom for two days. (Mr. Lampert survived the incident, and his kidnappers were caught and convicted.)

These days, bankers and hedge fund managers are willing to spend millions of dollars to avoid enduring anything similar.