Jul 24 (vanityfair.com) - When the auto king fled house arrest, he captivated the world. Now, the guy who helped him is in jail—and never got paid a dime.
In the spring of last year, a former Green Beret named Michael Taylor was in between jobs when he received a call from an old friend.
“Hey, we got a guy,†said the friend, a Lebanese businessman. “He’s close to us. He’s getting railroaded over in Japan. Is there something you can help us with?†Ali, the pseudonym Taylor gave him, wouldn’t provide any more specifics, not even a name.
“It’s possible,†Taylor told his friend. But he would need a lot more information.
The call wasn’t that unusual. Taylor had once run American International Security Corporation, a private military contractor specializing in risk assessment—and in spiriting people out of complex situations. Over two decades, he had established a reputation in certain circles for dramatic recovery missions conducted all over the world. Most were unofficial referrals from the FBI or the State Department—a young girl abducted by her Lebanese father amid a custody dispute, or a teenager who had gotten into a car accident over spring break in Costa Rica and was facing jail time. During his career, he has completed nearly two dozen such operations, charging clients anywhere from $20,000 to $2 million per job. The missions, some of which took years to plan and execute, earned Taylor the nickname Captain America. He lived in a binary world populated by, as he saw it, patriots or traitors, “our guy†or the “bad guy.†True to superhero style, the tales Taylor recounts from this career are outsize, epic, including the escape of Carlos Ghosn.
