Notable Neighbors
February 11, 2022 at 1:37 p.m.
Notable Neighbors
By Dean M. Laux
How does an Australian farm boy with “humble beginnings,” to use his words, end up keeping company with kings, queens, heads of state and international celebrities in far-off lands such as Austria, Brazil and Tanzania? Certainly not via a magic carpet, a friendly genie or a very rich uncle. Lawrence Anthony (“Larry”) Wilson can tell you he did it the hard way: on his own.
Born to Lawrence and Judith Wilson in Sydney in 1972 as the youngest of four strapping boys, he was a scrawny kid who got bullied and picked on from the time he was 5 years old. But he was a scrappy one. “Even then I didn’t back down,” he says. “I’d go right back at ‘em with all I had.” As he grew older, he also grew bigger and stronger and faster, and by the time he was a teenager at 6’4” and 265 lbs, most folks wouldn’t want to find out how tough he really was.
“I was a capable but unwilling student in school,” he admits, although he points out that his Mom, a career nurse and healthcare worker, gave him a liking for biology and medicine. “I was more into hunting and fishing,” he says. He was also an outstanding athlete, excelling in rugby, cricket, field hockey and motorcross biking, which earned him some attention from area sports fans.
The family farm raised beef cattle and dairy cows, and young Larry put in long hours at farm chores every day. When he was old enough, he also spent four evenings a week flexing his muscles as a bouncer at the local bars along Sydney’s waterfront. He took courses in a variety of martial arts along the way, and it was at Sydney’s harbor that he first developed his skills in maintaining order in crowded conditions that could become hazardous–particularly when U.S. Navy sailors were in town on shore leave after a lengthy tour at sea.
“In 1993 I met a gentleman–a former soldier in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe–who had a personal protection company, and he told me that if I came to work for him, I could make big money as a bodyguard, $50 an hour for four hours’ work per day compared to the $20 an hour I was making. That sounded great. But he said I needed some field experience in a war zone setting, to prove to myself that I could operate successfully under dangerous conditions. I was 21 years old, and the next week I was off from Sydney to Paris, France on a one-way ticket, ready to join the French Foreign Legion and gain that experience.” He signed on with the FFL, but shortly after his arrival in Paris he “became sick enough to pass on a chance to become cannon fodder in a battle zone,” he says. Instead, when he recovered his health he went back to Sydney and worked for a couple of years for his Rhodesian friend, doing close protection for witnesses who were waiting to testify in court.
“I knew then that I had the skill set to make a career by providing protection for others who did not have those skills,” he says. By this time he had taken every martial arts course he could sign up for, and he was ready. There’s a saying that chance favors the prepared mind, and Larry was prepared to make a life of helping others be prepared.
In 1996 he went back to Paris, where he worked briefly for the Australian government and then landed a job as a security officer at the United Nations Headquarters in Vienna, Austria. In that capacity he had duties much like the U.S. Marine Corps guards have at America’s embassies around the world: screen entrants to the property and check the security of the premises daily. “Once you crossed into our UN enclave, you were in our territory, and we had the power to arrest and prosecute any intruder,” he says. That gave him experience in the use of police powers to protect UN property at the massive headquarters building. He also traveled out of Vienna to provide personal protection for UN authorities at conferences and other meetings.
In 1998 he took on a bigger assignment as Special Projects Supervisor for the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, which was prosecuting war criminals from the armed conflict between Bosnia and Herzegovina. This involved him in mission work for Head Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte in Macedonia, Kosovo and Tanzania and providing security for all evidence collected in the cases.
In 2002 the Australian government posted Larry to its embassy in Berlin, where he did background checks on foreign nationals seeking citizenship in Australia. In 2008 he went back to UN Headquarters in Vienna as Senior Security Officer, a position he held for the next six years. It was in those years that he dealt extensively with internationally known figures. “I looked after lots of dignitaries,” he says fondly. “The King and Queen of Sweden, the King and Queen of Thailand, our Australian Prime Minister, the Director General of the UN, America’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and American actor and film director Nicolas Cage. I had dealings with Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan, Monaco’s Prince Albert and many others.”
His responsibilities at the UN included not only close protection of dignitaries but also responding to intrusions on UN property and public protests in the compound or its perimeters, responding to alarms at the UN’s highly sensitive narcotics and nuclear research laboratories, and also to medical incidents that might occur anywhere on the property. He provided counter-surveillance and intelligence services to the UN’s Threat and Risk Department, and training for the UN’s counter-assault team members. In all his years of security work, Lawrence found himself in many a “tight situation,” as he puts it, but he was able to use his own training and experience to avoid serious injury and to head off disaster. He put that experience into the training he gave to others. “I wanted them to be prepared,” he says. “It’s better to be ready for trouble and not experience it than it is to experience trouble and not be ready for it.”
In January of 2015 Larry moved over to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Seibersdorf, Austria as Site Security Supervisor. In that capacity he was the primary liaison for the IAEA with the UN’s Department of Safety and Security and with the Austrian police. He was responsible for protection of the Seibersdorf nuclear labs and all their personnel, assets and facilities–a critical job for a high-risk category 2 nuclear site. Not bad for a one-time Australian farm boy who decided to make himself into a protector of others.
Larry did have one occurrence that he wasn’t prepared for. He met a beautiful young woman named Aleida in 2010 at UN headquarters, but he found himself not ready to make her acquaintance. “I was still involved in another relationship, which was winding down badly,” he says. It seemed that a golden opportunity had passed him by, but some two years later he by chance met her again, and this time his mind was prepared. Things got serious, they became a couple, and they got married in 2015.
“In 2017 my project with IAEA ran out, and Aleida and I decided to move to America,” Larry says. “I had job opportunities in New York, and I could have stayed with the UN, but I decided I wanted to have a business of my own and be my own boss.”
During the years he was in Europe there were crises everywhere, and in every country hostile environment awareness training (HEAT) was a requirement. “I had developed expertise in that field. I was a weapons specialist, a counter-assault trainer, a tactical medical instructor, skilled in emergency response activity. I had training in threat and risk assessment, fire protection, radiation security measures, incident command and rescue techniques.” He felt he could offer that expertise to America, where hostile situations seemed to be becoming ever more frequent and dangerous.
He and Aleida now had some company: their young daughter Isabella and also Sophie and Nicolas from Larry’s prior conjugal relationship. “We’re a real mishmash of nationalities,” he says, all having been born outside the U.S. They moved first to New Jersey and then rather quickly relocated to Florida, where the weather was friendlier. “We love it here in the Englewood area. It’s quiet. It’s off the beaten track, and people only come in this way if they live here or they’re lost. We looked and looked, and we finally found the right home last August. It’s a fantastic community and it has fantastic schools. We’ll be staying here and putting our kids through college and letting them build careers of their own.”
Lawrence and Aleida have set up a company called Americanequalizer that offers training in tactical medical response, proper pistol and rifle technique, and for local entities, hostile environment awareness and response. He’s begun giving talks at volunteer organizations and has already found several new clients in the short time he’s been here. “We can show people how to cope with whatever emergencies they might encounter,” he says, “and we fervently hope they will never encounter them.”
Amen. Now that’s a service we could all benefit from.
Dean Laux is exploring interesting folks living in our community. If you know of anyone with an interesting background please send an email to: [email protected]. Include the person’s name, contact info and give a brief description of the person’s background.