Cher, cocaine and blood money at the Bellagio: What it was really like doing PR for dictators

In 2009, Mutassim Khadafy, the then 34-year-aged son of the ruthless Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy and the African country’s Nationwide Safety Advisor, preferred to getaway in Las Vegas. But he didn’t want his each individual transfer — notably the illegal ones — to conclude up in the information. So he hired Phil Elwood, a self-explained PR “arsonist,” to cover his tracks.

For 3 days, Elwood fundamentally babysat Khadafy and his entourage, producing guaranteed all of their bills — which involved 9 suites on the 20-ninth flooring of the Bellagio resort and endless bottles of classic Champagne — received billed to Elwood’s particular AmEx.

There experienced to be “no document of this journey. No credit score card monthly bill emblazoned with the name ‘Khadafy’ leaked to the press,” writes Elwood in his new book, “All the Worst People: How I Designed Information for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians” (Henry Holt and Co., out now).

As a primary operative for the PR business Brown Llloyd James (now named BLJ Around the world) it was Elwood’s position to manipulate the general public narrative encompassing his clients. Sometimes that intended coaxing journalists into producing what he desired them to compose. Other periods, it intended preserving them in the darkish totally.

The latter endeavor proved to be no smaller feat, particularly when Khadafy begun threatening a Bellagio housekeeper for hoping to clean up his suite. BLJ attained a hefty fee by “cleaning up a slew of scathing headlines” for the dictator and his loved ones. If Peter Brown (Elwood’s boss at BLJ) “opens The New York Submit to the headline ‘Khadafy Person-Boy or girl Tossed Out of Bellagio, Pisses in Fountain,’ I’m out of a task,” Elwood writes.

His credit history card racked up expenditures for every little thing from a telescope to Cher tickets to jean shorts — the dictator’s son was established to go away the States with a pair of jorts. But the most stress filled assignment associated monitoring down cocaine for Khadafy and his attendees, and paying out for it from a briefcase crammed with millions in money and a 9mm Beretta.

1 disaster was averted right after an additional. When Khadafy was denied obtain to the large-rollers blackjack desk because he refused to don shoes, Elwood paid off the pit boss with a stack of costs, “enough to invest in a Toyota Camry,” he writes. Later, when Elwood shared aspects of the “f—ed up” vacation to Brown, his manager was happy inspite of the 7-determine AmEx bill. 

“There were being no news posts released about it,” Brown informed him. “And that was your job.”

It experienced never been Elwood’s aim to make a occupation as a PR huckster. The son of a pastor from Idaho, he moved to DC in the early 2000s to forge a lifetime in politics, toiling in internships on the Hill in advance of at last landing a common gig as legislative correspondent for Democratic Michigan senator Carl Levin. 

He experienced a revelatory minute all through the 2002 congressional hearings, led by Levin, on the alleged malfeasance of Enron’s board of directors. Elwood was fascinated by how the Enron executives fumbled on the witness stand. “Who prepped them for this massacre?” Elwood writes. “Where’s the regular messaging? Why weren’t they anticipating these questions? Why are they just giving effortless seem bites to the senator and the media?”

He shortly gravitated in direction of general public relations, performing for numerous important companies like Enterprise and Burson-Marsteller.

He before long recognized that his task wasn’t to manipulate community feeling but to get the media gatekeepers to do it for him. “Once you have ink, your tale gets true,” Elwood writes. “The community begins to settle for some thing you created out of nothing at all.”

He was so great at orchestrating smoke-and-mirrors that he was shortly poached by Peter Brown, a just one-time manager and challenge-solver for the rock band the Beatles. Immediately after assisting John Lennon approach a key marriage ceremony, the band immortalized Brown in the tune “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” (“Peter Brown known as to say ‘You can make it ok,’” Lennon sang. “‘You can get married in Gibraltar, around Spain.”)

In 1983, Brown experienced started BLJ, an global PR firm for “high-visibility clients” that at some point arrived to involve some less-than-admirable characters, this sort of as Khadafy, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russia Now, a information outlet began by the Kremlin that utilized BLJ “to legitimize it in the American news market place,” Elwood writes.

Elwood learned that manipulating the media came down to providing journalists what they desperately needed: scoops.

“The very best journalists in the globe are not often breaking stories simply because of their dogged reporting expertise,” he writes. “They’re breaking them simply because they count on folks like me. We use journalists to do our clients’ bidding.”

Acquiring a journalist to write about his clientele —and far more importantly, compose about his clients in a way that would gain them — associated a lot more than just contacting in with a idea. Elwood experienced to give exclusivity, which could include things like anything at all from off-the-record discussions to interior memos.

1 of his beloved strategies, specifically when finding out that a impressive outlet like the New York Instances or the Washington Write-up was investigating 1 of his purchasers, was to leak the story to a lesser publication.

“You pitch the adverse tale yourself,” Elwood explains. “Leave nothing at all out. No room for added reporting. Then give the reporter an several hours-very long embargo day. Explain to them you are likely to other reporters in a couple of several hours.”

His reasoning: if the story is coming out anyway, may as properly give it to a publication where by it can do the least harm. “If you know you are about to be punched in the facial area, would you somewhat have Mike Tyson do it or some male named ‘Mike’ from the accounting section?” Elwood writes.

Some of his cases created him sense like he was creating a favourable variation. He aided a Turkish barber named Sabri Bogday who was sentenced to demise by spiritual authorities in Saudi Arabia for stating “goddamn” at work.

“When you’re seeking to use pressure by way of the push, you should know and exploit your enemies’ weak spots,” Elwood writes. The Saudis “don’t give a shit about political hits. But they do not like spiritual disgrace.” 

When Saudi Arabia hosted a summit at the United Nations to examine religious freedom, he tipped off reporters that they had “a scarce opportunity to confront a brutal regime about a religious prisoner.” A 7 days later on, Bogday was a no cost person.

But often, it was obvious Elwood was manipulating the strings of the media in a negative way. In 2010, when the govt of Qatar — a BLJ shopper — was established to get their shot at internet hosting the Entire world Cup, Elwood helped run a campaign to “kneecap the American bid,” he writes.

Applying President Obama’s Nutritious Young children Coalition as a go over, Elwood planted a seed with journalists, inspiring them to generate (as he experienced brainstormed on a bar napkin) that till physical schooling for American youngsters is completely funded, “no taxpayer dollars should be spent in the pursuit of internet hosting global athletics events, like the Olympics or the Environment Cup.”

The scheme labored. BLJ paved the way for Qatar securing a Earth Cup bid, all for just $80,000, the firm’s month to month retainer. Given that Qatar would soon expend $220 billion on the game titles, “our fee was a hell of a deal,” Elwood writes.

Elwood began to eliminate religion in his field all-around 2011, immediately after a disastrous try to give Syrian president Bashar al-Assad an graphic makeover via his spouse, Asma. Mainly because of Brown’s relationship with Anna Wintour, they’re ready to get the dictator’s husband or wife featured in the “Power” concern of Vogue.

“It’s an American tactic,” writes Elwood. “The To start with Woman is usually extra well known than the president, and she would make her husband search great by association.”

But then arrived the Arab Spring rebellion. BLJ was billed with serving to the Assad regime set a constructive spin on the protests, and, according to a confidential memo shared by WikiLeaks, “developing media coverage exterior of Syria that details to the President’s difficult job of seeking reform, but performed in a non-chaotic, rational way.”

Elwood turned down the account “after I find out that the Syrian federal government is shooting its have people today,” he writes. Brown immediately fired him.

Elwood, 45, proceeds to work in public relations now, but he however grapples with the morality of his picked occupation. “I’m proud of my operate, but I’m not very pleased of what I have carried out,” he writes. “I’ve manipulated narratives—even invented them when needed—to deal with problems for a consumer. My stories didn’t occur in a vacuum. They circulated out into the entire world. And they improved it. From time to time for the worse.”

His most significant regret is encouraging Qatar win the Planet Cup bid, he writes, but it may very effectively pale in comparison to how the media is staying manipulated now.

“We are living in risky periods,” Elwood writes, “and my industry assisted make them so.”