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-old son of the ruthless Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy and the African country’s National Security Advisor, wanted to vacation in Las Vegas. But he didn’t want his every move — particularly the illegal ones — to end up in the news. So he hired Phil Elwood, a self-described PR “arsonist,” to cover his tracks.
For three days, Elwood essentially babysat Khadafy and his entourage, making sure all of their expenses — which included nine suites on the twenty-ninth floor of the Bellagio hotel and endless bottles of vintage Champagne — got charged to Elwood’s personal AmEx.
There had to be “no record of this trip. No credit card bill emblazoned with the name ‘Khadafy’ leaked to the press,” writes Elwood in his new book, “All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians” (Henry Holt and Co., out now).
As a leading operative for the PR firm Brown Llloyd James (now called BLJ Worldwide) it was Elwood’s job to manipulate the public narrative surrounding his clients. Sometimes that meant coaxing journalists into writing what he wanted them to write. Other times, it meant keeping them in the dark entirely.
The latter task proved to be no small feat, especially when Khadafy started threatening a Bellagio housekeeper for trying to clean his suite. BLJ earned a hefty commission by “cleaning up a slew of scathing headlines” for the dictator and his family. If Peter Brown (Elwood’s boss at BLJ) “opens The New York Post to the headline ‘Khadafy Man-Child Tossed Out of Bellagio, Pisses in Fountain,’ I’m out of a job,” Elwood writes.
His credit card racked up expenses for everything from a telescope to Cher tickets to jean shorts — the dictator’s son was determined to leave the States with a pair of jorts. But the most stressful assignment involved tracking down cocaine for Khadafy and his guests, and paying for it from a briefcase filled with millions in cash and a 9mm Beretta.
One crisis was averted after another. When Khadafy was denied access to the high-rollers blackjack table because he refused to wear shoes, Elwood paid off the pit boss with a stack of bills, “enough to buy a Toyota Camry,” he writes. Later, when Elwood shared details of the “f—ed up” trip to Brown, his boss was pleased despite the seven-figure AmEx bill.
“There were no news articles published about it,” Brown told him. “And that was your job.”
It had never been Elwood’s goal to make a career as a PR huckster. The son of a pastor from Idaho, he moved to DC in the early 2000s to forge a life in politics, toiling in internships on the Hill before finally landing a regular gig as legislative correspondent for Democratic Michigan senator Carl Levin.
He had a revelatory moment during 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 consistent messaging? Why weren’t they expecting these questions? Why are they just giving easy sound bites to the senator and the media?”
He soon gravitated towards public relations, working for various major firms like Venture and Burson-Marsteller.
He soon realized that his job wasn’t to manipulate public opinion but to get the media gatekeepers to do it for him. “Once you have ink, your story becomes real,” Elwood writes. “The public begins to accept something you created out of nothing.”
He was so good at orchestrating smoke-and-mirrors that he was soon poached by Peter Brown, a one-time manager and problem-solver for the rock band the Beatles. After helping John Lennon plan a secret wedding, the band immortalized Brown in the song “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” (“Peter Brown called to say ‘You can make it okay,’” Lennon sang. “‘You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.”)
In 1983, Brown had founded BLJ, an international PR firm for “high-visibility clients” that eventually came to include some less-than-admirable characters, such as Khadafy, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russia Today, a news outlet started by the Kremlin that employed BLJ “to legitimize it in the American news market,” Elwood writes.
Elwood learned that manipulating the media came down to giving journalists what they desperately needed: scoops.
“The best journalists in the world aren’t always breaking stories because of their dogged reporting skills,” he writes. “They’re breaking them because they rely on people like me. We use journalists to do our clients’ bidding.”
Getting a journalist to write about his clients —and more importantly, write about his clients in a way that would benefit them — involved more than just calling in with a tip. Elwood had to offer exclusivity, which could include anything from off-the-record conversations to internal memos.
One of his favorite strategies, especially when learning that a powerful outlet like the New York Times or the Washington Post was investigating one of his clients, was to leak the story to a lesser publication.
“You pitch the negative story yourself,” Elwood explains. “Leave nothing out. No room for additional reporting. Then give the reporter an hours-long embargo date. Tell them you are going to other reporters in a few hours.”
His reasoning: if the story is coming out anyway, might as well give it to a publication where it can do the least damage. “If you know you are about to be punched in the face, would you rather have Mike Tyson do it or some guy named ‘Mike’ from the accounting department?” Elwood writes.
Some of his cases made him feel like he was making a positive difference. He helped a Turkish barber named Sabri Bogday who was sentenced to death by religious authorities in Saudi Arabia for saying “goddamn” at work.
“When you’re trying to apply pressure through the press, you must know and exploit your enemies’ weak spots,” Elwood writes. The Saudis “don’t give a shit about political hits. But they don’t like religious shame.”
When Saudi Arabia hosted a summit at the United Nations to discuss religious freedom, he tipped off reporters that they had “a rare chance to confront a brutal regime about a religious prisoner.” A week later, Bogday was a free man.
But sometimes, it was clear Elwood was manipulating the strings of the media in a negative way. In 2010, when the government of Qatar — a BLJ client — was determined to get their shot at hosting the World Cup, Elwood helped run a campaign to “kneecap the American bid,” he writes.
Using President Obama’s Healthy Kids Coalition as a cover, Elwood planted a seed with journalists, inspiring them to write (as he had brainstormed on a bar napkin) that until physical education for American kids is fully funded, “no taxpayer money should be spent in the pursuit of hosting international sports events, including the Olympics or the World Cup.”
The scheme worked. BLJ paved the way for Qatar securing a World Cup bid, all for just $80,000, the firm’s monthly retainer. Given that Qatar would soon spend $220 billion on the games, “our fee was a hell of a bargain,” Elwood writes.
Elwood began to lose faith in his industry around 2011, after a disastrous attempt to give Syrian president Bashar al-Assad an image makeover via his wife, Asma. Because of Brown’s relationship with Anna Wintour, they’re able to get the dictator’s spouse featured in the “Power” issue of Vogue.
“It’s an American tactic,” writes Elwood. “The First Lady is always more popular than the president, and she makes her husband look good by association.”
But then came the Arab Spring uprising. BLJ was charged with helping the Assad regime put a positive spin on the protests, and, according to a confidential memo shared by WikiLeaks, “developing media coverage outside of Syria that points to the President’s difficult task of wanting reform, but conducted in a non-chaotic, rational way.”
Elwood turned down the account “after I find out that the Syrian government is shooting its own people,” he writes. Brown promptly fired him.
Elwood, 45, continues to work in public relations today, but he still grapples with the morality of his chosen profession. “I’m proud of my work, but I’m not proud of what I’ve done,” he writes. “I’ve manipulated narratives—even invented them when needed—to fix problems for a client. My stories didn’t occur in a vacuum. They circulated out into the world. And they changed it. Sometimes for the worse.”
His biggest regret is helping Qatar win the World Cup bid, he writes, but it might very well pale in comparison to how the media is being manipulated today.
“We live in dangerous times,” Elwood writes, “and my industry helped make them so.”
