Teaching Bankers to Kill -- Literally

Right, I'm not talking metaphors here: This is "kill" as in "cause to cease living," or more specifically "end the life of someone who's trying to do the same to you."

Tim Larkin, founder of Las Vegas-based Target Focus Training, has taught close combat techniques to organizations such as the U.S. Navy Seals, the Texas Tactical Police and FBI hostage teams for more than 20 years. Now he's finding a market for his self-defense seminars among investment bankers. Past clients include senior staff of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse.

Now, I'm well aware that bankers haven't exactly been the most popular guys on the planet this past couple of years ... but combat training?

Curious as to why he's targeting this particular demographic, I caught up with Larkin after he returned from a seminar tour of the United Kingdom. "They found me," he explained. "It started with a New York class that I did a while back for the general public, white-collar people who just wanted some self defense. But there were some market trader guys and one of them was a board member and he immediately arranged to have a class for his traders after the trading day. They bought mats, they matted out one of their boardrooms, and I trained them for five days straight." Word got around, and pretty soon some of the big banks were interested, mostly for their international positions.

This was in the early '90s, back in the Wild West days of the Soviet Union, Larkin recalls. A lot of U.S. bankers were going over there to do deals, thinking it was a normal place to do business, and quickly finding that it wasn't. So he started offering training for corporate execs who needed to travel to various parts of the world where protection is inadequate, kidnapping is a real possibility, and criminal assaults are normal even in the nicest parts of town.

What Larkin teaches is definitely not to be confused with those taekwondo classes you took in college. The rehearsed, competition-oriented moves of martial arts may be of little use in a true life-or-death situation. Larkin teaches his clients the stark reality of what it takes to survive violence. "I literally show them what happens if somebody is trying to come at you with a knife or gun -- the real stuff, that's my specialty -- and I show them in a very quick manner that it doesn't take a lot of skill to injure another human being.

"Most of them are shocked to find out that the best people in the world at killing other people with their bare hands are not trained in martial arts or combat sports; they're basically just career criminals. And you realize that it's not about training for years and years, it's more about, you know, grabbing a tire iron and hitting somebody over the head until they don't move."

At the same time, the training emphasizes staying out of trouble in the first place, knowing what the threats are, and taking steps to make yourself a harder target. Larkin offers a couple of tips:

Don't underestimate the threats. Executives and entrepreneurs often pride themselves on being just ordinary people who happen to have had some success, and they assume that's how other people will see them. But in some parts of the world, they're not seen as a person; they're seen as an asset. "These execs think the idea of having security or a bodyguard is pretentious and an overreaction; they don't realize there's a real threat until something happens to them or their inner circle," Larkin says.

Don't assume that what works in the States works elsewhere. Larkin tells a chilling story about "a very arrogant corporate warrior" who, while visiting his daughter in Corsica, narrowly missed being struck by a car that pulled up late at a red light as he stepped out into the intersection. The guy kicked the car and yelled at the driver.

"A very well dressed man in his late 30s got out of the car, didn't say a word, walked right up to him and hit him with his fist square on the nose and took out four front teeth, dropped the guy right on the ground, then got back into his car and left," Larkin says. The police came up right away, having seen the whole thing, and started yelling at the American and telling him he got what he deserved, because you don't talk to people like that.

Americans live in a kind of Disneyland, Larkin adds. "The fear of being sued here prevents a lot of people from taking physical action against others, and we know that and we take advantage of it. But it doesn't necessarily work once you step outside of our borders."

With the globalization of business opportunities, more and more executives are stepping outside of U.S. borders, and they're finding themselves in places where the cultural mores are much more alien than those of Corsica. An understanding of the potential threats and how to respond to them could literally be the difference between life and death.