Enterprise security risk management takes Blaine man across the world

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From the corner of the Starbucks on Peace Portal Drive, Joe Zaccaria can evacuate executives of multinational corporations from high-risk security situations with a few clicks on his laptop and calls on his smartphone.

Zaccaria, who has a background in enterprise security risk management and crisis response, has a career that has taken him all over the world doing everything from defusing bomb situations in Thailand to helping secure important documents during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, B.C.

Zaccaria’s career started 36 years ago in law enforcement before he transitioned to private security, which led him to work in Bangkok for a U.S. security company, Pinkerton, where he was the managing director of security consulting for all of Asia. Eventually, Zaccaria relocated to Vancouver where he set up his own company and could easily commute to Asia. Blaine became Zaccaria’s home six years ago.

One of Zaccaria’s most recent projects was assisting in the multi-billion-dollar remodeling of the LAX airport for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In the fall, he worked for four months to review station and platform designs for the remodel that will create a 2.25-mile elevated train that travels from the airport to offsite parking and other transit facilities. The project is slated to be built by 2023.

In 2009, Zaccaria managed security and business continuity for E-Comm 911, a 911 dispatcher in Vancouver that receives more than one million calls for service per year. There, Zaccaria worked with the RCMP Integrated Security Unit, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to ensure the E-Comm facility was secure.

Zaccaria also works in food defense. He is qualified with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to inspect food production facilities and conduct vulnerability assessments. In these facilities, he looks for the potential for someone to intentionally contaminate food. This work is the result of the Food Safety Modernization Act passed following enhanced security after 9/11.

“The federal government instituted a law that required companies to assess and mitigate threats related to intentional adulteration,” Zaccaria said. Now, Zaccaria tracks emails every day from the FDA on food recalls.

Everything Zaccaria works on is contracted, he said.

“It could be a food defense project. It could be a transportation-related project,” Zaccaria said. “I’ve done work for big technology companies assessing global offices. I’ve done international work with Fortune 500s that are building new facilities overseas and they need input into the design process.”

Zaccaria said his favorite part of his career is its day-to-day variance.

“Physically, I may be in Starbucks coordinating something or out on the road in a food plant watching production or in a technology facility watching a manufacturer of electronics,” Zaccaria said.

Zaccaria also helps get executives of multinational corporations out of crisis situations by coordinating with global contacts, primarily special forces or high-level police officials who Zaccaria has met over his career.

During Indonesian protests and riots last September, Zaccaria helped escort four Fortune 500 clients that had 28 staff members to a safety zone, away from the civil unrest. Two of the firms decided to send their employees back to the U.S., which Zaccaria helped facilitate by chartering aircrafts from Singapore and Malaysia.

“When somebody calls me with the need for an evacuation, I’ll call one of [my contacts] and we usually look to charter an aircraft,” Zaccaria said. “We securely pick the executive’s family up, we coordinate and we have armed guards escorting them to the airport. Then we go to a private area of the airstrip where we have a chartered aircraft waiting.”

In the late 1990s, hand grenades were planted in one chain of stores in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand, resulting in three bombing incidents. Zaccaria worked to prevent further bombings by assessing every store in the chain and training employees to look out for potential threats. Six months later, Zaccaria and a team of legal and investigative colleagues were able to identify the perpetrator, a former employee who had been fired for committing fraud.

The last crisis situation Zaccaria worked on was in November 2018 when he helped move a group of Fortune 500 executives and their families from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia after a controversial U.N. convention evoked protests in the capital city.

Zaccaria said that as his field grows, more universities are offering programs in security management. He has given presentations at the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington on how real-life cases differ from textbook examples. With the recent coronavirus outbreak, his phone has been ringing off the hook for pandemic planning and response.

“When people hear the word ‘security,’ they think of security guards,” Zaccaria said. “They don’t realize that there are actually enterprise security risk management executives like myself out there who do this kind of work and help big corporations assess where they’re at and where they need to go.”

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