It was March 2002, and Del and Barbara Spier were flat broke. The Texas couple, grandparents of five and owners of a small, Houston-based private investigations firm, were more than $260,000 in debt. They carried balances as high as $18,600 on more than a dozen credit cards and were saddled with $80,000 in outstanding bank loans and a $95,000 mortgage. In their bankruptcy filing, the Spiers' company, which they founded in 1987 and named the Agency for Investigation and Protective Services, was deemed of "no marketable value."
Although their circumstances looked dire, the Spiers were about to become millionaires. By May, Barbara Spier had filed the paperwork to form a new corporation called US Protection and Investigations. Soon, thanks to the contracting sweepstakes that was the war in Afghanistan, she was signing an $8.4 million deal with the Louis Berger Group. The multinational construction and engineering company had landed a $214 million contract to rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure—roads, water and sanitation, power and dams—from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USPI's job was to provide security for contractors repairing a 300-mile road stretching from Kabul to Kandahar.
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