If you happened to be walking around the northern edge of Brentwood during the fifth night of the fires — and you really shouldn’t have been, since by then that neighborhood had been evacuated and was teeming with national guardsmen on the lookout for looters — you might have noticed a large white van parked in front of a $15 million Georgian revival mansion on North Bristol Avenue.
Then again, you might not have. The vehicle couldn’t have been more nondescript. It had no markings on it, no windows other than a few darkly shaded ones near the driver’s cabin, nothing that made it stand out at all.
Inside the vehicle, though, it was a very different story. There, you would have found a mobile crime-busting surveillance headquarters bristling with tech so cutting-edge, it’d have Batman biting his knuckles with envy. Its interior was packed with flat-screen monitors crackling with live-feed video, Starlink-capable communication equipment, drone-launching and -tracking apparatus, AI-assisted license plate-reading and smart-query analysis software, and radar-sensor gizmos capable of creating crystal-clear images of the surrounding area, even in the blackness of night.
At the center of it all, swiveling like a supervillain in an ergonomic throne, peering over his Oakley ballistic frames into the monitors, was Chris Dunn, 56, founder of Covered 6, arguably the most successful — and, until now, the most secretive — private security operation in L.A., the personal protection service that in recent years has safeguarded everyone from Elon Musk to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
“No other security company has this state-of-the-art mobile command,” Dunn says, beaming with pride as he nods at the buzzing equipment all around him. “Let alone the police.”
Private security firms have been around for decades, of course, especially in L.A. So has the debate around them. To some, they’re little better than high-tech, high-priced vigilantes, a secret police force for the rich and famous. To others — especially the rich and famous — they’re literal lifesavers, filling the widening security gap as municipal police forces struggle more and more with fewer and fewer resources.
But now, with the wildfires, there’s a new twist to the discussion.
Take, for instance, Rick Caruso’s luxe shopping mall in Pacific Palisades. It was one of the few structures to survive the fire, in part because it was brand-new construction, only 7 years old, built to be more flame-retardant than the older buildings around it. Another reason it survived, though, was that the billionaire developer (and former mayoral candidate, not to mention potential future gubernatorial candidate) had the resources to hire one of Dunn’s competitors, a for-hire firefighting force bussed in from Arizona (with its own water tankers) that kept a singular eye on Caruso’s property throughout the blaze.
That was great for Caruso, but how about his neighbors, the ones who lost their homes because they couldn’t afford their own private firemen? Shouldn’t they have been protected, too? Or are only the super-rich now afforded such luxury?
“I look at things from the perspective of supply and demand,” says Dunn, who spent 17 years in the Burbank and L.A. police forces (he was awarded an LAPD medal of valor at the age of 31) and dabbled as an inventor (his patent for a briefcase that folds out into a body-length bulletproof shield sounds like something out of Q Branch) before founding Covered 6 in 2010 (it means “cover your back” in military speak).
“One of the models I have for this company is R&D,” he goes on. “There’s no R&D in any police department that I know of. It’s the private sector that’s driving innovation. It’s an opportunity for us to pioneer and innovate in technology and solve public-safety issues.
“If there’s a problem,” he adds, “why can’t we solve it?”
At the moment, the problem he’s trying to solve is the fire-sparked looting that’s been breaking out in evacuated wealthy neighborhoods like northern Brentwood. Dunn has a half-dozen of his men — burly guards with sidearms holstered to their hips, dressed in black tactical uniforms that appear to have been lifted from Josh Brolin’s wardrobe in Sicario — scouting the area, literally looking for trouble.
“Looting is standard,” Dunn says, “but I’ve never seen so many opportunists with masks and hoods trying to go into people’s homes.”
Dunn also has a smaller squad positioned strategically up the hill, on Mandeville Canyon, standing by with hoses and other firefighting equipment in case the encroaching blaze threatens any of the multimillion-dollar homes under his protection.
For this sort of service, Covered 6 charges untold thousands of dollars — the numbers are, like Covered 6 itself, hush-hush — which on this Saturday is being paid for by homeowners on and near North Bristol Avenue who have pooled their considerable resources.
Secrecy, of course, is a big part of private-security culture, and many of Covered 6’s activities go largely unnoticed. They were the ones, for instance, whom Beverly Hills quietly hired to protect the neighborhood’s Israeli flags display honoring those killed and kidnapped on Oct. 7 (Covered 6 used drones to keep an eye on them). Before that, during the COVID era, Dunn’s group teamed up with BHPD to crack down on the rash of smash-and-grab robberies that had been bedeviling luxury department stores all over the city. And a few years before that, they helped Hidden Hills rid itself of the “Chilean tourism burglars” who’d been repeatedly raiding the affluent community. Around the same time — without making a single headline — they saved Kim and Kanye’s $60 million mansion from the 2018 Woolsey Fire.
“Another [group] came in after we put out the fire and took credit for it,” he says. “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to say they didn’t do it. But they came in after the fire. It had already blazed through the day.”
Unlike some other security operations in Los Angeles that boast about having ex-Mossad agents on their payroll, Covered 6 doesn’t make machismo a huge part of its sales pitch. Indeed, despite the sidearms and tactical gear, Dunn and his agents are practically Canadian in their politeness. “Other people are like, ‘Well, I was ex-military, this is how we look. If you’re scared, scared is good,’ ” he says. “We’re more like the Four Seasons. Courteous, considerate, inconspicuous — that’s our thing.”
His thing has lately been expanding. Along with security services, he’s launched a vocational training program, a multiweek boot camp at the company’s Moorpark headquarters that offers courses on firefighting and other security skills. Ever the inventor, he’s also developed his own customized fire trucks and water tankers and forged a partnership with a tactical clothing manufacturer to produce his own line of firefighting uniforms and gear (fortunately, you don’t have to go to Josh Brolin to get those black tactical outfits; they’re for sale online at the Covered 6 Essential Gear Shop).
On this night in Brentwood, however, Dunn remains focused on the job at hand, protecting North Bristol Avenue from fire and looters and whatever threats may be lurking in the shadows. Inside his tech-packed white van, he swivels in his command chair and issues orders to his troops, looking very much like a man bent on protecting and serving — albeit for a hefty price.
“The future is very interesting,” he notes cryptically as he gazes fiercely into his monitors. “And it’s a lot worse than people know.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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