In the latest installment of their series on the business of war, the Center for Public Integrity's team of investigative journalists examines the career of Tim Spicer, the figurehead in a PR campaign to improve the unsavory image of soldiers who fight for hire. "Politicians in the West seem quickly to have accepted a convenient if illusory dichotomy just as it has been handed to them - contrasting the old-style (and bad) 'dogs of war' with the new-style (and good) private military companies, or PMCs," the report states. It shows how Spicer and other soldiers of fortune [3] have operated through a shadowy network of companies with names like Executive Outcomes [4], Sandline International [5] and Strategic Consulting International [6]. Even as their activities prompted arrests, government inquiries and civil unrest in countries like Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone, mercenaries used "leading London public relations consultant, Sara Pearson," whose company, Spa Way, hired a ghostwriter to pen Spicer's autobiography and transform his image "from law-breaking buccaneer to respectable commentator, a minor celebrity to include in chat shows and TV quizzes," so that mercenary soldiering could be "rebranded, restyled, sanitized and relaunched."