OK, OK, not Blackwater. That's the mercenary force of convicted war criminals founded by Erik Prince that will never outrun its infamy no matter how many times it changes its name.

No, no, no! Not Blackwater! It's Frontier Services Group—an entirely different mercenary group chaired by Erik Prince—that is heading to China! And they're not there to sell mercenary services! Absolutely not. They're merely opening some "forward operating bases" to help the Chinese train "ex-" PLA soldiers how to be mercenaries! It's entirely different!

Now that we have that clear, some context: Erik Prince is the notorious mercenary who believes he's the modern-day descendant of "Wild Bill" Donovan. (Prince even named his youngest son, Charles Donovan Prince, after Bill.) Prince's budding career as a contract killer went down in flames in 2009 after it was revealed that Blackwater was a front for a secret CIA assassination program. He later admitted that Blackwater "became a virtual extension of the CIA" and took orders directly from the agency, but by that point the news spotlight had shifted elsewhere.

As I reported last year, however, that was certainly not the end of Prince or his machinations. He reappeared on the news radar in 2016 after it was revealed he was once again under federal investigation, this time for allegedly attempting to broker mercenary services to foreign governments and launder money for Libyan officials through a Chinese bank.

Things only got stranger when Prince hopped on board the Trump train with $150,000 in donations to Trump's PAC, becoming a regular guest on Stephen Bannon's Breitbart radio program where he advocated reviving the Phoenix Program, the US government's death/torture squad campaign which it tested out in Vietnam and has become the blueprint for operations around the world (and in the US itself through the Department of Homeland Security). In return, Trump appointed Prince's sister as the new Secretary of Education and took Prince himself on as an unacknowledged advisor.

And if all that wasn't enough, here comes the latest news: Erik Prince's new company is "setting up a private army for China."

Here's what we know:

Erik Prince is now chairman of Frontier Services Group, a publicly listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that bills itself as a "security and logistics services" provider.