Employees of the Month

ROBERT YOUNG PELTON

Robert Young Pelton has made a career out of being on the inside of dirty wars and getting to know the leaders as well as the people who actually fight in them. At the age of 40, he quit his job in marketing to focus on conflicts and dangerous regions, and the resulting book, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, told people how to get into war zones and dictatorships all over the globe, whom to bribe, and how to get out. The book is now in its fifth edition, and since writing it Robert’s unique access, independent point of view, and intense experiences have generated a following among journalists, NGO workers, spies, mercenaries, and assorted adventurers. In addition to making immersive articles, books, and documentaries, Robert is an inventor who has more than a dozen US patents for DPx Gear, a company he founded to make survival equipment.

He has worked for 60 Minutes, CNN, National Geographic, Men’s Journal, Businessweek, Foreign Policy, and many other outlets, and he’s the author of, in addition to The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Licensed to Kill and The Adventurist. His latest book, Finding Kony, explores the recent scramble for Africa and will be available from St. Martin’s Press in 2015.

TIM FRECCIA

Tim Freccia is a photographer and filmmaker who was raised by wolves in Seattle, Washington. He began his working life as a commercial fisherman in the north Bering Sea, but he got inspired by Robert Young Pelton’s cult classic The World’s Most Dangerous Places and ran off to take pictures and make films in Haiti. He covered Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s brief, meteoric tenure as the country’s only democratically elected president. After Haiti, Tim made his way to West and North Africa and has covered conflicts and crises ever since. Though he’s gone through brief stints as a creative director at an ad agency and a furniture designer, Tim has returned to Africa again and again to cover what he calls the “new scramble” for resources and land—he estimates he’s spent more than half his life on the continent.

Tim’s been working for VICE as a freelancer ever since finding company co-founder Suroosh Alvi weeping in a mud puddle in the Congo, but this is by far the most extensive project he’s ever undertaken with us. He told us he thoroughly enjoyed the suffering involved in traveling with Robert (a.k.a. King Rat).

Tim is based in New York, is represented by the snobbish Chelsea art gallery Ricco/Maresca, and has plans to marry a famous classical cellist.

OLE TILLMANN

Ole Tillmann grew up wandering the forests of rural Belgium. He moved to the US to attend the Rhode Island School of Design and later worked for Disney, but then his visa ran out and he was asked to leave the country because America is unkind to immigrants, even the insanely talented ones. He packed his bags and relocated to Berlin, and now he spends his days drawing and smoking cigarettes in an attic in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. We asked Ole to illustrate the time line of South Sudan’s history that opens the issue because we needed an exacting eye, a steady hand, and a dependable guy who could meet deadlines. He exceeded our expectations and even made a brand-new font for us based on the region’s hand-painted signs, which he calls Sudanese Barbershop.