The National Enquirer has his sexts and, it appears, saucy photos. His imminent divorce is the talk of Wall Street.

So Jeff Bezos, the Amazon boss, announced on Friday that he had turned to a singular figure for help – a “bodyguard to the stars” and Los Angeles-based security consultant named Gavin de Becker.

Bezos and his longtime wife, MacKenzie, are divorcing and the National Enquirer has revealed his extramarital affair with the television personality Lauren Sánchez. Writing on the website Medium, Bezos said the publisher of the National Enquirer had threatened to publish sexual photos he and Sanchez shared if he did not call off De Becker, whom Bezos described as an acquaintance of 20 years. De Becker, Bezos said, is still on the job with instructions “to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts” related to the Enquirer’s possession of his communications.

By declaring his troubles so publicly, Bezos was operating straight out of De Becker’s playbook.

In his 1997 book The Gift of Fear, De Becker offered a strategy for dealing with extortionists. De Becker described the case of a client, a young actress, whose ex-boyfriend was demanding $50,000 for his silence about a private matter. He suggested she “kill the threat” by disclosing the matter to her parents so they wouldn’t learn it in “a tabloid’s way”.

“Disclosing harmful information oneself is so radical an idea that most victims of extortion never even consider it,” De Becker wrote, noting that his firm has “a few cases” like that each year.

De Becker & Associates, the 64-year-old’s firm, provides security and, as in Bezos’s case, conducts private investigations for the rich, the powerful and the famous. He has been romantically linked to stars – he dated Geena Davis and Alanis Morissette – and was a guest on Oprah. He and his employees are frequent foes of the tabloid press.

In The Gift of Fear, De Becker recounts, in jarring detail, a childhood defined by brutality. He describes picking up a pistol his mother used to shoot his stepfather, gripping it by the hot barrel as his mother went to tend the wounded man she’d just shot. As he tells it, those experiences drove him to understand violence and fear.

De Becker’s destiny was set at least in part by geography. Attending Beverly Hills high school, he befriended the actor Carrie Fisher, at whose funeral he spoke, and Miguel Ferrer, son of Rosemary Clooney. De Becker went to work for Elizabeth Taylor at 19 as an assistant, took over security for Shaun Cassidy, then a teen star, at 23, and launched his security firm in 1978.

By ever-increasing degrees, has been a Hollywood fixture since, and has become known for injecting analytical processes into the security business.

Dr Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist called as an expert to testify against Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski and other prominent killers, began working with De Becker in 1983. De Becker’s firm had collected thousands of threatening communications sent to stars, and built dossiers on their authors to gauge those threats. Those records, and a similar collection held by the US Capitol police, formed the basis for their joint research: a National Institute of Justice-supported study of threats against public figures.

They shared an interest, Dietz said, in changing the way society understood stalking, which was then viewed as something experienced only by a handful of famous women. Dietz, founder of the Threat Assessment Group, believes their work made stalking “a household word” and a prosecutable crime.

De Becker, Dietz said, was “on the vanguard of recognizing the similarity of paparazzi and other stalkers”. De Becker also wanted to revolutionize his industry.

Jeff Bezos said he told De Becker ‘to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts’. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP

“His concern was that Hollywood was full of thug-like bodyguards, with various backgrounds in the martial arts or the military or professional wrestling,” Dietz told the Guardian. “He wanted to try to professionalize an industry that was not well-regarded. And he was a leader in that.”

De Becker’s approach hinges on the proposition that violence can be anticipated, and that would-be subjects of violent crime can be prepared. He has developed, and aggressively defended from critics, a suite of threat assessment tools known as Mosaic. Users answer a series of questions about a threatening person or occurrence using an online interface; the system analyses the answers and gauges the level of threat. His efforts landed De Becker a seat across from Oprah in 2008, an appearance that solidified his status as a security guru.

De Becker is an unabashed protector of the famous and powerful. He launched a private terminal at LAX, the Los Angeles airport, catering to that cohort. He took out an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter defending Mel Gibson after the actor’s drunken antisemitic tirade was caught on police video.

His other clients have been reported to include Madonna, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael J Fox and John Travolta. He provided security to Planned Parenthood, was hired by the Cosbys to investigate threats against the family after the only son of Bill and Camille Cosby was killed, and has consulted on blockbuster films, including The Bodyguard.

During the years Dietz worked with De Becker, he visited the homes of De Becker’s clients, touring guardhouses and safe rooms De Becker’s team had installed.

De Becker, Dietz said, moved with the glad-handing charm of a successful sports agent. “He knew every aspect of the world of celebrity, and had a real commitment to trying to protect them against people who would do them harm,” Dietz said.

Dietz described his time in De Becker’s celebrity-stuffed world eye-opening “and, frankly, fun”.

Others have made a similar appraisal, though considering his travails, Bezos may not be enjoying his time in De Becker’s orbit quite so much.

“He’s the funniest civilian I know,” the comedian Harry Shearer told the Los Angeles Times in 2002 of De Becker. “He’s very bright and disciplined, and he’d probably be good at whatever he wanted to do. But if you do what he does for a living, having a light side would be a necessity.”