The Modern Detective: Inside the Secret World of Private Investigators
Corporate intelligence is reshaping the world. One private detective surveys the shifting terrain.
On February 8, 2018, at 10:22 p.m., Donald J. Trump opened his Twitter app and name-checked a private detective. “Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame,” the president wrote. “All tied into Crooked Hillary.”
It was a remarkable occurrence: an American head of state publicly acknowledging the work of a private eye, in this case a former British spy named Christopher Steele.
Trump had reason to fear, and disparage, Steele. A veteran of MI6, the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service, with expertise in Russia, Steele helps run a private intelligence firm in London called Orbis Business Intelligence.
In mid-2016, during the U.S. presidential campaign, Steele uncovered what he believed to be salacious and treasonous behavior by Trump, who was then one in a crowded field of Republican candidates.
The leads Steele and his contacts developed—about Trump’s sexual proclivities (potential blackmail material) and what Steele suspected was evidence of Russian collaboration with Trump’s campaign (potential impeachment material)—so alarmed him that he alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom he had consulted on other projects.
Orbis’s report—what became known as the Steele dossier—had been leaked to BuzzFeed, and although the FBI had been investigating Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia since mid-2016, it had the effect of a violent explosion: political chaos and media obsession ensued.
Steele found himself in the central nervous system of global political discourse. Trump’s detractors cite Steele’s work when compiling lists of the president’s failings. Trump’s supporters label it slanderous liberal dirt.
(When, in March 2019, the report issued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller included no explicit evidence of collusion with Russia, Trump, although relieved, continued to blame Steele, arguing Mueller’s “witch hunt” was spurred by the “phony dossier.”)
Steele’s first client on the project was an organization financed by Paul Singer, a wealthy hedge fund manager who commits abundant resources to funding Republican causes and candidates, but who was no fan of Trump’s. (At the time, Singer supported Marco Rubio’s candidacy.) Steele had been contracted through an American research firm called Fusion GPS.
This kind of investigation is often called “oppo” work, in which candidates for public office, constituents, or issue advocates fund research designed not just to understand their opponents’ integrity and reputation but to undermine them to gain an advantage.
When, in late 2016, it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee, Singer ended the engagement, and Fusion GPS recruited another client to fund further work to chase the tantalizing leads: Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Steele and one of the founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson—a former investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal—have joined the ranks of modern private detectives (whether revered or reviled) who might be considered well known: Jules Kroll, David Fechheimer, and Anthony Pellicano are some others.
In 1992, The New York Times called Kroll “the world’s most famous gumshoe.” In 2018, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Fechheimer, who died in April 2019, was “the veritable dean of American private investigators.” In 2018, The Hollywood Reporter called Pellicano “the private eye to the rich, famous and distressed.” (In 2008, Pellicano was imprisoned for bribing police officers and wiretapping, among other misdeeds; he was released in March 2019.)
Steele’s fame forced him underground for a spell, but it has been good for business. Orbis landed a slew of new clients, and it has been reported that the company received two thousand job applications soon after the firm’s work was revealed.
Steele’s notoriety brings into relief the crucial, if usually discreet, role private detectives play in modern society—smoothing the flow of global capital, resolving disputes among private citizens and corporations, and ensuring that our legal systems, government agencies, and financial institutions remain fair and transparent.
(Of course, not all clients have such benign motives for hiring private eyes.)
Why does anyone hire an investigator? To uncover wrongdoing. To right a real or perceived wrong. To punish or to exact revenge. To gain an advantage over a competitor. To satisfy a curiosity. To find a missing person or recover a stolen object. To feed paranoia. To benefit the public interest. In other words, to help satisfy basic human impulses.
When people or companies are harmed—by a crime, by intentional or accidental noncriminal conduct (what lawyers call a tort), by physical violence, or by reputational damage—there are scores of remedies, including the civil courts, law enforcement, government regulators, and media coverage.
Private investigators are often called upon to help find the information that will help attorneys litigate, prosecutors indict, regulators sanction, and journalists report.
We are everywhere. We work for large companies, government agencies, A-list movie stars, professional athletes, nonprofits, sovereign nations, media organizations, and business tycoons, among others.
We are engaged by frozen food processors, video game designers, diamond dealers, jet engine manufacturers, nut sorters, collateralized mortgage brokers, coffee bean shippers, book publishers, patent licensees, sports teams, railcar builders, miners, retail chain operators, university deans, plastic pressers, building contractors, labor organizers, and pretzel sellers.
Our fingerprints are on litigation battles, mergers and acquisitions, public relations campaigns, loan agreements, securities trading, labor campaigns, investments, executive hires, political campaigns, and front-page news stories.
Elon Musk, Alex Rodriguez, Hewlett-Packard, Uber, Credit Suisse Group, Jay- Z, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Drexel Burnham Lambert, Goldman Sachs, the government of Kuwait, Elizabeth Taylor, and Tom Cruise have all hired private eyes.
Even the most indigent among us benefit from the skills of investigators. Federal and state governments often not only provide defendants with lawyers but also subsidize investigators, among other experts, to support a legal defense.
In the United States, there are more than thirty-five thousand private investigators, with nearly four thousand in Florida alone, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Many who join the trade come not with relevant university degrees (in criminal justice, for instance), but are refugees from other industries: law enforcement, journalism, accounting, the labor movement, government intelligence, software development, and academia, as well as nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and law firms.
Corporate investigators—as distinguished from the lonewolf gumshoe who lurks in the shadows with a telephoto lens— are often hired by wealthy investors, Fortune 500 companies, wealthy individuals, and global law firms to conduct due diligence in advance of transactions, provide support to litigators during high-stakes legal disputes, or uncover fraud within large corporations.
Each detective agency has its own DNA. Some shops run networks of contractors around the globe. Others have a narrow focus—in a region (Southeast Asia, say) or a technology (data scraping for disinformation online, for instance).
Still others are all things to all clients: providers of background checks, executive protection, forensic accounting, criminal defense, surveillance. Some market a single skill, such as political opposition research or tracking down missing assets.
My firm, QRI, specializes in large, complex investigations that seek to benefit the public interest: reforming the criminal justice system, holding corrupt government officials accountable, exposing financial crimes, fighting causes of the climate crisis.
Each American state regulates the detective industry in its own way. Where I live, the New York State Division of Licensing Services permits private investigators to “obtain information regarding the identity, habits, conduct, movements, whereabouts, affiliations, associations, transactions, reputation, or character of any person or group of persons.”
We can investigate “crime or wrongs done or threatened against the government of the United States of America or any state or territory of the United States of America,” and we can assess the “credibility of witnesses or other persons” and identify “the whereabouts of missing persons.”
We can gather information about “the location or recovery of lost or stolen property” and “the causes and origin of, or responsibility for, fires, or libels, or losses, or accidents, or damage or injuries to real or personal property or the affiliation, connection or relation of any person, firm or corporation with any union, organization, society or association, or with any official, member or representative thereof.”
We can collect “evidence to be used before any authorized investigating committee, board of award, board of arbitration, or in the trial of civil or criminal cases.”
We can obtain information “with reference to any person or persons seeking employment in the place of any person or persons who have quit work by reason of any strike” or “with reference to the conduct, honesty, efficiency, loyalty or activities of employees, agents, contractors, and sub-contractors.”
As a corporate private detective, I have access to a broad spectrum of business and legal proceedings, transactions, tactics, behavior, strategies, and personalities from which I have absorbed lessons that are not taught in MBA programs or law schools and cannot be learned from reading The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times.
These lessons were gleaned from my work as a PI and from investigators I met around the world while reporting this book, an experience that came with a challenge (that I also encounter in my day job): the misperception that private eyes are amoral rule flouters who deploy dark arts—hacking, impersonating, bribing. Popular culture is replete with such narratives, both real and fictional.
My colleagues and I work hard to maintain integrity, and I would argue that private investigators benefit the public good in sharp contrast to our reputations. We are traditionally hired by criminal defense lawyers to counter the unparalleled resources of prosecutors; we prove the existence of financial frauds for companies in cases where law enforcement is uninterested; we expose civil rights violations; we recover money squirreled away offshore by despots and dentists alike.
But the media is fascinated with the archetype of the rogue detective. I have a Google alert for terms like “private investigator” and “private eye,” and most of the links that land in my inbox are to stories about investigators running afoul of the law: “Former Private Eye Pleads Guilty to One Count of Wire Fraud”; “Who’s Investigating Fake Chinese Goods? Fake Investigators”; “Private Eye Cops to Bribery Scheme with NYPD Officer.”
In 2017, private eyes were, once again, dragged from the shadows, exposed as miscreants, equivocators, and worse. An Israeli firm called Black Cube, among other companies, was hired by the film producer Harvey Weinstein through his lawyer David Boies to gather compromising information on women Weinstein had allegedly victimized (such as Rose McGowan) and journalists whose articles Weinstein sought to quash (such as Jodi Kantor).
Black Cube, it was reported, employed classic techniques of the clandestine services from which some of its employees had come: fake identities, fictional companies as cover, pretexting, lying, deceiving.
If this is true, these activities might have been criminal—a disservice to Black Cube’s clients, to the industry, and to society. (In 2016, two Black Cube employees were convicted in Romania for intimidating a prosecutor and hacking into her emails.)
In 2016, it was revealed that Uber had hired retired spies from a firm called Ergo (whose slogan is “Intelligence for an opaque world”) to investigate someone who had sued the company. It is common in corporate America to hire investigators to assess the credibility of legal adversaries. What is uncommon were the firm’s tactics.
Among critiques of Ergo’s work by the New York district court judge Jed S. Rakoff, who oversaw the case in federal court, was that its investigators were not licensed (a violation that, at least in New York, where Ergo operated, can be a misdemeanor), and they lied about why they contacted witnesses. Rakoff was not circumspect in his opinion of this behavior, labeling it “blatantly fraudulent and arguably criminal.”
The tool kit available to private investigators is considerably less potent than the one available to spies and cops and prosecutors. We cannot flip witnesses, blackmail agents, develop confidential informants, bug phones, offer protection, send subpoenas, or bribe sources. This means we must, almost by definition, be more creative.
Private investigators are occasionally allowed to “dissemble”—not tell the whole truth. When, for example, we are working to uncover violations of civil or intellectual property rights, the dissemblance is authorized by law, the evidence sought “is not reasonably and readily” available through other lawful means, or the dissemblance does not violate the rights of third parties.
Many investigators disregard such restrictions. Others operate in countries where such limits do not apply. Some exploit shady reputations to attract clients with shallow morals and deep pockets.
In 2005, after a decade in journalism, I joined Kroll Associates, the seminal corporate investigative firm, and became a private detective. The prospect of my new profession was thrilling, but I was apprehensive. I had not studied law or finance or accounting or criminal justice. I was not a retired cop, intelligence operative, prosecutor, or litigator. I had no experience mining data or employing digital forensic tools. I didn’t understand how the SWIFT financial messaging network worked or how to get behind a website whose registrant was hidden behind a proxy.
Although I have been at it for more than fifteen years now, I am still in awe of the depth and volume of issues my industry, broadly defined, tracks. A trade publication called Intelligence Online, which chronicles gossip, trends, and news on global intelligence agencies, security firms, and corporate investigative companies, reminds me of this.
One recent issue covered freelance Brazilian armaments advisers, “gas diplomacy,” the expansion of private security squads in the Emirates, “e-policing” in Poland, innovations in Israeli missile designs, Scandinavian “offensive” Trojan horse computer hacking firms, telephone communications interception tools, an examination of where fallen dictators hide assets offshore, diplomatic cable leaks, identity-anonymizing software, “fleets” of antipiracy developers, cyber defense tactics, and master code breaking.
We live in an era marked by a kaleidoscope of disarming trends: technological innovation, rising populism, new brands of autocracy, “fake news,” deregulation, demographic division, and eroding public discourse.
Governments employ, and are victimized by, cyber espionage. Vast tranches of private consumer data are stolen by shadowy hackers and global technology companies alike. Social media platforms are poisoned by disinformation campaigns. Artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies are growing in scale and accuracy. A free press is under attack. Amateur drones buzz above us.
If these developments feel chaotic and unnavigable, my experience as a private detective, as a professional fact finder, as an analyst of hidden information, has given me the optimistic perspective that once in a while our work—exposing corruption, providing intelligence to corporate clients, serving the indigent, reforming bureaucratic rot, uncovering fraud, and solving riddles—provides a measure of relief.
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