We have dedicated ourselves to neutralizing the concerns of our clients for the past twenty one years. Each investigative assignment contains a series of challenges and a continuing education that contributes to our knowledge base. We have been quite fortunate over the years to work with some of the most brilliant lawyers in America all of whom have been marvelous mentors and who enhanced our ability to provide legal investigative services that have culminated in successful outcomes.
Clients retain us when they find themselves in precarious situations or when they are in a troubling state of mind because they are uninformed. We isten carefully to potential clients and to what they are asking of us. We are often asked if we accept every case presented to us. No we do not and the reason is simple. Many people attempt to utilize the services of Private Investigators to locate people or gather information about someone they have no legal right to have. We are extremely keen to hearing what people say to us and if we suspect something is amiss we will refuse their request for our services.
Our Blog was created to enlighten the public as to the reality of what it is like to be a Private Investigator. We will also write about the reality of being a Personal Protection Specialist also referred to as a Bodyguard.
PROLOGUE
The Real World of a Private Investigator
We thought you might like to know what’s really like to be a Private Investigator as opposed to what is portrayed in the movies and on TV. We are going to let you in on the realities of a private eye’s life and what a typical day might be in the life of a Private Investigator. We welcome your comments, suggestions and questions and we will try to answer them as time permits and as long as they pertain to the theme of this blog.
We receive investigative requests from all over the world. There are times when we nearly fall off our chairs when we’re asked to perform an investigative task that a potential client saw on CSI segment. T.V.’s CSI is one of the most successful and entertaining shows on TV. It is not our intention to discourage your viewing of the show but so much of the technologies portrayed on CSI are fictitious and they simply do not exist in the real world of Crime Scene Investigations. Some of the fiction portrayed on CSI is; CSI personnel do not carry weapons they carry the forensic tools of their trade. CSI personnel do not interview suspects, police officers and detectives conduct interviews or interrogations of suspects. CSI personnel collect forensic evidence and they examine the evidence under specific guidelines established by the Forensic Science Community and State and City Prosecutors. Our staff wishes they could solve cases within the 35 minutes CSI solve theirs (we subtracted commercial time).
Another show we wish we could duplicate is “Criminal Minds.” Yes there is an FBI Division that studies criminal behavior. They have become an essential group of experts who have contributed significantly to solving crimes. For those of you who are interested, here is a excerpt from the FBI website “17. I want to be an FBI “Profiler” – where do I begin the application process?
You first need to realize the FBI does not have a job called “Profiler.” The tasks commonly associated with “profiling” are performed by Supervisory Special Agents assigned to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at Quantico, Virginia. Despite popular depictions, these FBI Special Agents don’t get “vibes” or experience “psychic flashes” while walking around fresh crime scenes. It is an exciting world of investigation and research — a world of inductive and deductive reasoning; crime-solving experience; and knowledge of criminal behavior, facts, and statistical probabilities.”
What we wouldn’t give to have a “Garcia” from Criminal Minds working for us. She types faster than a speeding bullet and she’s able to find out everything about anyone in less than a minute including the size of their socks LOL. Reality Check time, Garcia is a fictional character but she’s also very entertaining. Most of the information she’s asked to find on her computers does not exist in reality. If it did exist we would be nearly a crime free country and we would be living under a totalitarian government. Wikipedia describes Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) as a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible.[1] Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all-encompassing propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror.
Have you been watching an “A Person of Interest” now there is a Private Investigator’s and law enforcement’s dream come true. To know about a crime before it happens and to jump on the investigation before it becomes a crime. My goodness, how delightful.
In our world there are no handbooks on how to find a runaway child or catch a cheating spouse or to save an innocent person from going to prison. Take for an example a case we conducted on behalf of a very successful usinessman in Los Angeles. He had over three hundred employees working for him in a five hundred thousand square foot warehouse. He was in the freight forwarding business. His trucks would pickup goods arriving at the docks in Los Angeles and then take them to his warehouse for storage until he received instructions from his customers asking him to size and package the goods and then ship the goods to his customer’s retail stores across the USA. This client was also licensed by the US Customs Service to inspect incoming containers rriving into the USA which was another lucrative business.
Our client (the owner of the company) and his brother who worked for him were dating two women who were employees of the company. Some people will say that dating your employees is a bad policy and we concur but it had already occurred by the time we arrived on the scene. Eventually the client and his brother became disenchanted with their girlfriends and broke up with them. Then both brothers went on to marry two other women.
As you can imagine the two ex girlfriends were not very happy and we all know that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” and now there were two very unhappy ladies which translated to double trouble for the brothers. Please pay close attention now because here’s where it gets a little complicated. While one brother (not the owner) was dating his girlfriend before he married someone else his girlfriend decided to marry an informant who was working for a Special Agent of the US Immigration Service because she wanted to be a legal resident of the USA (she was from the Philippines). Her husband the informant and the Immigration Agent were also Filipino and both were US Citizens.
Are you following this scenario so far? We hope so and here it is again; the bother (not the owner of the company was dating a Filipina woman who was illegally in the US. She married the informant of a US Immigration Agent. Then the US Immigration Agent fell for his informant’s wife and decided to have an affair with her. The US Immigration Agent then dispatched his informant out of town continually so he can be alone with his wife. Then the owner of the company broke up with his girlfriend and he married someone else. So as thsi plays out my client (the older brother and owner of the company) has a new wife and a very upset ex girlfriend who is also from the Philippines who doesn’t have a new love in her life. Eventually, the two ex girlfriends go to the US Immigration Agent and ask for his help. They want to inflict some serious pain on their ex boyfriends. As the saying goes, “Love conquers all” so the US Immigration Agent tells the two ex girlfriends that he’ll teach the brothers a lesson they’ll never forget. Let’s remember he’s no paragon of virtue as he’s sleeping with his informant’s wife. You recall that there were over three hundred employees working at my client’s warehouse. The US Immigration Agent walked into my client’s office one day and told him that he was in violation of US Immigration law because nearly all of his employees were illegally in the country and that the fine for hiring illegal’s wwould be in the thousands. Now here is where the story stops being humorous. The US Immigration Agent, suggest that all of this can go away if my client pays him off. After that conversation the US Immigration Agent goes to the FBI and tells them that he was bribed by my client and that my client is transporting drugs throughout the USA via his trucks which are delivering goods and my client is paying off US Customs agents to bring in more trucks into his facility for inspection so he can make more money and that my client is paying his employees under the table and not declaring payroll tax. The FBI believes the US Immigration Agent and they commence a full scale two million dollar one year investigation after which they indict my client for bribery. No indictment was filed for illegal drugs or for bribing US Customs Agents.
We were called into this case not because of the indictment but because the owner found out his new wife who was now his estranged wife had broken into his warehouse and stole goods belonging to his customers and then she sold the goods at swap meets. We caught her in the act and our client was so pleased with our investigation that he asked us to look into his Federal indictment which we learned that he had already plead guilty to and was waiting for his sentencing hearing. When asked why he plead guilty he said he had spent a fortune on attorneys none of whom believed that he was innocent and none of them reviewed the evidence in the hands of the US Attorney General and given to him. “Are you guilty” we asked, he replied no and that he was set up by the US Immigration Agent who told him that for five thousand dollars he would not report him and our client was foolish enough to go along with the plan.
We reviewed all the evidence the government turned over to our client and we discovered that the US Immigration Agent had set up the entire operation as a vendetta on behalf of the ex girlfriends and that the Government had severely misstated the evidence, withheld evidence, never had any proof whatsoever that my client was involved in illicit drugs, payoffs to the US Customs Department or that he had not paid payroll taxes on his employees.
We then introduced our client to two partners at Lobe & Loeb LLC law firm with whom we have worked with for years to represent my client in withdrawing his guilty plea. Once a defendant has pleaded guilty it is extremely difficult to reverse that plea. However, the attorneys we recommended won the motion and we proceeded to trial. Due to our investigation and our exposure of falsified evidence presented at the trial the judge dismissed the case in Federal Court and demanded a Grand Jury hearing on Criminal Perjury for the US Immigration Agent.
The US Immigration Agent voluntarily resigned, turned in his badge and gun and left the USA for the Philippines. The ex girlfriend who married the informant got divorced, the other ex girlfriend (the one involved with the owner of the company) received no benefit from any of her vindictiveness and the Assistant US Attorney who prosecuted the case was fired because it became known by the Inspector General of the United States that the Assistant US Attorney had known all along the evidence presented in court was deliberately flawed and created by the US Immigration Agent. Although the Assistant US Attorney knew the Government’s evidence was false he went forward with the case with a complete disregard of the law. The saddest part of this story was that the client eventually lost his business because he had spent everything he had on his defense but he was not sentenced to prison and that was worth all of it. We invite you to read the leeters of appreciation we received from the two partners involved with this case from the law firm “Loeb & Loeb” under our Testimonial links. Stayed tuned for there is more to come. Thanks for dropping by.