Private Investigator Answers PI Questions

Private investigator Mike LaCorte joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the profession of private investigator. 

How often are the people they're hired to watch cheating on their partner? 

What are PI's allowed and not allowed to do on the job, legally? 

Has anyone ever caught him investigating them? more

Jay J. Armes, Private Eye, Dies at 92

With steel hooks for hands and a flamboyant personality, Mr. Armes captured the attention, and scrutiny, of reporters across the nation.

Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands, including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver, died on Sept. 18 in El Paso. He was 92.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure, his son Jay J. Armes III said.

Described by People magazine as “armless but deadly,” Mr. Armes appeared to live the life of a superhero. In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation even reproduced him as a plastic action figure, with hooks like those he began wearing in adolescence after an accident in which railroad dynamite exploded in his hands. more

Book: Monroe affair with JFK Confirmed on Wiretap

For decades, Fred Otash was alleged to have kept the darkest secrets of Hollywood stars, including America’s most famous sex symbol.

Tinseltown’s most notorious private detective died in 1992 at age 70. The World War II Marine veteran is the subject of a new book, "The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn."

It delves into shocking revelations from his never-before-seen investigative files.

For the book, co-author Manfred Westphal was given access to Otash’s archives with the blessing of his daughter Colleen. Westphal, who first met Colleen at Otash’s funeral, developed a close friendship with her over the years. more

Otash was notorious for bugging the homes, offices, and playpens of movie stars, kingmakers, and powerful politicians, employing then state-of-the-art methods of electronic surveillance and wiretapping for a who’s who list of clients for whom he’d do “anything short of murder.”

China’s ‘Men in Black’ v. Foreign Corporate Sleuths

In China, foreign consultants are learning to expect a knock on the door. 

First, police raided the Beijing office of US due diligence group Mintz in March. Weeks later, there was a similar visit to the Shanghai premises of Bain, the blue-chip US consultancy. Police have also visited one of the China offices of expert network Capvision, according to at least four people familiar with the matter, as part of an emerging number of raids on international consultancies operating in the world’s second-largest economy...

While Bain is known for its management consulting work, the incidents at Mintz and Capvision — a network whose members are available for chats with clients about an industry they have worked in — have thrown the spotlight on the world of corporate investigations in China, which also includes companies such as Control Risks, Kroll, FTI and Blackpeak... Even in ordinary times, due diligence is inherently risky in China. more

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One person prevented from leaving China this year is a Singaporean executive at the US due-diligence firm Mintz Group, after a raid in March that led to its Beijing office being shut down, according to three people familiar with the matter. The company, the executive and China’s Public Security Bureau did not respond to requests for comment. more

Reno 911: Mayor Finds GPS Tracker on Her Car – Sues PI

Reno mayor Hillary Schieve is suing a private investigator and his company after finding a device attached to her vehicle that was capable of tracking its real-time location.

The lawsuit alleges that the investigator trespassed onto her property to install the device without her consent. It says Schieve was unaware until a mechanic noticed it while working on her vehicle.

The complaint says, further, that the investigator was working on behalf of an “unidentified third party” whose identity she has not been able to ascertain...

There was no immediate response to a request for comment emailed Friday by The Associated Press to David McNeely, the investigator alleged to have placed the tracking device, and 5 Alpha Industries, the company... She brought it to police in neighboring Sparks, and they were able to determine that it had been purchased by McNeely. more

Do-it-Yourself Vehicle GPS Tracker Detection

Private Espionage Is Booming - The US Needs a Spy Registry

via Wired Magazine...
Years ago, while stationed in Moscow as the bureau chief for a major news magazine, I was approached by a representative of a multinational company and presented with a tantalizing offer. He said he had highly sensitive materials exposing possible criminal activity by a Russian competitor. The documents were mine with one condition: advance notice so he could be out of the country when any story was published.

I had every reason to think the materials came from a private intelligence operative hired by the company—there were many such operatives in Moscow—but I didn’t ask my source for his source. Instead I embarked on a somewhat harrowing investigation of my own, and on corroborating the materials, I was able to publish a splashy story.

This episode came back to me while reading Barry Meier’s new book, Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies. A former New York Times investigative reporter, Meier casts a harsh light on both “private spies” and journalists who make frequent use of nuggets unearthed by these operatives. In the book’s afterword, he revives an idea for “a kind of ‘spy registry’ in which operatives for hire would have to disclose the names of their clients and assignments,” just as Congress now requires of lobbyists hired to influence legislators.

Is this truly a problem in need of a solution? Or would a spy registry create worse problems?

It’s tempting to conclude that there is really nothing new here and that private spies may even supply a public service. In the original, late-19th-century Gilded Age, the Pinkerton Detective Agency devoted itself to the art of subterfuge. In 1890, a Pinkerton man went undercover on behalf of his client, the governor of North Dakota, and confirmed from rigorous barroom investigation that a fair amount of “boodle,” bribe money, was being dispensed by advocates of a state lottery opposed by the governor. The governor revealed the dirty dealings to the public, and the lottery scheme failed—all perhaps to the civic good.

Today’s circumstances are far different. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf technologies for surveillance, hacking, and spoofing make the spy game easier to play than ever before. What hired sleuth doesn’t now travel with one of those metallic-fabric bags that blocks cellphone GPS signals, like the GoDark Faraday model that sells online for $49.97? It’s an insignificant item on the expense report.  more

The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World (book)

More than thirty thousand private investigators now work in the United States, Maroney reports in his new book, “The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World” (Riverhead). 

They engage in a dizzying variety of low-profile intrigue: tracking missing people, tailing cheating spouses, recovering looted assets, vetting job applicants and multibillion-dollar deals, spying on one corporation at the behest of another*, ferreting out investment strategies for hedge funds, compiling opposition research. 

Contemporary private eyes, Maroney explains, are often “refugees from other industries,” including law enforcement, journalism, accounting, and academia. 

One hallmark of the business is discretion—like spy agencies, private eyes must often keep their greatest triumphs secret—so it is notable that Maroney would write a book like this. In a disclaimer, he says that he has had to change names and alter some details, presumably to protect client confidentiality. But “The Modern Detective” is not an exposé. It is part memoir, part how-to guide, a celebration of the analytical and interpersonal intelligence that makes a great investigator. more

*Counterespionage is also being done.