Private Investigator News and Information

German man fired from job for smoking

BERLIN, Dec. 3 (UPI) — A German man is fighting his employers’ decision to fire him for violating a voluntary no-smoking policy that rewarded him for giving up cigarettes.

Sandro Beier was terminated by Laserline after a private detective the company hired caught him smoking in his backyard, the Telegraph of London reports.

The company offers a monthly bonus of about $117 to employees who sign the no-smoking pledge.

Babett Deuse, operations and risk management supervisor at Laserline, said Beier’s home smoking was equivalent to lying and defrauding the company.

Beier said he smokes only on rare occasions when he’s stressed out.

His attorney criticized the company for spying at their employees’ homes.

An employment tribunal will rule on the legitimacy of the firing next week.

Investigator Follows Spouse, Documents Infidelity

POSTED: 12:35 pm EST December 1, 2005

GRANDVIEW, Ohio — Infidelity can be a reality in any relationship, NBC 4’s Mike Bowersock reported.

For some, picture evidence is the final item that ends a marriage.

Dean Boerger runs Boerger Investigative Services in Grandview.

“We had a business man whose wife suspected when he left state to come to Columbus, Ohio, to check on his businesses, had a local girlfriend,” Boerger said.

Boerger runs Boerger Investigative Services in Grandview.

For about $1,000 he’ll follow a client’s spouse with a camera and wait for that moment that could prove infidelity.

Boerger uses a variety of devices, including a pen camera.

“We use (the pen camera) if we have to go into bar situations,” Boerger said. “We document, we videotape all their activity, when they’re in the public view, when they’re in a public place. We have the equipment to be able to view and videotape, (which) documents their activities.”

Statistics of cheating spouses run all over the board, with some estimates as high as 60 percent, Bowersock reported.

The National Opinion Research Center in Chicago said that as many as 21 percent of all men and 11 percent of all women have committed adultery.

“You kind of wonder why are they working so late. One night I decided I’d drive by to see if he was really there and his car wasn’t there,” said a Columbus woman who did not want to be identified.

She said the classic signs of infidelity were there, but she didn’t want to believe her husband was cheating until she saw it on tape.

“I can’t even describe the … you’ve put that much of your life into a relationship and been through so much over a period of time, and to think it didn’t mean as much to the other person,” the woman said.

Boerger said he’s providing a his clients with a service, and when someone thinks his or her significant other is with another, there’s a good chance, they are.

“In most cases, I’d say nine times out of 10, there is some kind of activity going on,” Boerger said.

Some of the classic signs of cheating are working late, late-night phone calls, a lack of sexual interest, renewed sexual interest and lost wedding rings.

CHICAGO The push is on to get a convicted killer a new trial. Attorneys for Alstory Simon believe their client was framed and plan to petition the courts Thursday.

It was the Anthony Porter case that triggered then Gov. George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty.

Porter was released in 1999 after a Milwaukee man, Alstory Simon, confessed to a private investigator retained by Northwestern University, that Simon, not Porter, killed two people in Washington Park back in 1982.

“I just pulled it up and started shooting,” Simon said in his confession.

But now, two Chicago area attorneys, Jim Sotos and Terry Ekl, contend that Simon was coerced and pressured into that confession and that Simon was not the killer.

“People working on Anthony Porter’s behalf framed Alstory Simon for a crime he did not commit, with fabricated, false, and flimsy evidence,” Sotos said.

“I would not be involved with Alstory Simon unless I felt he was innocent and an injustice had occurred,” Ekl said.

Sotos and Ekl say that veteran private investigator Paul Ciolino made several promises or money and leniency to Simon to persuade him to confess. Ciolino disagrees.

“The only promise I made to him was that I would try to make sure he didn’t get the death penalty,” Ciolino said.

Ciolino denies that he did anything improper.

“I don’t have any rules. The Supreme Court says I can lie, cheat, and do anything I can to get him to say whatever I want him to say. The Chicago Police Department is a master at that. So is every other police department,” Ciolino said.

Simon’s estranged wife, Inez, told Northwestern’s Project Innocence in 1999 that she witnessed her husband kill the two people in Washington Park in 1982. One year later she implicated him again.

But in a videotaped statement taped earlier this month by investigators working for Sotos and Ekl, Inez Simon, in failing health, says that she was offered money in 1999 to say that her husband was the killer. Now she recants that version and claims her husband was innocent all along.

Professor David Protess of the Northwestern University Project Innocence denied that neither he nor his staff made any promises of compensation to Inez Simon or her family. He said there is no question about Alstory Simon’s guilt.

Lawyers Sotos and Ekl will request the court vacate the conviction of Simon, who’s serving a 37-and-a-half-year sentence in Danville.