Gumshoes are being replaced by high-tech wizzes, many employed by companies to prevent stealing of intellectual property
BY JAMES BERNSTEIN
STAFF WRITER
December 19, 2005
In the summer of 2003, Rocco Gatta found himself hiding in the deep woods of Vermont, videotaping the comings and goings of a woman whose multimillionaire husband suspected her of cheating on him.
She was.
Two years later, Gatta found himself in a courtroom in Hong Kong, narrating the videotape that showed the woman and her television-repairman lover meeting at her Vermont vacation home, at a trial that was about far more serious actions than two-timing a husband.
She stood accused of poisioning and then bludgeoning her husband in November 2003, in what became known as the Milkshake Murder.
According to prosecutors, Nancy Kissel, 41, had given her husband, Robert Kissel, 40, one of the top investment bankers at Merrill Lynch who was then working and living in Hong Kong, a milkshake laced with Rohypnol (a central nervous system depressant infamous as the date-rape drug), three types of sleeping tablets and an anti-depressant. He passed out, and she bludgeoned him with a lead statuette. She is now serving a life sentence in a Hong Kong prison but has appealed her conviction.
The Kissel case was a shock even for Gatta. The former Nassau narcotics detective-turned-private investigator had been hardened by decades of rough-and-tumble police work - a career in which a loaded revolver once was pointed at his head by a drug suspect.
The suspect pulled the trigger. The gun jammed.
In 1987, Gatta left the Nassau police department for what he expected might be a less-harrowing career as a private eye.
But “you don’t think it’s going to lead to this,” he said of the Kissel case. “Most cases, they hate each other and fight over money and children. But she planned this thing. This wasn’t impulsive.”
Gatta, 59, a white-haired former U.S. Marine who lives on Nassau’s South Shore, said in a recent interview that he’s learned that, in the world of the private eye, little, if anything, can be taken for granted.
Nonetheless - or perhaps because nothing can be taken for granted - growing numbers of former police officers, ex-federal agents and reporters are becoming private eyes. Many have made the move since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; since then, security of all types has become bigger business than ever. American companies lost between $53 billion and $59 billion in proprietary information and intellectual property thefts in 2001, according to the most recent survey by the American Society for Industrial Security. In 1999, the association said, U.S. companies lost more than $45 billion from such thefts.
Allstate is one of the Fortune 500 companies that are increasingly making use of private investigators. It said that in late November, for instance, it used private investigators to compile information for a $3.4-million insurance fraud lawsuit against a psychological testing service that had a post office box in Mineola.
Computer literacy a must
Today’s private investigators are likely to be highly computer literate and even speak several languages and understand foreign currency.
Gone, both private eyes and security industry experts say, are the days of the trench-coated, fedora-wearing investigator, who always had a cigarette in his mouth - yes, it was almost always a he - and a line on a sure-bet horse.
“These days, there’s no smoking in our office,” said Francis Shea, president of Melville-based Alpha Group, an investigative agency that hired Gatta to spy on Nancy Kissel. “We look for a more educated individual and somebody who can sit in a boardroom instead of a bar,” said Shea, who spent 15 years as a New York City police officer before starting the firm.
“I think [private investigators] have a long way to go because many of them are still saddled with that old image,” said Vincent Henry, also once a city cop and now a professor of homeland security at the Southampton campus of Long Island University. “But in the last decade, there have been a lot of changes” in the industry. Technology and the Internet are now as much a part of the job as the old Yellow Pages and notepad, he said.
“There’s been a professionalization,” Henry said.
And there’s certainly more people on the job.
Kroll Inc. of Manhattan, now one of the country’s largest investigative firms, has about 3,600 employees worldwide, up from 300 as recently as 1997, said Jeremy Kroll, the company’s managing director and son of the founder, Jules Kroll.
A ‘mainstream’ occupation
“It’s a much more legitimate, mainstream corporate service” that agencies are providing these days, Jeremy Kroll said. “That’s very much reflective of the people providing the service. There’s a surge in patriotism, not just here but in other countries. For a period of time, people believed security and intelligence was a place they could make a difference.”
According to PI Magazine, a leading industry publication in Freehold, N.J., there are now about 60,000 licensed private investigators in the United States, about 29,930 of them in New York State, a 14.5 percent rise since 2000.
On Long Island, there are 811 licensed investigators, up from 695 in 2000. The New York State Department of State licenses private eyes. To obtain a license, one must first pass a written test, mostly related to law-enforcement issues, and have worked for a private investigator for three years.
At Summit Security Services of Uniondale, recent hires include Patrick Melia, a highly decorated former New York City police officer, and Tom Valery, a former federal investigator who worked to help convict Michael Swango, a physician serving three life sentences for killing three patients at the Northport VA Medical Center in 1993.
Industry sources say the pay for private sleuths has improved significantly. About 30 years ago, one could count on about $50 a day, with expenses, if he was lucky. Now, industry sources say, entry-level investigators earn about $40,000 annually; those with 10 or 15 years’ experience can make $80,000 to $120,000, and senior level investigators, $120,000 to $1 million or more a year.
Jimmie Mesis, PI Magazine’s editor in chief, said an estimated 500 to 1,000 new licenses are handed out each month in the United States. The number issued in New York State so far this year has risen by about 200 since last year.
Mesis estimates the industry’s annual sales at about $600 million. And, because of technological innovations, the industry has become global.
“The local gumshoe is now no longer local,” he said. “He’s doing work in Switzerland or China or anywhere else in the world.”
And, Mesis said, women are becoming more and more of a presence. About 15 percent of private investigators in the country are women, he said, up from 2 percent or 3 percent five years ago.
A woman who made a switch
One of those is Vicki Multer Diamond, 37, of Plainview, a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Diamond works for Fortress Global Investigations & Security in Great Neck. She said she made the switch from the courtroom to the corporate office in 2000 because she likes investigations. But it’s a job that can be unpredictable.
“There are times I’m on the phone with the kids in the background,” said Diamond, the mother of two.
Jim Mulvaney of Long Beach left the newspaper business almost a decade ago - he had been a reporter at Newsday and, subsequently, at the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif., where he formed an investigative team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for uncovering an embryo theft scandal at a fertility clinic. He is now managing director at Tactical Intelligence Services, which has offices in Long Beach and Manhattan.
Mulvaney found that the world of the private eye was a familiar one. “We’re paid to find and analyze information,” Mulvaney said. “In the [newspaper] days, we wanted to know which politician was cheating. Now, we want to know which husband is cheating,” he said with a laugh. The bulk of his work, he said, involves fraud cases and protection of brands and intellectual property.
A former FBI agent
One of Long Island’s best-known private eyes is John Good, a partner in the Babylon firm of Lawn, Mullen & Good, who spent 30 years as an FBI agent, retiring in 1986 as supervisor of the Hauppauge office.
Good’s reputation was built in the late 1970s, when he masterminded the FBI’s ABSCAM operation, a sting that led to the convictions of seven U.S. congressmen and one U.S. senator for taking bribes. Now 69, Good says he is part investigator and part business executive, a role to which he is still adapting.
“It’s a challenge,” Good acknowledged recently. “Sometimes, we’re up half the night writing proposals” for potential clients, he said. “I’ve done well, but I’m not a millionaire.”
But few in the business get really wealthy, said Gatta, the private investigator on the Kissel murder case.
Money is often not the goal, anyway. “This has got to be in your blood,” Gatta said. “I like solving things. I like saying, ‘I caught you.’”