Stakeout

Trenchcoats and fedoras are long gone. Computers and video cameras are vital. In search of today's private eye

by Justin Wolff

Illustration by Mark Reusch

In the first 30 or so pages of The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe shadows a mysterious bookseller's cream-colored coupe, sips whiskey from the bottle, witnesses a murder, breaks into a house, and meets three women -- all vaguely attractive, but none worthy of anything more than curt wisecracks. As the book opens, Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's noir detective, also gives voice to some of the coolest utterances in literature.

The book opens at the grand house of General Sternwood, Marlowe's client. Marlowe meets him in a humid greenhouse that "smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket." Sternwood asks the detective how he likes his brandy.

"Any way at all," Marlowe answers, and lights a cigarette.

Later, Sternwood asks Marlowe to describe himself.

"There's very little to tell," he says. "I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there's any demand for it. I worked for Mr. Wilde, the district attorney, as an investigator once. I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination, general."

Moments later, he asks Sternwood, "Do I have to be polite? Or can I just act natural?"

College once, work once -- that's the life. And what better evidence of Marlowe's aplomb than his perfunctory admission, to a stern general no less, that he's disobedient.

Sadly, Marlowe is a fantasy. No matter how hard Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum tried to bring the man to life in film versions of Chandler's book, he remains an enigma, born, one critic notes, "in that time out of time that allowed him to be 33 in 1933, 42 in 1953, and 43 in 1958." The fictional private eye, like fiction itself, is above the law. Real private eyes are not. Real private eyes are mouse-clicking businessmen and expert Internet hounds.

Vic Pichette

Vic Pichette greets me from behind his desk, which is illuminated by the azure glow of a huge computer monitor. Pichette, a private eye, sells surveillance products and runs his investigative business, PSS Inc., out of an office located in a strip mall behind T.F. Green Airport in Warwick. He's everything that Philip Marlowe isn't -- sober, genuinely polite, and garrulous. He's also within earshot of his mother, who periodically checks in on us.

Pichette, 35, grew up in Rhode Island and has been an investigator for almost 15 years. Knowing that real private eyes don't live the lives of their fictional counterparts, I ask Pichette what attracted him to the work. He believes that he got into the business for the same reason that most people do.

"When I was a young guy, about 21," he says, "I decided I didn't want to work for anybody. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Somebody gave me a break, I apprenticed for a little bit, then ended up here."

Pichette's response suggests that PI work remains alluring for the same reasons that it is in fiction, because it offers independence. But, Pichette says, the seeming charms of investigative work conceal pitfalls. The work lures young men with promises of danger, only to give them drudgery. It's the myth of the sirens, only reversed.

Sam Spade's cryptic moral code and Marlowe's insubordination would sink a real investigator today, Pichette argues. The work requires tedious training, specialized skills, a cooperative mentality, and fiscal savvy. To get a PI's license, most states require about five years of law enforcement experience or apprenticeship, and you can't have a record and must have money in the bank -- "about $5000, for insurance purposes," Pichette explains.

"A police officer retires, starts a PI business, and just waits for the door to get knocked down," he explains. But without business skills, a PI will sink. "If you don't know about marketing, you're gonna fail."

What's more, detective work today is boring -- "95 percent tedium, 5 percent adrenaline rush," according to Pichette -- in part because it has been radically transformed by computer technology. Many private eyes aren't street-pounding gumshoes anymore, but skilled technophiles who succeed by forging special partnerships with Internet information brokers. And, for the most part, they work inside, at desks. Pichette, for example, says that he wants to do only corporate and legal work.

Pichette reflects a growing trend when he says that he no longer enjoys outdoor surveillance. Workers' compensation cases -- spying on the firefighter with the bad back doing cannonballs at his kid's pool party -- used to be easy money for investigators, but Pichette won't take them any more because the insurance companies who assign the cases interfere with his autonomy. "I don't like being told how to work a case," he says. Most investigators I spoke with agreed that they are becoming so-called disk detectives and are more than happy to leave the grunt work behind.

Naturally, many investigators still specialize in workers' compensation cases, in hiding behind bushes, door-to-door canvassing, and interrogation. For some, that's the essence of the job. Patrick Higgins, for example, who runs Action Investigations Inc., based in Phoenix, Arizona, says he loves false-claim work. "I like getting them. I like to prove fraud," he says. "If they're guilty, they're guilty."

But Higgins will spend as much as 16 hours a day in his car spying on claimants. When the moment comes, Higgins explains, all he does is flip a switch on his strategically-positioned video camera and drive off. "It's no Jim Rockford, that's for sure," he says.

Pichette agrees. "None of that romance is left for me," he says. "Today, the smart PI makes his living on the computer. You can find out almost anything about someone on the computer -- you can run backgrounds, find out where they go and what they do. The guy driving around is wasting money for everybody, really. I would never hire an ex-cop because they don't know how to use a computer; they're used to getting information on the street. Look, the techno-geeks are way ahead of the game. They're the ones who run the information brokerages -- they're the ones I pay."

Ralph Thomas, a gruff former PI, founded the National Association of Investigative Specialists (NAIS) in 1980. NAIS, based in Austin, Texas, is a network of about 3000 PIs who have banded together to share information gathering tips. The association helps investigators navigate the currents of electrical and digital information sources.

Thomas is able to survey the industry from his perch at NAIS. He says that while many private eyes still make a living from field observation, new, more sophisticated specialties are the trend. "This profession started out as a seedy business, digging up dirt on cheating spouses. Today, the number of those cases compared to the whole is very small. The future of PI work is in highly specialized areas."

Some of the narrow specialties include employee background checks and locating missing persons, both of which can be conducted, in large part, on the Internet. Data recovery is another of the fastest growing specialties in the business, Thomas says. Law firms hire investigators to locate hidden or deleted data from computer systems, while spouses hire them to document cybersex affairs.

"Disk detectives," Thomas explains, "can fret out illegal activity and cheats by analyzing the fingerprints one leaves in hidden little puzzle pieces on their computer."

PI work today gives new meaning to the expression wired. As Pichette describes it, what rush there is in investigative work now comes from refining computer skills, from developing a specialized, technical expertise and acquiring privileged access to the information buzzing through the world's circuits. One thing that remains constant about the work, whether in fiction or the real world, is that it's about the thrill of knowing what others don't.

Thomas is not worried that the many Internet businesses offering information-finding services to ordinary people will outcompete the new breed of ambitious investigators.

"I think the future is very secure," he says. "Although there are a number of do-it-yourself types, some of the stuff gets complicated, and other than basic computer searches, people cannot do it themselves. There's a big difference between running a few computer searches and conducting a real investigation."

One successful Internet information broker is AutoTrackXP, based in Las Vegas. For $25 a month and about $20 for each successful search, one can haul in massive amounts of information about an individual. Access to the site, however, is limited to law enforcement and legal professionals, including licensed PIs. "We can't get credit bureau information," Pichette says, "but we can get aliases; addresses; telephone numbers; names of friends, family, and neighbors; civil filings; liens; bankruptcies; licenses of all kinds; boat records; you name it."

Thomas insinuates that this kind of investigative work is addictive for the same reason that the Internet is addictive. People who are attracted to the work, he says, enjoy the thrill of the hunt. Only now, it's the digital alleys that invite inspection.

James Pero and Joel Picchi

Since 1989, Trace Investigative Services has been one of New England's larger investigative companies, with offices in Providence; Arlington and Plainville, Massachusetts; and Gilford, New Hampshire. James Pero, 38, and Joel Picchi, 42, founded the company to conduct matrimonial and workers' compensation investigations, but now, according to Pero, the nature of the company's work is changing.

"Today," he says, "instead of following a car, we can use GPS [global positioning satellite] devices to track cars." It's possible then to plug those coordinates into software that processes where someone has gone, when, and for how long. "We can use this technology to track spouses or drivers for trucking companies. We gather so much information from databases that we rarely go to poke around town hall anymore, or even to ask the neighbors questions."

These advances in surveillance technology have exposed loopholes and grey areas in privacy laws. Tracking movements with GPS, for example, tests the limits of certain laws. Picchi claims it's perfectly legal to monitor the movements of employees in company vehicles, but not so clear when it comes to tracing a spouse's personal vehicle.

Despite these changes, Pero believes that he's still doing what he signed on to do. Unlike Pichette, who became a PI for the autonomy the work offers, Pero saw it as an opportunity to get into law enforcement. "I was a college kid," he says, "studying psychology and business, but I wanted to be a state trooper. I thought I would try investigative work first. It turns out that this is a better job."

Pero doesn't pretend that his work lives up to people's expectations. He's content working a normal workday and protecting his clients' legal assets. "I work Monday through Friday, then go home. That's nice," he says. And things are looking good for Trace. Pero says they're moving toward doing more security work for software companies, which includes erecting firewalls and monitoring employee computer use to prevent piracy. "Protecting valuable secrets," is how he describes it.

Picchi says that many of the investigators who get into the work expecting fast times leave after a month. "They come in thinking about all the novelties of the work, but that doesn't last long. It's very time consuming and tedious." For $30,000, the average salary for a freshman investigator, the work is hardly worth it.

Most investigators I spoke with agreed that field work, when it comes, rarely lives up to its glamorous reputation. "You get cold, you have to go to the bathroom, you get tired," Picchi says. "You don't get the girl in the nice car. I mean, in reality, you have to keep a distance -- you can't seduce someone you're following."

"In the 18 years I've been in this business," Pero says, "I can only recall three life-threatening incidents. One time, we were staking out a fraudulent workers' comp claim. Someone fired shots, but I don't even think they were at us."

Reluctantly, Picchi let me talk to an investigator in Trace's office in Arlington, Massachusetts, near Boston. Perhaps to add some mystery to the workaday reality of his job, the man insisted on anonymity and refused to even tell me his age (though he sounded young). Fair enough, I said, but tell me about your job.

"I enjoy the traveling, and visiting different places," he says.

That's it?

"Well," he admits sheepishly, "there have been some high-speed chases -- a few. But, you know, you have to slow down to the speed limit or you'll get pulled over by the cops."

Remember the question Marlowe put to the general -- "Do I have to be polite?" That gallant insolence, according to Boston University English professor Charles Rzepka, is just a fictional trope, one dating to the 19th-century frontier romance, which morphed into later literary genres such as the western and hard-boiled detective novel.

Rzepka teaches a course at BU that examines detective fiction in terms of politics and economics and that seeks to place canonical works of the genre in their place and time. Rzepka says you can trace the hard-boiled detective back to Natty Bumppo, the roaming frontiersman who appeared in several novels by James Fenimore Cooper, including The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826. "Bumppo, like Huck Finn, or the cowboy, is free to move across geographical space and is also free to move across the lines of society," Rzepka proposes. "The frontiersman roams the rural landscape, while the detective roams the urban landscape."

The years between the two world wars were ripe for the emergence of figures like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Not only did Los Angeles (Marlowe's home) emerge as a new frontier for the ever westwardly-moving American psyche, but Prohibition and gangsterism bequeathed the hard-boiled voice to the American lexicon. According to Rzepka, "The trauma of total war coincided with total lawlessness in this country -- the lid had popped off society." The time was appropriate, Rzepka suggests, for a return of the masculine ethos, which obliges one to step out of bounds before moving forward. Even Sherlock Holmes, the priggish progenitor of the hard-boiled detective was a "bohemian with the soul of an artist unhappy with social conventions," Rzepka says.

The appeal of our iconic private eyes is not terribly difficult to detect -- they uphold the law, but are free to work outside it. The comparison between the detective and the artist is an apt one -- both ask the tough questions, and both look for the answers without playing by the rules that circumscribe the rest of us. What's more, both are private eyes. The artist shows us what we've only imagined, and the detective, the fictional ones anyway, guide us to the places we won't go on our own, places that are dangerous but seductive, like the crime scene, the flophouse, or Rue Morgue -- the "miserable thoroughfare" where Edgar Allan Poe set the murders in his 1841 story.

"This is the fantasy of absolute freedom," Rzepka says.

But the facts of investigative work contradict the popular image of the PI as a fringe character wary of corporate interests. From the beginning, private eyes almost always worked for big business. The first real private eyes in this country, for example, who worked for Chicago's Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, relentlessly hounded Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, and other cowboys -- precisely the kinds of nomadic figures that foreshadowed the fictional detective.

Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant, founded the agency in 1850. The agency's engraved logo, a wide-open eye over the motto "We never sleep," is the source of the term "private eye." For handsome rewards, the "Pinks," as the detectives were known, would pursue criminals clear across the Continental Divide. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Valley of Fear, even the invincible Mr. Holmes has high praise for Birdy Edwards, a fictional Pinkerton's detective.

The agency's first clients were the wealthy midwestern railroads, not distressed mothers looking for missing children or antique dealers tracking down exotic wares. Spade and Marlowe may not be saints, and they struggle with what's ethical and what's not, but we love the fact that they aren't righteous. The "Pinks," by contrast, are remembered for the brutal tactics they used to break strikes for magnates like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick. After they rolled heads at a strike in 1892, "Honest" John McLuckie, the mayor of Homestead, Pennsylvania, described Pinkerton's men as "cut-throats, thieves, and murderers in the employ of unscrupulous capital for the oppression of honest labor."

Boston native Darren Donovan, vice president of what is now called Pinkerton Security and Investigation Services, based near Los Angeles, is in charge of the agency's 12 offices in the eastern region. He admits that the agency is still a watchdog for corporate America. "Eighty percent of our clients are from the Fortune 1000. Look," he says, "from the moment there was ownership in this world, there was a need to protect it or get it back if it was stolen. Investigative work is corporate work. We are in a service industry."

Nevertheless, Donovan believes that corporate investigation is alluring. As he describes it, the romance comes from using extraordinary skills to do good. "The PI is a unique animal," he says. "The work we do is intrusive and so it takes a special individual to do it. The good investigator has to have an eclectic body of knowledge, has to get up to speed quickly, and has to be tenacious. Also, the investigator has to be of higher ethical standards; he has to be above reproach. We serve the public good."

Despite the changes within the field, some PIs are reluctant to acknowledge that investigation is more about playing by technology's rules and adhering to the protocols of corporate America than it is about sovereignty and unfettered mobility. According to Donovan, for instance, PI work carries traces of its mythology -- it's about gamesmanship, cunning, doing the right thing. In place of Los Angeles, information technology has emerged as the frontier that is the PI's milieu. "The digital trail has replaced the paper trail," Donovan says. But, he adds, "Investigation is still an art, not a science. People who are good at it are good at understanding human nature."

What entices investigators today is not the girl in the red dress, but being privy to secret corporate information, the notion of access. Like reporters, PIs get the inside beat; they know things that ordinary people aren't supposed to know -- and that's seductive.

Joel Picchi, of Trace, agrees. "It's still nice to see the look on people's faces when you tell them what you do," he says.

Still, during my foray into the investigative industry, I came across only one private eye who might be described as legendary. That would be Ed Ciriello, a Boston native who now lives in Northhampton, Massachusetts. Ciriello, 65, has been in the business for 50 years. He started as an underage enlistee in the military (he forged his birth certificate), where he went right to work for the Army Security Agency, which has since become the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). During Vietnam, working then for Navy intelligence, he orchestrated the abduction and interrogation of high-ranking enemy officers.

"After the military, I went to work for Pinkerton's in Chicago," he says, "but after a couple of years, I went out on my own. It's easier to work for an agency, of course."

But independence, Ciriello stresses, is the key to successful investigative work. That's a lesson he tries to teach the 500 or so students enrolled in his correspondence courses at the Global School of Investigation in Northhampton, which he founded in 1973. The school's students, who find it on the Internet or advertised in magazines like Soldier of Fortune, come from every state and about 60 countries. A majority of the students are older, Ciriello says. "They're looking for a career change; they're bored in their old job."

Ciriello explains that self-reliance is the "single most important thing to teach someone going into this business. You have to ask yourself, `Can I work by myself and get the job done?' I try to teach people to develop their instincts."

To that end, Ciriello inscribes a Ralph Waldo Emerson axiom on one of the school's brochures, tipping his hat to intuition's best salesman. "The only really educated," Emerson writes, "are the self-educated."

Ciriello denies my suggestion that detective work is being taken over by techies and corporate lackeys. "Yeah, I teach my students how to use the Internet and that stuff, but lots of assignments still require good, old-fashioned detective work. Nothing beats going undercover and door-to-door."

Ciriello specializes in international kidnapping cases. He's gone to Iraq, Egypt, and Russia to retrieve children for grieving parents. "I won't sit at a computer all day. That's not investigation. To be on the street, to match wits with a criminal, that's what rewards me."

And?

"Yeah, I've been shot at."

I've learned that Ciriello is a special investigator in the truest sense of the title. He's an industry novelty and an endangered species. He's the kind of person you find in stories. He's the one who puts his hand on the distraught woman's elbow and guides her into his office. He lights her cigarette.

She sobs into her handkerchief, "I want my kid back, Mr. Ciriello. Can you please get my kid back?"

"I'll do what I can, Ma'm."

It sounds so 20th-century, doesn't it?