PI Perceptions

In our first-ever Sound of Pursuit podcast, we dig into the myths and misconceptions surrounding private eyes, then peel back the curtain to offer a glimpse into the real lives of professional investigators.

Our team: Jim McLeod, Hal Humphreys, Kim Green, Stephanie Mitchell, Doug Hayes, Ruben Roel

Thanks to Brian Willingham, Kelly Paxton, Eli Rosenblatt, and Joe Stiles.

Music provided by Jason White (who composed our theme) and Financier.

Special thanks to radio producer Daniel Potter and engineer Simon Gugala.

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Pursuit Magazine and PI Education are part of StoryboardEMP, a media and education company in Nashville, TN. Pursuit, a free online magazine for private investigators, explores all things investigative, from gumshoe techniques and surveillance tech to industry news and crime in media. PI Education, its sister brand, provides online continuing education for licensed PIs. Pursuit and PIed are owned and edited by husband-wife team Hal Humphreys, a PI, and Kim Green, a writer and radio producer.

In this podcast, you'll find episodes that dive deep into the work and the business of private investigations. And at PI Education's YouTube channel, you can dive even deeper into the knowledge pool of this fascinating profession, with regular briefings and webinars. Subscribe to stay up to date!

Pursuit Magazine: https://pursuitmag.com/​
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Transcript

Montage of voices:  There's still quite a bit of a misconception about what we do.

Most of the public thinks what they see on TV is the —

…movies and television —

…Magnum PI. Of course, that's the first reference point. 

…Magnum PI drove a red Ferrari —

…larger-than-life figures —

Television and movies just basically have it wrong. 

That’s not the way it really is. 

Host HAL HUMPHREYS: This is the sound. Of pursuit episode 1: Perception.

HUMPHREYS: Pursuit is an online resource for professional investigators and truth-seekers of all stripes. And we just crossed the sound barrier with a brand-new podcast. You're listening to it right now. The first episode. I used to be a public radio guy myself before I became a pi and I know the power of this medium can have. Now, I took over as executive editor of pursuit in 2012, but the magazine’s been around a lot longer than that.  

HUMPHREYS: Over the years, Pursuit has kind of sidestepped the issue of professionalism. Basically, we've just accepted — and I think rightly so — that our ranks are filled with professionals who have a mastery of the trade. And we've just assumed that our clients and the public in general, get this. Well, turns out, we were wrong. People by and large, do not trust PIs. It's not that people find individual PIs dubious. People don't trust the idea of a PI. And there are a number of reasons for this. We asked the independent producer Daniel Potter to help us get our heads around PI perceptions.  

DANIEL POTTER: What do you think of when you hear the term private investigator? Before I looked into it, the first answer for me would have been a guy who chain smokes in this car for hours, waiting to snap a photo of someone's cheating spouse through a window. Just being honest. I also thought of TV — like “Dog, the Bounty Hunter,” you know, guy with the mullet, has a tactical vest and just does not care about the laws of Mexico, where, turns out, bounty hunting is illegal. Lastly, I thought of that guy with the mustache, from the 80s. Not my dad.  

Music: Magnum PI theme

POTTER: Magnum, P.I., you know, Tom Selleck? Sick Ferrari? Never mind. Not to belabor the point, but I'm not the only one who thinks these things.  

Montage of voices: The first thing that comes to mind when you say private investigator to me is “mysterious man.”

Cool. It's like a cool job. 

I know a lot of people would say Magnum PI of course. That's the first reference point.

 Unscrupulous, slightly. 

The Pink Panther 

Shady 

Stalking

Cigarettes 

Naked ladies.

Obfuscatory, how do you say that? Obfus-cate-ory?

COURTNEY KRAMPF: When I hear the term private investigator, I think of just things gone awry. Because why else, you know why else would you need to hire private investigator? 

POTTER: This is Courtney Krampf regular old friend-of-a-friend who cuts hair for a living in Nashville 

KRAMPF: Immediately. I think of either business fraud or cheating scandals, or yeah, just divorce gone bad 

POTTER: As it happens. Courtney used to date a PI. 

KRAMPF: You know it's funny because everyone assumed his job was all exciting and everything, but really it was a lot of long hours sitting in a car, watching a house for hours and hours and hours. 

BRIAN WILLINGHAM: My name is Brian Willingham. I am the founder of Diligentia Group, which was founded in 2009. I've been a private investigator based in New York since 2001.

POTTER: For the record Brian's focus is white-collar crime. He's not really into that whole bit with the car and the camera. 

WILLINGHAM: And most of my work is sort of behing the computer, on the telephone. I'm not as much of a field guy. I don't do surveillance kind of work, so my work is more behind the scenes, so to speak. 

POTTER: One of Brian's fascinations is how private investigators are perceived by outsiders. 

WILLINGHAM: And one of my colleagues that I originally worked within the first few weeks of me starting in the business so that when he is always introduced to people, he always says that he's a garbage man.

POTTER: At first, Brian didn't get it. Basically the guy didn't want to make small talk about his job. 

WILLINGHAM: So by telling everybody that he's a garbage man, it kind of quiets the conversation pretty quickly. But also he mentioned that, you know, investigators don't have a very good perception around. And, you know, as a newbie in the business you know, I'm excited to be in the business, I want to be in this business and from the outside it looks like one of the coolest jobs around. 

POTTER: It took a few years to sink in, but Brian says, at some point, he noticed people at say, a dinner party, had weird ideas about what his work entails.

WILLINGHAM: Asking me about things that I can do, or what can I do? Can I break into somebody's house? Hack into people's emails? I need my wife's bank information. And people are flabbergasted that I can’t do these sort of things. 

POTTER: So in 2013, he did an informal poll of around 1,000 people online, just trying to get a sense of PIs general perception.  

WILLINGHAM: And what I found was 95% of the people that were polled believed that private investigators broke the law at some point, and twenty percent of people actually thought that we broke the law all the time.  

POTTER: Not too savory. Brian also tried out six associated characteristics.  

WILLINGHAM: What was the word that came to mind when you thought of a private investigator? And the most common term was “resourceful,” which I think is a pretty good term to describe what we do. But the second one, most common term was “shady.” And the term that they thought least of about private investigators was “honest.” 

POTTER: Ouch. Now as an aside there's a long conversation among pi as that's worth having some time about professionalism —

HUMPHREYS: Let’s — I'm going to stop you. Let's have that conversation right now. What, talk to me about what you've learned so far.

POTTER: Basically, what I learned is that in some states, if you want to be a PI, you hang out a shingle. Apparently, it's easier than becoming a hair stylist. 

HUMPHREYS: Yeah, that is a problem. There are a number of states still to this day that don't have any licensure requirements at all. I think, I don’t know, 17 or 20 states, require continuing education, the rest of them do not. The test that you have to take to become private investigator in a lot of states — some states it's an actual test. Other states, it's kind of a joke. There's a real problem in the industry of, I don't know that there are enough barriers to entry, that it should be more difficult to become a private investigator. The things we do, we're dealing with pretty sensitive information and sensitive topics that have real impact on people's lives. 

POTTER: Yeah, you showed me that video of the divorce guy found evidence that that his ex was looking after their kids while doing drugs. I mean, that's you don't want that to be amateur hour, if that's your life.

HUMPHREYS: Exactly, exactly. And, you know, part of the problem with the perception of private investigators is over the past several years, there have been a number of news stories out — Chris Butler and the PI mom story, where he was basically staging surveillances to make the media like him. At the same time, he was stealing drugs from an evidence locker and selling them on the streets to fund these endeavors. I think he was he was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2012. News Corp. several years ago got in trouble for hiring PIs to tap people's phones. I hate to say it but there's a shady aspect to this business. 

POTTER: And then there are there are people that are trying to be less shady about it. Like Inoticed you sign your emails “CFE” —what was the fancy word to use for it?  

HUMPHREYS: CFE stands for “certified fraud examiner” It’s a post-nominal, right? And when I started in this business, I wanted to find a way to kind of set myself apart as a professional, and certified fraud examiners you know, they commit to 20 hours of continuing education on an annual basis. They commit to a course of study. They have to adhere to the code of ethics. Pretty much anyone who has committed to getting and maintaining the CFE designation is trying to set themselves out as a professional. And a lot of times the folks that get the CFE designation will try to specialize in a certain area. Like I am a criminal defense investigator. I try to focus on criminal and civil defense involving fraud cases. I've got several friends in the business who have done similar things, trying to set themselves apart by specializing in other  areas 

POTTER: Which I mean for you your background before you got into this was real estate, right? 

HUMPHREYS: That’s correct.

POTTER: So I guess one of the things I learned is if you want a sense of what PIs actually do apart from the whole stereotype, with the telephoto lens and yelling at people on reality TV, you have to actually go out and talk to a few. Well, this is what I did.  

HUMPHREYS: You actually went out and talked some other professional investigators?

POTTER: Yeah. And one of them was, let's go to this lady I talked to named Kelly Paxton up in Portland.

KELLY PAXTON: No one would ever, looking at me and like, my sort of quote lifestyle, no one would ever think I was a private investigator. People that I grew up with. They're like what? You? 

POTTER: Kelly runs into the perception problem all the time.

PAXTON: My kids’ friends think it's crazy that I do what I do. They think it's just bizarre. 

POTTER: She has a financial background and is in her mid-50s. 

PAXON: And so actually a lot of times, I introduce myself as a certified fraud examiner and then I also say, which is just you know, another version of a private investigator. But we are licensed by the state. Because if I say I’m a PI, people's ears kind of perk up and they're like, ‘Oh, you peek in windows.”

POTTER: Turns out. There is lots of different skill sets to being a PI.

PAXTON: And you do have the ones that peek in windows and, you know, I’ve done it before. It's fun.

POTTER: Kelly’s specialties run more towards spreadsheets, and the kind of software you use to handle billing at say, a water department or the dentist's office. She says they get ripped off all the time. So maybe one day, a dentist gets a call from the bank about some weird deposits going into a worker’s personal account instead of the office’s.

PAXTON: And then they're kind of like, “Oh God.” And so then they start digging. 

POTTER: They call their lawyer and/or their accountant, who calls her.

PAXTON: I get a lot of referrals from accountant. Just because accountants generally don't like to do this type of work because it's kind of — it isn't even kind of — it's very confrontational. And most accountants are accountants because they don't like confrontation.  

POTTER: Then there's the matter of getting what you find out to the police. Many of them aren't exactly into proprietary accounting software. So Kelly breaks it all down for them. She says there's a learning curve to this if you've never worked with law enforcement before. She has. For a while, she worked in a sheriff's office.

PAXTON: I have a case that I'm waiting on, where the law enforcement agency is going to let me do part of the interview because I understand the software and how it was done. 

POTTER: There are also after-the-fact interviews with coworkers who often say they thought something was up. That's actually kind of how Kelly got into investigations.

PAXTON: I mean, I started off in the financial industry, and then one of our clients was arrested and I was like, “Oh, I knew that guy was dirty.” Granted, of course, I thought it was different than what it was. Actually it was white-collar crime. And then I called the federal agent and I'm like, “I knew that guy was dirty. Like, what you do sounds kind of cool.” And next thing, you know, within a year I'm at the federal law enforcement training center in Georgia.

POTTER: Kelly says stories like hers are less rare than you, might think pointing to another PI in town.

PAXTON: She was a concert musician and she's probably 65 close to 60 years old. And she decides to become a PI. And I think that makes the industry kind of interesting. It's not just a bunch of ex-cops. 

POTTER: Now, Kelly has a favorite subject. What she calls “pink-collar crime.” pinkcollarcrime.com is her website. It's when a middle-class lady with a clean record decides to start embezzling. We could do a whole piece about it sometime, but the point is PIs have specialties. And when they need help in a less familiar area, they look to other PIs. For investigations into technical computer stuff, Kelly has a guy she goes to just for PCs and another just for Macs and iPhones. 

ELI ROSENBLATT: My name is Eli Rosenblatt. I'm a private investigator and a forensic specialist here in Portland, Oregon.

POTTER: One of Eli's main specialties is finding deleted files on Apple gadgets essentially establishing who knew what, and when they knew it.

ROSENBLATT: To help attorneys and their clients find items that might have been deleted for instance, from a phone or a computer. Help them fetter out exactly when a particular text message was sent or whether or not this browsing history reflects what law enforcement is saying it reflects in their reports. 

POTTER: Eli is quick to echo Kelly's point about what he calls the “Lone-Wolf Myth” of the solo PI. For one thing, sometimes an investigation takes a village.

ROSENBLATT: On any given case. I might work with a DNA expert and a forensic accountant. And someone who, you know, has been steeped for years in doing civil compromise cases.

POTTER: One other myth Eli points to has to do with interviewing people. Think of movies like LA Confidential, where the hard-ass investigator is like pressing for information, pushing his subject to the edge.

Sound: Where’s the girl?! WHERE IS THE GIRL? 

ROSENBLATT: Yeah, that just doesn’t fly. Television and movies, just basically have it wrong.  

POTTER: It might be entertaining to watch, but it doesn't tend to work that well in real life.  

ROSENBLATT: What happens in reality is that you're going through a long process with someone to help them feel more comfortable and get them to a place where they can admit what they did or where they can explain what their co-worker did. 

POTTER: Sometimes he says you don't even get there, which may not be what a client wants to hear. 

ROSENBLATT: We don't have a particular allegiance to particular parties in cases — at least the professional investigators that I work with. We have an allegiance to the facts. 

music

HYUMPHREYS: Right there. That's a great point: an allegiance to the facts. Professional investigators can set themselves apart in a couple of ways: One, get credentialed, get a designation of some kind. The other is adhere to a code of ethics — away of doing business that sets you apart.

POTTER: Yeah, I talked to this old-school guy actually out of — I mean, he's technically not a PI, but a lot of the work he does is a lot like being a PI. He is name's Joe Styles. He's from Knoxville. 

HUMPHREYS: He's a good example of kind of the crossover. A lot of people don't get it that bail enforcement agents, they think they're just muscle that go retrieve people. But a lot of the work they do, I would say the bulk of the work they do is more like a private investigator. They're trying to keep track of people, trying to locate, people who have skipped out on bail, that kind of thing. So, Joe's a great guy to talk to.

POTTER: One thing that I noticed about them is that, you know, even though he's ex-military and he has what he calls “war stories” about going out and finding skips and occasionally, you know, having to get mean with them is, you know, that's not what he thinks the job is really about. I mean, in a lot of ways, his job is about, you know, treating people the way he would want to be treated.  

HUMPHREYS: That's his reputation, and it's well deserved. He treats his clients, he treats his subcontractors, with respect. The bottom line is, I don't think Joe thinks of this is a job where you get to go out and beat people up. I think he tries to avoid that at all costs.

POTTER: So Joe's company, Bail Fast Bonding, employs about a dozen agents in a couple dozen counties. You might call them up if you ever happen to get arrested in East Tennessee.

JOE STILES: On an average day, we will do things like answer the phones, dispatch agents, go to the jails to make bonds, go to court appearances that we’re scheduled for, have meetings with either clients, attorneys, indemnitors. We also do bail enforcement.

POTTER: Bail enforcement is where someone misses their court date and has to be found and brought back. It's what a lot of people think of as “bounty hunting.” Joe doesn't like that term. He calls it a misnomer. He also doesn't like it when I bring up “Dog, the Bounty Hunter,” who he calls a “character.” It’s clear Joe wants to set his business apart.

STILES: I just finished a recovery where I had been talking to the individual who had missed his court date for no other reason than he simply did not have a ride to court, and his court date was in a county about 75 miles away. 

POTTER: In other words, the guy wasn't skipping town. He just didn't have a ride. Now, Joe figures if he had wanted to, he could have made this dramatic like you see on TV. 

STILES: All I had to do was grab a camera crew and a couple of agents, and we could go over and kick the door in on his house and walk in and get him. And would have been perfectly justified legally in doing so. But understanding the nature of his situation, what we try to do is pursue a sense of justice that allows us to recover the individual with the least amount of fanfare or danger of either getting him hurt or getting us hurt. 

POTTER: So instead, Joe’s approach was courteous. Almost weirdly so.

STILES: I actually went over to his house, he had agreed to meet me, he got in the car, and I drove him down to the jail and walked him into the lobby and turned him in. And those are the more common occurrences. 

POTTER: Joe says he thinks people would be surprised at how mundane most of his work is. But he acknowledged every once in a while, it's pretty hair-raising. 

STILES: I've been in it 28 years and so I've had my fair share of war stories. But those are usually the exception to the rule. I used to teach classes where I told people that if you've never fought anybody that you've ever picked up, then you just haven't picked up enough people. But if you end up having to fight every person that you pick up, you need to work on your people skills.

POTTER: I did get Joe to share one of his stories about a time he went looking for a skip in New Orleans and ended up spending days incognito on the streets of the French Quarter. The only lead Joe had was the skip kept making calls from the same phone booth over and over. 

STILES: So after tracing the phone booth number down to Royale Street down in the French Quarter, I staked it out for a few days. Well, I think it was maybe two or three days. But in order to stay in that area, I had to assume the role of a street person. And so I camped out there, I don't know, a few yards down from that phone booth. And sure enough, on the second or third day, he walked right up to the phone booth and I walked right up behind him and shoved him into the phone booth and handcuffed him and brought him back to Knoxville.  

POTTER: I can't top that story, so that's where we're going to leave it. I'm Daniel Potter for the Sound of Pursuit. 

music

HUMPHREYS: I love that last story from Jim, but I'm not quite ready to leave it there. It's funny. We just spent the last 20 minutes talking about what investigators really do. And then we end on a story that plays into the myths: a guy dresses up like a hobo and stakes out the French Quarter, then applies a little muscle when his mark turns up it's like something straight out of “The Rockford Files.” But here's the thing: Joe's day-to-day doesn't necessarily make for great storytelling The Styles Files are mostly pretty mundane: long afternoons poring through courthouse archives, weeks of pounding on doors, to no avail, and the occasional surveillance, mostly not in the French Quarter. Mostly not in a red Ferrari. But at the core of every myth, there's a hint of truth. Stereotypes exist for a reason, good or ill. The hard-boiled constructs of Edgar Allan Poe and Dashiell Hammett anchor our trade in a tradition of noir and mystery, from Dupin to Spade, from Rockford to Magnum. From Taylor Jackson to Clete Purcell. These are the front men and women we've been dealt. They're the source from which people craft their image of the modern private dick. And you know what? That's okay. Here at Pursuit, we accept that a lot of people think our jobs are cool, crafty, and maybe sometimes even a bit dangerous. But — and this is the key — we're nowhere near ready to leave it there. 

We'll be back soon to keep the conversation going about who we are and what we do — what we really do. Later this spring, in production, episode two: profiles. We’ll peel back the curtains and offer a peek inside the lives of real professional investigators. Early summer, in pre-production: episode 3 -  technology. 

That's the Sound of Pursuit, produced by Storyboard EMP. Our team: Jim McCloud, Hal Humphreys, Kim Green, Stephanie Mitchell, Doug Hayes and Ruben Roel. Thanks to Brian Willingham, Kelly Paxton, Eli Rosenblatt, and Joe Styles. Music provided by Jason White and the Nashville band, Financier. Special thanks to Simon Gugala, who keeps on telling us:

That’s it's not the way it really is.