Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [110]
To her credit, Shaw is unflinching in discussing this less genteel side of her business. Industrywide, she estimates that the division between defensive and offensive intelligence gathering is about fifty-fifty. “Surveillance is a fact of life,” she says. “We’re all recorded I think an average of 300 times a day in the United Kingdom through [closed circuit television].” Indeed, in 2002 one report estimated that Londoners—who live in one of the most surveillance-heavy cities in the world—are monitored every day by more than 500,000 closed-circuit television cameras: about one camera for every fourteen people.2
What’s more, Shaw says, there’s an enormous and growing demand for competitive intelligence in the global economy. “Some companies want to find out what their competitors are doing; everybody does. And I think anybody that says they don’t want to know what their competitors are doing are not actually being truthful about it.” In Shaw’s mind, there’s nothing untoward about using veteran intelligence operatives to spy on the competition. Asked if spying on people’s business lives feels illicit or even creepy to her, she replies, “Generally, no. We deal with very legitimate investigations.”
The limits Shaw puts on herself are broad, but they are definable. Her company won’t do anything illegal, she insists. “If you can observe somebody in public space, in public activity without infringing on their privacy or without going illegally into their premises, by breaking and entering or stealing and things like that, then people will be prepared to do that. There are also people who will be prepared to go that little bit farther and do that breaking and entering, but that’s not something we’re involved in.”
Shaw also restricts her team from placing families of subjects, particularly children, under surveillance. And she insists that if in the course of following a subject her operatives come across information that’s not relevant to the business question at hand—say, if a subject stops off at a hotel for a quick tryst before heading home to his wife—her investigators will not record that information or provide it to their client. “You don’t go recording that person when they’re with their family in their private space; you don’t go trying to put cameras inside their house whilst they’re inside their own home. That’s certainly not the work that we get involved in.” She may have her limits, but not everyone in her industry does.
SOMETIMES, SURVEILLANCE IS used not for business, but for pleasure. In one case, several sources say that a high-living hedge fund executive used a corporate spy firm to conduct intelligence operations against a Hollywood actor. Why did he do it? Reportedly, the hedge fund executive had fallen in love—or lust—with the actor’s model girlfriend.
The financier—who will remain nameless in this account—was up against some steep competition, and he’d need every advantage he could get. The Israeli model who caught his eye was Bar Refaeli, a globe-trotting beauty who was dating the Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who had starred in Titanic and The Departed. Soon DiCaprio would become a target of corporate spies, the sources claimed.
Bar Refaeli, the first Israeli model featured in Sports Illustrated’s famous swimsuit issue, was born in 1985 in Hod HaSharon. She began dating DiCaprio soon after she attained stardom, and tabloid reporters reveled in the details when the photogenic couple strolled along Paris’s beautiful Champs-Élysées holding hands.
At the same time, the financier, too, began to take an interest in Refaeli. In late 2005 or early 2006, recalls Bar’s mother and manager, Tzipi Refaeli, the money man met the model, and asked her to lunch. Tzipi says she spent one entire evening at the financier’s side, and came away unimpressed: “He’s nothing to write home about,” she says. She found him shallow and materialistic. “All he can do is buy, buy, buy. Not many people will say no.”
According to her mother—who, like many mothers, may