Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [42]
Before long, Peloquin and his boss Bill Hundley—who had been born in Brooklyn and had worked at the Department of Justice as an anti-Mafia fighter*—began to get restless. They’d both been commuting to New York during the week and living in Washington on weekends. They both had large families (each had six children). And both thought they could make even more money selling their services to clients beyond the NFL.
Once again, a powerful senior player stepped in to boost Peloquin’s career: Pete Rozelle agreed to set Peloquin and Hundley up in a law firm of their own in Washington. After all, he was already paying their hotel bills and dining and travel expenses. The two men were getting expensive. Rozelle put up the first six months of their office rent and provided cash to hire a secretary and pay the phone bill; and the two men started their own law practice, with the high-profile NFL as their premier client. Soon they added others. Life magazine signed on for help with a series of articles it was doing on the Mafia. Each time Life published an article on a Mafia family in a given city, lawsuits would be filed, alleging that the magazine had libeled people not connected to the Mafia. It was Hundley and Peloquin’s job to prove that Life had been right, and get the lawsuits thrown out of court. Leaning on their contacts inside the Department of Justice, they succeeded.
One morning, a former contact at the Justice Department called Peloquin. Could they meet at the office? Someone was there whom Peloquin should know.
The man was James Crosby, the owner of the Mary Carter Paint Company. He’d just purchased Hog Island, in the Bahamas, and was in the process of developing it as a resort and renaming it Paradise Island—a better draw for the tourists he hoped would flock to it. Crosby was maneuvering in local Bahamian politics to get a gambling license for Paradise Island, but he was terrified of getting into the gaming business, which was rife with gangsters and hoodlums. Crosby wanted Hundley and Peloquin to make sure his new employees weren’t connected to the mob. “I didn’t know diddly-shit about gambling,” Peloquin recalls. But he knew the mob. And he got the job.
He hired a staff to work on the project, bringing in several of his old pals who had retired from the organized crime strike force, including an imposing former director of enforcement at the U.S. Bureau of Customs. This man, who had entered Peloquin’s circle as the senior representative from customs to the Justice Department’s organized crime task force, relocated to Paradise Island full-time and used his government contacts to screen new hires at the resort, determining if they had Mafia connections or any other criminal connections.
That technique became a hallmark of Peloquin’s later career: charging clients fees to run background checks on people, and then using former work connections to dip into government files to make the checks. It was a great business model. And the U.S. taxpayer never knew that government money was paying for agents to run background checks on behalf of millionaire owners of Caribbean resorts.
Peloquin spent much of the rest of his career charging private clients for access to their own government’s enormous security files. “We capitalized on private industry,” he recalls. “But we depended on the government to give us the poop.”
As long as secrecy was protected, it was a lucrative business. Asked what outsiders should make of his techniques, Peloquin replies, “I’m not that hung up on invasion of privacy, but a lot of people are. It depends on how you look at it. If you’re in business, there’s nowhere for you to turn to find out what the hell is going on. What