Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [51]
Intertel developed a new system of high-resolution closed-circuit television cameras for its casino customers. Intertel installed them to help casino security forces monitor the action at gaming tables. Were employees pilfering cash? Were players cheating? The cameras could tell. “The quality of the pictures was excellent,” recalls Healy. “You could look at the customers and tell if they had real freckles or fake freckles.”
In 1994, Intertel was bought out—ironically—by the Pinkerton detective agency. By that time, Pinkerton had become a security firm, providing armed guards to patrol factories and warehouses. But the executives there saw the growing market for corporate investigative services and wanted to get back into the business their company had invented. They acquired Intertel, operating it for a time as an independently branded firm, but ultimately subsuming it into their own larger company.
Aside from Intertel, Peloquin served as an executive vice president of Resorts International. And when Crosby died in 1986, the company was sold to the New York real estate magnate Donald Trump. Peloquin thus became perhaps the only man in the world who has done business in person with both Howard Hughes and Donald Trump. But his new situation didn’t go well. Peloquin and Trump butted heads. “Trump would say, ‘You guys are scumbags.’ And then he’d look up and say, ‘Hey, Bob, have you seen my new boat?’ We’d talk about that. And then we went back to being scumbags again.”
Reflecting on the differences between the two men, Peloquin says, “Hughes was weird—an addict. I don’t think Trump was on drugs. I think he was born on drugs. He’s such an egocentric person.”
INTERTEL BEGAN TO run out of steam because of retirements among its core employees; but another firm, begun in the 1970s, would far surpass it, and ultimately emerge as the twentieth century’s heir to the Pinkerton legacy: Kroll.
In 1972, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, Jules Kroll, founded a small consulting firm—Kroll Associates—to work with corporate purchasing departments. It would grow to be much more than that: a nearly 4,000-person corporate investigative and intelligence juggernaut that would employ veterans of the FBI and CIA transitioning back into private-sector service. In the coming decades, Kroll would play a key role in the development of the modern intelligence firm—and Wall Street’s gradual embrace of intelligence techniques.
In many cases, up-and-coming firms such as Kroll would turn to a well-connected network of former FBI agents for help in the spadework of their day-to-day investigations. There is even a quiet but effective guidebook to the network of the top private detectives in the country. Once a year, a small company in Dallas publishes a spiral-bound paperback directory, the Trapline. This publication lists every retired FBI agent in the country who works in the private investigations business, giving names, telephone numbers, and addresses. The veteran agents pay to be included in the book, and they are listed by region and by specialty—including such esoteric skills as “electronic countermeasures,” “hostage negotiations,” and “psychological profiling.”
The 326-page Trapline is distributed only to the several hundred FBI veterans it actually lists. It is not sold to outsiders by mail or in bookstores. The information in it is not available on the Internet. For security reasons, most FBI veterans won’t give or sell copies of the directory to outsiders.*
The publication is put out every year by Trapline, Inc., which is led by Jim Abbott, a thirty-two-year veteran of the FBI, long retired. Abbott named his directory after an old FBI tool called a “trap line,” a telephone technology used to capture a caller’s phone number even if the caller is trying to conceal it. He is proud of