Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [52]
On the phone, Abbott is polite and gracious, but he refuses to send a copy of the Trapline to a reporter. Later in the conversation, though, Abbott consults his own copy of the Trapline to rattle off the names and phone numbers of retired FBI agents who might be helpful in the research for this book. Connecting people who have problems with people who solve them is what Abbott does.
For its exclusive readership, the Trapline gives a one-man private investigative shop the national—and global—reach of Kroll or any of the other large investigative firms. Thomas Bara, an investigator with the Bara Hutton Group in Lavallette, New Jersey, retired from the FBI in 2000, at age fifty, after putting in twenty-eight years at the bureau. His career included hunting fugitives, surveillance, organized crime enforcement, SWAT teamwork, and counterintelligence. “I joined counterintelligence because I figured out that spies eat at better restaurants than mobsters do,” he says with a laugh. “My picture’s on the wall at The Palm.”
When he formed his private investigative firm, Bara was careful to make sure it was listed in Trapline, but nowhere else. His listing includes the alphabet-soup codes for an array of skills: GIM (General Investigative Matters), MVA (Motor Vehicle Accident Investigations), OC (Organized Crime), PH (Photography), PP (Personal Protection) PSS (Physical Security Surveys), SC (Security Consultant), and SU (Surveillances). “If I get a call from somebody from Trapline, I know I’m going to get paid,” Bara says. “And I know it’s not a bullshit case. If I advertised out there, I’d be getting calls from people who line their walls with aluminum foil.”
As a result, he says, a steady stream of reliable business rolls in. Bara won’t reveal details, but says he worked on a surveillance project for a pharmaceutical company recently. The company’s head of security is a retired FBI agent, and got Bara’s name from Trapline. For years, Bara says, he worked as a subcontractor for General Electric, where the head of security was another retired FBI man. The Trapline is a bit like an institutionalized old-boy network for retired G-men. Each member is able to trust it because Abbott promises to remove the listings of any private investigator who is not in good standing with the rest of the group. In the preface to the Trapline, Abbott notes:
In the event three or more documented complaints against a listee are brought to the publisher’s attention, wherein the facts appear to impact adversely upon the reputation, business practices, and/or financial well being of the other listees, the publisher reserves the right to delete the designated party’s listing.
In other words, Trapline polices itself.
When the cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, thousands of government-trained veterans of the nation’s intelligence services flooded into the private sector, beginning a profound change in the way companies related to the world around them. In contrast to the operatives of the Pinkerton era, though, the new generation of corporate spies would be deployed by one company—or financial firm—against another, beginning with the corporate takeover wars of the 1980s. The new intelligence operatives didn’t track down train robbers; they chased down hard-to-find witnesses for corporate lawsuits. They didn’t spy on counterfeiters; they spied on corporate directors. But the tactics were still intelligence and investigation, and the goal was still the same: profit.
By the first years of the twenty-first century, a globalizing economy and the rise of large pools of private capital called hedge funds would create a market for corporate spying. The tactics, techniques, and technologies that had been developed by government intelligence services would now be for sale in the private market. The price would be high. So would the risk—and the drama.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thug Busters
Like Robert Peloquin, Jules Kroll spent part of the 1960s socializing at Robert F. Kennedy’s Virginia