Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [57]
All along, Kroll was concerned about appearances. For years, he had resisted using the terms “investigation” or “detective.” Those were low-rent labels, associated with toughs who wore fedoras and trench coats and hung around in dark alleys. Kroll had higher ambitions. He wanted to be seen as a social and professional peer of lawyers and accountants. Unlike Robert Dolan Peloquin and the corporate spies at Intertel, Kroll had high corporate aspirations. His was not a company that would be content to work for mad billionaires and sleazy casino operators. Although he made it into some of America’s most exclusive corporate boardrooms, Kroll was never quite able to shake off the private-eye image. “No matter what we do,” he complained, “people want to put a fedora and a trench coat on us.”
In a way, though, Kroll himself reinforced the image—if unconsciously. A big man, with a bald head and, in the 1980s, ever-present suspenders and cigar, he was in many ways the physical embodiment of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detectives of an earlier era. And when the New York Times came calling in 1985, Kroll embraced the chance to let the wider world know he had arrived. The Times reporter Fred R. Bleakley interviewed Kroll for a profile, “Wall Street’s Private Eye,” which ran on March 4, 1985. Bleakley detailed Kroll’s history, methods, and growing popularity on Wall Street:
Mr. Kroll relies on a team of 50 full-time professionals who include a bevy of former FBI and law enforcement officers, business executives, lawyers, Ph.D.’s skilled in research and several former investigative reporters. In addition to a research library of business directories and electronic data banks, the firm has on call more than 300 detective agencies, specialized industry consultants, accountants and lawyers in the United States and around the world. One of these “subcontractors,” he said, is the former Israeli Ambassador to Mexico who was chief of police in Tel Aviv at one time.
The article was accompanied by a picture of Kroll, with suspenders and cigar, looking every inch the private detective of legend. His reputation was made. One of his rivals says the publication of the article in the Times marked the beginning of a new era in the investigative business. Corporate investigators would now be seen as respectable players in the business community, on par with the lawyers and accountants that Jules Kroll hoped to match. Clients poured in his door. Before long, Kroll had detailed files on players across Wall Street. Like Pinkerton’s 100 years before, Kroll’s files became so valuable that access to the information in them was often reason enough for companies to hire his firm. Kroll had reinvented an industry, and dozens of competitors would spring up to imitate him.
One other large investigative firm was gathering steam at the time, too: Investigative Group International, which was based in Washington, D.C., and was headed by a former Watergate investigator, Terry Lenzner. Lenzner had started his firm in 1984, and before long he had abandoned the old Pinkerton code of conduct, becoming ever more deeply involved in political spying. That move would make Lenzner the keeper of the most sensitive secrets of President Bill Clinton, and earn him the enmity of Republicans, many in the press, and some civil libertarians.
BUT EVEN AS a wider industry began to become aware of the opportunities in the new investigative business Kroll was perfecting, Kroll himself was focusing on ever larger targets. His next big break arrived in 1985, when an old friend called with a request. The friend was Stephen Solarz, a congressman from New York who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and