Cover Story

By Kevin Lee Associate Editor

It was all very discreet.

No fedoras or sports cars, no shady characters or furtive glances. Just a small table in the corner of a restaurant and a non-descript man doing most of the talking.

“This is the way we do it,” the fellow in the black jacket said. “I’ve got some attorneys that allow me office space if I need to meet a client in that type of environment, but usually like right here, this is how we meet.”

The man describing the scenario is Robert St. John, a private investigator in Mobile for the last 11 years. Prior to setting up his own agency, St. John worked for the City of Prichard and before that in Jacksonville, Fla. Even earlier, he did similar things for a defense entity he asked remain anonymous.

“There’s only about a half a dozen of us that this is what we do for a living in greater Mobile,” St. John said about the Port City private investigation game. “Most investigators, 99 percent of us, run home-based businesses because it’s not real smart to park your vehicle right outside a sign that says ‘private investigator.’”

The particulars of the business make that small group understandably wary. Of the investigators we, contacted, only St. John had few worries about appearing in the article. Even using St. John as a contact, his contemporaries were reticent to speak on record.

The public perception of the gumshoe’s life has been shaped by years of literature and entertainment. From Sherlock Holmes to Phillip Marlowe to Thomas Magnum, the depiction of the private detective has seldom been accurate.

“The life is closer to ‘The Rockford Files’ than ‘Magnum P.I.,’” St. John said. “Everything doesn’t fall into place as easily as it does on television. We usually don’t solve them in an hour.”

“Surveillance is much more boring than people think it is,” St. John said. “Only one in 30 actually produces something that’s good.”

“The key in private investigation is private,” the detective said. “The only times I’ve been caught, the client had gone out and told someone they were using investigators.”

St. John’s secret to tailing a car well? “Don’t be seen. Give up if they pull on Airport Boulevard.”

“There’s a lot of people that think they can do this job because it’s just sitting in a car with a camera, or sneaking and creeping,” St. John said. “They forget you still got to take that and present it to whomever you’re working for in a format they’ll understand and then be prepared to come to court and give it in the record.”

“I get calls all the time saying, ‘I want you to train me to be a P.I.’ Or ‘Are there any schools or courses I can take?’ Well, I’ve looked at a couple of these online courses and things like that and actually took one, and they’re doing things like fingerprint examination, tire tread recovery and your basic forensic stuff.”

All techniques are essential.

“In this line of work, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades, you have to know something about everything,” St. John said. “But keep in mind that a little information is a very dangerous thing. You’ve got to know that OK this is my case that I have, I know a little bit about it, but where do I go to get the extra piece I need. That’s the crux of this business, is knowing where and what your resources are.”

Which explains an easy assumption on the background of most detectives.

“Whatever comes through the door, I’ve got the background to handle it from having such a varied background coming into this with law enforcement and the other stuff. And the only reason I mention it is those of us in this area that have made a living of this, most of us are prior law enforcement.”

St. John describes case flow as seasonal and claims to have seen the effect of the recession on business. He admits the great majority of cases are domestic relations cases and they wane at times. Still, some clients keep things humming.

“Things like criminal defense work and some insurance work is pretty steady, but certain other investigators have carved their niche in that,” St. John said. “I try to keep mine general. In general, the bread and butter of the industry are domestic relations cases, divorce, child custody, anything to do with families. Second to that is missing persons cases for me.”

He believes the key to survival is a wide skill set.

“There’s so much more an investigator has to do,” St. John said. “There’s missing persons, corporate security, attorneys. You know a good investigator is the eyes, ears, arms, legs, everything but the mouth of an attorney. And you have to ask the questions the attorneys might ask.”

“Remember,” St. John reiterated, “Attorneys can’t take the stand. Private investigators can.”

As with all work of this nature, technology has made a tremendous impact.

“A lot of this work is sorting through documentation,” St. John said. “Now, thanks to the Internet, things that used to take days, if not weeks, now take minutes. I did a piece for a television channel on identity theft. They brought me in three people that I had no idea who they were. I told them I needed two pieces on you. I need name, date of birth, former address, last name, just two points and I’ll come back and I’ll give you name, date of birth, social security number, where you live right now, your phone number, probably your cell phone number. The longest one of the three took me six minutes.”

The detective said two decades ago the same information would have taken days to acquire.

“Going from 35mm to digital prints, that’s big, too.” St. John said. “Where, without having a darkroom available to me you have to go to a developer. I used that when I worked on the force in Prichard.”

Other components of the job have become more difficult.

“It is harder to tap cell phones since they’ve gone to digital phones,” St. John said. Still, there are ways to gather more detailed information about the phone’s usage, numbers dialed and frequency of those calls, than ever before.

“And then we can do reverse checks on numbers,” St. John said. “There used to be a company in Florida where you could get cell phone records and we thought they did it legally, but then they went to prison.”

Some actions must be undertaken by the parties involved in the conflict.

“The person whose name is on a car, the owner, can legally put a tracking device on that car,” St. John said. “So we just sit on the computer, see where they go and drive there. I have a device right now that I’ll know where you are within three seconds of when you actually are, using GPS and cell phone technology.”

The amount of time taken to develop a case varies wildly.

“Nothing is typical, every case is different,” St. John said. “I could go out and get something the first day or it may take six months before I get it. You want to catch something three times to set up a pattern.”

The investigator is bound by expectations that arise in a court of law.

“The rules of evidence say ‘What would a reasonable person believe?’” St. John emphasized. “I’ll give you a great example. Two people go into a hotel room, and they’re not married to each other. She comes out adjusting her skirt and he’s tucking his pants in, as they come out. Now what were they doing inside that hotel room? They could be the president and the vice-president of the national Tiddly-Winks Foundation, and that’s where they’re having their annual meeting, but what would a reasonable person believe?”

The investigator is the interpreter of that evidence. “The key phrase in court is that ‘accurately represents what I saw,’” St. John said.

St. John relays a story where a job wreaked havoc on his passion for University of Alabama football.

“So this client calls on Saturday morning,” St. John said, “says ‘my wife’s going to the beach,’ to a particular hotel and asks what would it cost to get me to surveil them. And I gave him some outrageous price so I could scare him off and watch the game. His response was, ‘Do you take cash?’ And I said yes and he meets me with the King James Bible in one hand and cash in the other.”

St. John had an idea for making money while feeding his gridiron yen.

“I got a camera set up and watched the football game while I watched the monitor,” St. John said. “I’ve got three monitors and the TV on.”

Before long, the action in the video monitor surpassed that on the television. St. John described the sexual activity on the hotel balcony between the wife and her boyfriend. At one point, the couple performs a particularly graphic act prompting the detective to tell his client later, “Look, I got everything you need, but when your wife gets home, don’t kiss her.”

The client insisted on watching the surveillance tape at first opportunity. When they reached the portion where the wife’s face was buried in the boyfriend’s posterior, the client grew incredulous.

“He just kept saying, ‘What’s she doing?’ St. John recalled. “Now this guy met me with a Bible and I didn’t want to be too graphic, but I never knew what the clinical name for that (act) was.”

St. John finally answered the client’s question in frank terms.

“When I told him he turned every shade of the rainbow,” the detective chuckled. “I asked him,’You kissed her didn’t you?’ And he just nodded with this disgusted look on his face.”

“But something that easy comes along once in a blue moon,” he said.

The investigator said he’s never been in situations too dangerous -“Other people might have considered it life-threatening but I wasn’t worried.” – and witnessed few things that motivated him to blow his cover and step forward.

“I draw the line at children,” he said. “If I see a child’s welfare is in danger, I’m going to do what I can to stop that.”

St. John feels there are investigators doing good work but that there are other pitfalls, mainly for potential clients.

“The problem that we have here in Alabama is that Alabama has absolutely no licensing requirements for investigators. None,” St. John said.

“Now, there are some unscrupulous people in this business who will go out there and clip valve stems and you know, put cinderblocks in the bottom of trashcans so that when you go to pick it up it’s heavier than it should be,” he continued. “I refuse to do that. My job is to collect and present evidence, not fabricate it.”

As he’s seen it, the shadier methods wither in the light of a courtroom.

“Those type of individuals don’t last long because eventually you’re going to have to testify and there’s a very good possibility that if you’re that type, I’m going to be working on the other side,” St. John said.

“There’s a lot of waiting on something to happen. There’s so many fly-by-night agencies. Many don’t make it through one run of the phone book. All because there’s no governing body.”

He has adamant advice for those seeking investigative services.

“Ask them how long they’ve been in business,” St. John said. “Ask for references and see what they say. If the tell you they don’t give out clients’ names, go somewhere else because an investigator’s references are the attorneys they worked for. Ask if they are licensed. If they say they are, they’re lying because there is no license here. Ask about the billing, what exactly you’re paying for.”

“The local attorney, old Bob Clark used to say to the jury, ‘There’s two sides to the same coin’ in his closing statements,” St. John said. “You want your side to be seen and a good investigator shows that for you.”

Kevin Lee is Lagniappe associate editor. Contact him at klee@lagniappemobile.com.

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