Using Private Eyes to Keep Track of Tenants

As a parade of slovenly dressed 20-somethings passed through the entrance of a downtown Manhattan apartment building on a weekday afternoon, these seemingly savvy New Yorkers did not seem to notice they were the subjects of a photo shoot.

That is because this shoot was covertly orchestrated by their landlord, who had hired a private investigator to root out illegal tenants.

Masked by lunchtime crowds and afternoon rain, the private eye, Joseph Mullen, who has run a sleuthing firm for more than 40 years, parked his car in front of the building, flipped through papers showing that several residents of the seven-story building were “dead or living somewhere else,” and waited.

Shane Williams, a vice president of the firm, J.T. Mullen Inc., slouched strategically in his seat and photographed people as they entered and left. The affable pair looked like observers at an antifashion show as food deliverymen paraded through, an older portly renter stepped out to buy cheese biscuits and renters dressed in gym clothing shuffled outside to smoke.

“We don’t know half the people who live in this building,” Mr. Mullen said. He released a gravelly chuckle, rustled through papers and glanced through the tinted window. “The landlords say, ‘I got to get these illegal tenants out and make some money.’ ”

In a high-rent borough like Manhattan with plenty of rent-regulated apartments ripe for exploitation, real estate investigation has long been a big business. Private detectives say it has picked up in the past year as some New Yorkers have tried to find extra money by moving out of their apartments and subletting to other renters for more than they are paying, which is not allowed.

And, of course, there are landlords pressed for cash, trying to root out people who are using rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments illegally. This would allow the landlords to find new tenants and raise the rent by 20 percent or more under state housing law. During the speculation boom of the last decade, some large landlords were accused of using private investigators to harass legal tenants out of their apartments in order to raise rents to cover large mortgages and increase their profits.

Landlords who root out illegal sublets and absentee renters — a rent-regulated tenant must occupy the unit for at least 183 days a year — crow about how profitable these investigations can be.

Craig Charie, a lawyer and landlord who has hired private investigators for such cases since 1994, described a tenant at one Chelsea building who held onto her $433-a-month apartment while living primarily in New Jersey. An investigator tracked her commuting patterns, and Mr. Charie kicked her out, combined the apartment with another to make a duplex and raised the rent.

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Judge Appointed to Hear Case of Tonya Craft’s Private Investigator

A Cobb County judge was appointed for the trial of Tonya Craft’s private investigator, who is charge with interfering with a witness.

After all the Catoosa County Superior Court judges recused themselves from Eric Echols’ case, a new judge had to be appointed to hear the case, Echols said.

Echols trial is scheduled for Sept. 13.

Echols, who worked as an investigator in Craft’s child custody and molestation cases, was charged with three counts of tampering with a witness last August. He was arrested after the father of an alleged victim in the molestation case said Echols threatened him.

Craft was acquitted May 11 on all 22 counts of child molestation, aggravated child molestation and aggravated sexual battery.

Echols filed the written transcript of the taped conversation he had with the father in August 2009. The conversations show Echols having a cordial conversation with the man.


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Chevron's Private Investigation Firm Attempts to Recruit Independent Journalist To Spy in The Amazon

An exposé in the Atlantic magazine reveals how one of the world’s largest private investigation firms, Kroll, hired by oil giant Chevron, tried to recruit an American journalist to undermine a massive $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron brought by the residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We speak with the journalist, Mary Cuddehe, and with Han Shan, the coordinator for Amazon Watch’s Clean Up Ecuador campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today with a new twist in the 17-year legal battle between oil giant Chevron and the residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon, who say decades of reckless oil drilling have taken a deadly toll on their health and their environment. They accuse Texaco, now Chevron, of dumping over 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest. Chevron now faces a $27.3 billion lawsuit.

An article in the latest issue of the Atlantic magazine reveals how a private investigation firm, hired by Chevron, tried to recruit an American journalist to undermine the high-profile lawsuit. According to the first-person account of Mary Cuddehe, the investigative firm Kroll flew her to Colombia and offered her $20,000 to spend six weeks in Lago Agrio, the jungle town in Ecuador where the trial is being held. They wanted her to say she was an independent journalist, while spying for Chevron, and find out if the plaintiffs in the lawsuit had "rigged" a health study that found the community suffered abnormally high cancer rates. But Mary Cuddehe said no. She refused the offer to become a corporate spy.

The article is called "A Spy in the Jungle," and Cuddehe writes: "There was a reason they wanted me. With one Google search, anyone could see that I was, in fact, a journalist. If I went to Lago Agrio as myself and pretended to write a story, no one would suspect that the starry-eyed young American poking around was actually shilling for Chevron."

We invited Chevron to come on the program, but they declined. Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson did, however, not directly address Mary Cuddehe’s claims, but acknowledged hiring Kroll. Robertson said in a statement to Democracy Now! that "It should come as no surprise that we have hired an outside investigative firm to help document the fraud being perpetrated by the plaintiffs’ lawyers and their associates in this case. There are now numerous documented examples of falsified expert reports, fraudulent evidence, unsubstantiated health claims and collusion with court experts," he wrote.

Mary Cuddehe is based in Mexico City. She joins me now via Democracy Now! video stream. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Mary Cuddehe.


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VideoGate Cop Andrew Cohen Now Private Investigator

The five-year-old VideoGate scandal is back in the news, as Officer Wendy Hurley released some of the offending videos to the public for the first time at her disciplinary hearing last week. Meanwhile, the ringmaster of the entire video scandal, Andrew Cohen, officially said sayonara to the department on July 1 and has found a new line of work: hunting down child predators.

Goodbye, department blues. Hello, fedora hat. Cohen nabbed his private investigator license and started a Berkeley-based practice, Theia Investigations, last month focusing on child predators and educating kids and parents about the potential perils of the Internet.

"It's one of my pet peeves as a cop," says Cohen, who has two teenage daughters. "That kids were so easily groomed online as easy prey and parents were so easily ignoring the signs."

Cohen never worked in the SFPD Juvenile Division, the department that handles child sex crimes, yet things would often come up while he was working as an officer at Francisco Middle School. He says so far, the bulk of his work has been on adultery cases -- one case involves a woman worried that her husband may be a pedophile - and live-scan fingerprinting.


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Widow Says Man’s Eyes Were Stolen; Body Exhumed

HENDERSON, N.C. -- A woman who says her husband's eyes were removed from his body without permission is having his body exhumed for a private autopsy.

A private investigator who is working for widower Linda McMichael said the body of Elven Alston will be exhumed from the Alston family cemetery in Warrenton.

The body is expected to be taken to Pitt County Memorial Hospital.

McMichael filed a police complaint last month because she claims parts of her husband's eyes were removed after the 61-year-old man died in February at a Henderson hospital.

Police Lt. Chris Ball said Wednesday an investigation found no criminal wrongdoing but wouldn't say what led to that conclusion.

McMichael has said her husband wasn't an organ donor.


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N.J. Appeals Court Denies Handgun Permit for Warren County Private Detective

A state appeals court today upheld a denial of a handgun permit for a private detective in Warren County because he “lied” about whether he previously had such a permit rejected, according to the ruling.

Scott Churchill, former treasurer of the county’s SPCA and former trustee at the county’s community college, had a permit to carry a handgun since 1994, but in July 2008 was denied a renewal by New Jersey State Police, according to the Appellate Division decision.

One of the questions on the renewal application asked whether he had any prior gun-permit applications denied, and Churchill answered “No.”

But that was “inaccurate,” as Churchill “failed to disclose that New York had previously denied his application for a gun permit because he had lied about his business and obtained a private-investigator license under false pretenses,” the ruling states. It also says the permit was denied by police because Churchill “failed to demonstrate a justifiable need for a handgun.”

Churchill appealed to state Superior Court, claiming he believed the application was inquiring only about being denied a permit in New Jersey. But last year an appellate judge upheld the ruling, finding “Churchill was not a person of good moral character because he ‘purposely falsified his renewal application and attempted to mislead the investigating officers and the court as to his reasons for doing so.”

Churchill then appealed further, claiming he is a person of good moral character, there was no evidence he “knowingly falsified his New Jersey application” and he has a justifiable need to carry a handgun.



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Lou Smit, Detective in JonBenet Ramsey Case, Is Dead at 75

Lou Smit, a longtime police detective who was called out of retirement to help investigate the 1996 slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old beauty pageant winner, but resigned after concluding that the police had wrongly focused on her parents, died Wednesday in Colorado Springs. He was 75.

The cause was colon cancer, a spokeswoman for Pikes Peak Hospice said.

Detective Smit helped solve several cases that gained national attention, including the killing of Karen Grammer, the sister of the actor Kelsey Grammer, in 1975.

He is also credited with identifying the killer of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church. She was killed in 1991, and her father was among more than 40 suspects, but in 1995 Detective Smit arrested Robert C. Browne, who confessed to the crime and has since admitted to 47 other murders.

Detective Smit was proud to assert that of the more than 200 murder cases he had investigated and turned over to prosecutors in his 30-year career, all led to convictions. “I’ve never lost a homicide case,” he told The Denver Post.

But he was unable to solve the Ramsey case.

JonBenet Ramsey was found strangled and bound in the basement of her upscale home in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 26, 1996. The case, which attracted enormous attention, remains unsolved.

Three months after the killing, the district attorney asked Detective Smith to join the investigation. He initially explored the Boulder Police Department’s theory, that JonBenet’s mother, Patsy Ramsey, was the killer and had written the ransom note she said she had found in her home. The department also believed that JonBenet’s father, John, was protecting Mrs. Ramsey.

Eighteen months after joining the investigation, Detective Smit resigned, accusing the police of pursuing the Ramseys as suspects despite substantial evidence to the contrary.

“The Ramseys did not do it,” he wrote in his resignation letter, dated Sept. 20, 1998. “There is substantial, credible evidence of an intruder and a lack of evidence that the parents are involved.”

For years after his official involvement in the case ended, Detective Smit continued to work to identify the killer, both independently and with a private investigator hired by the Ramseys. He carried a photo of JonBenet in his wallet.

He also teamed up with a former F.B.I. agent, Charlie Hess, and a former publisher of The Colorado Springs Gazette, Scott Fischer, to investigate local cold cases.

In 2008 the Boulder County district attorney, Mary T. Lacy, said in a letter to John Ramsey that DNA evidence, unobtainable by earlier methods, had “vindicated your family.” The evidence pointed to an intruder, as Detective Smit had concluded.


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Christina Milian Served Divorce Papers While Pregnant

Christina Milian and The-Dream confirmed their separation to UsMagazine.com earlier this month -- but according to documents obtained by TMZ, the singer's husband had already filed for divorce in February.

In the papers, the 32-year-old producer (real name: Terius Nash) claims his marriage to the 28-year-old "Dip It Low" singer is "irretrievably broken." Despite being parents to 5-month-old Violet, he also says "there is no hope for reconciliation" between him and Milian.

Earlier this month, Nash blogged that he attempted suicide in the wake of his "failing" marriage.

"I've cried about this for months, after interviews, after prayer and I've tried to take my own life at a point because of the failure that was looming," Nash wrote. "This is not to justify anything, it's true emotion! It's a real thing that involves real people!"

The couple first wed in a quickie ceremony in September 2009; they had a second, more traditional ceremony in Rome in December. But earlier this month -- after photos surfaced of Nash frolicking in the Caribbean with his assistant of one year, Melissa Santiago -- the couple announced their separation.

"Terius 'The-Dream' Nash is saddened to announce that his marriage to Christina Milian was unsuccessful," his rep told Us. "The couple reached this decision in late 2009, but decided to keep the news private in efforts to protect their baby daughter Violet. They ask for consideration and respect for their family moving forward."

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Mel Gibson Had P.I. Grilling Witnesses in Oksana Grigorieva Case; Actor's Ex Alleges More Abuse

Mel Gibson hired private investigators to visit key witnesses in an attempt to discredit former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva's abuse claims, reports say.

Radar Online says PIs visited at least two witnesses poised to provide evidence against Mel, who stands accused of battering Oksana on January 6.

Oksana has told police, who are investigating Gibson, that he punched her twice in the face, leaving her with two broken teeth and a concussion.

One of the witnesses visited by Mel’s private eyes was her dentist, Dr. Ross Sheldon, whose accounts of the injuries Oksana suffered have varied.

“This calculated ploy explains the conflicting stories the dentist supposedly made about injuries Oksana suffered at the hands of Mel,” said a source.

Despite his apparent conflicting stories, Dr. Sheldon says willing to go on record stating that Oksana did indeed suffer a major blow to her mouth.


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Spotting a Troubled Employee Before Mass Murder is Almost Impossible, Law Experts Say

It has become a disturbingly familiar workplace scenario, statistically rare, but occurring often enough to have a ritualistic feel.

A head-case employee, after a series of run-ins with managers, decides to even the score. He - and it almost always is a he - storms the factory floor, guns ablaze, leaving a string of bodies in his wake.

Such was the case last week near Hartford, Conn., when an employee at a beer distributor, caught on videotape by a private investigator stealing beer from his delivery truck, reached into his lunch pail for two 9mm handguns, and shot 10 of his coworkers, killing eight, before taking his own life.

The killer, it was learned afterward, had been viewed by some of his acquaintances as a terrific guy.

And that underscores a central reality for employers and the labor and employment lawyers who advise them on how to handle workplace conflicts: Identifying the one-in-a-million person on the verge of committing mass murder is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

"It scares the heck out of me every time I advise the employer to go ahead and fire the guy," says Michael Ossip, a partner in the labor and employment practice at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P. "I always counsel people: Make sure you know exactly what you are doing, because once you let someone go, you lose control over them."

Fred D'Angelo, a labor and employment lawyer at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney P.C. and based in Philadelphia, said one tragic error made in the Connecticut case was that the employer permitted the dismissed employee to go unescorted to an adjacent room, where he retrieved two handguns concealed in a lunch box.

Even so, D'Angelo, who happens to represent many of this region's beer distributors, says he doubts employers can change much.

That's because horrific workplace killings, though they rivet national attention, are so unlikely that it wouldn't make sense for employers to dramatically reconfigure their workplaces.

Employers seem to recognize this. D'Angelo, who counsels employers on how to deal with workers who are about to be disciplined or dismissed, says he has never been asked by a client about what to do if an employee shows up with a gun.

The worst case of workplace violence he ever dealt with, and he has been at this for 35 years, involved a shop steward who threw a punch at his supervisor and was dismissed on the spot.

So does that mean society must simply accept a certain level of workplace carnage as the cost of doing business?

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Hero Cop and Private Eye John McNally is 'Longtime Associate' of Gotti Hired Gun, Fed Files Reveal

He was a hero cop, an ace detective and a private eye extraordinaire - but now prosecutors say John McNally is an unindicted co-conspirator to one of the mob's most vicious hit men.

McNally, 76, is the "longtime associate" of John Gotti's hired gun, Joseph Watts, and has worked with him on extortion and money laundering for years, documents filed in Manhattan Federal Court say.

"At this point, he's really old and really sick," said a friend of McNally, who assisted in the recovery of the Star of India sapphire as a detective and helped win the O.J. Simpson case as private eye.

"They are just trying to besmirch his career, to embarrass him."

McNally has been eyed by the FBI before, most notably when he was working with F. Lee Bailey on the Simpson defense team in the 1990s, and when he did "security" in the 1980s for Gene Gotti, the Teflon Don's brother.

But now McNally's name is all over government papers filed against Watts, who is charged with racketeering in connection with a slew of homicides during the mob's go-go 1980s.

One hit is among the most notorious of all - the murder of Gambino godfather Paul Castellano that paved the way for Gotti to take over the New York mob.

McNally isn't tied to any of those homicides, or with any of the crimes committed by Watts' co-defendant John D'Amico - who is expected to take a plea today in exchange for a three-year sentence.

But McNally's name is linked to more recent extortion and money-laundering allegations against Watts.

"In January 2007, Watts longtime associate John McNally, a retired NYPD detective who has performed various services for Watts, traveled from Florida to New York to try to collect at least $30,000 that [Wail] Al-Khalib owed Watts," according to a court paper filed last week.

Prosecutors also allege that Watts once transferred approximately $200,000 from a Swiss bank account to a Staten Island bank where McNally then paid off debts.

Calls to the ex-cop's phone were not answered.

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Tarot Card Readers Used in Missing Girl Case

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A former private investigator for the family of Caylee Anthony regularly consulted tarot card readers for leads into the case of the missing Florida toddler.

New evidence released Thursday by the State Attorney's Office in Orlando contains e-mails between private investigator Dominic Casey and a team of tarot card readers who offered leads into the 2-year-old toddler's disappearance.

Caylee's mother, Casey Anthony, has been charged with her daughter's murder. Casey has pleaded not guilty and says a baby sitter kidnapped her daughter.

The tarot card readers also provided leads on other missing-persons cases in Florida, including that of Haleigh Cummings, a 5-year-old girl who disappeared in February 2009.


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Private Investigator Credited by NBC's Dateline for Freeing Wrongly Convicted Man

(SALEM, Ore.) - The night Bimla Boyd killed her property caretaker at her home on what is now known as 'Murder Hill' near Salem, Oregon in 2002, Bonnie King and I were there on assignment for Portland TV station KGW Channel-8. It was a memorable night. We were a freelance TV news camera crew and the only other person on scene beyond the cops, was a single newspaper reporter.

It was raining, it was cold, and the Polk County Sheriff's Office kept us way back, but I had a serious lens and could see the house to some degree. Otherwise it was as dark as any night could be. Still, KGW was glad to receive it.

Shortly after this freelance period, I was hired by Portland's KATU Channel-2, the ABC station in this Northwest city. There I quickly became friends with Eric Mason, a veteran investigative TV reporter who had recently crossed over from KOIN TV, Portland's CBS station. Eric had a reputation for pulling off big stories and exposing corruption in ways that few could. The fact that he transitioned into the role of a private investigator a few years ago, always struck me as a perfectly logical move.

Monday night Eric's role in helping free a falsely convicted Oregon prisoner serving a life sentence for three tragic murders, was featured in a very compelling episode of NBC's Dateline program. They are murders that happened on the same property, the Bimla Boyd residence in west Salem.

It was the afternoon of 23 Nov. 1998 when Jason Kinser, Suzan Osborne and Celesta Graves were all shot to death, reportedly execution style, in the head with a .22-caliber pistol.

Scott Cannon as it turns out, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This plumber, also a recreational drug user and firearm collector, called out to a mobile home on the West Salem property owned by Bimla Boyd, ended up taking the fall for the murders.

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Video Shot By Private Investigator at The Center of County Investigation

YULEE, Fla. -- Allegations of misuse of public money have led to the suspension of four Nassau County administrators.

Nassau County Sheriff Tommy Seagraves said last Friday he was approached by a group of concerned Nassau County taxpayers, who hired a private investigator to trail the officials, who traveled to attend the governor's hurricane conference in Ft. Lauderdale in late May.

Seagraves said he has seen an hour and half worth of video that was taken by the private investigator and is now part of the investigation.

The concerned taxpayers, who wanted to remain anonymous, gave First Coast News video clips. The video showed the county officials walking near a dock and hanging out on a hotel balcony with beverages in their hands.

One video clip shows a man and a woman embracing and caressing in a dimly lit outdoor area. Another video clip appears to show a nude woman standing on a balcony.

"It's an embarrassment to our community. It's an embarrassment to Nassau County to have this occur. It's a sad situation," said Seagraves.

When asked to characterize the video, Seagraves said that some portions he would not want to show his wife or see published in a church bulletin. He said the behavior in the video was unbecoming of county officials but would not specify what he meant.

"We are going to have to determine what did occur at the conference," said Seagraves, who has reams of documentation detailing the nearly $4,000 taxpayers invested in sending the department heads to the conference.

County manager Ted Selby said he started work on the paperwork last week after being contacted by Sheriff Seagraves.

"I am not going to discuss anything that is on the video," said Selby, who added the employees have more than 70 years of combined service to the county.

Seagraves said he intends to ask an outside law enforcement agency to handle the nuts and bolts of the investigation because of his closeness to county government.

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