1. Doorstepping In the fall of 2016, I drove to Paterson, New Jersey, to meet with a congenital criminal. Bill Antoni's rap sheet ran twelve pages: drug possession, assault, burglary, attempted manslaughter. He was also a former confidential informant for the Paterson Police Department who had recently been released from prison. I did not call Antoni or try to make an appointment. Instead, I went to his apartment building unannounced-what private eyes call doorstepping. It is easier to hang up the phone on someone than it is to slam the door in her face. I also wanted Antoni to see me so he knew who was asking him to recant sworn statements he'd made to police detectives twenty years ago. I was hoping he'd sense my credibility, or at least give me the opportunity to prove it. His apartment building's intercom did not seem to work, so I waited for a neighbor to come out of the building to let me in. The tinny door clanged behind me as I pushed through a scrum of children in the foyer, their squeals echoing off the vaulted marble ceiling. As I neared the top of the second flight of stairs, Antoni appeared, blocking the staircase. I recognized him from his mug shots. "Mr. Antoni," I said. "My name is Tyler Maroney. I'm a private detective. I'm here to ask for your help on a case." He was listening. A good sign. "My client is a man who spent more than ten years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was a victim of police misconduct, and you may have information that can help. He filed a lawsuit against the city and the cops that he hopes will lead to compensation for the injustices he suffered." I had rehearsed this approach-an attempt to deputize instead of antagonize him. I was gambling that Antoni sought penitence. He was from a broken home, a former drug addict, in his late forties, on parole. Perhaps he was exhausted by a life spent estranged from his family and in custody. "Who is your client?" he asked. His question suggested a willingness to cooperate. I told him (I cannot disclose his name) and then explained to Antoni how I had come across his name in the transcript of a hearing from 1996 when Passaic County, New Jersey, prosecutors were considering calling him as a trial witness. "How did you know I lived here?" he asked, more out of curiosity than defensiveness. I had anticipated this question, too. "Through database research," I said. My first exposure to the tools of powerful data mining that are available to private investigators was through a product called Accurint, whose predecessor, Seisint, for "seismic intelligence," was developed by Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler, housepainter, gin drinker, and computer programmer who died in 2013 and whose technology is credited with helping law enforcement agencies find terrorists, missing children, pedophiles, and murderers-and with making him rich. In 2004, Vanity Fair wrote that Asher's tool helped investigators track down John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, two serial-killer snipers who, over ten months in 2002, shot and killed seventeen people and injured ten more, becoming known as the Beltway snipers. Using Accurint, investigators drew up a list of all of Muhammad's "relatives, associates, every place he ever lived," Asher told the magazine. "The next morning they were in Tacoma, Washington, cutting the stump down that had the projectiles"-bullets-"in it that matched the projectiles from the killings." The snipers were nabbed by a SWAT team the next day. I learned about Accurint in 2005, when I joined Kroll. That year, I turned thirty-three, was recently married, and had made a career change. During the previous decade, I had been a journalist: on staff at a national magazine, working as a documentary film producer, and contributing articles to various magazines and newspapers as a freelance reporter. I wrote a cover story for ARTnews Magazine about a frenzy for Andy Warhol and an article for The Atlantic about a diplomatic row between England and Spain over a nuclear submarine that had a reactor meltdown in the Mediterranean. As a reporter for Fortune magazine, I covered technology start-ups, economics, and investing. I interviewed Jesse Jackson about discrimination on Wall Street, Dr. Dre about Napster, Bill Bradley about community service. I spent a weekend at the Bellagio covering the Disneyfication of Las Vegas. I wrote about a travel website run from Havana by an exiled former CIA officer whose exposure of American intelligence agents led to the agents' murders. I had some small scoops. I was among the first journalists to tell the world about a travel website called Orbitz. I broke the news that the married founders of Nerve.com, a website from the dot-com era that peddled "literary smut," were separating. I lived in Spain on a Fulbright fellowship for professional journalists. My byline appeared in The New York Times and Sports Illustrated. I helped produce two documentary films for Frontline, one of which won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award, the broadcast and digital news equivalent of a Pulitzer. But for all my success, I sometimes felt insecure, especially when covering the business world, and as a generalist I never quite knew where to find my next story. I had not studied finance and did not know a proxy statement from a quarterly report. I used acronyms that baffled me: OTC, EBITDA, P/E. I could not have told you the difference between a limited liability company and an S corporation. During these years, however, I became enthralled with investigative journalism, which had a fundamental magnetism for me: uncovering hidden information. So I wrote a few investigative pieces. For instance, for The New York Sun, a now-defunct newspaper, I exposed fraud and discontent at the Greenmarkets, New York City's farmers markets. But I had not inspired an editorial rant, a congressional inquiry, a regulatory probe, or a criminal investigation. Meanwhile, the media industry was reinventing itself. Traditional brands collapsed, print went digital, and advertising and subscription revenues dried up. My foray into muckraking led me to consider private investigative work. The industry, I hoped, would pay better than the media and offer opportunities for growth. What I was looking for was a way for my work to matter to people-and to myself-and uncovering wrongdoing offered that promise. A chance encounter led me to apply to Kroll, where I was offered a job as a senior analyst. To my ear it sounded spooky. During my first week, my insecurities grew. My colleagues came from the CIA, various district attorneys' offices, the FBI, the faculty of Ivy League business schools, the diplomatic corps, and Big Four accounting firms. When I emailed an executive of the firm to ask where his office was located so I could introduce myself, he refused to tell me. "You're an investigator now," he said. "Find me." Jules Kroll is legendary-the protagonist in the creation myth of the modern private investigator who's been featured on 60 Minutes and profiled in The New Yorker-but there are conspiracy theorists who argue that the company's detectives were agents of the New World Order and the Illuminati. One blogger spreading disinformation accused Kroll of "creating a 'massive virtual computer infrastructure' linking the Governments and intelligence communities of nearly every civilized nation on earth with one solitary purpose, since 1966. Covering the sins and Planet-Wide Machinations of Rockefeller Inc." There are less absurd and spurious ways to assess my alma mater. In the 1980s, the media dubbed it "Wall Street's private eye," and the firm is famed for tracking down the assets of the former Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and Saddam Hussein. Over the generations, thousands of Krollies, as some people in the industry call us, have left and formed our own companies. A few days before I visited Antoni in Paterson, I had logged in to a database called TLO (a successor, of sorts, to Accurint). These databases-IRB, Clear, and Tracers are a few others-are owned by data giants like Reed Elsevier, Bloomberg, and Thomson Reuters. As a PI, if I had to choose one digital resource to pay for, it would be this one. It is invaluable and relatively cheap-about $10 for a report on one person. And it led me to Antoni. Documents from the civil rights law firm that hired me on this case provided me with the background on Antoni, which is what made him such an attractive prospective witness. While in prison in the 1990s, he had apparently overheard our client discussing the murder for which he was later convicted. But Antoni disappeared from the record after that, which is why the law firm, which sues government employees and agencies on behalf of victims whose civil rights have been violated, asked me to interview him. Antoni glanced around the hallway and motioned for me to come into his apartment. A black leather couch was shrink-wrapped in plastic. The moldings around the doorways and windows were blunted by decades of paint. A security camera was affixed conspicuously on the wall of the kitchen facing the only window with a fire escape. A holstered Glock was on the living room table. An FBI badge hung from a nail above the couch. A crucifix hung at a compass angle above the front door. Taped to the wall in an arc that swept across the living room were black-and-white printouts of photographs: the grassy knoll in Dallas, the Oval Office, Jackie O., Hyannis Port. Antoni-wearing black slippers, black sweatpants, a white sleeveless T-shirt that exposed inked arms, a gold chain, and slicked-back hair-noticed me notice his shrine. "Kennedy was the last great American," he said. I knew he would talk. As Antoni and I settled into his living room, I noticed that his television was on with the volume turned low. Pornography. Because he was answering my questions, I did not point out how surreal this was. He soon realized, however, and, hardly embarrassed, reached over to hit the power button. The video went dark, but the audio remained. We spoke for an hour to a moaning Muzak. Here is what he told me. While Antoni was in prison, an undercover officer approached him one afternoon and showed him a single photograph of one of their suspects. Antoni was told that he was to identify this man at trial in return for leniency on the drug charges he faced. Detectives from the Paterson Police Department abandoned their first plan for Antoni-to have him say he witnessed the shooting-because he had been in prison that day. This was not unfamiliar territory for Antoni. He had a kind of side career as a professional informant, both offering information and agreeing to fabricate it. Antoni agreed to participate in the corruption-to testify that he had overheard the defendant confessing to murder while in central booking. A few months later, when he was out on bail, Antoni and the undercover cop sat in a police cruiser in the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts while Antoni rehearsed a handwritten script the detective showed him. At the end of the meeting, the detective gave Antoni $500 in cash. Antoni's credibility and memory were so marred by drug abuse and mental illness, however, that prosecutors declined to call him. But I now knew how the trap had been set, and I set out to find other witnesses who could corroborate what Antoni told me. Antoni was remorseful. He agreed to provide an affidavit or testify to what he told me to help the man he helped convict. "I just wanted to get out of jail," he said. "That kid was innocent and needed help," he continued. "But I fucked him." (Antoni's willingness to speak with me is rare: as a private detective, I can never compel a witness to speak; only law enforcement officers have that power.) About a year later, the City of Paterson settled the lawsuit brought by the man Antoni helped imprison for about $10 million. The law firm that funded the investigation, for which we were paid about $75,000, litigated the case for years, and its fee was approximately one-third of the $10 million. Antoni was also looking for some kind of redemption, I suspect. However, our conversations helped a man who had spent years in prison for a crime he did not commit earn some measure of justice: if not an apology by the government agencies that conspired to steal his freedom, then at least money and self-respect. The business model of the law firm that filed this case is, in part, to earn revenue from settlements or jury awards with government agencies. But there is a greater good in this kind of legal strategy. This kind of litigation, supported by investigators like me, helps hold our elected and appointed officials accountable for overseeing a system that is rarely concerned with reforming itself. This case also illustrates the reach of "big data." The databases I used to find him are obscure but available, in various iterations, not just to private investigators but also to insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, law firms, intelligence agencies, government contractors, health-care services companies, media organizations, and banks, among other customers. A typical report includes your first, middle, and last names, as well as other names you've used on an official document like a utility bill or a credit card application or a property deed; name variations; your date of birth; your Social Security number; the state your Social Security number was issued in; the approximate date your Social Security number was issued; the names of other people who have been associated with your Social Security number; home phone numbers; mobile phone numbers; phone numbers you have used previously, landline and wireless carriers; your address and every address linked to you during the past generation; the counties in which those addresses are located; the approximate dates you have been linked to those addresses; the names of the owners of every address you have ever been linked to; your driver's license number and the state in which it was issued; the cars you have registered in your name, along with the model, make, and vehicle identification numbers of those cars and the dates those cars were registered; your current and former employers and other companies linked to you; professional credentials (such as an accounting or law or pilot's license); planes you have owned; boats you have owned; your voter registration information, including the state in which you are registered; your party affiliation and the date of your most recent vote; any hunting and fishing permits you have; tax liens placed on you; civil judgments against you; Uniform Commercial Code financing statements naming you; the names, states, and addresses of companies you have set up; the names of other people who helped you set up those companies; the names of your close relatives, the names of your neighbors, and the names of your neighbors from every place you have lived in the past generation; the block, lot, and parcel number of every one of those addresses; the assessed value and market value of every one of those properties; the census information on any addresses linked to you and your neighbors and neighborhoods; the dates the buildings you lived in were built; the most recent sale price of every one of those properties; how much you paid for any piece of real estate you have bought; the amount of any mortgage you took out to make those purchases; the names of the people or companies that sold you those properties; the names of the people or companies who bought those properties from you; certain criminal records; and your bankruptcies. Excerpted from The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World by Tyler Maroney All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
