Why Private Eyes Are Everywhere Now

Posted on Feb 14th, 2022

One day in 2016, a Manhattan private investigator named Tyler Maroney went to the doorstep of a seasoned criminal. In this era of the ubiquitous smartphone, even an unscheduled call can feel like an intrusion; showing up unannounced at someone’s house can seem outright belligerent, and a bit antique. But Maroney, who is a careful student of human interaction, figured it’s easier to hang up on someone than it is to slam a door in his face. The man he was looking for, Bill Antoni (a pseudonym), had a rap sheet that included charges for assault, burglary, and attempted manslaughter. He had recently been released from prison, and Maroney consulted a proprietary database to find his new address. When Maroney arrived at Antoni’s apartment building, he found that the buzzer was on the fritz, so he waited until another tenant walked out, then slipped inside. As he was climbing the stairs, Maroney ran into a man who was walking out. He had tattooed arms and wore a gold chain around his neck.

“Mr. Antoni?” Maroney said.

In such encounters, some investigators adopt what is known as a “pretext,” telling a fib about the purpose of their visit, or assuming a fake identity. Occasionally, the ruse is more elaborate, involving a fictitious business, with phony business cards, e-mail addresses, and social-media accounts. But Maroney takes a dim view of such subterfuge. “I’m a private detective,” he said to Antoni. “I’m here to ask for your help on a case.”

He had rehearsed this overture, hoping to make Antoni feel enlisted, rather than antagonized. “My client is a man who spent more than ten years in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Maroney said. “He was a victim of police misconduct, and you may have information that can help.”

Antoni had a sideline as a police informant, and, two decades earlier, he had offered sworn testimony to help convict Maroney’s client of murder. Now the man was suing city authorities, and his attorneys hired Maroney, who runs a detective agency called QRI, to find the jailhouse snitch and see if he might recant.

Antoni invited his visitor in. A good sign. Prior to becoming a private investigator, Maroney had worked as a journalist, and he had an eye for detail. Surveying the apartment, he noticed moldings blurred by layers of accumulated paint, a CCTV camera, and, on a table, a holstered Glock. One wall was decorated with a homemade collage of J.F.K. memorabilia: photos of Jackie Kennedy, Hyannis Port, the grassy knoll. Unprompted, Antoni declared, “Kennedy was the last great American.” And, when he said that, Maroney knew: this guy was going to talk.

People talk to a detective for different reasons. Sometimes they want absolution, or credit, or justice. Sometimes they’re lonely, seduced by a sympathetic ear. Antoni revealed that he had been induced to supply fraudulent testimony in the case by crooked cops who offered him a break on his prison sentence. Maroney’s client ended up receiving nearly ten million dollars in a settlement. A third of that went to the lawyers. Maroney’s firm got seventy-five thousand dollars.

More than thirty thousand private investigators now work in the United States, Maroney reports in his new book, “The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World” (Riverhead). They engage in a dizzying variety of low-profile intrigue: tracking missing people, tailing cheating spouses, recovering looted assets, vetting job applicants and multibillion-dollar deals, spying on one corporation at the behest of another, ferreting out investment strategies for hedge funds, compiling opposition research. Contemporary private eyes, Maroney explains, are often “refugees from other industries,” including law enforcement, journalism, accounting, and academia. One hallmark of the business is discretion—like spy agencies, private eyes must often keep their greatest triumphs secret—so it is notable that Maroney would write a book like this. 

The private eye has been a staple of popular culture for so long that it can be difficult to disentangle the fictional archetype from the real thing, and part of Maroney’s aim in his book is to demythologize his vocation. This is a tricky undertaking, not least because the very notion of a private investigator first flourished not in the real world but in fiction.

Globalization, deregulation, and rapid technological change have combined to create new threats and opportunities, Maroney observes, and, in his telling, a capable private investigator can assist the client in navigating this treacherous environment. More and more of our personal information is now readily available online, a vulnerability that has been a boon for the investigations business. As discreet subcontractors, detectives may be largely invisible in our contemporary landscape, but they have become “indispensable,” Maroney argues, adding, “We are everywhere.” In one passage that is both thrilling and unsettling, he describes the logistical challenges associated with stalking a target who is moving through a city, and suggests that on any given weekday in midtown Manhattan “there are, I would estimate, dozens of surveillance teams shadowing people.”

Because the detective business is frequently an adversarial one, the professional ethics of the trade differ, in significant ways, from conventional ethics. An investigator can follow every legal and ethical guideline and still be doing the wrong thing. When Tyler Shultz, an employee at Theranos, attempted to blow the whistle on fraud inside the tech startup, the company had him followed by private eyes. If investigators sometimes function as agents of transparency, they also sometimes do the opposite, seeking not to clean the fish tank but to muddy it. It depends on the client—and the detective.

Hackers, who have some affinities with private eyes, are often distinguished as either “white hat” (law-abiding and scrupulous) or “black hat” (neither of those things). Maroney, decrying “the misperception that private eyes are amoral rule flouters who deploy dark arts,” points out that private investigators are generally hired not directly by clients but by “lawyers, including the world’s savviest and most ethical.” Still, there’s little comfort in the fact that Black Cube was engaged to surveil and intimidate journalists not by Harvey Weinstein but by the celebrated attorney David Boies. (Boies, who also represented Theranos, has said that he regrets his handling of the Black Cube contract.) Lawyers, even the world’s savviest, can be prone to a certain ethical flexibility.

in a 1949 essay, the social critic David T. Bazelon argued that Dashiell Hammett’s real subject was “the ascendancy of the job in the lives of Americans.” Where Sherlock Holmes was “essentially an English gentleman acting to preserve a moral way of life,” Hammett’s world is one in which “the moral and social base is gone.” Hammett’s investigators are morally pliable, less assured that there is anything edifying about their professional exertions. These men aren’t “doing their duty,” Bazelon writes. “They are merely doing.”

Bazelon—who later wrote speeches for a federal judge, his uncle, famed for expanding the rights of criminal defendants—describes the Hammett gumshoe as a job holder whose adventures “begin with an assignment and end when he has completed it.” (The same structure holds for each of Maroney’s chapters.) The hardboiled detective knows that there are no guarantees about a client’s moral worth, and, indeed, he frequently finds himself working for the bad guy. So Hammett’s detectives approach their professional obligations in a spirit of weary detachment. The “moral problem—the matter of individual responsibility or decision-making in a situation where society has defaulted morally—is never even faced, much less resolved,” Bazelon writes. “The question of doing or not doing a job competently seems to have replaced the whole larger question of good and evil.”

Maroney acknowledges that investigators “do not always choose their clients.” He discloses that he was once hired to conduct dozens of interviews just so that his interview subjects would report to their boss that a private eye had been asking about him. “I was, in essence, used as a tool for intimidation,” he writes. And he describes uncovering criminal wrongdoing in an investigation, only to learn subsequently that a client has, for one reason or another, chosen not to act upon the information. Investigators can pledge to follow the law; they can regulate their own conduct by adhering to a finely honed ethical code. But, like Hammett’s detectives, they answer to clients, and the client is in control. The professionalization of the industry means that personal values are, necessarily, sublimated to corporate objectives. The investigator is no longer an amateur, like Dupin, or a morally conflicted lone gun, like Spade, but an instrument of the check writer. Often, the detective, hired by a law firm or some other intermediary, does not even know who the client is. Maroney appears to have succeeded in fashioning a righteous career. Still, the typical modern investigator combines impressive technocratic ability with conspicuously limited moral agency.

When Hammett talked about Sam Spade, he said that his character had “no original”—that he was not based on any actual investigator. Rather, he was an ideal. “He is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been,” Hammett said. It takes nothing away from Maroney’s fascinating account to say that the gap between the profession’s noblest aspirations and its customary activities is a subject worth investigating.

Original article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/05/why-private-eyes-are-everywhere-now