There are private investigators, of course, who find the old techniques irresistible and continue to employ them, often in contravention of the law. Some, Maroney says, “exploit shady reputations to attract clients with shallow morals and deep pockets.” Working on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, the Israeli firm Black Cube, which was founded by two former spies, routinely engaged in pretexting—creating false identities and fictitious companies—and, according to the book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” by my colleague Ronan Farrow, may have relied on unlawful surveillance techniques. (Black Cube denies this.) After Uber hired the private intelligence firm Ergo to investigate people who were suing the company, a federal judge described the investigators’ tactics as “blatantly fraudulent and arguably criminal.”
In Maroney’s view, a firm that resorts to such conduct does a disservice to its “clients, to the industry, and to society.” Most private investigators work within the rules, he says, and those constraints require them to be “more creative.” At times, “The Modern Detective” can read like a promotional brochure, depicting investigators as “painstaking and nimble, law-abiding and enterprising, imaginative and deliberate—all to ensure our clients get the hidden information they need.” Indeed, Maroney writes that one of his purposes is “to demonstrate that our services are necessary throughout the ecosystem of global transactions and disputes.”
It’s certainly true that this ecosystem is becoming increasingly opaque. In another new book, “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World” (Harper), the journalist Tom Burgis depicts an unsavory coalition of corrupt strongmen, artful criminals, and rapacious élites who, abetted by a network of accountants, lawyers, and other professional facilitators, have managed to pillage money on a grand scale and hide it abroad. When millions of confidential files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca were leaked to the press, in 2016, Burgis observes, it was as if someone had flicked on the lights: suddenly the public could see the outrageous self-dealing that had been happening all along, in the dark. “From Australia to Argentina, Iceland to Rwanda, presidents, prime ministers and their advisers and confidants, intelligence chiefs, generals, ministers, legislators and central bankers had chosen to store their money not among their compatriots but within the global financial secrecy system,” he writes. The leaked files revealed that a hundred and forty political leaders held money in front companies. The monetization of public office, Burgis believes, is no longer an aberration but often the very “purpose of seeking that office.” The techniques of financial obfuscation have grown so sophisticated that theft is easy, and, for the thief who hires the right advisers, impunity is all but assured.
Jules Kroll has claimed that the role of his industry is to “keep the fish tank clean,” and Maroney makes a compelling case that the private detective is an antidote to the prevailing trends of financial malfeasance, a check on corruption and fraud, and a force for transparency and accountability. In one delightful chapter, he tells the story of Michael and Linda Mastro, an elderly couple from Washington State, who, facing bankruptcy and a stampede of pissed-off creditors, shipped their Range Rover to Portugal, boarded a private jet with their beloved Shih Tzus, and fled the United States. Maroney recounts how a pair of patient, charming investigators managed to track the couple to Annecy, in the French Alps, and then, in a moment of inspiration, paid a visit to the poshest veterinarian in town and showed him a photograph of Michael Mastro. (“Find the dogs, and you find the man.”) With the help of the investigators, who were working on behalf of the Mastros’ creditors, authorities were ultimately able to recover twenty-four million dollars in assets. Asset recovery is a major staple of the business. Maroney notes that Kroll helped to repatriate the plundered riches of dictators like Saddam Hussein and Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier. In a 2009 Profile in this magazine, Kroll told a story about how Baby Doc’s assets were not so difficult to trace, because he paid for them by check. “Apartment in Trump Tower?” he said, pantomiming the dictator writing out a check in longhand. “‘Trump... Tower.’”
Yet Donald Trump is now President; transparency and accountability could hardly be described as on the upswing. On the contrary, the wealthy and powerful are ever more capable of gaming the financial and legal systems to compound their own advantages. This is one nagging dissonance at the heart of Maroney’s book. He tells us that his firm, QRI, specializes in “investigations that seek to benefit the public interest: reforming the criminal justice system, holding corrupt government officials accountable, exposing financial crimes, fighting the causes of climate change.” And, indeed, this one small firm boasts a laudable record of such work. But how typical is it?
In a 2010 book, “Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage,” Eamon Javers takes a more jaundiced view of the industry, depicting private investigators as an accoutrement of corporate power, a tribe of highly skilled mercenaries who seem mostly untroubled by matters of moral conscience and ready, even eager, to flout the law, gaining access to personal phone bills and banking records. Maroney is dismissive of this characterization, suggesting that Javers cherry-picked sensational anecdotes. “My colleagues and I work hard to maintain integrity, and I would argue that private investigators benefit the public good in sharp contrast to our reputations,” he writes. But he also mentions that roughly “once a month” someone asks him to break the law. And, 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.
When the rapper Meek Mill was nineteen years old, in 2007, he was living in a house at 2204 South Hemberger Street, in Philadelphia, where several of his cousins also resided. Some of them were in the drug business. Meek was pursuing another line of work—he wanted to be a rapper—but he did carry a gun, illegally. He walked out of the house one evening and spotted a team of cops approaching. According to Meek, he immediately placed his gun on the sidewalk, but the cops rushed him, bundling him into the house and beating him mercilessly. In a photo taken not long afterward, his face is lumpy and bandaged, his left eye swollen shut. The next day, Meek was charged with aggravated assault, possession with intent to deliver crack cocaine, and seventeen other charges. Most damagingly, the cops maintained that, when they approached, he pointed his gun at them. To Meek, this was a laughable assertion. He was a young Black man. Had he pointed his weapon at advancing police officers, he would almost certainly be dead. But one of the cops, Reginald Graham, testified to that version of events, and a judge sentenced Meek to prison, which was followed by a decade of probation.
He was released after eight months, and continued to pursue his music career, with considerable success. He worked with Rick Ross and with Jay-Z, both kingmakers in the hip-hop industry. But he was still on parole, and the judge who had sentenced him, Genece Brinkley, seemed to take a fanatically punitive interest in curtailing his new career. Even as Meek travelled the country on tour, he was obliged to seek preapproval from parole authorities for his movements. When he slipped up, even in small ways, Judge Brinkley would haul him back into court. Eventually, in 2017, after a string of trivial violations, she sent him back to state prison with a new sentence of between two and four years. Meek Mill was thirty now. He had a son, and a thriving music career. Jay-Z wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that Meek’s plight was emblematic of how the criminal-justice system “entraps and harasses hundreds of thousands of black people every day.”
Among fans online, a #FreeMeek movement arose. The rapper was now represented by top-shelf criminal defense counsel, and his lawyers turned to Tyler Maroney’s firm, QRI. Maroney, working with a colleague, Luke Brindle-Khym, compiled a dossier of evidence on Judge Brinkley, revealing a pattern of vindictive behavior. The judge, it turned out, was also a serial litigant, who had initiated dozens of lawsuits on the slightest of pretexts. Meek’s attorneys demanded that she recuse herself from the case, but she wouldn’t. So the investigators decided to reëxamine the original arrest at 2204 South Hemberger Street. The cops had shown up that night with a search warrant, which they had obtained after claiming to have witnessed Meek Mill selling drugs on a street corner and then returning to the house. Yet, when Maroney and Brindle-Khym reënacted the scene that the cops described, the angles and the vantage points didn’t add up; it seemed unlikely that the police could have made a positive identification. Nor did the report’s description of the drug seller mention his having braids, which Meek did at the time—a conspicuous identifying feature.
When the investigators looked into Reginald Graham, the officer who had written the search warrant and testified against Meek, they discovered that he had subsequently left the police force after an internal investigation found that he had stolen money and then lied about it. Another disgraced ex-officer told them that Graham had been part of a ring of Philadelphia cops who robbed drug dealers. (Graham has denied the allegation.) After this information was brought to light, Meek was released from prison, five months into his sentence, and an appeals court ultimately overturned his conviction. He pleaded guilty to a single weapons charge, and is now free of court supervision for the first time in his adult life.
“We are traditionally hired by criminal defense lawyers to counter the unparalleled resources of prosecutors,” Maroney writes, and the Meek Mill case would seem to illustrate why private investigators are indispensable to righting the wrongs of the criminal-justice system—a system that ensnared a young Black man until investigators were able to expose corruption, and free him. But, of course, the acclaimed rapper had become precisely the sort of wealthy, expertly advised individual who can avail himself of such tools. Maroney suggests that “the most indigent among us” also benefit from investigators, and that “federal and state governments often not only provide defendants with lawyers but also subsidize investigators, among other experts, to support a legal defense.” Realistically, though, extensive investigative resources are mainly a prerogative of the privileged. In certain cases, investigators may help remedy the imbalances of our justice system on behalf of the powerless. But their deployment mostly ends up reinforcing these inequities. One wonders how Meek Mill might have fared had he been able to hire a topnotch investigator back when he was a poor Philly kid of nineteen.
In a 1949 essay, the social critic DavidT.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.♦
