Watching The Detectives

Sun Herald

Sunday April 22, 2007

By Bill Craske

Sneaking around at night, hidden cameras and hours in the car or up trees... It's all part of a private investigator's life. Then there's breaking bad news to your clients. The trench coat is optional.

In the room next door, a man screams. His rage carries through the thin coffee-brown partition that divides the rooms at Lyonswood Investigations and Forensic Group in Sydney's inner west. Private investigator Warren Mallard, 58, apologises for the polygraph test being conducted in the adjacent office. Mallard, a tall man with pale blue eyes, appears unfazed by the commotion. He deals, after all, in the problems of others for a living. "That's what the box of tissues is for," he explains from behind his desk. "They're for people I've got to give the worst news in the world to."

By the sounds of it, someone has just received theirs. According to Mallard, the man next door has asked his young wife, whom he suspects of infidelity, to submit to a lie-detector exam. "As you can hear, it's a terribly emotive business," Mallard says. "It's not a nice job. You regularly end up being a counsellor."

Outside the office hangs a neon sign with a magnifying glass and the words "private eye". Inside hangs a trench coat that Robert Mitchum might have worn in the 1947 film noir Out Of The Past. But the imagery, as evocative as it is, fails to outweigh the reality. "Sadly, Peter Corris and the people who write about private investigators have no idea what the industry is really like," says Mallard. "We've all been perceived as people who have two shots of bourbon before breakfast, don't shave and are a pretty dishevelled bunch."

Crime prevention is in Mallard's blood. The former president of the Institute of Mercantile Agents, he has received three commendations from police commissioners for bravery. A motorcycle accident prematurely ended his career in the police force and in 1982 Mallard helped set up Lyonswood. He now has 30 private investigators working full-time for him, mostly on cases relating to workplace theft.

Just recently, he exposed internal fraud among the nightshift workers of a printing company. Productivity was down and stock reported missing. The company applied, through Lyonswood, for a workplace surveillance warrant. Mallard then installed hidden cameras throughout the warehouse and over the card-swipe where the night workers clocked on and off. The footage was damning.

"They had copied each other's swipe cards so that each one had five cards in their wallet," Mallard recalls. "They would take turns working the nightshift, meaning only one person would work and swipe the other four people in while they were asleep at home."

Mallard, who looks for "uncommon sense" in a detective, claims his company gathers irrefutable evidence for his clients 98 per cent of the time. An investigation without intelligence gathering, he believes, is a wasted investigation. "We have to use pretext and subterfuge," Mallard says. "Every industry has its problem operators but fortunately ours is well-regulated and pretty clean."

Five years ago, psychiatric nurse Liz Hunter needed a new job when an accident left her unable to stand for long periods. She chose the male-dominated profession of private investigation and now spends hours in the car following, for the most part, unfaithful men around Sydney's south-west, where she is based. Most of her clients are female. The youngest was an 18-year-old unsure if her older boyfriend was the right man to marry. Hunter proved he wasn't.

But if breaking bad news is an unavoidable part of the process, a nursing background is an asset. "I bring understanding and a good ear to each case," says Hunter, who is in her early 50s. "I'm happy to listen to them divulge their woes, even if the story doesn't change."

That story usually begins with the client observing uncharacteristic behaviour in her significant other. According to Hunter, the usual telltale signs that a middle-aged man might be cheating are sudden changes in grooming habits and buying expensive clothes.

Hunter receives nearly as many inquiries from men but, in her experience, they tend to forsake the investigation at late notice. She's had only one infidelity case she couldn't prove. It was for a male client and she spent months on it. "He was convinced his wife was having an affair because she bought new undies," she recalls. "I told him women in their 60s like to feel sexy, too, but he wouldn't have any of it in the end. I think he ended up hiring someone else to spy on her."

Hunter describes the art of surveillance as "Oh, hurry up and wait." There are six-hour shifts behind the wheel, usually fixed in the same position, made satisfying by clients' emails and letters at the end of a job. The latest note was from a woman in Sweden, who had hired Hunter to check up on her daughter, a backpacker in Sydney and whom she feared had fallen in with the wrong crowd. "So I followed this girl for a week around town, down to the harbour, the cinema and the park," Hunter says. "These weren't the haunts of an unsettled young woman. In fact, she was the opposite - quite lovely."

Hunter doesn't network with the PI fraternity, instead she enlists the help of her partner, Tony Gordge, an engineer. Often the pair will go to dinner with a camera hidden in a handbag.

Peter Wright has 17 years of private investigating experience behind him. A former fitter and turner in the navy, the 45-year-old sports several eye-catching tattoos. He works from home in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg but spends much of his time in the car, which he uses to track down missing persons or do background checks for overseas clients. "Usually, it's one half of an arranged marriage from India, who wants the uncertainty that their prospective spouse inspires either eased or confirmed," he says.

Sometimes Wright is asked by barristers to follow witnesses to disprove their testimony. He has infiltrated local football clubs to verify that a knee injury took place on the weekend and not at work. In country Victoria, he was once chased by an enraged man swinging a back hoe. And last year, he followed a girl who spent her day on trains ("Perhaps there was some bullying at school") and not taking drugs as the client, her father, feared.

Like Wright, Steve Murray has tried his hand at numerous jobs: fitter and turner, soccer player, squash referee. He became a cop but left, frustrated by the hierarchy. An acquaintance employed as a loss assessor for an insurance company pointed the way to private investigation. Originally from Luton, north of London, Murray, 50, a PI for more than 20 years now, grins from his office in the Melbourne suburb of Huntingdale, surrounded by sports memorabilia and racks of clothes. He wears a loud brown and gold shirt ("they notice the shirt, not the face") and speaks in a heavy English vernacular.

"I like meeting people and I quite like sneaking around at night," Murray admits. "The people who hire me aren't doing the wrong thing; on the contrary, they're the type of person who has doormat written across their forehead."

Murray pulls up a screen he uses to conceal the gadgets he keeps for work. As well as the baseball bat, for emergency security, there are microphones calibrated to fit inside Tic Tac boxes, digital video cameras, one remote-control truck on which he once mounted a tiny transmitter camera, and a tray of cat food used to lure a crippled feline from under a house.

"This is where people see the bad news," he says, sniffing heavily through a nose that has been broken a few times. "I've served people twice [with a summons] and have been punched out twice - once into Port Phillip Bay."

On one occasion, Murray had climbed an oak tree to shoot footage on a super-8 camera of a man claiming compensation for a crippling back injury despite the fact that he was digging a swimming pool in his backyard. Evidence in hand, Murray climbed down to find three men waiting below. The PI ended up making his own worker's comp claim that day.

"My boss was a lateral thinker and he found out which morning the garbage bins in their area were emptied," Murray says. "I went through the trash at five in the morning and, sure enough, the three canisters of film they had taken were all there. You should have seen their faces in court when the footage was shown."

Murray claims the job has made him cynical. Even so, he leaves the distinct impression that the world is a comedy and he has balcony seats. "I've got a

75-year-old woman at the moment who wants me to follow her 76-year-old husband," Murray says. "He keeps threatening to leave her for a younger bird. She's 61." He smiles. "They've been married for 54 years, longer than I've been alive. But if this job has taught me anything, it's that people need to know."

© 2007 Sun Herald

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