BETRAYAL

The weekend has provided time to read the newspapers (even their name is diametrically opposed to truth. They should be called postiche-papers) and watch about 2 hours of television.

Michael Jackson is still ringing in my ears. Not so much the scope of his enterprise, but more the terrible ordeal he seems to have had to go through, just to be himself.

Having had some experience in well publicized “crimes”, I am only too familiar with how distant truth and reality can be, from what you see on TV news.

I’ve met and worked for celebrities who were known world wide. These are people with unimaginable amounts of money. The ones I’ve met have also been extremely intelligent, cautious and for the most part, kind.

Many celebrities know, just as I know, there is a particularly terrifying evil that specializes in stalking their kind. The darkness of this creature, born of humankind, cannot be underestimated. It’s presence is so insidious that when you are hunting it, trying to protect your client, even their families, friends and advisors cannot be trusted. The truth is, even the most efficacious security sometimes will not protect them against this beast. It lives in the dark, and inspires those, closest to the star, to the most disgusting kind of treachery that I deal with. It’s name is Betrayal and it’s history is so old and rooted so deep in the darkness that even I and Wikipedia, cannot definitively cite it’s first kill.

Somehow my investigative intuition tells me that Michael Jackson is another victim of this predator. How could we all have forgotten Anna Nicole so soon after her death? Of course, everyone says “That can’t happen to me.”

So what happened to Michael Jackson? We will never know the truth. At least, I will never know the truth. I am not on the inside, and unless you are, you are never going to know.

This is indeed the land of secrets, and those secrets are protected. We will never see a person exposed for betrayal and at the same time be allowed to see the devastated victim as they truly are. When the media spins betrayal, you would hardly recognize it! They will disguise it and wrap it in a package that calls upon the beast itself, again, to destroy the victim. The second time around it will do so by pointing to clichés like, “She was really asking for that” or “He got what he deserved”.

And we’ll see betrayal in soap operas, and late night talk show hosts will joke about it, pointing to whoever is in the latest crop of Political or Hollywood miscreants, most of whom we can’t stand to begin with. And that’s why they will be chosen to be the victims. Once again we’ll be convinced that only those who “deserve” it, get it. We want to believe, that “they got what they deserved” but that’s not justice. That’s propaganda.

As long as we are willing to accept that betrayal is a means to administer justice to those who deserve it, it will walk among us. And while it lives, it will continue to take some of the brightest people on the planet. The same people who provide us with so much of the beautiful mosaic of our lives. Believe me. They don’t deserve it. No one does.

So it’s Sunday. I have a brief meeting scheduled with an investigator who works for me. He needs some ideas on how to penetrate the security of a palatial condominium in Miami. Seems someone who lives there owes a bank a bunch of money.

When I first heard of the case I thought it would be pretty simple. As it turns out, it’s not quite so simple. Oh the security wont’ be a problem. Most security guards can be compromised in a variety of ways. How we do it depends on how much money it’s worth to the bank to get it done.

I suppose I should start at the front end of this. I got a call from a bank that said they were trying to serve papers on a person who resided in Miami. The lawyer for the bank further stated the amount of the claim (millions) and said they had used another agency without success.

I did some research, and spoke with our firm’s manager in Dade County. She said she thought we could do it, estimated the costs and expenses and I called the bank back. Of course the bank did not want to come up with any money up front (which my firm, without exception, gets) so they delayed another week before finally sending a small retainer.

So where we’re at is, while we are able to walk up to the front desk, I.D. ourselves and get access to the defendant’s unit, there is nothing to stop the security guard from calling the defendant and warning him/her that we are on our way up. So herein lays the problem.

There are laws against warning defendants of the imminent approach of a process server. I don’t know of anyone who has ever been prosecuted for violating those laws so for our purposes they might as well not exist. That brings us back to betrayal.

In my experience security guards protect individuals from process servers for a variety of reasons. Number one reason is they like making the process server’s life difficult and that makes them feel powerful. Number two reason is the defendant is paying them on the side to warn of a process servers approach. Number three reason is that they have an affinity for the defendant or like them for one reason or another and are therefore willing to go out of their way to “help” the defendant. Remember, we are only talking about security guards who are compromised, i.e. they are not at their posts solely to protect their charges in a lawful manner. Many security guards are loyal, law abiding and trustworthy. We’re not talking about those guys here.

Without going into the psychology of why the reasons above tell us everything we know, what we do know is that these guards practice betrayal all the time. They betray their badges by deliberately violating specific criminal statutes as they relate to obstruction of justice. They betray their protectorship by taking money from residents to provide extra services that they do not offer to all residents. Finally they betray the entire concept of laws and justice by deciding that they like someone or someone makes them feel important and they repay that by breaking the law and offering extra protection from process servers at no monetary charge.

These are the things that I am going to go over with the investigator who I am meeting later today. We’ll discuss it and when he leaves he will fully understand the vulnerabilities of these guards predicated upon their documented conduct.

The short and the long of it from an investigative perspective is this: Simply determine which betrayal each guard you are targeting uses. Once that’s done it’s just a matter of deciding how to utilize their weakness, caused by their conduct, to your advantage.

For instance, the guard who really likes the defendant can be countered by a guard who does NOT like the defendant. If one will go over the line to protect him, the other will go over the line to give him up. So you patronize the guard who is protecting the defendant and you satisfy the guard who dislikes the defendant by convincing him he’s helping bring the guy/girl to justice and the guy/girl “deserves it”. If you are asking how I know there will be a “counter” guard there, the answer is I don’t know. But if there is a large staff of security you can almost always find two who disagree. If there is not a guard who does not like the resident, then you can go on to another type of betrayal with another guard.

Anyway, I’m sure you get the idea. For each guard who obstructs you there will be one who will help you. You can pay them, you can satisfy their need to “get even” or you can patronize them and beg for their help. Those are the things, I believe in this case, that it takes to get to the door of the residence without the resident knowing, in advance, that you are there to serve them a summons and complaint.

It’s harder to explain than it is to do. Much of process serving is like that. If someone had told me the secrets when I first started out doing process serving I could have made a fortune. But like most things involving a little art and a little science, you have to learn the tricks yourself. Psychology is a big part of what process servers need and use and the example above of knowing about security guards can be extraordinarily helpful. After learning the principle, now all you have to do is go out with someone who can lead you through an actual implementation. Then you’ll have it all for that particular scenario.