PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR: HOW & WHEN TO DO YOUR OWN INVESTIGATION - KUSI NEWS

How & When to Do Your Own Investigation – KUSI News

Welcome back everybody, we are reading a book called “If you only knew” and Tom Martin knows what he’s talking about, he’s one of the country’s top private investigators. In this book he shares some of his tips on how to do things like, babysitting background checks, finding lost loved ones, even finding out if your spouse is being unfaithful.

Tom Martin, private investigator, welcome to the show. Good morning Sam we’re going to cover a gamut of different things but let’s start with these babysitter background checks. We’ve been hearing these horror stories about nannies babysitters that go berserk on the children. How do we find out? Is there a simple procedure, is this gonna take a lot of time and effort and money?

Well I don’t think it’ll take a lot of effort and not a lot of money I think that the public has to get more aggressive when they’re choosing a nanny and we recommend a number of things in the book but some of the simpler things I can share this morning with your viewers are four basics  that we say that if you’re gonna bring somebody into your home that you should do the first. Start with a simple civil check, have they been sued or are they are they in the process of suing somebody, have they had a criminal record – this would be at the Superior Court level felonies, do they have a driving record that you would not want to have your child possibly in a car with them, and finally the fourth thing is a derogatory check which gives you a little picture of their finances, bankruptcies notices, default judgments and tax liens all of this can be done by a competent private investigator for less than a hundred dollars.

Okay and if you were to do that yourself all of this is that available to the public from the courthouse most of the times you can go down to the courthouses and access the three of the four – you can’t access DMV you have to do that through somebody that’s licensed but I think if you contact a local private investigator he can save you a lot of time. If you go down to the courthouse you’re gonna spend a couple hours researching, nowadays most guys have online computers and can get you the information in a heartbeat.

Another big thing these days is checking the backgrounds of those people whom you may be dating right now and you’re thinking about getting serious. If you’re thinking about getting married but there’s just something there that is not quite right about and you want to do a background check without them knowing? I think they do all the four checks that we just talked about but one of the things that’s most amazing to me is 50% of the people in this country are divorced and remarried and 90% of those people will remarry somebody without looking at their new partners divorce records. So if you were to get married a second time I think it would behoove you to go down and take a look at that, see if there is any wife-beating, is there any child molestation, drug problems – those things will all be in the file.

I don’t think people are aware that you can simply go down to any Superior Court records and they can provide that to you. Just walk in there and most of the people that work in those buildings are more than happy to help you or look in your yellow pages and find a competent private investigator or somebody maybe that’s been a police officer or former federal agent in our office up in Anaheim where our corporate offices we can just do that right on the computer.

One thing that people don’t talk too much about is OK say you have your one of your loved ones checked out or somebody you’re planning to marry or you’re just dating you find out something horrible about that person how do people become emotionally prepared to find out this news whether it be good or bad – you need to be ready to hear it. I think that’s what separates a lot of the top private investigators from just the run-of-the-mill you you really have to be very sensitive to bringing the bad news, about 97% of the clients that that hire us to do marital surveillances we actually catch their mate – about 70% of our clients are women 30% or men it’s an interesting phenomenon that I found over the last 30 years that if a man catches his wife cheating about 99 percent of the time the marriage is over, the men just cannot handle it. If the women hire us and we catch their husband’s about 50 to 60 percent of the time they will consider counseling, they will consider trying to save the marriage and keeping the family unit together.

I’m gonna ask you something else real quick that concerns everybody especially when you’re moving into a new town. You’ve bought a house in a new neighborhood or you’re thinking about that neighborhood and you want to find out who their neighbors are, and in this day and age it’s important to find out who’s living next door to you, is that an invasion of privacy? I don’t think you really need to do a background check on your neighbors, what we suggest is in the chapter on security is that you simply go and knock on the door. We tell people you don’t need to go break bread with these people, you don’t need to have picnics with them, you don’t need to talk to them constantly but just find out their names and if they don’t want to engage you after that’s fine. But it’s very helpful that when we leave on a trip it’s nice to be able to walk over to one of the neighbors and say can you pick up my mail, can you just watch the house for me, can you take in the garbage cans? We encourage people to go out and talk to their neighbors, it’s a really good security tip.

The book is called “If you only knew” by Thomas G. Martin, it’s in paperback right now at your local bookstore. Thank you for being here this morning. Thanks for inviting me, I appreciate it.