photo by Dan Bishop
Twilight on the mean streets of Milwaukee’s South Side. The sun drops from the sky like an empty beer keg and the city feels hung over, weary and splashed with shadows, the perfect cover for Tim Petersdorff, Private Eye.
Petersdorff slouches deep into the seat of his dusty Chevy van, rearranging the creases in his black leather jacket, his buzz-cut jarhead a picture of alert intensity, his eyes locked on an empty black sedan just a spit away. The assignment? Keep close tabs on the skinny brunette who owns the wheels. The client? Her fiancé, some poor jamoke with a suspicious mind and a jaundiced heart. Me? I’m just along for the ride.
Time slips into a coma as we wait for the lady to show. The air goes stale as a three-day lager, and so does the conversation. I check my watch for the hundredth time and wish I was Downtown, nursing a nightcap at my favorite gentleman’s club, where the action is endless if not always pretty.
OK, OK, enough of the overwrought pulp. Fact is, I’m on surveillance with a licensed private investigator, and yes, it’s pretty damn boring. I had hoped for something like the hardboiled melodramas dished up by Raymond Chandler (no relation to this writer, alas). But so far, it’s more of a drag than drama. The quiet before the storm, maybe.
While we wait for the brunette – I’ll call her “Jezebel” – Petersdorff spreads her dossier across the dashboard: her name, address, birth date, employer, license number and a half-dozen snapshots. It seems Jezebel has told her fiancé she’s going out with friends tonight. The boyfriend has doubts. A few “inconsistencies” came up in her previous alibis, and he thinks she might be rolling in the hay with some lustful Lothario from her not-so-distant past.
Petersdorff tinkers with his cell phone, his eyes on Jezebel’s car. A hand-sized Sony video cam sits ready on the floor of the van, and a pocket-sized camera is tucked into his jacket – tools of the trade. Along with domestic cases like this one, Petersdorff has worked welfare fraud, criminal
investigations, even car repossessions. “I try to be diverse,” he explains. “There’s a lot of peaks and valleys in this business.” This seems like one of the valleys.
As we wait, he spins tales of past cases. Once, he was hired to tail a police officer who was collecting disability after getting hit by a car. He rigged up a video cam in his gym bag and followed the cop into a fitness center, where he recorded the allegedly injured officer doing bench presses. “He was lifting more than I was,” says the V-shaped Petersdorff, who’s done his share of bodybuilding.
Petersdorff originally wanted to be a cop himself. With a degree in police science from Milwaukee Area Technical College and another in criminal justice from UW-Milwaukee, he applied to a few police departments. As he waited for a call back, he took a couple cases with a private investigator. That was 18 years ago. He’s now the president and sole employee of Investigative Resources. “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” he says.
Suddenly, before you can say “Farewell, My Lovely,” a thin brunette slips behind the wheel of the black sedan and swings into rush-hour traffic, blowing straight through the stop sign. Petersdorff jolts into action. He pops the van into drive and stomps on the gas, cutting across two lanes of traffic as we fly into the boulevard. I snap on my seat belt, safe as a crash test dummy.
“She told her boyfriend she was going right Downtown from work, but she’s going the opposite way,” Petersdorff almost sings as the adrenaline kicks in. “She’s already doing something funny.”
Jezebel is two blocks ahead, but Petersdorff wastes no time making up the difference, gunning the van to 50 mph in a 35 and shooting through a yellow light.
Traffic lights are the bane of any PI. Petersdorff once lost a moving van in heavy traffic, an entire freakin’ moving van. “Sometimes the driving can be a little crazy,” he admits, checking his rearview mirror. “But, knock on wood, I’ve never been in an accident.”
The black sedan turns left into a strip mall and Petersdorff slows to a crawl, careful to keep his distance. Jezebel parks in front of a tanning salon. Nothing like a cosmetic tuneup before a night of carousing.
Petersdorff calls his client to give him a progress report, careful not to pass judgment too soon.
“The way I look at it,” he says, snapping shut his cell phone, “I’m just collecting the facts. I’ve had clients crywhen I give them the bad news, so I take their feelings into account. You want to break it as softly as you can. There was one guy, he was kind of nasty, and I was afraid to tell him his girlfriend was cheating because I didn’t want him to go after the girl.”
I can’t resist asking: Does he ever catch anyone actually doing the dirty deed? “Verrry raaarely,” he drawls, declining, unfortunately, to provide any details. “Usually if you see them walk into the house, that’s all you need.”
Twilight gives in to night, and the parking lot lights flicker overhead. Jezebel steps out of the salon, her face one shade closer to the perfect Floridian glow. She motors up and makes a beeline for the freeway. We’re on her tail, but forced to stop behind a Corolla waiting for a green light on the on-ramp. By the time we merge into traffic, the black sedan has vanished.
“Crap.” Petersdorff leans toward the windshield, squinting at a sea of red tail-lights, quietly studying the cars inching along the expressway. Then, out of the mass, he picks up her scent. “I think I got her,” he whispers, as though she might hear him and get spooked. “Three cars in front of us? I’ll be damned, that’s her. I got her.”
But the victory is fleeting. Exiting the expressway Downtown, Jezebel suddenly aborts a right-hand turn and veers back into traffic, leaving us at the light. Poof. She’s gone.
Petersdorff shifts to Plan B. The woman is supposed to be meeting friends at a Downtown condo. He digs out an address and makes for the Water Street bar district, double-parking on a side street with a clear view of the condo’s front door. He shuts off his engine. Headlights from passing cars flood the van’s interior and recede. We wait and watch.
A fine line separates private from public. For investigators, the rule of thumb is, you can’t trespass, you can’t film anyone through windows. “But in public and in plain view, we can observe anything,” Petersdorff says.
And if he gets caught in the act of surveilling? “I lie,” he says. “I’d never disclose who I was working for.”
Still no sign of Jezebel. More waiting. Petersdorff tells about working years ago as a bouncer at Steny’s bar in Walker’s Point. As proof of his service, he points to a jagged scar above his left ear, a cut from a broken beer bottle, an occupational hazard.
Petersdorff lives a dual life. On weekends, he’s a homebody, spending most of his time at his Muskego residence with his family – watching movies with his wife, who manages a real estate office, and coaching his two sons’ Little League teams. But as a PI, he spends his life tracking cheats and corruption.
Two hours into the surveillance, nature calls. “I gotta piss,” Petersdorff says, and he climbs into the back of the van, fishing out two wide-mouth plastic water bottles. “I actually brought along a bottle for you,” he offers. Uh, no thanks, I can hold it, I tell him, though I’m about ready to find a convenient alley or bush someplace. “This is one of the things that a female investigator can’t do,” he boasts from the back of the van. Lovely.
Jezebel finally appears from inside the condo with a man – and another woman. They duck into a nearby bar, arm in arm. A few minutes later – just enough time to down a rum and Coke, I’m thinking – the three emerge, moving quickly down the sidewalk.
“Let’s go,” Petersdorff says, and we’re on foot, tracking the trio until we’re two steps behind. Jezebel is much shorter and more attractive than she looks in her snapshots, I think. It feels creepy to know she doesn’t know who I am, though I know who sheis and what’s she’s suspected of doing. It’s sleazy – and thrilling, I have to admit – snooping into private lives like this.
The trio enter a sports facility, and we sit a few rows behind them. The girl scans the crowd, and her gaze lands on Petersdorff. Instinctively he looks away. “I try not to make eye contact,” he says, and I follow suit, staring into the ceiling lights like I’ve suddenly experienced the Rapture. Jezebel’s attention returns to her friends, and I sneak off to the men’s room. Finally.
Another half-hour later and still no hanky panky. Just a young woman in the company of two friends. Sigh. What good’s a game of cat-and-mouse if we never get the chance to pounce?
But Petersdorff seems pleased that he won’t have to break his client’s heart. He calls the guy. “So far it all checks out,” he tells him. The client is overjoyed.
Jezebel, it turns out, is actually a Chastity. Or so it seems tonight.
• • •
Lori Gonion has been sticking her nose into other people’s business for years. Starting out as a hired contractor, she has run her own company, Ambrose Detective Agency, since 1985.
While domestic cases are a small part of her business, there seems to be more Eliot Spitzers in the world these days, Gonion says. Except those cheating hearts aren’t always men. “It’s becoming very equal-opportunity, close to 50-50,” says Gonion, sitting in a high-backed swivel chair in her West Side office. “I’m astonished at the number of women with small children having affairs. I don’t know where they get the energy.”
All this suspicion and subterfuge doesn’t bode well for the state of romantic relationships. Wisconsin has a no-fault law, meaning divorce does not require proof of wrongdoing in the marriage. Still, some scorned lovers seem to want the evidence – the embrace or the kiss in flagrante delicto – captured on video so he or she can confront the philanderer.
Of course, stakeouts aren’t just for busting cheaters, Gonion notes. There are around 400 private detectives in the state (and probably twice as many people writing detective novels). They work criminal investigations for attorneys and serve summonses and subpoenas. They do background checks for parents who might be suspicious of their adult child’s sweetheart. They check credit histories and criminal backgrounds of new hires. They investigate workers’ compensation claims and child-custody cases, spying on employees who claim to have bad backs or divorced parents ordered by the court to not drink alcohol during visitations with their kids.
Gonion is the Kinsey Millhone of Milwaukee. Like mystery writer Sue Grafton’s hard-bitten but soft-hearted heroine, Gonion is divorced, with a spotty record of long-term relationships. She prefers to live alone (except for her dog, a Shepherd mix named – of course – Bogart), is compulsively organized, and, like Millhone, always on the fly, one minute running a criminal background check by computer, the next, tracking down a cheater on the make.
Gonion can be playful but takes her job very seriously. As a co-founder and board member of the Wisconsin chapter of Professional Association of Wisconsin Licensed Investigators, she has a list of no-nos for PIs: “When tailing another car, we are not to speed. We cannot put a GPS on a vehicle unless the person who hires us is on the vehicle’s title. We are never to identify ourselves as law enforcement. We cannot obtain phone records or banking information without a court order…”
But Gonion has her tricks. She keeps an empty long-stemmed-roses box in her car and stuffs it with court documents, disguising them when serving someone with divorce papers or a lawsuit. She has posed as a telephone survey researcher to get personal information. She’s hung out in hotel bars or hospital lobbies, eavesdropping on targeted parties. She’s donned a hard hat, orange vest and clipboard, posing as a public works employee and setting up a camera and tripod in the street to track a person’s activities. “It works all the time.”
Sometimes the work is risky. A few years ago, while working a homicide, Gonion was forced to move from her house after a gang member threatened her, sliding his finger across his throat when he saw her in the courthouse.
In one of her first cases, she was hired by legendary PI Ira Robins to help gather evidence to clear the name of former policewoman, Playboy Bunny and convicted murderer Lawrencia “Bambi” Bembenek. Gonion’s peers see her as one of the best in town. When working surveillance, she’s like a chameleon. “I can sip tea with one client,” she says, “and then sit down with another and do a shot of Patron tequila.”
• • •
PIs come in all shapes and sizes – wannabe cops, retired cops, former paralegals, even ex-journalists. Milwaukee County Supervisor Gerry Broderick, an ex-cop himself, was once a private investigator.
The hours are long and irregular – early mornings, weekends, holidays. The pay fluctuates, anywhere between $35 and $125 an hour, say investigators. On average, a half-day of surveillance nets $500.
Milwaukee native Catherine Hansen wanted to be a federal agent. Fresh out of Ohio State University with a degree in criminology, she applied to the FBI and Secret Service, dreaming of covert
operations and presidential details.
“I didn’t get the job,” Hansen says. So she joined a PI agency instead and worked undercover, busting shoplifters for five bucks an hour. “I was really good at it,” she says. Eventually she went to work for Pinkerton – the country’s oldest private detective agency, founded by Allan Pinkerton, who famously foiled a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. (Pinkerton, though, was not on hand in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.) After a series of PI gigs, Hansen started her own company in 2006, the one-woman Draws-Alan Detective Agency, named after her parents.
“I just seem to have a knack for it,” she says. “I don’t miss much.”
I’ll say. Once she starts, she never leaves “the sit,” to use the jargon. As I sit in her van and ask about tactics and technique, her eyes stay riveted on a house two blocks away. (Inside: a suspected cheater, waiting for her lover boy, who never shows.)
Dark curtains cover the rear windows of Hansen’s van. Scattered about: a set of binoculars and digital video camera, a dashboard-mounted GPS and XM radio (usually tuned to a ball game), a dark stocking cap and change of clothes (for disguises), a box of snack food. And a Porta Potty. (Midway through the stakeout, she suddenly orders me out of the van.)
“One of my clients sometimes puts me out there for 10 hours,” she groans, noting the travails of the hard-working, bladder-strained PI. “It’s tough.”
Dressed in jeans, pointed cowboy boots and a black leather jacket (the PI’s uniform, it seems), her long hair pushed behind her ears and a blue tattoo ringing her right bicep, Catherine Hansen puts the C in Clandestine. She’s good-looking, fit and, owing to her athletic skills in high school, still something of a jock, though she smokes little cigars from Amsterdam and resorts to a McDonald’s fish sandwich when pressed for time. Hansen looks the part and loves the role, tuning in periodically to “Parco P.I.,” a reality TV show that follows the cases of the New York City-based Vinny Parco, and reading novels from The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agencyseries.
Like her fictional counterparts, Hansen can be nervy. She once had a redneck from Missouri point a gun at her head when he blew her cover on a roadside stakeout. “I jammed my pickup truck into gear and ditched the jerk,” she says.
Hansen is straight-talking and direct, with little patience for clients who try to hit on her. Like Gonion, she lives alone. (She prefers cats to dogs, however.) PI work is lonely work, but suits her fine. “Working alone, no one’s looking over my shoulder,” she figures. She’s at home in her van, navigating the city streets deftly with a cup of coffee in one hand while working the GPS and XM radio with the other. Sometimes she finds herself playing the role of a marriage counselor for clients, particularly scorned women. “They tell me everything – when they had sex last … Everything.”
With 17 years in the business, Hansen is one of the few female PIs in town who does strictly surveillance work. She uses her gender to her advantage. “I can get away with a lot more when I’m following somebody,” she says. “If some guy is sitting there alone and lurking around, people look at him suspiciously. I just sit there and smile and I get all this information.
“I can basically be invisible,” she says, reaching for her binoculars as a car comes to a stop across the street. “You have to be invisible, otherwise you’re going to get picked out.” And then? “Game over.”
• • •
Private Eye Tim Petersdorff is on the move again, this time tailing a guy who’s collecting worker’s comp after claiming a job-related injury. The guy’s boss suspects he’s faking it, and so Petersdorff has been hired to shadow this Artful Dodger – I’ll call him “Art.”
We start the sit in Petersdorff’s van outside a building where Art has a doctor’s appointment. We’ve got his license plate number, a description of his car, a two-page printout of his vital statistics and a short video of him hanging out at home. Stirring stuff.
“He’s got a thin build,” says Petersdorff, “black hair, shaped on the side, ethnic looking…”
Five minutes late for his appointment, Art waltzes through the front door of the medical building, looking hale and hearty. He’s wearing jeans, flip-flops and a bright-red windbreaker, a thoughtful touch that should make it easy to pick him out from a distance. The plan is to ID him at his doctor’s appointment, then follow him around to see if he commits any acts of heavy lifting.
As usual, the main action is waiting. With a constant eye on the building’s doorway, Petersdorff does some bookwork, rifling through a stack of affidavits. His van is an office on wheels, the bench seat in back crammed with legal files, the dashboard shelf littered with postage stamps, address labels, and packets and packets of taco sauce.
We fill more time with small talk. “I had this one case,” starts Petersdorff, “investigating a guy who had a disability claim. So I did a surveillance. I’m in my van, and he’s standing on a ladder and scraping paint off his house. I’m parked like two blocks away and he turns and looksat me. He’s looking at me and he’s scraping, and he’s looking and scraping. And he gives me the finger. So I drive away.
“I go back a couple days later. I drive by the guy’s house and he’s outside, and he snaps a few pictures of me. A few minutes later, he’s behind me in his car – tailing me. I don’t know what the guy is gonna do. I mean, he knows I’m watching him. He mademe. So, I’m driving along and he’s right behind me, and I spot a state trooper on the side of the road. So I pull up right behind him. And the guy just drove on and that was it.”
After two hours cooling our heels, we finally see Art, red windbreaker and all, flashing in the sunlight like a Chinese windsock. Art heads to his car, and I decide to follow Petersdorff in my own car as he follows Art, just to get a flavor of The Tail. I once drove a taxi for a living and pride myself on having a near-faultless sense of direction.
But as I pull out of my parking spot, I’m immediately stuck behind two cars – “Come on, come on” – and I lose sight of Petersdorff right out of the gate. I make a guess and turn right.
My cell phone rings. It’s Petersdorff. “I’m on 92nd Street,” he says, “coming up on Lincoln. The guy just turned on Lincoln, going east.”
I make a U-turn, then turn right on 90th Street, going north, until I come to National Avenue. But this isn’t right. Somehow I got turned around.
Again, my cell phone rings. “We’re at 84th and Lincoln, still going east,” says Petersdorff. Just three minutes into the chase and I’m a mile behind and heading in the opposite direction. My cabbie’s intuition has failed miserably.
I hit Greenfield Avenue and turn east, barely yielding at the yield sign. And instantly, I’m bogged down behind a dump truck that’s hogging two lanes and hitting every single friggin’ red light in West Allis. I’m doomed.
Again, my cell phone. “We’re at a little shopping mall at 13th and Mitchell,” Petersdorff tells me, ever patiently.
I’m not so patient. At 34th and National, I see road work up ahead and make a sharp right turn, tires squealing, and then a left on Mitchell. I run a stop sign at 22nd Street, then a red at 21st, checking my mirrors for police. I’m only six minutes behind Petersdorff, but it might as well be a week.
Finally, I spot Petersdorff parked on Burnham Street. I do a U-turn, barely missing a parked car, and pull up behind him. Sheepishly, I walk to the open window on his passenger side. He’s sitting comfortably in the back seat, video cam in hand, waiting for Art to emerge from a grocery store. He doesn’t say much.
“Looks like he’s doing some shopping,” I say, stating the obvious, and I’m beginning to feel like Inspector Clouseau, the blundering Pink Panther detective. The adrenaline subsides, along with my pride, and I go back to my car to wait, sinking low in the seat. Hey, I never claimed to be a detective.
Within minutes, Art comes out of the store. He’s lugging two bulging plastic bags of groceries like he’s pumping iron, showing not a hint of a ruptured disk or pulled groin muscle or even a sprained ankle. In fact, the way he’s swinging those grocery bags, his back looks a hell of a lot stronger than mine. He flings open his car door and nearly tosses the groceries into the back seat.
Petersdorff, of course, has it all on video.
Maybe it’s not the most glamorous case, and maybe it’s not the most incriminating evidence, but for half-a-day of undercover work, it’s a good start. The private eye will be back on the case again tomorrow, with his black leather jacket, digital video cam, Chevy van, taco sauce and, of course, his wide-mouth plastic bottle.
Kurt Chandler is a senior editor at Milwaukee Magazine. Write to him at kurt.chandler@milwaukeemagazine.com.
