Coup de grace, cont.
When Eli was eleven years old I took him to dinner at Hooters in Old Town Pasadena. He ordered a bucket of clams. The big bosomed waitress found it hard to believe. She passed the word on to the other waitresses and when his clams arrived three waitresses huddled around him, boobs hanging out, and watched him eat. “Is it good, do you like it?” they asked. That is the kind of attention a kid needs, I said to myself, barely able to eat because I was laughing so hard.
From January to September 1999 my business averaged over 35 new assignments per month plus about 10 reopens. I had about 75 regular customers that included law firms, third party administrators (they adjust claims for self insured companies), insurance companies, individual businesses and other investigation companies. In October 1999 I got 3 assignments and 2 reopens. At first I thought it was a business anomaly, but I was wrong. In November I got 7 assignments and in December 5 assignments. For all practical purposes I was out of business. I began laying of employees and on December 31, 1999 I laid off my last four people, three investigators and my video/computer assistant. I intended to keep the business going by doing all the investigations myself, typing my own reports and sending out bills.
My assistant, who had worked for me for seven years, was a month from getting his BSEE in computer engineering when I laid him off. When he applied for unemployment insurance they told him he was not entitled to collect because their records showed he had only worked for me for seven months. Someone had gone into the records and changed them. He provided documentation of his employment and the record was corrected.
That same employee, originally from Guatemala, had not gotten his US citizenship although he had been approved for it twice in the past couple of years. I encouraged him to follow through on it since he was so near graduation and many companies that might hire him required citizenship. He made an appointment with immigration. When he arrived they left him sitting in the lobby for hours past his appointment time. Eventually, a supervisor came out and told him his application had been rescinded. Later, it was suggested that they might actually deport him. He was married to a citizen, they owned a house and had a cute baby boy. He was forced to hire an attorney. Fortunately, Cal State University Long Beach, where he graduated from, gave him a job in their computer center while he resolved his problems.
None of my customers ever gave me an adequate explanation as to why they quit giving me work. Some, particularly a fellow name Cliff at Fireman’s Fund Insurance in Ontario, CA was out and out hostile, angrily yelled at me and suggested I was incompetent. I had done work for most of my clients for ten years or more.
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In October 1999 two of four computers in my office crashed. I was never able to recover their hard drives. I had to purchase another computer in order to operate the business.
At about the same time I was in the office with several investigators and we were discussing an investigation. The subject of the investigation had a very unusual last name, something like Bootatan. The telephone rang, I answered it, “Chosa Investigation, may I help you?” A male in his 40’s, who I later learned was on a cell telephone with an Orange County prefix, asked to speak with Mr. Bootatan. I said, “What??” He asked again and I responded asking him who the hell he was? He hung up. For the next two weeks we got something like a dozen hang-up telephone calls at the office per day.
A couple of weeks later, an attorney from the east coast who rented an office next to mine, arrived for his one week a month visit to Los Angeles. I overheard him standing in the hallway yelling at the building manager that he had just discovered his fax machine was forwarded to someplace in Upland, CA. It seemed likely that my telephones were wired into his fax. (Eventually, the entire seven story building we were in was debugged.) Several days later I received a telephone call from an investigator friend, Peyton Shur. He told me he had work for me and asked if I could come to his office in Upland so we could discuss it. Desperate for work, I agreed.
Peyton owned Confidential Management Services, an investigation company that specialized in undercover investigations. His clients included nuclear power plants and other government agencies. When Peyton and I met in his office he immediately made it clear that he really did not have work for me. He asked how I was doing and I explained the problems I was having. He seemed to already know all about it. He reminded me that his father had been the Commandant at Edwards Air Force Base. Then he asked me if I knew who occupied the floor below him. I did not. He told me, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). He asked me what other kind of work I considered doing, other than investigation. I was dumbfounded. He said he strongly suggested that I needed to get out of investigation. I thanked him and left.
As a footnote, Peyton was an experienced pilot with over ten thousand hours of flying experience. A couple of years later he crashed his twin engine plane after departing from his private airstrip in Paso Robles, CA and died, under somewhat unusual circumstances. Word had it that he was out of fuel.
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In November I scheduled an appointment with a psychologist whose first name is Rick, in Pasadena. My wife and I went to him in 1998 in an unsuccessful attempt to save our marriage. During my session with Rick I briefly outlined my work problems. Rick had previously told me that he had worked as a psychologist for the Air Force in Germany. I thought he might be sympathetic and offer some advice as to how I might psychologically deal with my problems. He asked me if I did some kind of meditation. I told him I did and he said I should do it regularly to assuage whatever unwanted feelings I had and just weather out the storm. He implied he didn’t want to see me anymore and that there was really nothing he could do for me. He told me my intuition about my situation was probably correct and that I should trust it-trust it and react appropriately. I left his office scratching my head.
