Vital Information Lists

I’m a sucker for lists, a sucker for year end best of’s. As 2021 dwindles, I’m trying to set up a FaceTime with all my family members to create our own best of 2021, but we cannot even determine our categories. I’m left, I suppose, with the Best in Vital Information.

Now, be forewarned, what I’ve said many times to many people. In background research, to many voters you’re only as good as your findings. In other words, when the person you check out ends up being a mobster or arms dealer or money launderer or serial fraudster, and those are all things I’ve come across in my searches (not all in this year), you look like Sherlock Holmes. There’s nothing magical though about summarizing what is in a newspaper article or court file. What’s not being rewarded is coming across things.

Instead, what tops the Robert Gardner & Associates LLC best of 2021 is this:

A lot of people found

The best work performed in 2021 was tracking down 100’s of people. Not because they were missing. Or often not especially hard to locate. Yet, all year long, I’m given names, usually names with a company, sometimes a name with something else, an allegation, a connection, a problem. Yes, sometimes the names were not even spelled right. No address. No social security number. Rarely a middle initial. Find them not to reunite with the birth parents or to serve them papers. Find them so you could search public records: court records and tax liens and bankruptcies and such. If you don’t know where to look, how can you find anything. The award goes to us because we found nearly everyone. Over the whole of 2021, maybe a handful of people we could not pinpoint.

Next best of 2021

No False Alarms

We deserve an award for spending a lot of time on reports that never clock in over a few pages. See, in most of our research, the real work is what is not reported. All those mobsters and fraudsters and arms dealers, well they often just have the same name as the jamoke you’re checking out. Or you found yourself a crook. If we say we have a crook, we have to know. How can we document it. Prove it. Mostly, all the fun things we want to report, they’re not our guys. For all the times we don’t report something, that’s a Best of 2021.

Best actual wow research done

Figuring out the identity behind an anonymous You Tube post

The details behind this award mostly have to remain behind the “trust me” veil, but it was a matter of social media and high profiles and harassments, and we figured it out. It turned out that one Reddit account had left just enough to lead us to an older Reddit account. Then there was a backyard video and images on Google Maps that linked certain things together. It was a very impressive piece of research.

Best threat identified in the place no one told you to look:

“Drop the lawsuit…I’ll drop the malpractice case…”

A good portion of 2021 was spent looking at the misdeeds of billionaire in litigation with our client. One of the most interesting things I dug up on him came not in looking at him. It was a lawsuit we might not have otherwise come across because it did not involve the principal nor did it involve his primary business entities. Instead, it was filed by a shell company used only for a small piece of his empire. In the answer to this lawsuit, however, came wonderful documentation of a shakedown. There was a lot of dirt on this guy, but this little tidbit put it out so well.

Best making sense of things

The one about the company named in various conspiracy theories

For you, the client, it was just a potential alliance partner. To many people on the Internet they were secretly owned and capable of nefarious schemes. The award goes not in piercing the conspiracy or establishing, case-closed. No what we did there was take all sorts of issues and allegations and scuttlebutt and reduce it to a few pages of reporting that put it all in context.

Best getting out of the way

What the person who read Spanish found

We’ve mentioned that Google Translate is something we can use to peek into a world beyond our English speaking limits. Still, there are times when we know we got to get out of the way. In a 2021 matter, we took a look at some documents in Spanish and said to the client, get someone else to read them. And sure enough, where our English language sources were agnostic on this company, the documents in Spanish spoke to some serious issues. We award ourselves for stepping away.

Best blast from the past

Going through archived court cases on microfilm

What’s research skill. Where does manual dexterity matter when providing vital information. Is it possible to re-live you college days. Believe it or not, there was a time when we performed research with nary a hyperlink. Most things, but not all things were on paper. Some was on film. In very, very tiny type. Documents, especially newspapers, were preserved on microfiche/microfilm—don’t make me look up the difference. There was a time in 2021 when I got to work again in this medium. Looking up court cases in Cook County from the early 1970’s. Believe me, it takes a lot of work to maneuver the microfilm reader around the pages. To see if there was anything there.

The best parts of 2021 were that we could provide vital information to manage risks and react to unforeseen events. We helped people invest money and hire executives; pursue lawsuits and make claims. While it’s mostly in the service of companies and professional service firms, it was also rewarding that we helped deal with some family matters and kept a couple of individuals from doing some misguided deals.

The Best of 2021