Awards Season

Best Research of the Year

The Oscars this year don’t arrive until March, at which point we can say award season is finally over. It also means we have time to nominate ourselves for some special work last year. My research over the year was as basic as looking up names at the Cook County Circuit Court, Criminal Division to a deep dive that had us looking at items from the 1970s.  

As a public records researcher, I would offer up that my starring role nearly all the time is making sense of documents, or simply reading them. For instance, I have reduced to bullet points, short seller reports, and extracted the riskiest of risk factors from SEC filings. One matter heavily abutted against a former Cabinet Secretary in the Trump Administration, and it was less a question of summarizing all the articles and more just putting them in categories by scandal. This was not the only matter I managed that touched on politics. There was a case about someone who did not run for Senate, which required tracking down some local news, and there was another matter looking at a contentious new law, which required picking through a host of old records to identify bias. None of this stuff is especially award-worthy. Let’s look at what was.

The Nominations

Best Document Found in a Federal Criminal Case

It was just last blog, where I told the story of how a sentencing document helped crack a case, although it was not the only time where a defendant’s sentencing document played a major role in my research. This was a matter where I was exploring an entrepreneur, and there were many indications that he had a prior identity. The evidence was murky until I found a particular sentencing document. The biographical information in it matched the entrepreneur pretty much word for word, and I was able to confirm his previous name and criminal history.

When I advise on how to do background research, I press, I insist, start with identity. You have to know whom you are researching. As I have noted many times, this is to make sure that what you find, applies to the actual person you are seeking to find things out about. Or that the person is not who they say they are. It happens. A research target is looking to hide something in his or her past by faking or fudging some key point – using someone else’s social security number, a phony address, or in my case, simply adopting a new name.

Another thing I always coach regarding background research, is what I call the “ripple theory.” The idea that no matter what we do, or what we try to control, we leave behind ripples of our existence, and a skilled researcher can detect and interpret these ripples. In this case, we found the ripples that suggested another name, but it was hard to prove. We found a lot of ways it could be true, but nothing that said it had to be true. Until we found the criminal case record.

The Address Knows

The address search is for sure the Meryl Streep of open-source research, always being nominated. Year after year searching street addresses through public record databases produces incredible results. There was a matter last year where something as simple as that really performed well.

If research step one is to verify identity, research step two is to determine where a subject has lived and worked over the years. The tangible artifact of these actions, where we have been, is addresses. You and me, we leave behind a trail of addresses; where we have lived, asked for bills to be sent, registered our vehicles, and established voting legality. These addresses tell us where to look for things like criminal records. But they can also point to much more.

You need to know that in the United States, one can set up a company in the state of Delaware and leave no public footprint. Unlike every other state in the US, Delaware has no public access database with any level of information on privately held companies. Yet it’s worse. Delaware corporate records that are not online are not required to contain information identifying members/managers. So, if you find that someone has set up a Delaware company, expect that it may be very difficult to find any useful information, especially people’s names, associated with it.

Now, there are legitimate reasons to purchase real estate with a limited liability company. You keep your assets segregated, perhaps protected. But do you need a Delaware limited liability company? Do you live in Delaware? Listen, there are many ‘real’ or ‘legitimate’  reasons to form a Delaware company. Find a corporate lawyer and they can explain. Otherwise, it is likely for privacy, secrecy.

In this case, our research target formed a Delaware limited liability company. He then purchased millions of dollars’ worth of real estate through that LLC. As the target was engaged in an eight-figure fraud, it made sense that he would want to hide these real estate purchases from the prying eyes of auditors and others who came looking into his transactions. He expected he could hide behind the Delaware company.

The addresses, however, gave him away. No search led directly to the Delaware company, but the address searches did point to real estate records – after all, real estate is commonly (if not legally required to be) sorted by address, and real estate records led to other real estate records, and pretty soon I had on my computer, a copy of a mortgage in the name of the Delaware company but signed by the target as Managing Member.

Looking for a Palestinian Business in Florida

The first red flag when looking at a purported Palestinian Authority-controlled company was its Israel address. I did not expect the next red flag to occur when the target company showed up on a US lawsuit court docket along with a ton of other companies that were parties to a grey market/fraud lawsuit. But was my target company really the one accused in the lawsuit? I tracked the company and its principal down to Florida and through a Facebook profile, tied it all together.

Oh No, Not There

There was nothing special about this case except that the person being looked at was about to take a very high position at a big company but turned out to have some serious skeletons. The award, however, goes to where he lived and where, frustratingly, a few other targets lived this year. North Carolina. Not every county in the US makes its civil and criminal records available via online database, but no state makes its records less available than North Carolina. If I’m giving out awards, I want to give one to North Carolina for delaying several research findings because of the long and winding road one must travel to track down records there.

I say all the time, doing background research is like doing tax returns. Most of my clients could do it themselves, but it's far less aggravating for you to pay someone else who has the expertise and is also willing to deal with the headaches. It's 90% just the grunt work, the blocking and tackling, but there’s also that 10%, the secret sauce; the tricks, and the minefields avoided. It means that the bulk of my work last year did not deserve any special award. Except some cases that did. Let me know who you think should win my 2022 research award.