7

UNTRACEABLE TRASH, ANONYMOUS UTILITIES

One of my PI friends reports getting the following information about a couple with two teens. It took him less than a week. None of the information came from an informant or from the Internet.

• The name of their doctor and the information that the father was buying Viagra.

• Someone in the family was consuming a lot of cheap whiskey.

• The son was working for minimum wage at a hamburger joint.

• The family was behind on their phone bills, due to lengthy calls to Spain.

So where did the information come from? From their trash. Once set on the curb, it’s fair game for anyone! And such items as empty pill bottles, paycheck stubs, bank statements, telephone bills, magazines, and want ads that are circled in a newspaper can reveal amazing amounts of information.

CAN YOU SOLVE THIS MYSTERY?

A bilingual private investigator in San Jose, California, takes a call from a law firm in San Diego. They wish to locate a certain Victor R. in order to serve a subpoena in a civil lawsuit. They have only two pieces of information:

1. Victor, who was born in Ameca, Jalisco, is staying with friends from his hometown. They live “somewhere” near Lake Tahoe, on the California–Nevada border.

2. Victor has a younger brother named Fernando who rents a one-bedroom unit in a sixty-four-unit apartment complex in San Jose. However, the PI is not to contact Fernando because if he does, Fernando will tip off his brother.

Worse, the lawyers want fast results and yet they put a limit on what the PI may spend. If he needs any helpers, he will have to use slave labor. The intrepid PI takes the job, despite the following drawbacks:

• If Victor is with friends, there is no way to track him down via rental agreement, telephone, or utilities.

• There are more than 10,000 Latinos in the Lake Tahoe area and nearly 80 percent of them come from the same place: Ameca, Jalisco (Mexico).

• A quick check shows that there is no landline telephone at Fernando’s apartment.

Our resolute PI is on the job that very evening, prepared for action. What he wants is every bit of trash that leaves Fernando’s apartment for the next thirty days. He observes that there are two large Dumpsters near the entrance of the parking lot, and learns that they are dumped between 3 and 4 a.m. every day. There is no uniformity in the bags the residents are using. Some are paper, some are white plastic bags from the supermarkets, and some are large black trash bags. The PI knows of a Guatemalan family where three teenagers are desperate for work, any kind of work, even diving into Dumpsters. If you wish to play detective, see if you can answer this question:

How will his Guatemalan friends know which garbage belongs to Fernando?

Okay, check your answer with what happened next. Late one evening, the PI goes from door to door, calling at each of the sixteen apartments that were on Fernando’s floor. He wears a uniform with a name tag and presents each renter with a free supply of thirty trash bags, speaking Spanish or English as the occasion warrants.

“This is part of an experiment by our company,” he says with a disarming smile. “The idea is to see if these extra-strong bags will cause less spillage when our trucks unload at the processing plant. If you and your neighbors use these bags for the next thirty days, we may continue to furnish them at no charge.”

A young, pregnant woman answers the door at Fernando’s apartment. He gives her the pitch and hands her the bags.

“Muchas gracias,” she says.

Then the three Guatemalans got their assignment. They are to take turns drifting past the Dumpsters both morning and evening, checking to see if there is a bag from Fernando’s apartment. For every bag they bring in, the PI pays them $20 cash. If he finds what he is looking for, there will be a $100 bonus.

In the next two weeks, they bring in eight bags, and two days later they bring in the bag that pays a $100 bonus—Fernando has a smartphone and he’s tossed the statement in the trash after tearing it into tiny pieces. Pieced together with tape, the statement shows six long-distance calls to the same number at Zephyr Cove on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. That’s all it takes to track down Victor, at a cost of $280 to the kids and $96 for the bags.

Have you have already guessed how the kids knew which bags to pick up? At fifteen doors, the PI gave away dark green bags. At Fernando’s door, he handed over dark blue bags.

To paraphrase the late Johnnie Cochran:

If it can be read,

Then you must shred.

WHAT YOUR TRASH REVEALS ABOUT YOU

Trash is not the remains of food. That is garbage. Trash is everything else. Unfortunately, the two may be mixed unless it is coming from an office building. Trash is to a detective what a gold nugget is to a prospector. Just imagine what investigators would have learned about you and your family if they had secretly gone through your trash for the last ninety days. We shall assume they started with a blank sheet, having no idea as to the occupants of your home. To put a picture together, they would have watched for any of the items in the following list. If there were any items that you had merely torn up (rather than using a shredder), they would have put the pieces back together.

• Bank statements with your name, address, account number, and balance.

• Telephone bills revealing your number.

• Utility and other bills, showing the name and address you use for those.

• Credit card statements and receipts, invoices, ATM receipts.

• Paycheck and/or money order stubs.

• Empty bottles from prescription medicine, with your doctor’s name.

• Personal and business letters; all address labels.

• Scraps of paper revealing a phone number or e-mail address.

• Beer cans, wine, and liquor bottles.

• Anything to indicate drug use, including triangular scraps of paper.

• Itemized grocery and pharmacy slips, for evidence of alcohol, illness, condoms, birth control pills, or anything to indicate homosexual activity.

• Classified ads from newspapers, to see if anything is circled.

• Magazines, travel brochures, or anything that would indicate interest in weapons or strange practices.

What else can you think of, in your particular case? Or that of your friends, relatives, or even your children?

Do you have a weekly arrangement for a woman to come in and clean? Does she have access to the trash?

If you work in an office, who handles the trash? Did you know that janitors are sometimes bribed to turn trash from a specific office over to private investigators or government agents?

Mostly likely, if you do everything else right, no one will be able to sift through your trash because they cannot find you in the first place. But if they do (perhaps by following you home), then make sure all papers have been shredded and that there is nothing further to be revealed from your trash. (Empty prescription bottles, whiskey bottles, and other nonshreddable items are best tossed in a Dumpster far away.)

UTILITIES

By utilities I mean the companies that furnish electricity, garbage pickup, water and sewer connections, and natural or propane gas. (Telephones will be discussed in chapter 10.) Never give your true name—much less your Social Security number or date of birth!—to a utility company, nor to any other private company that will furnish a service at your actual residence.

Rather, if you own your home in the name of a limited liability company (see chapter 15), give each company the name of the LLC and insist that the name in the company database is in the name of the LLC only. In fact, do not give them your own name under any condition. Try a fictitious one, or use your wife’s maiden name. Even then, this should just be her middle initial plus last name. Do not furnish her Social Security number or date of birth.

A quick-and-dirty method of setting up the utility accounts on short notice is to use a nominee (proxy), someone who will act on your behalf (see chapter 13.) Usually, the utility company will demand a cash deposit in lieu of being able to check your credit by using your Social Security number. Fine, give them a money order or a bank check for the deposit. It will be returned to you after one year of timely payments. Make sure that the bills never come to your home address. Give them your “ghost” address (see chapter 5), explaining that (a) you do not have a mailbox at the street address, and (b) all bills are paid from your “business” (ghost) address.

What has been accomplished? Just this: If a private investigator—acting on behalf of a stalker or working with a law firm or insurance company—starts searching for you, one of the first places he will check (after cable TV) will be the utility companies. If your name is in any database, the PI will obtain the address. But as long as your name never shows up, the search will be in vain.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

We have a small business that deals with top-secret information. How can we make sure that trash taken from our office building at night does not, under any circumstances whatsoever, fall into the hands of a private investigator from one of our competitors?

First on the list is to cross-shred everything. Then, give the job to the class of janitors recommended previously. Here is an additional suggestion, in case you do not want anyone to even read what may be lying open on a desk.

In larger cities, there are congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses who speak other languages besides English, such as Spanish, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, French, Hindi, Japanese, Albanian, Polish, Portuguese, Greek, Punjabi, Hmong, and—in California—Quechua. Communication may be a problem, but if the workers speak a little if any English, that may be a plus. If fact, if a PI tries to bribe a worker who speaks only Albanian or Chinese Mandarin, best of luck!

What’s the best kind of a shredder to use?

A year ago I sent out a mass e-mail to those on my privacy list, warning my readers to use only cross-cut shredders because strip shredders may not be as secure as they thought. (This was because some PIs now hire retired persons to put strips together using a special clipboard tool.)

I received some interesting feedback from my readers. The best came from Hamlet in Washougal, Washington. A warning for us all!

My mother (bless her soul) once shredded an important medical receipt. Upon discovering her mistake, she took the pieces and, while watching the Larry King show, put the puzzle back together. She was so proud of her work when she finished!