The modern private investigator

The modern private investigator

It’s night in the city and a female shape is silhouetted through the glass of a second floor office door.

“My husband’s cheating on me,” she said as she came through the door.

“Why would he do that?” A guy would have to be crazy to cheat on a dame like this. Her slinky red dress showed she had all the right equipment to keep anybody at home.

It’s the classic opening for a thousand private eye stories, novels and movies. People haven’t changed, but techniques today are different.

PIs, or private investigators, used to be mostly retired police officers, just like the movies and many of them are working out of a home office that is run by their wives while they are working.

More and more these days, Private Investigators are from “civvie street”, normal people who have drifted into it. In a busy modern suburb of London in Croydon, Jorge Salgado-Reyes, a former Loss Prevention Investigator for well known High Street companies who works primarily through contacts with Solicitors or other personal contacts. asked the client “How did you find my number?”

Surveillance is the major tool, and today it is most likely done with a stabilized video camera with an 800x lens taken through a privacy glass from a nondescript van.

Salgado says working for other companies as an employee didn’t work for him. “I love investigation work. Being a PI is little different from working for the retail industry, You’re still a fact finder who is getting to the truth. I leave it to the client and the lawyers to draw conclusions.”

“You have to know the law, and whether you are gathering evidence for a civil suit, or proof beyond a reasonable doubt for criminal activity.” explains Jorge Salgado-Reyes.

PIs do not have to be licensed at present but that will all change in the near future and it will drive the cowboys underground.

My bread and butter between surveillance jobs is process serving in the London & South East areas. “I do the more difficult cases,” he said.

Like the fictional PI, the real-life investigator sometimes has to question the motives of the client, especially with tracing and matrimonial cases.

“I ask, ‘What do you want to do with the information?’ ” Jorge Salgado-Reyes said. “If they say they want to get a divorce I tell them you don’t need an investigator for that. The courts don’t seem to care, so why waste the money proving something you don’t need? Most just need to know for their own peace of mind.”

“I usually get approached by individuals who need to know 100% that their partner is cheating,” Jorge Salgado-Reyes said of matrimonial cases. “They think something is going on but they’re not sure. I provide that peace of mind.”

It’s a shadowy world, and most investigators like it that way. “It’s not a television show, it’s real,” Jorge Salgado-Reyes said. “I became a PI one year ago. What a great career it is, and I look forward to going to work. Every day is different.”