Established 1981
Toll Free: 1.800.834.2512
In Nassau County: 1.516.742.6520
An excerpt from "His Eyes Are on The Lies," by Ron Dicker, which appeared in the New York Daily News 3/7/95:
"Michael McKeever gets the goods when love goes bad. He is one of New York City's private eyes who specializes in 'matrimonial surveillance.' That's Yellow Pages talk for spying on two-timers. As always, business is booming.
"A client's suspicions turn out to be right more than 90% of the time, he and colleagues estimate. But he doesn't take sides. He is simply doing a job...
"Out of his lower Manhattan office, McKeever takes all kinds of cases - including trademark infringement, adopted children searching for their natural parents and occasionally murder. But, 75% of his business is infidelity.
"The majority of his clients are women wanting to know the inevitable ... McKeever asserts that the best weapon is still legwork. His only concessions to the 90s are fast-speed film to shoot in darkness and a cell phone ... Then, as now, photographs are indisputable. 'Even if clients don't believe me, they'll believe the pictures'."
Vault Guide To Schmoozing
With finesse, however, keeping track of people can be easy and fun. Since his junior year at Harvard, Internet entrepreneur Kaleil lsaza-Tuzman has been compiling a list of friends and relatives on an Excel spreadsheet. Isaza realized the necessity of keeping up-to-date information on friends' whereabouts after transferring to Harvard from Brown University. Tuzman spent his first year at Brown, then took a year off from school to surf in Hawaii. When he arrived at Harvard as a transfer student, Tuzman realized that he had lost touch with many of his friends from Brown.
"When I was getting close to finishing school (at Harvard), I thought that I needed to get information down so I could keep track of people," he says about starting his spreadsheet. Now, his list is seven pages long - Tuzman prints it out every few weeks, pops it in a pocket, and makes notes on it when he learns of a change in a friend's information. As for keeping track of his friends? Tuzman says he regularly calls college alumni offices to track down friends from Brown and Harvard University to get their latest info.
Organizing your contacts is crucial. Like Isaza, Jay Alix, whose Michigan- based firm, Jay Alix & Associates, is at the top of the corporate turnaround business (having helped restructure National Car Rental System, Unisys and Wang Laboratories), carries around printed lists of his contacts. His list is a bit longer than Isaza's - nearly 90 pages of teensy type, as described in a profile of Alix in The Wall Street journal. He keeps in touch with hundreds of people with a system of notes and names written on 3-by-5 index cards that he buys by the tens of thousands. Many of Alix's major projects -such as the Wang Labs job, and a $4 million project with the discount drug chain Phar-Mor -have come from personal contacts.
AIN'T NOBODY CAN'T BE FOUND
Want to track down a long-lost buddy or business associate? You may not go to the lengths of hiring a private investigator, but the pros can at least give you some tips, Mike McKeever has more than 20 years of experience as a PI, To hear McKeever talk, it's not about punching out the bad guys or wearing funky masks, Instead the key, at least to the missing person part of the business, is to "just go with what seems logical to you," "The one thing I would say is try and see if the parent is in the old place, and 50 percent of the time that's true," McKeever tells us, "Start at the beginning, Maybe their parents are still there,"
If you're really interested in tracking somebody down, resourcefulness and persistence will get you to your destination. McKeever tells one story of finding the biological mother of a client. "I didn't even know her name," he says, "What I knew was that in 1967 her father owned a hardware store, and she was in the wallpaper business in Philadelphia, I was working from that,"
"I thought to myself, I'm looking for the wallpaper historian of Philadelphia, the guy who knows everything about the wallpaper business in Philly," McKeever says. "I finally got a hold of that person after a bunch of phone calls. He told me, 'Oh you must be looking for so-and-so.'.
Although he then had the name of the woman, McKeever was concerned about a possible name change because of a marriage. So, he found the courthouse that handled the adoption. By checking court records, he found the name of the lawyer who handled the adoption. Although the lawyer did not want to talk about the case, McKeever found a willing ear in the attorney's secretary. "She was sympathetic, even though the lawyer was by the book," he recalls. "She told me, 'I heard that [the woman's] brother was in the wholesale liquor business in the Virgin Islands.'” McKeever made some calls to the Virgin Islands, but found that the woman's brother had retired to Virginia. "I called him, said 'I'm looking for your sister, it's a matter of a small inheritance. It's these two old ladies down the block who really liked her... He had her call me." When the woman called, McKeever verified her identity, and then smoothly backed out.
