Recent anonymous online research commissioned by salgadoinvestigations.com of 1’476 British people has found that 78% have stolen from their place of work at some point in their lives. This means that with individuals admitting to stealing, on average, more than £920 worth of items throughout their careers, theft at work costs the economy nearly £432m[1] each year. The research stipulated that office stationary did not count, and the average was bunked up by many claiming that they have stolen more than £5000 worth of goods.

Those who denied pilfering from work however are certainly no angels, as 57% of people who haven’t yet stolen from a place of work said that they would if they thought that they could get away with it.

Jorge Salgado-Reyes, a leading UK Private Investigator is an expert in the fields of corporate and company theft, infidelity and person tracing with more than 18 years in the business, and has published the findings. Jorge commissioned the research to gain more of an understanding of Britain’s habits, and to highlight how companies can help turn this problem around.

Installing or more closely monitoring CCTV could be the saving grace for those companies who are noticing that their assets are dwindling. When asked “what would deter you from stealing an item?” 38.1% of the participants admitted that video monitoring would be the main deterrent. This was followed by 19% claiming that law involvement would be the one thing to dissuade them, with just 2.4% worried that their mum could/would find out.

Jorge had the following to say,

“In my line of work, you get used to shocking stories and facts, but these stats make for pretty scary reading. Companies are doing little to stop thefts of these kinds, with very few having deterrents such as monitored CCTV or robust asset management systems in place. The theft of confidential personal data has been in the media eye recently and for good reason – more and more companies are securing the services of Private Investigators like me to detect people committing often large-scale criminal acts of these kinds.

“It just goes to show that in today’s Britain, you really don’t know who you can trust.”

Amongst the stolen items anonymously detailed in the comprehensive survey were large sums of cash, alcohol, furniture, computer equipment and even one boss’ desk.

Tarita Virtue, a lingerie model once dubbed by Maxim magazine the “sexiest private investigator in America,” told jurors last week that she played a key role in probing screenwriter Vincent “Bo” Zenga and other Pellicano targets.

Pellicano, 63, who is acting as his own lawyer in this blockbuster Tinseltown case, is expected to attack the bombshell’s memory and true role with his investigative company after he hired her through a temp agency.

When Pellicano investigated Zenga, the scribe was suing the private eye’s client, studio head Brad Grey, over a writer’s credit for “Scary Movie.”

Virtue, who called herself a “junior detective” when working for Pellicano, allegedly listened to and transcribed hours of wiretapped conversations of Zenga and other targets.

In a memo presented to the City Council Monday night, State’s Attorney Michael L. Regan said he had analyzed the roughly 500 pages of employee-interview transcripts, which he had requested in late January from New London Police Chief Bruce Rinehart.

“I do not believe further investigation by our office is warranted,” Regan wrote in his Feb. 20 letter to Rinehart.

“The questions raised by the report mainly relate to labor-management issues. The allegations of criminal conduct are unsubstantiated and appear to be beyond the statute of limitations,” Regan wrote.

Rinehart said he also reviewed the report and agreed with Regan’s analysis, according to a Feb. 26 memorandum Rinehart sent to City Manager Martin H. Berliner.

In the report, which was based on 34 voluntary interviews, public works employees told investigators of on-the-job marijuana use by supervisors, according to a six-page summary of the interviews. City attorneys have declined to release the full report.

Employees also alleged that the department’s second-in-command, who retired in the fall and whose position the city has eliminated, installed a plow on his city truck for personal use and disposed of debris from a private business on city time at the transfer station.

The report’s allegations of illegal activity were among numerous and often contradictory employee complaints, which included mismanagement, delayed city projects and extremely low morale in the city’s second-largest department.

The interviews for the $14,000 investigation, which was conducted by Countermeasures Investigations/Surveillance LLC of Wethersfield, occurred this past summer. The firm’s findings were delivered to city officials around August.

At 61, he was a genial colleague, a homeowner, an avid metal sculptor, a father, a husband and a registered Republican.

He was everything, police said, except Jason Vonstraussenburg.

He was arrested last week by Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies, 36 years after he had escaped from a prison camp in Michigan.

Despite a record of nonviolent crimes, he was listed there — under his real name of Roger Lee Crona — as one of the state’s most-wanted fugitives.

On Tuesday, those who knew him at UC Santa Barbara were stunned.

“I totally couldn’t believe it,” said project scientist Eileen Hamilton. “He’s a normal, nice guy. He’s a valuable member of our campus community, and I’m going to miss him.”

University officials said the job he held in the biological sciences machine shop required no background check, unlike jobs that involve handling cash, access to student residence halls and tasks in a number of other sensitive areas.

Vonstraussenburg was asked on his 1994 application whether he had been convicted — under any name — of misdemeanors or felonies that led to a prison sentence or probation.

“There was nothing in his responses that would have disqualified him from working here,” said university spokesman Paul Desruisseaux.

In the machine shop, he was known as a high-tech Mr. Fix-It with a knack for innovation. At one point, he hooked up an alarm system on a laboratory freezer so researchers would know if delicate cells inside were in danger of thawing. Using mostly spare parts, he fashioned a device capable of processing 36 DNA samples at once instead of six.

One of more than 30 fugitives on Michigan’s “most-wanted” list, Crona was convicted as a young man of offenses that didn’t make the kind of local headlines sparked by his recent arrest.

In 1971, he was on parole after a conviction for receiving stolen property when he was found driving a car with someone else’s registration and a license plate that had been altered with a phony number painted on it.

His previous offenses included breaking and entering, reckless driving and larceny, said Russ Marlan, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Crona was sentenced to 2 1/2 to four years at a minimum-security work camp and escaped June 20, 1972.

“After a couple of months, I guess he just walked out the back past the cows and off he went,” said Tony Tosta, a retired Santa Barbara private investigator who said he and Vonstraussenburg had been friends for more than 30 years.

Tosta said he was unaware that Vonstraussenburg was an alias. “He occasionally alluded to a nickname of Roger. Other than that, I had no idea,” he said.

The two had bonded over a mutual love for building outsized, outrageous contraptions.

They collaborated on a 60-foot-long conveyance that combined the body of a small plane with the chassis of a motor coach. Equipped with a hot tub, it appeared in local parades and in car shows as far away as the Midwest.

As Vonstraussenburg, Crona worked at an airport machine shop and as an auto mechanic in Isla Vista, near the UC campus, before being hired at the university, Tosta said. He is married, with a stepson, and has a grown son from a previous marriage.

“Other than one DUI, he’s kept his nose clean,” said Tosta. “I can’t believe why they’re making such a tremendous stink out of this.”

An anonymous informant e-mailed details of Crona’s present life to Michigan authorities last week. Who did it — and why — remain a mystery.

“It surprised me that anybody would turn him in,” said his ex-wife, Anna Vonstraussenburg, an accountant in Mesa, Ariz. “Pretty much everyone likes him.”

Divorced for 12 years, the two remain friendly. She said she knows his current wife and is friendly with some of her former husband’s ex-girlfriends.

“I knew he had a little bit of a past, but I didn’t know everything,” she said.

Crona is in Santa Barbara County Jail, awaiting extradition to Michigan. He could be charged with escape from prison, a felony that carries a five-year maximum term.

Those minnows are confidential informants — CI’s in police talk.

Whatever they’re called, they can be a cop’s eyes and ears and calling cards. They can vouch for undercover investigators and get them inside the inner circles of criminal enterprises.

Problem is, most CI’s are bad guys, too, with criminal records. That’s exactly what makes them one of the best tools to infiltrate the illegal drug trade. Birds of a feather do drugs together.

“The CI’s have the inside track,” says Stewart Field, a retired New York State Police undercover drug investigator. “They know and have dealt with the bad guys. The bad guys trust them. They have the information, contacts and knowledge that police don’t have.”

That’s why informants were used in the August 2007 Operation Crack Hammer investigation in Elmira that resulted in the arrest of more than 20 drug dealers, says Elmira Police Chief Scott Drake.

“Drugs drive the criminal justice system,” says Richard W. Rich Jr., the Chemung County Public Advocate who has represented hundreds of drug defendants. “Other crimes, like burglaries, robberies and petit larcenies, are done to get money to buy drugs or for the drug dealers to exist.”

Drug investigations are unique and more difficult than say, a burglary. With a burglary, the crime has been committed, and police have evidence, like fingerprints.

But when it comes to drugs, police may suspect someone of selling them, but there’s no crime or evidence until police or an informant actually buys drugs from the dealer. With a drug investigation, the police have to set up the crime and need an informant to make the buy, says Rich.

Where do these informants come from? Some are law-abiding citizens who want to help rid their community of drugs.

But those folks are rare, says Drake. Usually the informants have been arrested, are behind bars or are about to get a long prison sentence, Drake adds. They’re backed into a corner and want to make a deal, like a shorter sentence for helping police catch a bigger fish.

“Or they know we’re breathing down their necks, and they’re going to get arrested next, so they come to us to make a deal,” says Dan O’Brien, a retired Chemung County Sheriff’s Office drug investigator.

The informants know the cops want the ringleaders, and CI’s are willing to cooperate if it will save their hides.

In return, the district attorney may agree to drop some charges against the informants or recommend a shorter prison sentence if the informants help solve a bigger crime.

On rare occasions, the informants receive cash for their information, usually with money confiscated in previous drug busts.

“There were very few that we gave money to,” O’Brien says. “When we did, it could be as little as $20 to as much as $1,000, depending on how badly we needed the information.”

But money isn’t as big of a carrot-and-stick incentive as a promise of reduced prison time. When informants work for cash, their hearts aren’t in it as much as if they were working to get out of jail, say police. And there’s always the possibility that informants may use the money to buy drugs.

Often, police develop and nurture potential informants.

“Let’s say you pull a guy over for speeding, and you know he’s running around with some bad guys you’re investigating,” says O’Brien, owner of O’Brien Private Investigations in Horseheads. “You give him a break. You give him a scolding and let him go, but you do it with the understanding that he will come through with some confidential information for you in the future on a felony.”

Some people may disagree with cutting a criminal a break. If someone does the crime, he does the time. But police say the end justifies the means.

Reliable informants save time and money, and more importantly, they are often the best way to get an airtight conviction against drug dealers, say cops and lawyers.

Police know that using informants is a delicate give-and-take situation that can go bad faster than a speeding bullet.

Informants can lie to investigators and commit crimes while working for police. Once that happens, the deal is off.

“We tell the (district attorney) that the CI was jerking us around, and the DA works to get the maximum sentence possible,” O’Brien says.

That happened years ago with a CI in Corning who was giving investigators information on other drug dealers.

“While he was working as a CI, he was out doing burglaries and drug deals,” O’Brien says. “He was informing on his (drug-dealing) competition to put them out of business.”

That’s why police often put their informants under surveillance or have other informants watch and report back on a new snitch.

“You have to meet with them face to face as often as possible and keep tabs on them,” O’Brien says.

That’s why the cops don’t tell informants much of anything. If they do, it’s to test the informant.

“Sometimes we ask them to get us information we already know to see if what they come back with and tell us is true,” says Field, who worked more than 150 drug cases involving CI’s. “It takes a lot of police investigation work to make sure an informant is reliable.”

Of course those meetings don’t take place at police headquarters or with uniformed officers.

Instead, they meet in a secluded place, like the middle of a rural dirt road or a church or wherever people won’t expect it.

Wherever the contact occurs, though, police always have to be wary of what the CI’s say.

“Never trust them. Every time they tell you something, you have to say to yourself, ‘They are lying,’” O’Brien says. “You have to verify everything they tell you. You have to know what they are doing, where they are going and who they are hanging out with, and make sure they’re not taking information from you and taking it back to the bad guys.

“Nothing is sacred when dealing with informants.”

Jim Pfiffer’s Real Life column about people, places and life in the Twin Tiers appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. You can reach him by e-mail: jpfiffer@stargazette.com or call (607) 271-8277.

By Friday afternoon, investigators found no further evidence and will end the investigation, according NMSU Police Chief Jaime Chavez.

“While there was no new information to cause this review, NMSU remains concerned about all students, faculty and staff and will actively pursue unsolved cases,” Chavez said.

NMSU would not confirm what cold case they are investigating, but the address where investigators were seen digging — 714 Standley Drive — matches the last known address for Edyth Warner, then 35, and her then-11-year-old son, Nicholas Smith, who disappeared Feb. 23, 1991.

The case is the only missing persons investigation at NMSU since the remains of Joanne Dodge, an NMSU student who went missing in 1981, were found in 2005 in her car submerged in Burn Lake.

Warner, an art student, and her son left their home by foot the day they disappeared. Warner left behind her car and 3-year-old son, Andrew. She took almost $1,000 in cash and $10,000 in gold coins, according to statements her husband made to police.

Henry Warner, Edyth Warner’s husband at the time, thought when she disappeared she might have taken her son to visit family in California. The couple was having marital problems. The two were missing for about a week before he reported it.

In 1991, investigators were quoted as saying they didn’t suspect foul play.

Randle Dewees, Edyth’s father, said he had been contacted by NMSU police about reopening the case.

“I’m glad,” Dewees said, said in a phone interview from his California home Friday. “Maybe they’ll stumble onto something.”

Dewees, 84, still alert, has kept meticulous notes on the case, and has been a critic of how police originally handled it in 1991.

“The old hands had no interest in this,” Dewees said. “But this is the second or third time it’s been brought up (to reinvestigate).”

Since 1991, he has visited Las Cruces several times to talk with police. His last visit was in October 2004. He has spent $25,000 to $30,000 on lawyers and private investigators, he said. He hired two psychics in attempt to find his daughter. Strangely, both psychics directed them to search an area in the desert about 12 miles north of Las Cruces.

Dewees said he has never been hopeful the pair would be found.

For years, Dewees said, he maintained a contact list for people who had lived near 714 Standley Drive at the time of his daughter’s disappearance. He said he has since lost track of most of them because they’ve moved several times.

Dewees also kept track of Warner, who officially divorced Edyth Warner, but now has only a vague idea of where he lives. He said he hasn’t seen his other grandson, Andrew, since the disappearance.

He believes Andrew does not know of his maternal grandfather.

Dewees said he talked with two officers on Friday and that they will be visiting him at his California home on Monday.

Renee Ruelas-Venegas can be reached at rruelas@lcsun-news.com

SACRAMENTO — A former private investigator who admitted forging documents to try to save the lives of four death row inmates — including one convicted in Orange County — was sentenced Thursday to five years in state prison.

Kathleen Culhane, 40, admitted that she repeatedly made up statements from real witnesses and jurors and forged their signatures to try to stop the executions. The fake statements were turned over to attorneys and filed with the courts and governor’s office as they considered whether to commute the men’s death sentences.

Culhane said she acted out of her moral opposition to the death penalty.

“I was very conscious that a life held in the balance, she told Sacramento County Superior Court Gary Ransom. “My crimes are crimes of conscience.”

She said she acted “not for personal benefit or gain but out of necessity” to influence a death penalty system she believes is dysfunctional.

But prosecutors said her actions threatened the same legal system she was sworn to support. State Attorney General Jerry Brown called Culhane’s actions the greatest fraud ever against the state’s criminal justice system.

Culhane pleaded guilty in April to two counts of forgery and single counts of perjury and filing false documents. By accepting a five-year prison deal, the former San Francisco-based investigator avoided a possible 19 years in prison on 45 counts.

She was immediately placed in handcuffs and led off to begin her prison sentence after Ransom imposed the sentence.

Her attorney, Stuart Hanlon, said she is likely to serve about two years and eight months behind bars before being paroled.

She was discovered after Michael Morales petitioned Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency as he was about to be executed last year for the 1981 rape and murder of a Central Valley teenager.

The other three death-row inmates are: Christian Monterroso, convicted by an Orange County jury for the 1991 murders of Tarsem Singh and Ashokkumar Patel and the attempted murder of Allen Canellas; Jose Guerra, convicted by a Los Angeles County jury for the 1990 rape and murder of Kathleen Powell; and Vicente Figueroa Benavides, convicted by a Kern County jury for the 1991 murder and rape of a 21-month-old child.

What happened. Claire Miller, a cashier at a Home Depot store [location not stated] had $1,000 missing from her cash drawer when she finished her shift on February 23, 2003. The next day, two investigators from The Home Depot’s loss prevention group asked her to leave her register and led her to a small room. There, Miller said, one of them loomed over her and the other blocked the door. They refused to allow her to call her husband or a lawyer and told her she could leave the room only after she signed a confession.

After 2 hours she finally signed it, and she was terminated. The Home Depot pressed larceny charges, and the case went to a jury. There was also evidence, however, of flaws in The Home Depot’s cash accounting system and evidence of several other employees who could have been responsible for the loss. At the trial, Miller’s lawyer raised the issue of the voluntariness of the confession, but the trial judge refused to conduct a separate hearing on that issue. Her confession then went before the jury as a key piece of evidence, and the jury convicted her. Miller appealed, raising the issue of voluntariness.

What the court said. If the evidence before a trial judge raises a substantial question about the voluntariness of an employee’s confession, that judge must hold a hearing on its admissibility outside the presence of the jury. This requirement applies regardless of whether the confession was obtained by police or, as here, by private investigators.

In this case the appellate court was troubled by what it called “oppressive interrogation techniques,” including isolation and coercion, and stated that the question of whether Miller’s confession was “of free will and rational intellect” was very much a live issue. At the evidentiary hearing that should have been held, the voluntariness of the confession should have been measured by “whether, in light of the totality of the circumstances surrounding the making of the statement, the will of the defendant was overborne to the extent that the statement was not the result of a free and voluntary act.” The court reversed the judgment and set aside the verdict. Commonwealth v. Miller, Appeals Court of Massachusetts, No. 05-P-1252 (5/4/07).

Point to remember: In questioning employees about possible workplace crime, employers should know that according to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the admissibility of any confession depends on (1) the time and conditions under which the questioning took place, (2) the content and form of the questions, and (3) the physical and mental condition of the employee during the questioning.

The house was infested with fleas, the plumbing was backed up, much of the furniture was broken and the stench of cat urine filled the air.

Matthew Booth, 34, was lying face-up on the mattress when he was shot in the head early July 30. His 13-year-old daughter told investigators she used a 12-gauge shotgun to shoot him in the face, a crime that her attorney said was precipitated by years of sexual abuse.

The Associated Press on Sunday toured the Elizabeth Township home, located about 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, and found revolting conditions.

“I’ve been in crack houses that have been nicer,” said Eddie Rose, a private investigator hired by the girl’s attorney, Patrick Nightingale.

Prosecutors initially charged the girl as an adult with criminal homicide. But after visiting the filthy home Friday, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. decried the deplorable conditions and said the girl would be tried as a juvenile.

A judge on Tuesday approved transferring the case to juvenile court. The Associated Press does not identify possible victims of sexual abuse.

The girl was sent Friday to a psychiatric clinic, where officials determined Monday that she should remain for up to 20 days more.

Matthew Booth was cremated in a private ceremony, his brother Josh Booth told the AP after visiting the house Sunday.

“Matthew was his brother and he loved him, but there is no excuse for the living conditions,” said Kim Booth, Josh’s wife. “We can’t defend this.”

Police told NBC 7/39 some high-profile suspects have been nabbed thanks to the eye in the sky. Those suspects include the so-called floppy-hat bandit, the rotten-tooth bandit and the Reagan-mask bandit.

Detectives said they are now able to enhance surveillance video and change the way they solve crimes.

They are using the same technology first used by NASA for space technology.