Palin continues to deny the allegations. She says she doesn’t see any reason for a private investigation because she’s says she’s already openly answering all the questions.

When Palin terminated former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan a week ago, she said she wanted to take the department in a new direction.

This weekend she outlined that new direction. It calls for an increased focus on recruiting returning members of the National Guard and new initiatives to control alcohol and related problems.

“Alaskans deserve to know where we’re going,” Palin said.

After hearing the highlights of Palin’s new plan many are asking what’s really new about the “new direction.”

Lauren Rice worked as the legislative liaison for the Department of Public Safety under Walt Monegan for a year and a half.

“All of those proposals are worthy, but none of them are new,” she said.

The new plan calls for legislation to slow the flow of alcohol to rural Alaska.

Rice says that’s not a new idea.

“There was a piece of legislation that went through last year that increased the sentences for bootlegging that came from a trooper in Bethel, so we had that passed,” she said. “The year before (Monegan) was part of a bill that essentially created a database for the (Alcohol Beverage Control) Board to track written orders of alcohol into rural Alaska.”

Palin also wants more recruitment and training.

“There are national guardsmen coming home from deployment who are looking for jobs, we want to be able to have a mutually beneficial relationship with these public servants in the National Guard,” she said.

But a look at one of Monegan’s plans, the State Troopers’ Strategic Compass, has some of the same priorities.

“The Alaska State Troopers have been recruiting with military bases for years,” Rice said. “It’s been a practice that has a long history.”

Monegan explained in his plan that budget cuts forced him to do more with less. Gov. Palin asked public safety to cut $2.3 million, Rice said.

The governor’s office insists it’s a new direction that will include creative and more resourceful ways of doing things along with follow through and a shift in management focus.

Rambam is director of the Pallorium investigative agency, and gave a keynote speech on Saturday at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference. He said afterwards:

Anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it. The genie is out of the bottle. Data doesn’t stay in one location. It migrates to hundreds of places.

The range of places Rambam, and other private investigators, use these days varies from search engines like Google, to social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook, and even to instant messaging and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

With Google, every search an individual makes leaves some kind of trace, which private eyes, and other snooping parties can use to identity your interests, and other online leads to follow. Twitter, and other blogging services can reveal your present location, or at least your last known location.

Facebook and MySpace offers a massive range of information for interested parties to use to track you, with the basics such as your name, and birth date supplemented by photos, not even always added by yourself, and message from friends that could reveal interests, and even your present location.

Rambam said “I used to pay the police $500 for a driver’s license photo. Now I just have to go to MySpace. I can find your location without leaving my desk.” Then there are job sites, dating site, and even photo sharing sites.

While all of this readily-available personal information is a boon to private investigators, it’s a worry for those of us who use the Internet in all the various different ways it can be used - all of which gives complete strangers more and more of a picture of us, and our way of life.

But for lifelong Fall River resident Bill Silvia Jr., it’s a dream he’s living with roles in “The Departed,” “Fever Pitch” and “Underdog,” to name just a few.

It wasn’t always bright lights and big city for this Spindle City man though. Silvia, 48, has been a private investigator for the past 18 years. Four years ago, he began a side gig searching for famous people he could photograph to sell pictures to high-profile magazines. But the closer Silvia got to the celebrity limelight, which included a photograph of former 80s singer Bobby Brown coming out of Dedham Probate Court taken from atop a nearby Dumpster that was printed in a number of national magazine, the more he wanted to get closer to the action.

When his PI work allows him some rare free time, Silvia is traveling to Boston or Providence in hopes of landing parts in another television series or movie. It’s hard to argue with some of his extra work going back to 2006 with small roles in TV shows like “The Bronx is Burning” and “Waterfront” and movies like “Hard Luck,” “Stiffs,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “Townies” and more recently, “Shutter Island,” a film by Martin Scorsese now being filmed in Boston.

Along his four-year journey, Silvia has been able to rub elbows with dozens of famous people — starting with Scorsese, Matthew Broderick, Calista Flockhart, Ben Affleck, Jimmy Fallon, Lawrence Fishburne and others.

Silvia doesn’t kid himself though. There’s no leading man role at the end of this rainbow, no $10-million-dollar check to be cashed, but he can still have fun. He’s spent months recently in the filming of “Shutter Island,” watching scenes unfold with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley and other actors, including much of the last few weeks reprising his own role as a hospital security guard in the film.

“I’ve done live work in places all around Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York,” said Silvia.

Two years back, he auditioned for a small part in another Scorsese film, “The Departed,” at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, losing out to an East Providence police officer, though he would secure a small role as a Chinatown extra in the film. Silvia would land on his feet weeks later as a SWAT team member in the movie “Underdog.”

“One of the things is that with my looks, I can be cast as anything from an Italian, Greek, Portuguese, even a mafia member,” said Silvia. “You don’t get rich from this though, but it’s not too bad. Around $325 for a stand-in role and up to $1,500 if you get a line, even if you’re scene is cut.”

Silvia started out without any union representation but after missing out on a number of roles due to that fact has since become a member of the Screen Actors Guild over the last two years. Silvia said he regrets that fact that he got involved in the business so late, wondering if things may have turned out better for him if he had went after this line of work in his 20s rather than his mid-40s. But considering he has never taken an acting class before, he certainly could have done a lot worse.

With four years dabbling in the industry under his belt, he said you tend to learn the do’s and don’ts the hard way.

One lesson Silvia has learned is to not mix it up too much with the actors or actresses on the scene, despite the fact that most of them are very down to earth.

“You learn not to approach the principal actors, don’t try to take pictures with them or ask for autographs or you will get thrown off the set,” said Silvia. “They will probably sign it, but you will still be asked to leave. Most are approachable and many of them could have lunch in their own trailers but come out and eat with everyone else. But the studio doesn’t want them being bothered.”

Whether he’s just showing off his elbow in a scene from “The Last Shot” with Matthew Broderick and Alec Baldwin to posing as a restaurant patron in the “Pink Panther 2,” Silvia tries to juggle his personal life. He’s getting married in July and has a 16-year-old son — along with his full-time private investigation career and some acting mixed in. Silvia said it’s hard finding time for acting roles but keeping his actor portfolio database up-to-date and reaching out to a number of casting agencies in Boston and Providence helps people find him.

As for any advice Silvia would give to anyone considering a part- or full-time acting career, he said get ready for some very long days.

“You’re working 10 to 12 hour days if not longer and you could be bringing home $75 after taxes, but you have to put your time in,” said Silvia. “It can get discouraging if you put all these hours into a scene and then you go and see the movie and your part has been cut. It would be nice to get that big break and you do hope that the big part comes, but I’m happy to just keep doing what I’m doing. I won’t be quitting my job, but I’ll take what comes.”

During that time, workers supervised the repair of more than 300 vehicles in that department, deliberately falsely recorded 94 damaged vehicles as roadworthy in order to increase their value, and then allowed them to be placed on auction.

Geri Prior, Interim President and CEO of ICBC, faces the media Thursday as the Pricewaterhouse Coopers investigation report into the repair and sale of vehicles from the corporation’s Burnaby research and training facility was made public.View Larger Image View Larger Image
Geri Prior, Interim President and CEO of ICBC, faces the media Thursday as the Pricewaterhouse Coopers investigation report into the repair and sale of vehicles from the corporation’s Burnaby research and training facility was made public.

Staff and managers then fixed the auctions so that they, or their friends and family members, could automatically win the bidding process. ICBC said 42 of these cars were so badly damaged before their repairs, that they would have been used only for parts. ICBC interim vice president Geri Prior said managers who condoned the practice are “no longer with the company.”

When pressed, she refused to reveal how many managers have been terminated. Since managers condoned employees to fudge the records of these vehicles, no employees have lost their jobs.

The investigation showed that without a written policy against the practice, ICBC allowed employees to repair their own vehicles in the building during lunch hours and on weekends; 5 employees profited personally from resale of the repaired vehicles; In February, ICBC announced it was investigating itself, opening the corporation to third-party investigations by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers recommendations include tightening up procedures and corporate policies surrounding vehicle salvage designations (ie. how they’re classified in safety terms); making sure that all ICBC employees are trained and updated in policies and ethical standards, and limit the number of staff members permitted to change vehicle salvage designations. The firm recommended tightening up the policy and procedures, the use of corporate property, and test-driving vehicles.

Sandy said it was clear employees and managers deliberately changed the safety codes to raise the value of the vehicles. ICBC’s internal investigation found that another 91 cars, above and beyond the core 94 vehicles in question, were also classified as safer and more roadworthy than they actually were. These vehicles were only sold to licensed salvage buyers who then may have resold them to the public.

The research and training facility was closed in February of this year to allow the investigation to take place. Since it re-opened, ICBC no longer sends vehicles there for repair. ICBC released the initial results of its internal probe in March. The RCMP’s investigation is still underway.

The program, which started this year, has helped businesses recover thousands of dollars, a police spokesman said.

A presentation is scheduled for St. Paul businesses on Wednesday, 7:30 to 8:30 a.m., in the Western District Community Room at 389 N. Hamline Ave. More information is available by calling 800-880-5420.

The creature also goes by the aliases Yeti, Sasquatch or Skunk Ape. Skeptics have added monikers such as “pure fiction” and “rubbish.”

To longtime private investigator David Paulides, the legendary creature is yet another case to solve.

Four years ago, the 1974 graduate of Monta Vista High School and a 20-year Santa Clara Valley detective, got bored and wanted to combine his love of outdoors with a good mystery. So he decided to go in search of the elusive simian.

Paulides is the director of the North American Bigfoot Search. He claims it is the only group in the world researching and studying the subject full time.

“No one has ever given 100 percent of their time to this,” said Paulides, citing the lack of serious and credible efforts put into tracking Bigfoot.

This first batch of research is detailed in Paulides’ new book “The Hoopa Project: Bigfoot Encounters in California.” The book describes Paulides’ search along with eyewitness accounts and sketches of the creature. The book, due for release Aug. 1, coincides with the 50th anniversary of the creature receiving the name Bigfoot.

Paulides set out to find consistent patterns, so he and his organization did an exhaustive search of the Western United States to determine the optimum location. They studied accounts, times, dates, seasons and elevations coinciding with sightings. He analyzed 350 sightings since 1861 and plotted the data.

“It all came back to Hoopa,” said Paulides of the Native American tribe that inhabits an area in northeastern Humboldt County. “The Hoopa have been dealing with Bigfoot since early times. They run into it regularly; they just don’t talk about it.”

Paulides then spent every other week for nearly three years in and around the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. He spoke with the elders and many in the tribe as he dug deeper for Bigfoot-related clues.

“After a year I had the complete trust of the tribe,” he said.

Paulides and the organization wanted to add credibility to a search for what many believe is a creature that exists only in the imagination of popular culture.

“We wanted to hold witnesses accountable for their statements, something that is rarely done by (Bigfoot) authors and researchers,” he said.

Paulides developed a system where the team investigated sightings only if the witness signed an affidavit. If no affidavit was signed, no investigation was pursued.

“The witnesses appreciated the professionalism,” Paulides said.

To add to the professional and investigative nature, a forensic sketch artist who has worked with the FBI was brought in. Muscle structure, facial features and closeup accounts were sketched in detail. The full-color sketches are in the book.

Paulides was astounded to discover that 90 percent of the sketches looked similar to each other, but do not conform to what Paulides feels is a mainstream depiction of Bigfoot.

“If you’re gonna fabricate an account, you’re going to make it look like what everyone is familiar with,” he said, citing the famous Patterson-Gimlin film footage.

“The consistency can not be argued,” he said. “Most went against the grain of common knowledge.”

Paulides has enjoyed his time researching and writing about a subject he is convinced is the real deal. He and the organization will continue to keep searching.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” he said. “There is a lot more that needs to be understood. The puzzle will be solved.”

“I think a mother’s greatest fear is somebody trying to take her children, trying to take custody of her children, and that’s what I was up against,” she said.

Brinkley’s risky strategy of going public with the ugly divorce had paid off. CBS 2’s Pablo Guzman tells WCBSTV.com that Brinkley gets all properties and sole custody of their children, Jack, 13, whom Cook adopted, and Sailor, 10.

Cook gets a paltry $2.1 million and regular visits with the kids.

“It’s a very bittersweet moment because it really is the death of a marriage, but it’s also a new start for all of us,” said Brinkley.

The divorce becomes final on September 12.

“In any litigation, to reach this day is extremely difficult. It has been a long and trying road,” said Acting State Supreme Court Justice Mark D. Cohen. “I’m going to urge that both parties continue to do what they are doing. I want to wish both parties good luck.”

Theresa Mari, the children’s court-appointed guardian, said the agreement was in the best interest of the children.

It may have been the private investigation team of twin brothers Ty and Steve Dux who came up with the dirt that caused Cook’s attorneys to recommend against having the results of the investigation revealed. The pair had been following Cook for more than a year and say they’d found more damaging information even as he was testifying.

“We were gonna set up video screens and supply our video tapes through the year of all the surveillance that we did on him and his activities with and without the children,” said Ty Dux.

Brinkley, 54, was married to Cook for a decade before his affair with a teenager he met in a Southampton toy store catapulted their troubles into the public spotlight in 2006.

The trial, which was in its sixth day, revealed a litany of salacious allegations about Cook’s affair with 18-year-old Diana Bianchi, as well as interactive Internet sex liaisons that cost him thousands of dollars a month. Cook, 49, testified he gave Bianchi a $300,000 payoff after having trysts with her in his office and Brinkley’s Hamptons homes for several months in 2005.

The former Sports Illustrated model said she was devastated to learn of the affair from the teen’s stepfather, moments after Brinkley delivered a commencement speech at Southampton High School.

Despite a prenuptial agreement, the couple feuded in court over child custody, and bickered over properties Cook advised Brinkley to buy in the Hamptons.

Cook adopted Brinkley’s son Jack, whom she had with husband No. 3, Richard Taubman.

Brinkley and her attorneys contended that Cook’s admitted adultery and pornographic proclivities made him an unsuitable candidate for child custody.

“Anyone who would run the risk of destroying this wonderful life, anybody that would chase a teenager — I mean, a young girl — where is his judgment?” she said from the witness stand.

It was not clear what sparked the move toward conciliation after days of embittered testimony, but on Tuesday a court-appointed psychiatrist said Brinkley should be granted custody. Dr. Stephen Herman said Cook deserved liberal access to the children, but added that both parents were in need of counseling to deal with their personal issues.

Herman said that the model needs to examine her taste in men and that Cook is a narcissist with a bottomless ego.

Cook’s lawyer, Norman Sheresky, repeatedly accused Brinkley of seeking to “publicly flog” her husband, noting that she had supported keeping the trial open to the public.

“I didn’t want this trial. It’s humiliating for all of us,” replied Brinkley. “…I really, really wanted to settle this.”

Brinkley also rejected criticism that the graphic revelations about Cook would have an adverse impact on the children. She sent them to camp during the trial and contended most of the scandalous details already were old news.

She said she tried to spare her children the messy details of the breakup, including her discovery of Cook’s Internet porn habits. She told them: “I think Daddy has fallen out of love with me,” while assuring them they would always be loved.

As the scandal became public, she took the children on a private plane for a vacation in Colorado. “I took them to the top of a mountain, and we camped out under the stars,” without TV or Internet access, she said.

While they were away, she said, “Ms. Bianchi spilled the beans. She went on TV to get her 15 minutes of fame.”

Brinkley also has a daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, with rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famer Billy Joel. The 22-year-old testified that Cook picked on her and once shoved her head into a bucket of water after she showered too long and caused a plumbing problem; he denied it.

Brinkley’s first husband was artist Jean-Francois Allaux.

“We have a variety of clients, but recently females have shown much interest in having their partners followed. Not so much to see if they were cheating but to make sure of their status, especially before they are married,” said managing director of Ultimate Security Services, Howard Rogers.

Of his 30 cases thus far for the year, 24 were women seeking to have their men followed for a two-week period. Basic private investigator fees start at $120 per day.

The remainder of the cases came from companies who had potential employees checked out following the submission of resumés.

Other services included videotaped movements of the subject and detailed outlines of their whereabouts – the when, where and with whom.

Senior manager at A & C Security Services, Bernard Atherley, who said 90 per cent of his clients were women, revealed that home tapping was also becoming popular.

Good sources

“To avoid tailing a target around the island, some companies have very good sources and can go in a home and set up [a] recording device.”

Rogers said the females were often businesswomen who were very deep into their various careers.

“Barbadian women are very tough. My clients are professionals and they are often very hard to deal with. They want detailed information, not necessarily a specific result, but the findings must be compact enough for them to make a decision either way of the fence.”

Given the small size of Barbados, many would assume that it was not easy for a private investigator to follow someone undetected. However, Rogers said it was quite the opposite.

“People in Barbados are not really aware of what is going on around them. There are special techniques when tracking a subject in terms of the distance and so forth but generally, it is easy for us to tail our subjects without their knowing.”

With no male clients recorded, Rogers said men often fell in love, and at the stage of marriage were not interested in having their fiancée followed.

“Men are trusting; we fall in love very easily. But it shows that times are changing. Women are bent on knowing the status of their partner, his history and most of all if he is being faithful to them before they tie the knot. Not for the sake of their emotions, but more so their property and bank accounts.”

“They’re like an army out there,” said Johnson. “They’re in trucks. They’re on cell phones. It’s a business.”

With prices for aluminum, cardboard and newsprint going up and an economic slowdown putting added pressure on people’s pocketbooks, curbside refuse has become a hot commodity.

A truck piled high with mixed recyclables can fetch upward of $1,000; newspapers alone can grab about $600.

“These guys are becoming much more organized and much more prevalent,” said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems Inc., a garbage and recycling company in San Francisco and other cities throughout Northern California. “This has nothing to do with the lone homeless man picking up cans. We’re seeing organized fleets of professional poachers with trucks.”

The issue has caught the attention of state and local officials, who are seeking more stringent regulations to curb theft, saying lost revenue threatens the financial viability of their recycling programs.

Pilfering cans, bottles and other recyclables from bins is already illegal in many places, including San Francisco and New York City.

In San Francisco, poachers can be fined up to $500 and get six months jail time. In New York, thieves are subject to arrest, vehicle impoundments and fines of up to $5,000.

California lawmakers are also considering legislation that would make large-scale, anonymous recycling more difficult by forcing scrap and paper recyclers to require picture identification for anyone bringing in more than $50 worth of cans, bottles or newspapers and to pay such individuals with checks rather than cash.

In Westchester County, New York, a proposal would make large-scale curbside recycling theft punishable by time behind bars and fines of up to $2,000.

Companies are also taking measures of their own.

Norcal Waste contracted private investigators and installed surveillance cameras at San Francisco spots frequented by poachers. The investigators compiled dozens of photographs of old pickup trucks covered by spray-painted graffiti and piled high with recyclables allegedly stolen from residents.

The free weekly The East Bay Express, which covers Oakland, Berkeley and other Bay Area cities, hired an ex-police detective to stake out thieves and began retrofitting curbside newspaper racks to make them theft-resistant because thousands of fresh copies go missing some weeks.

“We don’t want to be spending all our energy printing papers that people take directly to the recyclers,” said Hal Brody, the paper’s president.

Mike Costello, vice president of circulation at the free San Francisco daily, The Examiner, has taken to doing stakeouts of his own.

In April, Costello followed a man driving around the city, emptying newspaper racks and loading the stolen papers into a van. He eventually pulled up alongside him, and told him, “‘Stay where you are. You’re in big trouble,”‘ Costello recalled.

Costello called police and the man unloaded his spoils - thousands of copies of more than 15 publications, including multiple newspapers and piles of free San Francisco tourist maps and brochures.

NorCal Waste Systems estimates that in 2007, more than $469,000 in recyclables were stolen by hundreds of trucks. Officials from the City of Concord, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of San Francisco, figure they’re out $40,000 a year, while the city of Berkeley values the loss upward of $50,000 annually.

In the last five years, aluminum prices on the London Metal Exchange have climbed from around 65 cents a pound in 2003 to a record high of $1.50 a pound in July. Recycled paper and cardboard prices have also spiked, driven in large part by a burgeoning recycled paper export market.

“Newsprint is a hot grade,” said Mark Arzoumanian, editor in chief of Official Board Markets, a publication covering the paper industry. “There is a voracious demand in China and India for recycled paper.”

By cargo container load, the United States exports more waste paper than any other product. Last year, 20 million tons of recycled paper were shipped from U.S. ports. Approximately 75 percent of that paper goes to China, where it is reprocessed into shoe boxes, newspapers, cereal boxes, and the assortment of cardboard packages encasing all the consumer products China manufactures.

“China just doesn’t have a heck of a lot of trees to make paper with,” said Arzoumanian.

The force became involved in the search for Madeleine shortly after she disappeared 14 months ago from a holiday flat in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz just before her fourth birthday.

No-one has been arrested or charged in connection with her apparent abduction.

Madeleine, known as Maddie, disappeared after her parents left her sleeping in the apartment as they dined with friends in a nearby tapas restaurant.

Her younger brother and sister were also in the room, but they did not wake.

Madeleine’s parents were made “arguidos”, or formal suspects, on September 7 last year in one of the many twists in the case.

The couple insist that Madeleine was kidnapped and strongly deny any involvement in their daughter’s disappearance.

Madeleine’s parents were not in court, but their spokesman Clarence Mitchell welcomed the move to release the 81 pieces of evidence which relate to calls from members of the public to police soon after Madeleine disappeared.

Speaking outside London’s High Court, he said: “Kate and Gerry McCann welcome this compromise reached with the police.

“If we hadn’t gone to court we wouldn’t have these 81 pieces coming in. That information now goes to our private investigators, who will work on it, all as a priority.

“Anyone of those could unlock the information that could lead to Madeleine being found.”

The judge, Mary Claire Hogg, urged anyone who can help police to come forward.

“There is, of course, one person who knows what has happened to Madeleine and where she may be found,” she said.

“I entreat that person, whoever they may be, to show mercy and compassion and come forward now and tell us where Madeleine is to be found.

“I hope she will be found soon, alive and well.”

Portuguese police said last week they had filed their final report into Madeleine’s disappearance, leaving the public prosecutor’s office to decide whether to pursue the investigation.

Unconfirmed press reports said police had found nothing to incriminate her parents. The former police chief who led the probe last week said in an interview that he was “convinced” Madeleine was dead.