by Adam Tanner
Oscar Goodman’s clients from his life as a criminal defense attorney included some of the biggest names linked to the mob, including Meyer Lansky, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, and Anthony Spilotro (the latter two inspired the Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci characters in the film Casino, in which Goodman played himself as their defense lawyer). “In the old days, what you would do is that you would call a private detective,” Goodman said. He might ask for an address or phone number. How the detective got the information was not his concern.
Goodman’s old go-to guy was Eddie LaRue. Even the name sounded like a relic of a film noir private eye. Many of Goodman’s most notorious clients have since passed away, but LaRue was energetic and working on cases in Las Vegas. I contacted him and he agreed to meet. Two days later we had lunch at the Golden Nugget, one of the city’s oldest casinos, dating back to 1946. LaRue wore a Bluetooth earpiece for his cell phone and a short-sleeve shirt that hung over his slacks. He appeared a little more weathered than his seventy-one years, perhaps the result of half a century chasing leads in the desert sun. We sat at his favorite table, where he chatted amiably with his favorite waiters and waitresses (who are often great sources for information).
Over lunch LaRue told stories about some of his famous clients: Elvis (always polite, saying “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” to everyone); Sinatra (arrogant, had people in his circle deal with people he did not know); Spilotro (didn’t talk a lot, didn’t make a lot of jokes); Rosenthal (very arrogant, the kind who deserved to be blown up); and Howard Hughes (who, true to form during his reclusive Las Vegas years, never met LaRue even when using his services).
So, back in the day, how did he get personal data? First, LaRue bought the Criss Cross city directory, which surveyed households to learn who lived where, where they worked, how many children they had, their addresses and telephone numbers, and whether the person owned the apartment or home.2 Then he read Nevada Legal News, which published all sorts of public information, including when people had utilities turned on or off. He also looked up public records such as vehicle and voter registrations, although many of the characters he was looking for were not regular voters.
Over the years he developed sources at utility companies who were willing to share information. In the 1960s and ’70s, LaRue had a good contact at the local power company. Once a week he would show up bearing a basket of fruit, a couple dozen donuts, or some other gift as well as the list of people he wanted to learn more about. After that contact left the utility, he had to pay someone else $5 or $10 per name.3 Insiders at the gas and water companies were not as helpful because they did not have as comprehensive coverage as the power utility. He would pay a telephone company employee $25 to $100 for a private number. The proliferation of carriers, cell phones, and then Internet telephony after 2000 made one-stop shopping for numbers impossible.
In LaRue’s line of work, the stakes were high. Finding a key person could make the difference between winning a multimillion-dollar lawsuit or getting a client acquitted in a criminal case. There was a darker side to this kind of personal information. In the days of mob influence, details dug up by a private investigator could lead to intimidation, an assault, or even death—if the information landed in Frank Cullotta’s hands. From the 1960s until the early 1980s, he worked as an enforcer for the Outfit, as insiders called it, close to Tony Spilotro. If someone was behind in his payments, Cullotta would mete out a beating. If someone was considered a sufficient threat or nuisance, a boss might ask Cullotta to rub the person out. In the movie Casino, he was portrayed as the character mediating between the Las Vegas and Chicago mob bosses. Cullotta himself appears briefly near the end of the movie, gunning down people. In researching this book, I found no more serious impact of personal data.
Cullotta, who was born in 1938, had a falling-out with Spilotro, and in 1982 he agreed to provide evidence against some of his former associates. He entered the witness protection program and still lives under an assumed name. I wanted to find him and followed the old-school path. I called his former FBI debriefer and asked if he might pass on my contact details. He questioned me for some minutes, then agreed. A few weeks later, Cullotta called and agreed to discuss how the Outfit had gathered personal information.
The mob went first to a private investigator and asked for details on people. Then it would turn to helpers like Cullotta to do the job at hand. Cullotta did not concern himself with how the investigator turned up his leads. “How he done it, I don’t know, nor did I care,” Cullotta said, speaking in his no-nonsense Chicago accent.4 He might also visit a relative or friend of the person the mob was seeking. He had a convincing way about him when gathering details. “Of course, they would disown the person we were looking for, but yet they would know just about where they were, and they would reveal information,” Cullotta said.
Private investigators who worked with tough guys made a point of not asking why someone needed personal information. “It was their job—they didn’t have to know why. They didn’t ask why. They just wanted to get their money. They didn’t want to know the reason why you wanted them. If you told them, ‘I want to kill the guy,’ they are going to run away, that makes them part of a conspiracy,” Cullotta said. “You’ve got to remember something. The private investigator you would get is a little shady anyway. So you are not going to hire somebody who is not shady. You have to find somebody that is hooked up to somebody that is shady. And in the world I lived in, there was always somebody available.”
Cullotta recalls receiving information from another private investigator, not LaRue, whom he knew as well. The PI would tell him where the person lived, worked, family circumstances, and more. “You’d get a complete rundown, depending on what they wanted you to do,” he said. “If they wanted you to whack him, you’d get this from your direct boss, whoever your direct boss might be at the time. If they wanted you to break his head, then you took that on yourself, how to do it. You’d break a leg or break an arm, you know, to make him pay. Because if you kill him, you don’t get your money.”
Given what his line of work was back then, Cullotta said things worked just fine without the Internet and easily accessible databases. “Our way of doing it probably was, I think, a little more efficient than all this Internet shit,” he said.5
But whether the old-timers liked it or not, everything changed with the Internet. Today, anyone ready to pay a few dollars can “get the dope” on anyone. You don’t need to hire a private investigator or own a newspaper’s archive. Big firms, private investigators, corporate headhunters, lawyers, and others have long had access to background check services, an industry that grew when computers made it possible to store databases of information after the late 1960s. The Internet and digitization of public records brought such services to the masses. Already in the 1990s, some online firms started selling unlisted phone numbers for $69.6 “This is the information age, and information is power! Controversial? Maybe; but wouldn’t you sleep easier knowing a little bit more about a prospective business partner, employee, baby-sitter, neighbor or significant other?” a company called DocuSearch advertised in 1996. “Now any Internet-savvy individual can locate lost friends, track down debtors and deadbeats, or discover the secrets of the people with whom you associate. It’s all totally professional, completely legal, and entirely confidential.” In the 2000s, more entrepreneurs opened Internet businesses selling personal data built upon public records from thousands of government entities. Companies have created a host of websites that allow anyone to conduct background checks on most of the 318 million people in the United States. They advertise heartwarming reasons for their services, such as reconnecting old friends and lovers, reunifying families, and empowering singles to check potential dates.
US law restricts the trade of some personal information, such as medical and financial data, and how personal data can be used in hiring and financial decisions such as granting loans. But for the most part, the new data entrepreneurs can buy and sell
our information to their hearts’ content. By the 2000s, when Gary Loveman became the CEO of Harrah’s, the new gold rush of personal data was under way, and all types of entrepreneurs were entering the field.
Marketing to Newlyweds
Data brokers gain information about Chevy Chase and the rest of us by collecting the electronic clues we leave behind just by living a normal life in the modern world. Landmark days in our lives generate not just especially happy or sad memories but public records as well. These records not only document our lives for the government but give insights to marketers, including casinos, into who we are.
Consider the couple traveling to Las Vegas to get married. This happens quite a lot. Every month thousands wed there, making Vegas the US marriage capital. Nearly three times more people wed in Clark County, Nevada, than in the Chicago area, a city with more than double the population, and more than four times as many as in Miami, which also has a larger population than Las Vegas.7 The bride and groom may tie the knot with a Cleopatra wedding package at Caesars Palace or opt for an Elvis theme at a petite wedding chapel. But at some point they must interrupt the fantasy and stop by the Clark County Clerk’s office to obtain a marriage license. They pay $60, provide their birth dates and places of birth, address, parents’ names (including mothers’ maiden names), the parents’ places of birth, details about any previous marriages, and Social Security numbers.
Everyone goes through the same process, whether a drunken couple stumbling in for a spur-of-the-moment matrimony or a celebrity pair’s well-choreographed pageant. Over the years Elvis Presley, Angelina Jolie, Jane Fonda (with Ted Turner), Frank Sinatra (to Mia Farrow), Paul Newman, and Kirk Douglas have all obtained Las Vegas marriage licenses. After the wedding ceremony, the presiding official has ten days to send the marriage certificate to the Clark County Recorder’s office, which scans the document and enters the data. If the couple ends up buying property, the recorder’s office logs those details, as well as liens, court judgments, financing, and other relevant documents.
All of the personal information captured in this process is public. Anyone can see it, record it, and pass it on or sell it to others. And that’s exactly what a handful of individuals such as Marc Hall do. They spend their days trolling through public computers at the Clark County Recorder’s office hunting down information to sell to others such as banks and title companies. Hall, an “abstractor,” works freelance for a number of companies. An alarm installation business pays him $35 a day to gather the latest home purchase registrations. He types in up to 200 new registrations a day, recording them as soon as they are posted. Speed is important because a homeowner will buy only one alarm system. After Hall passes on his updated list, the company sends salespeople door to door. Other companies hire abstractors to look up new house registrations for landscaping services and pest control.
Another company pays Hall $40 a case to research a property’s history, including liens, judgments, mortgages, and tax information. Companies might use such information to refinance loans, for example. Clark County places summary information from many of its public documents online, but not the actual documents. Hall’s value comes from extracting details from the scanned copies of the original documents, which may contain Social Security numbers (in more recent documents these are redacted from public view), dates of birth, and fuller details. Companies doing background searches on potential hires ask him to check court records about people, earning him anywhere from $4 to $10 per person.
He got into the field working for the legal reference service Lexis in Los Angeles. In 1999 he struck out on his own in Las Vegas. He does his job when he wants to and makes anywhere from $80,000 to $150,000 a year. He writes up his reports from home. Just days before I met him he had added a new public record of his own into the system: he had married for the first time at age thirty-eight.
Of course, you don’t have to hire an abstractor to find public records. The documents are there for anyone to look up, increasingly via the Internet as well. Want to know what boxer Mike Tyson paid for his home or when he married? The details on him and any other local celebrity can be found in a few clicks.8 A search for Steve Wynn, one of the most important people in Las Vegas, turns up dozens of public documents.
Until the Internet era, people who wanted to see marriage licenses or other public documents would have to go in person to a government office and apply to see a specific document. After a wait of some minutes, the visitor would peruse the papers in a reception area under the watchful eye of a department employee. Copying pages was expensive at $1 a page.
Casinos looking to generate new business sometimes turn to public records to develop leads. For example, starting in 2011 the deluxe Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Resort asked both the county clerk’s office and the recorder’s office for an ongoing list of everyone who had married in Las Vegas three months before.9 The casino already knows the couples who wed at its resort. But it wanted to lure a far broader group of newlyweds to return. So it decided to invite couples to Vegas half a year after their wedding. The clerk’s office charged $1,500 to do the initial work to gather the data, and then $150 a month for continuous updates—spare change for a massive casino that might comp a good client that much in a night.
The Wynn marketing campaign was apparently not a big success. Clark County officials say the casino operator stopped asking for the information after about a year and a half.10 But many companies have solicited new clients from public records, and the practice has grown for many years. Turning to outside data such as marriage records was exactly the kind of information Caesars executives had long declined to collect. But should they?
Shy Data Brokers
For an industry focused on revealing information about others, data brokers are awfully shy. Take Spokeo, one of many data brokers offering services to the public, which long advertised itself as “not your grandma’s phone book.”11 Several graduates of Stanford—where Google’s founders had also studied—started the site in 2006 and offered especially detailed dossiers. I wrote cofounder Harrison Tang to ask if I could meet him. Eventually the company invited me to visit its headquarters in Pasadena, California, and confirmed a date. I purchased a plane ticket from Boston. Days before the departure, the company abruptly withdrew the invitation without offering a reason for the change of heart.12
With a nonrefundable ticket to Los Angeles in hand, I tried instead to meet Jeff Tinsley, who founded MyLife.com in 2002. His assistant said Tinsley’s schedule would not permit a visit at that time but said we could talk by phone later. He scheduled and then abruptly canceled interviews four times over a period of weeks. Eventually he stopped responding to emails.13 Jim Adler, then the chief privacy officer of the data broker Intelius, did not respond to four emails over a period of many weeks, but he subsequently agreed to speak after we met by chance at a congressional briefing.14
PeopleFinder.com distinguished itself by including a short description of its management team on its website, something few online data brokers did, especially in the earlier years of the industry. The company’s website also showed a photo of three men and two women.15 The photo looked a little too perfect. A Google image search revealed that PeopleFinders was not, in fact, showing the real people who ran the company but a group of models in a stock photo. Available for just $19 online, the same image appeared on sites such as the Bank of Ireland and the Ontario Real Estate Association. Rob Miller, the Sacramento-based PeopleFinder.com founder and CEO, initially said he would review questions by email but then did not respond.
Then there was PeopleSmart, another site that tried to differentiate itself by respecting privacy even while dealing in personal data. The two brothers running the company grappled with the same issue as Caesars: in gathering and using data, what is effective and what is morally appropriate? The company published real photos of its management and actually revealed how commercial data brokers gather information. The company was even willing to reveal some insider secrets to me
.
6
Dossiers on (Virtually) Everyone
Seeking Disruptive Ideas
Three and a half years apart in age, the Monahan brothers—Matthew and Brian—grew up in Murphysboro, Illinois, a town of eight thousand people. Their mother worked as a sixth grade teacher; their dad sold mobile classrooms—a type of mobile home used by schools undergoing renovations or unable to afford more permanent structures. The parents encouraged reading and limited TV watching; the Monahans did not own a computer until 1998, when Matthew was in high school.
While at the University of Southern California, Matthew set up an e-books company, where he wrote about how to get into college, how to do well in the SATs, and similar topics. He built his business by advertising on Google and Yahoo. When people looked up words such as “scholarships” or “scholarship tips,” his ads encouraged them to visit his sites scholarshipsecrets.com and collegeshortcuts.com. Those who clicked on the ad found some basic tips and a pitch to buy his $29 book.
The site made him sound a bit like a carnival pitchman. “When I graduated high school I had won over $130,000 in free scholarship money, aced the SAT and ACT, and had admission offers from Harvard, MIT, Penn, Georgetown, USC, Wake Forest, and several other top-notch institutions,” he told visitors to collegeshortcuts.com. “Then I went on to attend the college of my choice—for FREE.”
Even though he was indeed enjoying a free ride in college, Matthew dropped out after two years, in 2004, to focus on being an entrepreneur. A North Carolina company eventually bought his business, and he moved to the company headquarters. He stayed for two years and, with the economy booming, left in 2006 with $1 million in his pocket and a burning desire to create his own Internet business in Silicon Valley. He just wanted to be part of the exciting 2.0 expansion of the web and create a platform of some kind. To prepare for his new life, he changed his first name, which had been Air’n. He found the name too unwieldy; people couldn’t spell it, didn’t know how to pronounce it, and could not figure out the gender. He went through the formal legal process and became Matthew.