Marital espionage: The private eyes who catch spousal lies
February 9, 2011 at 7:29 am by Shawn Alff
In a waterfront hotel in Tampa, a Miami businessman sits gulping $14 martinis in a dim corner of the lobby bar. A young woman with dark hair and a red dress enters. The businessman approaches her, tries to shake her hand, then accepts an awkward hug. They return to the corner of the bar and
chat for about ten minutes before he drains his cocktail, straightens his Tommy Bahamas shirt over his gut, and exits with the woman to his room. She is a recently married USF student moonlighting as a $250-an-hour escort and the man is married, or so I’m told by the two men showing me video
of the encounter on a smartphone. Alan Payton and Tim Scheuermann look like the kind of nondescript guys you’d barely notice drinking at the table next to you or driving in the car behind you. Their job depends on them being forgettable. They are private investigators for the Investigative Support Group (ISG), and every year around Valentine’s Day business booms. “If they have a mistress, they’re going to see her around Valentine’s Day,” Payton says. “Maybe a couple days before or a few days after, but it’s going to happen.” Which makes V-Day high season for marital espionage.
Knowing when and where a spouse will likely cheat is important, especially considering how time intensive surveillance is. “The gym is one of the greatest places to see infidelity happen,” Payton says. “Cheaters go there at 6:30 or 7 to meet up when their spouse is at work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve caught a partner coming out of the gym kissing their lover or getting into the same car together.” ISG sends out a two-man surveillance team to reduce the chance of detection, so the hours add up fast. Accordingly, its clients are usually quite well off, people with household incomes in the low six figures who are often going through, or preparing for, a high-dollar divorce. However, catching a cheater can be easier for the PIs than, say, collecting evidence on a fraudulent personal injury lawsuit. Because they’re working with a client who is married to the subject under investigation, and who consequently has joint property rights, the investigators can do things like install recording devices in a home or put a GPS unit on the subject’s car. In the case of the Miami businessman, the wife called the Tampa hotel where her husband was staying to request his call history. Payton then ran the numbers and discovered they all belonged to escort services. While the PIs do have some standard surveillance equipment — black SUVs with tinted windows, high definition cameras, recording devices hidden in key chains — Payton’s favorite piece of spy gear is his smartphone. Everyone has one, which means a cheater will never suspect that the man sitting a few tables away texting is actually filming the cheater flirting with an escort. Similarly, while technologies like Facebook have made it easier for spouses to cheat, they also make it easier to get caught. “It’s amazing what people will put on their Facebook’s,” Payton says. “We go on there all the time.” The team has established a fake female persona on Facebook, but they deny requests from clients to entrap a spouse. They refuse to set up meetings or send attractive confederates into a bar to proposition a subject. They leave this kind of sexual espionage to their competitors. More women contact ISG than men, but the company does get a high number of husbands and even
some mothers-in-law as clients. A spouse’s suspicions are often very telling, usually provoked by some minor change in a partner’s behavior.
“He’s staying out more, he’s going to the gym, he’s changed his appearance,” Scheuermann says. “Those can all be indicators.” In a recent case, a husband grew suspicious when, doing the laundry for the first time, he discovered thongs. This struck him as odd, considering his wife never wore thongs for him. But proof of infidelity doesn’t necessarily lead to divorce.