Today’s Sam Spade--Tough, High-Tech Too

Spade stopped pacing the floor. He put his hands on his hips and glared at the girl. He addressed her in a loud, savage voice. “Nobody followed her. . . . I made sure of it before I put her in the cab. I rode a dozen blocks with her. . . .” Spade made a harsh noise in his throat and went to the corridor door. “I’m going out and find her. . . .”

--Dashiell Hammett, “The Maltese Falcon”

Don Crutchfield is a private eye. He is a fast talker, a veteran street sleuth right out of the mold of Sam Spade, or perhaps Philip Marlowe or some other character that Raymond Chandler dreamed up. Tail somebody? You bet. He’ll drill a little hole in the taillight, something he can see from a mile back.

Stakeouts are no problem. Borrowing a trick from the Jack Nicholson film “Chinatown,” he’ll slip a cheap watch under the tire and tell you exactly what time his quarry left the bar--or wherever.

Right now, Crutchfield is barreling down Sunset Boulevard, passing the lighted entrance to Bel-Air in a van equipped with binoculars, mini-blinds, a telephone, camcorder and just about every electronic gadget but an ejector seat. (His passenger hopes there is no ejector seat.) All the while, he is talking. At 47, he knows these streets; he knows Los Angeles in a jaded, back-alley way that comes only with hard miles.

“She hit the Bel-Air gate and was gone--I didn’t know which way she had turned.” He is telling of the time he was hired to trail a mogul’s flighty, drug-abusing wife.

“I went on instinct and turned left because I figured she was heading toward Hollywood,” Crutchfield says, rapid fire. “Christ, I was going 90 miles an hour! I had an old Pontiac Gran Prix. . . . I caught sight of her taillights in through here. . . .”

On this night, at a less hell-bent pace, Crutchfield is rolling toward a surveillance job in the inner city, a place where a manufacturer has been losing thousands of dollars worth of scrap metal. Someone has been stealing it at night. On the way, the boyish, blue-eyed detective--whose firm, Crutchfield Investigations, employs a staff of 30 agents and office workers at an undisclosed location in Beverly Hills--is describing his life in the shadows: How he has crept, unseen, along the tangled webs of high society, moving from bar to bar, nightclub to nightclub, on the trail of thieves, drug dealers and cheating spouses.

“This was--always has been--a night city,” Crutchfield says, recalling times--before California’s no-fault divorce law took effect in 1970--when he seemed to live in his automobile on the search for illicit affairs. He trailed one woman for six months, rolling up $50,000 in fees, but he eventually saved his client $3 million in the divorce settlement.

“The night is what we lived for. When that sun went down, that’s when we’d come alive. You knew all the side roads, the side streets. . . . We were Stealth bombers; we were invisible; you never saw us. We’d go for months without losing anybody, which is insane in the city of Los Angeles.

“It’s amazing to watch the whole city move and they don’t know you’re there.”

No-fault divorce radically changed the field of private investigation. Few clients nowadays are willing to lay out $10,000 or $20,000--or even twice that--to track a wayward spouse when such evidence means nothing in dividing assets.

But the private eye is by no means a dinosaur. Today, about 6,000 state-licensed investigators do business in California, roughly double the number of a decade ago, according to Robert J. (Bob) Frasco, owner of the R. J. Frasco Agency in Glendale and president of the California Assn. of Licensed Investigators. In addition to those, there are perhaps 8,000 to 12,000 other agents who work as employees of licensed investigators, accumulating the 6,000 hours necessary to qualify for the state licensing exam.

Tackling cases ranging from insurance fraud to industrial spying, these investigators know that the night indeed has a thousand eyes, if not more.

“There are a lot who do undercover work in factories, looking for violations of company policy and criminal acts . . . such as theft (and) illegal use of drugs,” Frasco said. Some agents specialize in running background checks on corporate employees and household servants; others search for children kidnaped during custody battles. A number do considerable business confirming or refuting tidbits of celebrity gossip on behalf of tabloid newspapers.

Beginning agents make about $25,000 a year, but the scale climbs to $50,000 for licensees and upward of $500,000 for the heads of major agencies. Crutchfield, who runs one of Los Angeles’ larger agencies, charges $55 an hour for his agents and $75 an hour when he handles a case.

Crutchfield’s practice these days consists largely of background screenings, narcotics “sting” operations in the workplace and other industrial surveillance. He has placed agents in warehouses where they have functioned for years as undercover “moles,” watching for drug sales and theft. “It’s reported to me and that guy (drug dealer) is out of there before he even gets a cup of coffee,” Crutchfield says.

Swinging his van through a freeway ramp in Gardena, Crutchfield sets a course into a bleak industrial zone marked by truck lots, spare gray buildings and chain-link fences topped by razor wire. Half a block from the target building, he pulls to the curb. His right-hand man, agent Mark Ford, is casing the area through the mini-blinds.

“This is a tough area,” Ford says, pointing out a derelict Volkswagen bug packed window-high with trash, its headlights missing. “This is where they steal them, strip them and drop them off.”

“I could put you in that thing for little or nothing,” Crutchfield quips.

The stakeout does not stop the flow of stories. No, there is plenty to tell, practically a lifetime of this, dating to days as a Culver City teen-ager when he hung out with the son of well-known Los Angeles detective Nick Duber.

Duber eventually took Crutchfield under his wing in an office on Rodeo Drive, where Crutchfield spent much of his time tracking patrons at the exotic Polynesian nightspot known as the Luau. One notable case in those days involved a stolen briefcase crammed with cash, marijuana and music contracts. The briefcase happened to belong to a member of the entourage of a red-hot singing group that was in town--the Beatles.

“My job was to get the briefcase back,” Crutchfield says. The thief, who was demanding $25,000 in a paper bag, was a particularly cunning adversary, arranging secret meetings, sending emissaries, until at last a late-night rendezvous was arranged near Los Angeles International Airport. The money changed hands, then the police moved in for the arrest.

“I identified the briefcase,” Crutchfield says. “I said, ‘Those are our papers, that’s our money, but that’s not our marijuana.’ They busted (the thief) for marijuana possession.”

Crutchfield laughs aloud. He goes on to recall days chasing embezzlers in Peru, arranging security for celebrities such as Marlon Brando and Jerry Lewis, jetting to New York to track a rich philanderer.

On this night, his stakeout nets nothing; the lifeless industrial zone remains as quiet and desolate as a tomb.

But that is part of the job, too: long hours, all-consuming tedium.

Rolling once more, heading for home, Crutchfield is again spinning stories--the time he helped close down 21 porno shops all at once; the time he wheedled a hotel room next door to the woman he was following by telling the clerk he had made a lucky business deal there; the time he uncovered widespread drug abuse at a company which installs navigational equipment; the time. . . .