Ex-Agent Now Has Own Crime Fighters : Private investigator: Paul Magallanes won a bitter bias suit against the FBI. His agency goes after white collar crooks.

Paul Magallanes got his first ideas about the FBI from watching the movies back in the 1950s and later spent most of his career finding out that reality was different.

Magallanes wound up working for the FBI as one of its highest-ranking Latino agents. But he left the bureau 21 years later after winning a bitter class-action discrimination suit in 1988 that he and 310 other Latinos brought against the agency.

These days, the silver-haired, 53-year-old Thousand Oaks resident has his own Century City-based investigations agency, Magallanes Associates International, fighting white collar crime.

“It’s as exciting as being an FBI agent, but now we’re working on corporate villains,” said Magallanes. “No more dodging bullets.”

When Magallanes left the bureau in 1989, he said he had always intended to retire early and go into business. However, friends and another Latino agent said the extended legal battle with the bureau forced him to quit.

Latino business leaders praise his career move. They say few Latinos have been able to establish a network like Magallanes’, using mostly former FBI agents. Nearly all of the 75 investigators Magallanes has hired are bilingual.

In the United States, there are fewer than a dozen investigation firms headed by Latinos, according to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. And among those firms, only one works on international cases.

Born in Chicago in 1938, Magallanes is the son of Mexican immigrants from the state of Jalisco. His father worked as a meatpacker, and the family lived behind the stockyards.

Spanish was Magallanes’ first language, and he learned English while a young boy. But, because his Roman Catholic school was run by nuns who spoke Lithuanian, he also had to learn to communicate with them in Lithuanian.

“These nuns didn’t care if you were Mexican or Polish,” he said.

In 1968, armed with master’s and doctoral degrees from American University in Washington, D.C., Magallanes applied to the bureau. It was the 1959 movie “The FBI Story” that Magallanes said drew him to the FBI.

“All I had were visions of Jimmy Stewart and machine guns,” Magallanes said. “I said, ‘That’s for me.’ ”

At the time he joined, Magallanes was one of only 28 Latino agents employed by the FBI around the country, he said.

Leo Gonzales, a former FBI agent in El Paso, described Magallanes as a “pit bull-like” agent who was known as brutally honest. Latinos were so rare in the bureau that fellow agents knew each other by name, even though they worked on opposite sides of the country.

“Being a Hispanic in the FBI meant that on any kind of detail, we’d run into each other again and again,” Gonzales said. “They used to call us the taco squad.”

Tony Silva, one of two attorneys who handled the suit against the FBI, said Magallanes was one of the 12 agents who were able to gather useful evidence against the agency to support Latino agents’ allegations of discrimination.

Magallanes reported that despite years of experience, he had to undertake tedious assignments such as wiretaps of conversations in Spanish because he was the only Spanish-speaking agent around. Such assignments were rarely given to experienced agents, he said.

In addition, Magallanes suffered retaliation for his involvement in the suit, Silva said. At one point the agency took away his gun and his FBI car on grounds that medication Magallanes was taking for a back injury might hinder his performance as an agent.

“He was absolutely shaken by that incident,” Silva said. The incident was partly to blame for Magallanes’ decision to quit, he said. “I think he grew weary of it.”

Between 1988 and 1990, 28 Latino special agents resigned from the FBI before the mandatory retirement age of 55.

James Perez, who was named by FBI Director William Sessions to revise the bureau’s internal policies regarding promotions and assignments, acknowledges that the suit forced needed reforms.

The FBI has hired civilians to translate wire taps instead of using special agents, some Latinos have been given promotions they sought, and today about 5.7% of the 10,200 special agents are Latinos, compared with 4.2% of 9,395 agents in 1987.

Magallanes’ company employs a staff that includes some of those FBI agents who resigned from the bureau.

Its brochures paint the tangled corporate webs his agency is geared to unravel. He advertises “hostage and terrorist negotiation,” “corporate espionage,” and “undercover operations.”

For all this, Magallanes commands an $85-an-hour fee with a $1,000 retainer.

Because his work consists of exposing the vulnerabilities of corporate clients, Magallanes refuses to reveal names of the companies that turn to him for help. Nor is he willing to disclose his company’s revenues since it was formed in early 1990.

But he acknowledges that at least a dozen clients are firms that own factories on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexican border that export goods to the United States and other countries.

Ruben Jauregui, a former president of the Latino Business Assn. in Los Angeles, said that for years Latino businesses complained about not having bilingual investigation firms around that were also headed by fellow Mexican-Americans.

With the possibility of a free-trade agreement between the United States and Mexico, Mexican-American grocers are interested in learning about their competitors south of the border, and many have been willing to pay Magallanes to do the job, Jauregui said.

Earlier this year, Magallanes received a late-night call from a company that had uncovered a theft of more than $1 million at its Latin American plant.

Magallanes would describe the company only as a producer of industrial equipment. It faced labor problems and its chief executive was the victim of threats, he said.

Within hours, Magallanes took a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to the country. He arranged for bodyguards and helped sketch escape routes in the event of an attack on the chief executive.

He arranged the installation of a closed-circuit television system to monitor operations and trained workers to detect theft. The situation was under control in four weeks, Magallanes said.

Magallanes has been able to convert his skills in law enforcement into a keen eye for business, said Joe Sanchez, a director for the Mexican American Grocers Assn.

Three years ago, Magallanes was ranked among Hispanic Business magazine’s 100 most influential people in the country because of the FBI suit. Today when Magallanes meets with business leaders, they see him as one of them rather than as an ex-agent.

“With the world getting smaller, with the United States doing more work in South and Central America, I think Magallanes went into the business at the right time,” Sanchez said.