CLOSE-UP
A cop I’ve never met before is ransacking my trash. This is the kind of investigation that brings down murderers and drug rings. After the first fistful of Equal packets, he clicks his tongue--he’s found something incriminating.
It’s not like it sounds. I’d offered up my trash bag of my own volition; I wanted to see Paul Edholm Jr., a reputed “garbologist,” in action. And Edholm, a Beverly Hills police detective assigned to bunco forgery with a specialty in dumpsters, quickly struck “black gold”--fraud lingo for credit-card carbons. “Visa numbers start with 4, MasterCard with 5, and the first four digits tell you what bank it is,” he says. “Once I have your account number and signature, all I need to do is make a telephone call, say I’m you, order merchandise and have it delivered to a mail drop. Or I get my little iron out, flatten an old card, re-emboss it with the new number and go on a shopping spree. Credit-card fraud probably runs $20 billion to $40 billion a year nationwide.” To avoid being a victim of such garbage crimes, Edholm advises buying a portable “power shredder” and turning every bill, slip or stub into slaw before tossing.
The contents of my Hefty bag are small potatoes compared to what Edholm has found in the course of investigating forgery, check cutting, money laundering and other white-collar crimes. Seven years ago, Edholm’s team went through murder victim Ron Levin’s wastebasket and found the telltale note that busted the Billionaire Boys Club. More recently, a cache of botched Dali prints in a dumpster cracked a multimillion-dollar art-fraud case. Refuse rummaging is a common form of sleuthing--garbage, says the U.S. Supreme Court, is legally fair game.
How does one become a garbologist? The title, it turns out, stems from a publicist’s pen rather than any official training. Edholm’s trashy reputation recently earned him a gig consulting for “Mystery Date,” an Orion movie in which Ethan Hawke scavenges the rubbish of a girl he wants to meet, hoping for clues to help him break the ice.
“Everybody says I should write a book on garbology,” Edholm, 43, says, “but I haven’t done it yet.” He’s too busy working on (surprise, surprise) a screenplay. Perchance, a crime story? “Of course,” he laughs. “I haven’t spent the last 20 years in Beverly Hills dumpsters for nothing.”
