Doughnut scam foiled as cops find hole in plan

Reprinted from: CanWest News Service

Published: Saturday, December 22, 2007

York Regional Police yesterday charged a man who allegedly bilked people out of thousands of dollars after promising to help them set up a Tim Hortons franchise.

Police say the man took out newspaper advertisements across Canada, wooing potential investors.

Police began their investigation Tuesday night, said Det.-Const. Jeff Bright. "I got a phone call from a woman in Regina because we're reaching out to different newspapers and people who's contact information we had from these guys and she said she'd been awake crying all night because she realized that she'd been defrauded," Bright said.

"And I went through my paperwork that I'd seized from him and I had her cheque in my hand. He hadn't cashed it yet. She didn't lose her money. It was almost $35,000," Bright said.
"She was overjoyed."

The victims were provided contact phone numbers in the ads, and asked to fill out an online application that included all the so-called investors' personal and financial information.

Once this process was complete, meetings were scheduled around Richmond Hill, Ont., where deposits up to $34,000 were taken for distributorships, police said.

Police were alerted to the scam after an investor contacted the Investigation Services of King-Reed & Associates -- representatives of Tim Hortons -- which confirmed they had not released the distribution rights of the company's product or name.
The suspect was using the name Joel Ferrier, but was later identified as 39-year-old Raphael Kojokaro, of Vaughan, Ont.

Keeping an eye on the prize

Reprinted from: Canadian Security Magazine

by Jennifer Brown

Thursday, 13 December 2007
Risk management can be applied to any venture to minimize threats to a company’s brand. How private investigation firm King-Reed & Associates helps Tim Hortons secure Canada’s best-known food prize contest.

When Ron Buist first conceived of the Roll Up the Rim to Win contest for Tim Hortons in 1985, integrity of the program was a top priority. Even then, he knew that to make it successful and trusted by Canadians year after year, it would have to be foolproof.

From the design and printing of the prizes on the coffee cup rims, to the distribution of those cups across Canada and the ceding of the prizes — the system had to be secure.

In fact Buist, the former marketing director for Tim Hortons and author of Tales from Under the Rim: the Marketing of Tim Hortons, knew that to make the contest ironclad he would have to put himself in the role of anyone who might try to beat the system and think of every possible way the contest could be compromised. Security was always a cornerstone of his planning and rollout of the contest every year.

In the early days, Buist stored the printing plates for the coffee cup prizes under lock and key in his own home.

“There was security; I was it. We didn’t have an outside firm doing it initially but security was very serious and very heavily controlled,” he recalls. “The one key word to running a contest is honesty — it has to be absolutely pristine pure, there can’t be any doubt about what you’re doing. The background of contests prior to Roll Up with other companies was not good.”

Buist put every step in place, including how the cups would be securely transported to their destinations. He thought through each step to make sure no part of it could be compromised. If someone managed to get their hands on a case of cups with 10 sleeves and 10 cups per sleeve were marked with car prizes it represented half a million dollars.

“You’re basically handling money,” says Buist.

When the contest began food was the only prize — coffee, donuts, muffins and cookies. Soon, cars, cash, bicycles, televisions and barbecues were added to the mix.

“You always have to be careful how it’s run — people want to know where the prizes are,” says Buist. “With this contest, the security was so exact and we wanted it to be right.”

Securing the transportation of the coffee cups was a covert operation in itself.

“The truck driver would come up (but) he didn’t know what he was picking up. We would load up the cups into the tractor-trailer, put a brand-new padlock on the truck. (We) put the key in a sealed envelope and gave it to the driver and he took off. We followed his truck and he didn’t even know it. If he had to stop, we stopped and watched the tail end of that truck and he didn’t even know it,” recalls Buist. “It’s secure beyond belief.”

More than 20 years later, the contest has become the biggest of its kind in Canada. More than $35 million in prizes were given away last year and it’s known as one of the largest and most successful contests of its kind in North America.

Just before Buist retired in 2001, Brian King of King-Reed & Associates was brought on to help manage the security of the program.

“We wanted further crosscheck and security on this,” explains Buist. “We weren’t missing anything, but it’s impossible to be everywhere all the time. You have to be very, very careful. And there’s never been any kind of security problem.”

King has investigated some of the most notorious cases in Canada including the effort to acquit Stephen Truscott, the Bre-X scandal and the case of Robert Baltovich, the man accused in the 1990 disappearance of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain.

But most people don’t know that he has taken up where Buist left off and is currently the point man behind the deep security plan in place for the iconic Tim Hortons Roll Up the Rim contest every year.

In a program like Roll Up the Rim, printing paper coffee cups is like printing money. When an average Canadian puts down their $1.30 for a coffee and rolls up the rim to win a prize they have no idea just how much planning goes into it.

In fact, managing security behind food prize promotions has become big business for King and his team of investigators. He’s created risk management plans for Frito Lay and works with McDonalds in Canada on other matters not related to food prize contests.

“This is probably our biggest program and probably the biggest in Canada,” says King. “We do a lot of work for food service industries and in the pharmaceutical industry. A lot of the time our risk assessments are done as a reaction to a problem — such as in the pharmaceutical industry.”

Food prize contests are a big part of establishing brand recognition in a highly-competitive marketplace. With contests like Roll Up the Rim, it becomes a tradition with an intensely loyal customer base.

“With Tim Hortons, they want to make sure, because of the size of the program, and the popularity of it, that the integrity is there for the public — that it can’t be challenged,” says King.

According to King, Tim Hortons decided to upgrade its security shortly after McDonalds had problems with its popular Monopoly game. About $2 million in prizes were stolen by vendors in the U.S. destined for Canada.

“To reintroduce $2 million in prizes probably cost about $10 million because of the work required,” says King.

It’s situations like that and how they are played out in the press, that Tim Hortons wants to avoid.

So King and his team wrote an extensive risk management program for Tim Hortons, which includes everything from vendor audits to background checks on the personnel employed by every supplier to the program. King reports to Tim Hortons chief legal counsel on all matters related to the contest and the security audits that take place around it.

“We audit every vendor that touches the program from art and design through to the printing plate manufacturers to cup manufacturers, transportation, the ceding of prizes and delivery to stores and prize promotion verification. We’re involved every step of the way, but there isn’t just one person who knows all of the steps,” he says.

King-Reed also makes sure that the computers used for the contest use are safe, that the integrity of the employees is there and they conduct audits of all facilities used.

King doesn’t use a brand-name software program to record details of each audit. He prefers to customize a review for each location because the vendors used for the contest can be so varied. Instead he refers to an established procedural manual.

“We’ve used some software programs in the past and we do recommend those programs to clients, but we don’t use them for our audits because they are very customized for the client. A lot of the off-the-shelf programs don’t necessarily fit,” he says.

Many of the suppliers involved in the contest process are the vendors Tim Hortons uses for non-promotional purposes, so the day-to-day security at their facilities isn’t necessarily high. For instance, a traditional cup manufacturer requires very little security. But an increase may be needed for Roll Up the Rim because they are now dealing with prizes that have substantial value built into a traditionally low-value item.

“We’ve assisted some suppliers in designing a complete security system for both physical security and personnel. We handle the risk to a standard that is extremely high,” says King.

Five investigators from King-Reed work on the program full time during the winter months, starting in August for a February roll out. “For certain aspects of it they know we’re coming and during the course of the program we do random audits to keep them on their toes.”

For the most part, suppliers are co-operative and comply with any requests. But it can also cost them. In one case, a supplier was ordered to install 16 CCTV cameras at a cost of $70,000 but they did it in order to keep the contract with Tim Hortons.

“We’ve had vendors that haven’t had the ability to comply and have been dropped from the program as a result,” he says.

Personnel issues are probably of the highest concern on an audit, says King.

“If a person doesn’t meet the standard we’re looking for, we ask them to be removed from the program,” he says. “As when any other employer wants a criminal background check you’re looking at issues integral to the program. If someone had a drunk driving charge from 10 years ago but they are not involved in driving with respect to the program and has a good personnel record, we’re not going to complain about it. There are degrees of risk at different levels in the program and we weigh the degree of risk in comparison to the position that person holds.”

It’s all about maintaining the integrity of what could be considered Canada’s favourite cup — perhaps second only to Lord Stanley’s. ∞

Eight people face 36 charges in counterfeit investigation,
Luxury goods seized,
52 Division

In May of 2007, members of the 52 Division Vice Section, in conjunction with the law firm of Kestenberg Siegal Lipkus LLP and investigators from King−Reed & Associates, began an
investigation into a retail outlet involved in the sale of counterfeit luxury goods.

The investigation, named Project "Chameleon", focused on the wholesalers and importers of counterfeit luxury goods in the Toronto area.

On Saturday, December 1, 2007, 52 Division Vice Section officers, along with 52 Division
CRU, 42 Division CRU, 33 Division CRU, 14 Division CRU and MCU, executed criminal code
search warrants at various locations.

It is alleged that:

− the seized counterfeits consisted of footwear, purses, wallets, clothing, jewelry, sunglasses and luggage bearing the brand names of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Chanel, Coach, Fendi, Armani, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, Nike, Prada, Puma, Tiffany, Victoria Beckham and Rock & Republic.

It is estimated that the seized counterfeit goods were worth $10 million.

Charged are:

1− Shushan Zhang, 32, of Toronto,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares
He was scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Sunday, December 2, 2007, at 10 a.m.

2− Xu Feng Chen, 33, of Toronto,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares
He is scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Friday, January 11, 2008, 3 p.m., room 111.

3− Xiao Yin Chen, 30, of Markham,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares
He is scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Friday, January 11, 2008, 3 p.m., room 111.

4− Hua Qing Wu, 22, of Markham,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares
He is scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Friday, January 11, 2008, 3 p.m., room 111.

5− Yun Qing Chen, 32, of Toronto,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares,
5) Forging a Trademark,
6) Possession of Instrument for Forging a Trademark
He was scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Sunday, December 2, 2007, at 10 a.m.

6− Siu Kop Tse, 27, of Toronto,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares
He is scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Friday, January 11, 2008, 3 p.m., room 111.

7− Soo Hiy Lee, 50, of Toronto,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares,
5) Possession of Proceeds of Crime
He is scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Wednesday, January 16, 2008, 3 p.m.,
room 111.

8− Zhiyong Tan, 34, of Toronto,
1) Theft Over,
2) Possession Over,
3) Fraud affecting public market,
4) Passing off wares,
5) Possession of Proceeds of Crime
He was scheduled to appear at Old City Hall courts on Sunday, December 2, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Constable Isabelle Cotton, Public Information, for Inspector Mario Di Tommaso, 52 Division

Reprinted from: The Globe and Mail - August 24, 2007

Hush up alleged at housing agency

Spokesman won't say whether probe led to staffer's departure

JEFF GRAY

Toronto's public housing agency, reeling from admissions that two employees are under investigation over bribery allegations, is now being accused of trying to hush up the matter.

Sources say one staffer left the agency in June in relation to the probe, although a Toronto Community Housing Corp. spokesman would neither confirm nor deny this yesterday.

The Globe and Mail first reported on Wednesday that a probe had been launched into allegations that housing agency staff took bribes from tenants waiting for larger subsidized apartments.

The city-owned corporation's chief executive officer, Derek Ballantyne, has not been available to comment, despite repeated requests since Tuesday.

Yesterday, TCHC spokesman Frank Clarke said Mr. Ballantyne's schedule was filled with meetings.

The lack of information has frustrated Councillor Frances Nunziata (York South-Weston), who represents the ward where the allegations surfaced.

She said yesterday she has written to Mayor David Miller to ask him to demand enough information from the TCHC to update city council on the investigation.

"It doesn't look good by us keeping this all a secret. It looks like we're trying to hide something," Ms. Nunziata said, adding that she understood why the agency could not reveal information that would jeopardize the investigation.

Yesterday, Mr. Clarke said privacy rules meant that he could neither confirm nor deny that the recent departure of a housing-agency staffer was related to the investigation.

But Ms. Nunziata said housing officials had told her office that the departure of a TCHC staffer was related to the probe.

Asked to respond to Ms. Nunziata's criticism that the agency has been secretive, Mr. Clarke would only say, "We have no comment on that."

Mr. Clarke also said yesterday that Toronto police fraud squad investigators were involved in the probe.

But a police spokeswoman, Constable Wendy Drummond, said there was no active police investigation.

Police expect the results of the housing agency's investigation to be forwarded to the fraud squad, however, if evidence of wrongdoing is found, she said.

Last month, an officer looked into the allegations, made by a tenant in a west-end public housing building, Constable Drummond said. But police couldn't find enough evidence to warrant a criminal investigation.

The Globe has confirmed that Toronto Community Housing has hired a private investigation firm, King-Reed & Associates Inc., to look into allegations that some in subsidized housing were paying bribes of $3,000 to $6,000 to jump waiting lists and move into larger apartments.

When contacted by a reporter, the investigators referred all inquiries to the public housing agency.

Ms. Nunziata said she believes there must be something to the allegations, since the agency took the unusual step of hiring private investigators to look into them.

Toronto Community Housing, with 164,000 tenants in 2,000 buildings across the city, is Canada's largest landlord, and owns $6-billion worth of real estate.

The mammoth agency, created from the merging of pre-existing housing authorities in 2002, is the second-largest provider of public housing in North America.

The non-profit corporation has 1,400 employees. Of its budget of $551-million in 2006, 23 per cent came from Toronto property taxpayers, with 25 per cent covered by other governments and 52 per cent by rent and other revenues.

A small minority of tenants pay market rates, while the rest usually pay rent capped at 30 per cent of their gross income.

ANNOUNCEMENT

March 20, 2007

Brian D. King, CEO of King-Reed & Associates Inc. and partners are pleased to announce the company’s equity investment in Paul Ethier & Associates Investigations in Eastern Ontario.

Norman D. Lalonde, co-founder of Paul Ethier & Associates in l986, will remain President of the organization. PEAI is one Ontario’s leading Francophone investigation firms with offices in Ottawa, Kingston, Sudbury and Gatineau, Quebec.

Shelley M. Taylor, CIP, B.Comm., Vice President of Operations will continue to manage King-Reed’s Eastern offices in Ottawa, Kingston and Trenton with David Black, who has assumed duties as Vice President of King-Reed Corporate Risk Solutions.

Both companies will remain stand-alone entities operating their own distinctive practices while sharing common synergies.

King-Reed is Canada’s leading investigation firm specializing in surveillance, litigation support, corporate intelligence and intellectual property matters and is a founding partner in Investigations Canada.

www.king-reed.com www.investcan.com

I'm A Real Life Magnum PI

By Robert K. Rainey as told to Orato Editor Cecilia Jamasmie , Canada
March 19, 2007

Reprinted from: http://www.orato.com/node/1984

We’ve seem them in action: sneaking into an office to get the file that will help to solve a case; eavesdropping on private conversations and recording them, jumping from a window and then running to hide in the bushes. They are Hollywood depictions of private investigators. But what is it like to be a real life PI? What do they do? What techniques do they use? How dangerous are their cases? Orato talked to Toronto-based PI Rob Rainey, and here’s what we found out.

For those of you who grew up watching TV series like Magnum PI, what I do surely sounds familiar: I’m a private investigator (PI). But unlike the super agents created by Hollywood, I don’t drive a Ferrari or crawl around in people’s yards to sneak a peak in their windows. What I do is legal, but not less exciting.

I started working in this industry 13 years ago. I wanted to be a police officer, but after taking some courses, I realized that was not the right career path for me. It seemed like too dangerous a job for the amount of money you get paid and the lifestyle of police officers is very hard as well. So instead of joining the police force I found another career that is very similar, but that allows me to use my head a little bit more. While cops seem to be more about muscle, PIs seem to be more about using your brain to solve problems and that’s something I enjoy.

So far I have no regrets. I love my job. You work any day, any time -- day or night. It’s actually not uncommon to spend 15 to 20 hours straight on a particular case. Whenever is the best time to go out and conduct your investigation or surveillance, you’ve got to do it. There’s no “I’m tired today” or “I’m hungry right now.” It’s all about seizing opportunities.

A common day for an investigator who is doing surveillance, for example, would start at 6 a.m. and go on until 8 or 9 o’clock at night. You work every day of the week and even when you might get a couple of days off, you usually have to work on weekends.

You know when you are going to start your day, but you never know at what time you’ll finish or where you’ll end up. It depends on the person you’re following. I’ve started, for example, before sunrise one day in Toronto and by the afternoon I’ve already driven to Montreal, rented a boat, gone fishing, or better yet, pretended I was fishing, while recording that person with my hidden video camera. Other times, I’ve ended up on a roller coaster or joining a snowboarding class.

Because of the constant challenges and last minute changes inherent to this profession, you have to be very versatile. It’s essential to be physically and emotionally prepared to affront challenges and situations that come up out of the blue. You also have to be able to go anywhere at anytime without looking suspicious. Above all, you have to have common sense.

The company I work for, King-Reed & Associates Inc., offers surveillance, criminal and corporate investigations, intellectual property investigations, background investigations of people (what’s the person is all about, what they do for a living, their status in the community, financial situation and the like) as well as domestic surveillance. I’d say that those are the main areas of specialization in this industry.

The bread and butter of this industry is, by far, insurance fraud investigation. Usually, insurance companies hire us to go out and follow their insurance claimants just to see whether their injuries are as bad as they say they are.

Many people involved in car accidents or who have slipped and fallen say they’re so injured that they can’t even walk. Many times, however, I’ve discovered individuals who claimed they couldn’t move, building a house, working out, gardening and doing anything but staying in bed.

I remember a case where I was hired to follow a woman who was allegedly so badly injured in a car accident that she couldn’t go to the bathroom by herself. I went out to her house one day early in the morning and I witnessed how she was able to drive her car to work, stayed there for about eight hours and then went to a gym where she actually instructed an aerobics class. I joined the class and, armed with a hidden video camera, I recorded her leading the class. I was the only guy among 20 women and maybe I wasn’t the most coordinated one, but nobody suspected anything and I actually had a lot of fun. It was the first time in my life I’d taken aerobics, and I found it very challenging and enjoyable at the same time.

I’ve also done quite a lot of domestic surveillance or “domestic investigations.” When people suspect their partners are cheating on them, we follow a person for days and record video footage to show later to the client. We never go out and confront the subject we are shadowing. Afterwards, we hand in a report along with the video to the individual who hired us.

Sometimes it gets especially difficult to tell our clients what we find out. Once, for example, I discovered that my client’s wife was cheating on him with his very best friend. That’s tough to communicate. In cases like that one, we try to tell the news to our clients in a way that sounds like good news.

We tell them that it’s good they found out now and not later; that they’ll be happier with somebody else who respects them; that now they can move on with their life and don’t have to worry anymore about whether or not their partners are cheating on them. No matter what we tell them, it’s never easy.

Contrary to what many people think, we don’t get more work from one gender or the other. We get even amounts of male and female clients, but the way they react when they hear the news is quite different. Women are very emotional about it, while guys get mostly angry - very angry. Another interesting difference is that women are right in their suspicions most of the time. When they come to us, it is basically looking for a confirmation of something they already know. They feel it somehow. Men, on the other hand, come to us driven mostly by jealousy, and about half of the time, they are wrong: nothing is really going on.

High Tech Devices

Technology has changed our methods quite a bit. In the past, it was mostly taking photographs. Now, we have moved to shooting videos and researching online. There are a lot of things we can do by taking advantage of Internet databases and other methods of online research. However, for the surveillance portion, we still need to go out there. Surveillance is not only the bread and butter of our industry, but also the most exciting part in my opinion. It’s actually a great part of the job because you are assigned to watch somebody who you know very little about, and by the end of the day, you know a lot about that individual. It’s amazing. There are boring parts too.

For example, when you have to sit down in a car in front of the house of the people you are following and wait for them to come out. It could be hours and hours of waiting. But once they do come out, the thrill of the chase begins, and the adrenaline starts pumping.

I believe that anybody can become a good private investigator, and in the last five years, I’ve seen a lot more colleges and private companies offering training courses. For a long time, this industry wasn’t looked upon as reputable. I’m sure that it had a lot to do with the way Hollywood portrays detectives. They show private investigators doing very sneaky things, such as crawling in people’s yards, hiding in bushes, peeking through windows, not to mention jumping from a third floor without getting injured… We don’t do that. Everything we do is according to the law. We can’t, for example, record a conversation unless we are part of that conversation. It’s not as easy as someone may think. We are professionals who want to conduct investigations properly and ethically.

Currently, our industry is male dominated. I’ve met excellent female investigators, but there are very few who seek this line of work. I think the reason is that the surveillance portion of this job is a very difficult one in the sense that it’s physically demanding and it can be very dangerous too.

Some of the people we are assigned to watch belong to gangs or live in rough neighborhoods, so for the ladies to be walking by themselves in those areas or watching an apartment door from a stairwell must be too hazardous.

The biggest challenge for PIs is to stay up to date with all the changes that go on in this industry, such as new laws, technologies and trends. It can also be very hard on families sometimes too. It’s hard to make plans because of your schedule. You can’t just leave a case and go home because your daughter is sick or because there are friends coming over for dinner. In my case, I’m single but engaged, and looking forward to starting my own family. Like in everything, it’s all about finding a person who is understanding and respects the fact that you love your job and that it is what you want to do for the rest of your life.

The most rewarding parts of this job is knowing that you’re helping people and the fact that people are usually very impressed by what you do. Everyone thinks it’s a very cool job! And it sure is. My dream assignment? I’d love to be flown to a Caribbean island and shadow somebody there or work on a high-profile murder investigation. I still have time.

Reprinted from: The Toronto Star

Years later, sleuth seeks Bre-X clues
Jan 31, 2007
Jennifer Wells - business columnist

It's 26 degrees in Jakarta.

Or thereabouts.

The palm trees sway. The Bintang beer is ice cold.

And somewhere in the Indonesian capital, Brian King, the Toronto-based private eye, is readying for a 10-day journey into the dark heart of Bre-X.

What was it Conrad said? "Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame. ..."

Well, here we are again.

Ten years after the gold mining "discovery," the biggest ever, turned to dross, Bre-X is back with us.

There is, on the securities side, the soon-to-arrive decision from Ontario Superior Court Justice Peter Hryn as to whether geologist John Felderhof did or did not engage in insider trading.

And then there is, on the Raymond Chandler side, the revived mystery as to whether Michael de Guzman did or did not die after tumbling out of a helicopter and into the swampy, malarial jungle lands of Kalimantan. If, that is, he tumbled at all.

It is the latter intrigue that has engaged the private eye. A Montreal film house has hired him to solve the riddle. A documentary is in the works.

What was it Chandler said? "A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled."

In the summer of 2005, a singularly interesting story ran in the Singapore Straits Times.

Writer Jon McBeth, a long-time follower of the Bre-X drama, reported on a two-hour interview conducted with Genie de Guzman, one of the many wives of the Filipino geologist.

In the interview, Genie revealed that she had been warned by a military police officer not to give interviews after the dramatic events of March, 1997. She said she never saw her husband's body.

And she revealed that a month after his demise, Michael de Guzman phoned his home in the Jakarta suburb of Cimangiis. He spoke, reportedly, with the maid, asking that Genie be notified of new funds in her Citibank account. When she checked her account, Genie told McBeth, she discovered a fresh deposit of $200,000 (U.S.).

Years later, in February 2005, Genie said she again heard from her deceased husband, this time by fax, notifying her of a $25,000 deposit. The fax, she said, was in her husband's handwriting and had been sent from Brazil. The story garnered worldwide exposure, fanning the fantasy that instead of being dead, de Guzman is sipping pulpy drinks on some far off beach.

Just before Christmas, I chatted with Brian King. He has worked a number of high-profile cases, including tracking witnesses for the Steven Truscott defence - the Ontario Court of Appeal today resumes its review of Truscott's 1959 murder conviction - as well as unearthing fresh evidence in a bid to exonerate Robert Baltovich in the murder of Elizabeth Bain.

King had called to talk about Bre-X. Like a million other writers, I had written a book on the scam: the vapourization of $6 billion in shareholder value; the old-as-the-hills "salting" of the core to make it look as though it hosted vast reserves of gold; the exotica of the players and the locale, not least of which was the thuggery of the Suharto regime in Indonesia.

Even after a decade, the question occasionally surfaces. Do you think de Guzman might still be alive?

To this I can only respond with what I know. I traced "Dokter Daniel," the Indonesian pathologist who performed the initial autopsy, to his home in rural Kalimantan, but did not find the doctor there. I pursued the cadaver to the National Bureau of Investigation in Manila. I interviewed the two pathologists who worked on the case - Dr. Ed Kalalo and Dr. Noel Minay - and scrutinized photographs of the body.

There was nothing resembling the Michael de Guzman I had interviewed in the Jakarta offices of Bre-X in February 1997.

It was Dr. Minay who recounted the story behind the photographs. The ascendant aroma of formalin as he popped the autopsy stitches, which ran, not in the more conventional "Y" incision - think CSI - but a straight line from chin to pubis. The collapsed insides - all internal organs either having been removed or possibly snorffled by the wild boars in the jungle of Kalimantan. The brain was gone. The skin was smooth, swollen, pale, like a piece of pork, said Minay, that had been on the boil for some hours.

The nose was gone.

The penis was gone, too. Clean as a whistle.

Dr. Kalalo undertook the dental examination. There were two molars present in the upper jaw, and two below. The dead man, Kalalo knew from the smoothness of the skin where the rest of the teeth had once been rooted, wore two dental plates. Neither was recovered with the corpse. No dental records had been provided by the dead man's family.

The body was cremated and interred in a custom-made mausoleum outside Manila.

Later, Dr. Jerome Bailen, retained by the de Guzman family, offered a positive identification based on what he said was a tell-tale lump on de Guzman's left shoulder, a deformity, if that's what it was, that I cannot attest to. Bailen theorized that de Guzman had been murdered.

Brian King is now in Jakarta, intent on doing a better job. Meetings have been arranged with Genie de Guzman. Of course, he will expect to view for himself the documents that support the funds transfers.

And beyond that? If I had a million dollars, I'd be chasing Cesar Puspos. Puspos and de Guzman were inseparable. As much as de Guzman was the mastermind, Puspos was the day-to-day scam manager. It was Puspos who put out the initial reports in which the presence of gold was eyeballed. It was Puspos who micromanaged, under de Guzman's eye, the flow of samples to the assay lab.

When we spoke, King wouldn't comment on next steps.

On this we agree: Why would de Guzman get into that helicopter in the first place? As anyone interested in the Bre-X saga has persistently asked, what kind of an exit strategy was that?

Canada’s Brian D. King presented with “Investigator of the Year” Award

Brian D. King, Managing Director and President of King-Reed & Associates of Toronto, one of Canada’s largest private investigation firms was presented with “International Investigator of the Year” award at the 2003 Council of International Investigators’ Annual Meeting in Kinsale, Ireland on September 20, 2003. On hand to congratulate Mr. King was key note speaker, Mr. Patrick Cox, President of the European Union.

The Council is an elite organization of private investigators which includes former officers from Scotland Yard, the FBI and Interpol.

The International Investigator of the Year Award was established in 1976 when The Association of British Investigators delivered a silver loving cup to the Council with the request that it be presented each year to the investigator who best exemplifies the high professional and moral standards of the Council. This award is considered the most prestigious worldwide recognition that can be bestowed on a professional investigator.

Mr. King’s agency has approximately 120 full-time staff and 10 offices throughout Canada. The firm has a reputation for providing high quality, cost-effective, and confidential investigation services since 1984. The company is retained regularly by major law firms, insurance companies, government agencies and corporations across the country.

Mr. King and his team have been involved in a number of high profile investigations including the 1991 shooting of Raymond Lawrence in which the family requested they conduct a parallel investigation; the Bre-x scandal of the early 1990’s and the disappearance of Elizabeth Bain in 1990 and assisting Steven Truscott’s counsel in the reinvestigation of his sensational 1959 case and trial. Mr. King is especially proud of the investigation work completed in the sensational Elizabeth Bain disappearance, in which Robert Baltovich, Ms. Bain’s boyfriend was convicted of 2nd degree murder. In fact, a popular book by Derek Finkle entitled “No Claim to Mercy” thoroughly covers the full extent of the police investigation, various possible scenarios, interviews with Mr. Baltovich and includes details of Mr. King’s efforts to clear the accused’s name. Although Baltovich spent almost 9 years in a maximum security federal penitentiary, the Supreme Court of Canada freed him as a result of a decision that is rarely made in such cases. He is on bail pending appeal while the courts wait to review fresh evidence obtained by King-Reed. Mr. Baltovich remains free today and is working on his Masters Degree in Library Sciences as he awaits what is hoped will be the final disposition of his case.

Mr. King has been frequently profiled in relation to many exemplary cases including police shootings, missing persons, homicides, large scale fraud investigations. He has had many articles published relating to various investigative techniques including Surveillance, International Fraud Groups and New Trends in the Investigative Community. Mr. King is a frequent international speaker and has been actively involved in industry organizations. He is a founding partner of Investigations Canada a national partnership of elite investigation firms. He is a Certified International Investigator with the Council of International Investigators and was President of this organization in 1997 and currently sits on their board as their Strategic Plan Committee Chairman. He is a Certified Fraud Examiner, a member of the American Society of Industrial Security and Vice President of the Council of Private Investigators, Ontario where he currently sits as the Chairman of their Privacy Committee.

PRIVATE EYES TRY TO LOSE GUMSHOE IMAGE

Work is more than tracking cheating spouses, say sleuths at Toronto Conference.

By Tracey Tyler
Legal Affairs Reporter.

It won't take much detective work to find one of the world's biggest gatherings of private investigators.

They're coming out from behind bushes and binoculars this week for an international sleuth summit in downtown Toronto.

About 350 members of the Council of International Investigators will discuss the latest tools and trends of their trade, which is trying to ditch its image of the trench-coated gumshoe tracking cheating spouses from a dingy office.

"That's really not the norm for the industry," says Toronto investigator and conference organizer, Brian King, of King-Reed & Associates. "If you were to do that, you would be at the starving-artist level, because you're working for people who are often emotionally and financially tapped."

In Canada, investigators are assuming an increasingly important role in the justice system and are as likely to help the prosecution as the defence, says King who has been playing shamus since he was 6 years old and tacked a sign on his bedroom door reading "Detective - Keep Out".

This weeks meeting, which kicks off today, is the Council's 47th Annual gathering after being formed in 1955 by investigators from the United States and Britain, in part to develop standards and a code of ethics. The Private Investigators and Security Guards Act requires Ontario's 3,600 licensed PIs to be bonded and over 18 - no junior Nancy Drews need apply - and to avoid any confusion with police, it's also illegal to call yourself a private "detective".

However, Jon Herberman, Ontario's registrar of private investigators, says the entire act may be reviewed within a couple of years. That would be welcomed by King. Lumping security guards and investigators together is a carryover from the days of the American Stagecoach, when detectives rode along to protect passengers from marauding outlaws, he says.

Today, private investigators are almost a given in certain civil cases; for example, in personal-injury lawsuits filed against corporations such as the Toronto Transit Commission.

The TTC gets hit with about 3,500 lawsuits a year from people alleging injuries in accidents and it aggressively defends itself against suspicious claims, says commission lawyer, Brian Leck. For example, a plaintiff in a lawsuit stemming from the 1995 fatal subway collision dropped out of the case after evidence from investigators showed he wasn't on either train.

Leck says high-profile corporations like the TTC will continue to be targeted - making more work for PIs - unless police start laying fraud charges against those making bogus claims. These days, major growth areas for investigators is sexual harassment and workplace violence, says King, whose company investigates white-collar fraud for corporations. If an employee considered at high risk for violence is fired, some companies will hire an investigator to trail him later to ensure he doesn't come back to the workplace for revenge.

For work like that, old-fashioned tools like binoculars still come in handy, King says. But digital cameras have revolutionized the industry, as have the Internet and DNA, he says.

Sexual harassment complaints, for example, can be investigated by using a hidden camera no bigger than a loonie, though laws and ethics prohibit filming in areas such as washroom cubicles, King says. But often a combination of old-fashioned legwork and the latest technology yields the break.

Like when King recently investigated the theft of a lottery ticket from a company manager's desk. DNA was extracted from the turned-in ticket stub and employees were interviewed to come up with a possible suspect.

When a water bottle the suspect - another high-ranking employee - drank from was swabbed for DNA a match was found, King says.

But King also does work for the defence in criminal cases. He's now helping the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted in its bid to exonerate Steven Truscott, who was convicted at age 14 of murdering 12 year-old Lynn Harper in 1959. King's role includes finding witnesses long vanished from Clinton, the Ontario town where the death occurred.

"Often a sign of a wrongful conviction is a PI's preparedness to do a great deal of work on the file, "says Toronto lawyer James Lockyer, a director of the association, who'll speak at the conference.

Reprinted from: The National Post, Monday, June 11, 2001

"RAIDS NET COUNTERFEIT KARAOKE DISCS
Valued at $250,000.00"

By Jill Vardy

OTTAWA - The war against counterfeit karaoke discs has spread north of the U.S. border with a weekend raid on eight southern Ontario locations in search of pirated discs worth up to $250,000.00.

The raids came after a four-month investigation by King-Reed & Associates Inc.™ a private investigator working on behalf of the North Carolina-based Karaoke Anti-Piracy Association, which represents about 90% of US and Canadian karaoke music manufacturers.

About 30 peace officers, investigators and police acted on a civil court order allowing them to seize computer hard drives, CD writers, blank CDs, and all items associated with the possession, manufacture and distribution of counterfeit compact discs with graphics (CDGs).

The CDGs contain the music and the lyrics used in commercial karaoke businesses.

It is the first raid of its kind in Canada. Two similar raids were conducted in Detroit in April and May on KAPA's behalf.

"This client wants to make it known they will vigorously investigate any infringement of their rights and they will litigate", said Barry Logan, manager of the corporate crime section at King-Reed & Associates Inc.™.

The order covered 15 named individuals, businesses and small entertainment companies in the Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph area.

"Several of the businesses investigated have employees and thus generate a decent income while avoiding the retail cost associated with the purchase of an original CDG - and I suspect, avoid paying taxes on an undeclared income", said Mr. Logan.

"Local police participated in a limited capacity" in the raids last night because it was a civil action, he said.

"Our client could have gone the criminal route, there are laws they could use to convict the counterfeiters. But it's a little heavy-handed to have somebody sent to jail for having a bad karaoke disc," he said.

King-Reed, which specializes in intellectual property investigations, was hired to follow up a tip to KAPA about illegal karaoke discs being used in the area.

CANADA IS A HOT SPOT FOR KARAOKE DISC COUNTERFEITING

"We investigated that tip about an end user of the product. From there, we were able to identify other end users and distributors of the counterfeit karaoke discs. So we implemented undercover means and infiltrated distribution channels and identified the manufacturers of the discs," said Mr. Logan, who led the investigation.

He did not, however, have to actually sing any karaoke. "Thank God it didn't go that far," he said.

King-Reed is now conducting other investigations on behalf of KAPA to crack counterfeit karaoke rings in other Canadian cities, Mr. Logan said.

"Canada is just a hot spot of karaoke counterfeiting, I'll tell you."

Financial Post
Jvardy@nationalpost.com

King-Reed & Associates Inc.™ investigators have been involved in various high profile matters which have been widely publicized in both the print and broadcast media.

	Toronto Star - May 7, 1998 - "Man Drops Action in TTC Suit"
	St. Catherines Standard- December 3, 1998 - "Book Author Suspects Bernardo of Bain Murder"
	Focus International - Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1997 "Surveillance Techniques for the International Investigator"
	Without Prejudice - June 1997 "Bill 59: Liability Investigation File Criteria" (co-authored)
	Canadian Underwriter - February 1, 1996 "How Fraudsters Dupe Doctors"
	The Litigation Brief - February 1996 "Finding Someone...Without Leaving The Office"
	Niagara Falls Review - April 25, 1996 - "Private Eye hired to probe casino choice"
	Saturday Night Magazine - October 1996 "Doing Bernardo's Time?"
	Ontario Business Journal - January 1995 "Toronto Office Part of Investigations Network"
	Without Prejudice (Official Journal of the Ontario Insurance Adjusters Association) "Insurance Fraud - An Update On Bodily Injury Claims"
	Toronto Sun - February 6, 1994 "Cabbies Flagged By Fraud Cops"
	Law Times - March 28, 1994 "Investigators Discouraged By Legal Aid Plan From Doing Criminal Work, Pi's Say"
	Law Times - April 3, 1994 "Trademark Fraud On The Rise With Free Trade"
	Barrie Examiner - Wednesday, June 15, 1994 "Private Eyes-They're Watching You"; "But Computers Are As Important As Binoculars In 90's"
	Toronto Star - December 21, 1994 "Private Eye Has Nationwide Network Of Sleuths"; "Gumshoe Business Goes Big Time"
	Law Times - March 29, 1993 "More Investigators Needed On Criminal Cases, Lawyers Say"
	Law Times - April 4, 1993 "Investigators' Work Takes Them To Far Away Places"
	Toronto Star - October 14, 1993 "Private Eye Uncovers Startling Findings - Convicted Killers Fate Hangs On New Evidence"
	The Globe and Mail - Friday, April 3, 1992 "Private Investigator Stays on Trail In Bain Case"
	Law Times - April 6, 1992 "Science Plays Increasing Role In Investigations"
	Law Times - April 12, 1992 "Investigators Face Flood Of High-Tech Equipment"
	The Toronto Star - Sunday, May 17, 1992 "Family Begins Probe Into Slaying By Police"
	The Toronto Star - Thursday, May 21, 1992 "Unit Didn't Search Apartment Of Man Killed By Officer"
	The Globe and Mail - Friday, June 26, 1992 "Inquest Vital, Victim's Family Believes"
	Without Prejudice - (Official Journal of the Ontario Insurance Adjusters Association) - October 1992 "Insurance Fraud - A Perspective On Bodily Injury Claims"
	Law Times - April 1, 1991 "From Fraud To Mergers Private Eyes Can Help Lawyers Serve Their Clients"
	The Toronto Star - Wednesday, November 13, 1991 "Suspect Charged In Bain Slaying Released On Bail After Nearly A Year" Law Times - April 7, 1991 "Sizing Up An Investigation Agency Requires Lawyers To Search Info."