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CHAPTER 1
Have We Got a Story for You
THE BIGGEST STORY in my career as a journalist started as a puff piece.
When the story showed up — for me, at least — I was working as senior editor for Diablo, a monthly lifestyle magazine that covers dining, shopping, and society events in the suburban towns of the San Francisco Bay Area. Diablo is big and glossy and focuses on lifestyle stories in a very affluent area. It's a very cheerful magazine.
My beat has always had a heavy emphasis on entertainment. I write most of the magazine's pop culture pieces and guides to the local arts scene. Any story about a local personality chasing the contemporary American Dream of celebrity is likely to fall on my desk.
And that's exactly what happened on August 23, 2010.
A Beverly Hills–based publicist contacted me about an East Bay client — a retired cop named Chris Butler. Butler ran a private investigation company out of the suburban city of Concord, California, and he had an interesting angle to his business. Butler staffed his PI firm exclusively with soccer moms.
I'm a huge fan of detective novels and film noir, so I was immediately interested, imagining myself tagging along with some private eyes on a stakeout. The story was both voyeuristic and empowering — I'd write about these suburban moms catching unfaithful husbands and deadbeat dads, insurance frauds and workplace injury liars. Thanks to their mandatory martial arts training, the PI Moms could even employ the occasional chokehold or knee to the nuts, if the guy was really asking for it.
The piece was writing itself!
Clearly, these PI Moms didn't need Diablo to turn them into a media sensation. By the time I got the pitch, they already had plenty of press. From March through July 2010, Butler and his PI Moms had enjoyed a tsunami of national media hype, with publicity from People magazine, the Today show, and Fox News. The PI Moms' biggest media conquest had been the Dr. Phil show, which had invested an hour in Butler and his sexy, skilled investigators.
Regional lifestyle magazines like Diablo love to celebrate any kid from the neighborhood who has made it big. Diablo's area of coverage claims Tom Hanks and Green Day as backyard celebrities, as well as Markie Post from the 1980s sitcom Night Court.
The PI Moms pitch landed squarely in our celebrity sweet spot. In addition to the celebrity hook, the story was a great fit for Diablo's readership demographic: East Bay women in the same age range as the PI Moms.
And then the story got even better.
The publicist told me that I was the first to know that the PI Moms were soon to be featured in their own reality show. In the coming months, Americans would follow these East Bay mommy snoops every Tuesday night on the Lifetime cable network. Water-cooler conversations and message-board debates about the PI Moms were sure to follow.
Real Housewives, PI? I thought. That sounds like a hit.
Finally, the publicist offered more than just an interview. He said I could interview the PI Moms while riding along on an actual investigation. I was welcome to tag along with a couple of lady gumshoes on a stakeout, and write all about what happened.
I told the publicist I was in.
CHAPTER 2
The King of Stings
ONE DAY AFTER MY CALL with the publicist for the PI Moms, I received a call from Chris Butler, the man in charge of the operation.
Butler spoke in a cool monotone, heavy on the been-there, done-that authority. He told me a bit about his background, which was not too far off from the bios of renegade cops from the movies — Dirty Harry Callahan and Lethal Weapon's Martin Riggs. Butler told me he was a former SWAT cop from Antioch, California, and that his police career was cut short when the squares behind the desk couldn't deal with his envelope-pushing techniques for hooking criminals.
The bio section of Butler's then-active website, Uncover-Truth.com, summed up his career like this:
[Butler's] creative, cutting-edge methods of investigating and arresting criminals, coupled with an intense work ethic, was [sic] lauded by prosecutors as extremely effective. Law enforcement administration often had trouble understanding his tactics and drive, as they were well above the standards of routine performance.
Tired of being hassled by The Man, Butler went independent and acquired a PI firm from a retired FBI agent who had been called back into government service. Butler told me that, while building his business, he discovered an invaluable (but previously untapped) gold mine of a recruiting pool for private investigators: suburban soccer moms.
"At first, I hired former and off-duty law enforcement officers, all men, to work on assignments. They were too often competitive, impatient, and difficult to deal with," said Butler. "Then I hired a mom, and she was the best investigator I had worked with. She was patient and worked well with the other investigators, and she could multitask better than any of my employees, because moms are always multitasking."
Moms, Butler realized, are natural investigators. Moms have built-in bullshit detectors and a sixth sense for the truth.
Butler said a lightbulb went on, and he started hiring moms exclusively. Instantly, he claimed, the quality of his work product skyrocketed.
Butler's rap, though catchy, had an infomercial tone. I started picturing ShamWows and Magic Bullet blenders while Butler talked up his newfound celebrity status, acquired from his spring 2010 trifecta of national media stories about the PI Moms.
"After the Today segment aired, I had Al Roker calling me from his dressing room, saying, 'I have a production company, let's talk about a reality show,'" Butler claimed. "After we were on Dr. Phil, the phones in our office started to melt!"
Butler said that after Dr. Phil pimped the PI Moms, women from all corners of the country wanted to come out to Concord, California, to enter the official PI Mom training program. Interest was so hot that Butler envisioned an opportunity to franchise his brand and create PI Mom outlets from coast to coast.
Kind of like Curves, but for catching cheating husbands.
All the attention had led Electus, a company run by former NBC Entertainment chairman Ben Silverman, to produce a PI Moms reality show for Lifetime Television, a subsidiary of A&E Networks. Once the Lifetime show hit the airwaves, Butler told me the show's success was a slam dunk, because he had the goods.
"Lifetime bought the show for the most money it had ever offered for a reality series," Butler bragged — an absurd claim, I would realize later, when considering that Lifetime had previously purchased the proven hit Project Runway from the Bravo channel.
Butler's business ambitions and the sizzle of a reality show were important threads in the story I was already writing in my head, but I was equally interested in the cases that Butler and the Moms were investigating. I asked about the ride-along case the PR agent had promised me, quizzing Butler about what kind of investigation I might be tagging along on.
Butler described one of his favorite types of cases: the undercover sting. After the call, I found that his website offered detailed definitions of setups, as well as a general outline of how Butler's clandestine operations were crafted. The website stated:
When all other investigative methods have failed, or if your problem requires a more proactive approach, an undercover sting may be the last, or only, effective strategy remaining ... An undercover sting is an intricate illusion created to fool a Subject into thinking that the circumstances that they find themselves in are real.
Which, in Butler-speak, means: Butler & Associates Private Investigations can help you trick or deceive someone. The website went on to wax philosophical about stings:
The illusion created by this designed coincidence is crafted to weaken the professional (or protective) façade we all erect to effectively hide our true base desires. The end product of the undercover sting often results in hard evidence that can be used to criminally prosecute or introduce a means of leverage to a preexisting situation.
Translation: If a client were to hire Butler for a sting, Butler could make a significant other or professional adversary believe an illusion was real. Which could really help the client mess up someone's situation, if need be.
The website also offered a disclaimer:
It is important to note that our personnel NEVER induce a Subject into engaging in activity; we simply create the illusion of a scenario, within which the Subject is free to act as he or she pleases. Our investigators are there to observe, record, and report. Drug dealers, drunk drivers, scam artists, pedophiles, perjurers, thieves ... all have been caught as a result of our designed coincidences.
Translation: Don't worry! Undercover stings are never illegal, and Butler & Associates only stings the worst types of subjects: pedos and grifters and losers who drive through school zones while drinking from an open container.
As Butler proudly described his sting success rate, I felt a couple of tremors in my moral compass. Stinging people and setting them up — isn't that kind of shady? Diablo's vibe has always been Stay Classy, East Bay.
The sting Butler wanted to take me on was an old classic; noir buffs will recognize it as the kind Dan Duryea pulled on Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street.
Butler was planning to set up a horny husband.
The PI pooh-bah explained that he and the PI Moms had a female client who thought her husband might be secretly seeing other women.
"This guy has been frequenting a dating website called Millionaire- Match.com," Butler explained. The horny husband's online indiscretions made him a mark, a sucker susceptible to a scam in which he could be easily duped into making a date with a mystery woman who didn't exist.
Butler told me that he had created his own MillionaireMatch account, and contacted the husband, posing as an available MILF.
Butler described sending the husband pictures of one of the PI Moms to test what virtual eye contact (and a hint of cleavage) would do to the unsuspecting man's better judgment. Butler was now ready to lure the man in, and ask the dope for a date.
If the guy fell for the trap, Butler would send in a PI Mom for a flirt-and-tease meeting in a Starbucks or wine bar. Butler would be parked nearby to provide protection — and of course, to secretly videotape the meeting. He hoped I could be sitting in a van with a team of two PI Moms, all of us observing the operation.
I asked Butler what would happen if the husband didn't take the bait and ignored or deleted his online come-hithers.
"Then we would move to Phase Two of the sting," Butler explained, "in which I assign a decoy to approach him in an unexpected place, like his gym."
I asked Butler for a further explanation of the decoy assignment. Butler said the decoy is a woman, not a PI Mom but a sexy special agent whose job title seemed to be Professional Seductress. Butler told me about a woman whose day job was working late nights in the San Francisco underground club scene, and who was 100 percent smoking hot.
I thought of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, but in workout clothes.
"This girl is a knockout, Pete," he told me. "A very sexy girl. She approaches the Subject, she flirts with him, and we observe how he reacts."
I imagined myself at the gym, being approached by Linda Fiorentino.
Maybe she would wear a combo of Victoria's Secret and Lululemon, I thought. Maybe she would start doing stretches in front of me, while mentioning how much she liked my receding hairline.
Even in my own imagining, I worried that I might not excuse myself from the decoy to go call my wife.
"Gotta tell you, Chris, I'm not crazy about this scenario," I said. "If you didn't put the girl there, who knows if the guy would be cheating?" Butler said that some of his clients just wanted to see what their partner would do, if tempted with forbidden fruit.
"I get it, Chris," I said. "But I really don't want to write about you baiting some dude with a hottie."
The King of Stings seemed concerned that I hadn't instantly jumped at the chance to trick an unsuspecting schlub into thinking that a voluptuous maiden wanted to jump his Under Armours.
"I totally understand your position, and the position of your magazine," Butler conceded, attempting to correct the coarseness of his swing-and-a-miss.
To Butler's delight, I invited him to keep trying. "If you were following someone who happened to be actually cheating, I'd be OK with that," I said.
Fortunately, Butler responded, his firm was so busy with cases that it would be no problem to find a case that suited my sensitive ethics. He said he would get back to me shortly, and the very next day, Butler emailed me to tell me about an entirely different case, one that just happened to fulfill all of my ethical requirements. I was so wrapped up in the story that the coincidences lining up seemed like they were just that, coincidences.
Butler explained that his client, a wealthy fifty-three-year-old widow, had recently gotten engaged to a much younger man. As the couple's wedding date approached, the client began to wonder if there was funny business happening during her boyfriend's long trips to the gym. The suspicious behavior seemed to occur every other Saturday, when the widow had to spend her days at work.
Butler explained the PI Moms had been working with the client for a while, helping her soberly collect information about the situation before she went through with the wedding.
"The PI Moms have been coaching her to avoid questioning him, as this tends to alert the cheating party to the fact that their partner may be suspicious," Butler wrote. "The PI Moms are also coaching her to avoid confronting him after she learns the truth; an anti-Cheaters TV show approach."
I hadn't ever seen Cheaters, but somehow knew exactly what it was: a late-night reality show about cheating spouses getting caught on camera, looking like sensationally stupid douche bags.
Butler assured me that his case wouldn't be anything like that.
Butler said the next Saturday that the widow had to work happened to be September 11, and the Moms planned to tail the fiancé that day.
Butler told me that his client was a big fan of Diablo, so she agreed to let me write about her case, with the caveat that I would not reveal her name or any identifying details about her or her fiancé.
That way, her neighbors, who also subscribed to Diablo, wouldn't gossip.
* * *
On Thursday, September 9 — two days before the ride-along — I visited Butler's office for the first time, located at 1000 Detroit Avenue in Concord.
Butler's workplace did not measure up to the flashy impression I had formed during the Beverly Hills publicist's pitch. I expected swankier digs for a business that had received so many accolades in national media stories.
The office was located in a storage warehouse in an industrial area of Concord. Unit J, Butler's space, was toward the back of the warehouse's parking lot. The nondescript location just didn't seem like a place for a guy with a big TV show in the works to be running his business from.
I have a habit of using TV and movies as a reference filter in my life, having spent so much of my life watching screens. The thought that came to mind — Jim Rockford worked out of a rusty mobile home on The Rockford Files — made Butler's Unit J seem less seedy.
Unit J's exterior windows and door were blacked out with some kind of reflective material, so anyone standing outside could not see in. There was no sign or lettering on the door to suggest that the space was an office of any kind. Standing in front of the door, I looked up, and noticed a security camera positioned above the upper right corner, pointing down at me.
I looked at my reflection in the door's shiny darkness, and I thought of the scene from the film This Is Spinal Tap, when the band stares dumbfounded at its all-black album cover for the first time. Guitarist Nigel Tufnel looks at his reflection in the cover and asks, "How much more black could it be? The answer is none. None more black."
None more black. The line made me laugh.
Instantly, I felt self-conscious and a bit foolish, realizing that Butler and the PI Moms might be a few feet away on the other side of the door, watching me through the one-way window or via the security camera.
I stopped laughing and rang the bell. The door opened immediately.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Setup"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Pete Crooks.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
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