It could be one of any number of offices in the Washington area.
There are thousands just like it—the desks, the file cabinets, the bookcases, the cubes and laptops, an office manager’s space, and a small kitchen down the hall. There’s the boss’s desk, which is larger than the others, with leather and suede couches in front of it, forming a kind of comfy conference room for closed-door meetings where confidentiality is required.
Then you begin to notice the ways in which this office is not like others. Mounted on the wall near the conference-room couches are four flat-screen TV monitors. Techy-looking gizmos are on the floor. The laptops are loaded with apps for OSINT and SOCMINT, which sound like classified programs.
The screens don’t get much use anymore, explains Kevin Hooks, who runs this operation: “We used to use them to watch—in real time—four different surveillances that were in progress. We can do that now on our cellphones.”
OSINT, Hooks continues, is short for “open-source intelligence.” SOCMINT stands for “social-media intelligence.” These are methods of perfectly legal snooping and sleuthing, of sifting through posts, databases, and other public records to compile dossiers on people. The apps themselves have intel-gathering capacities that far exceed those of LinkedIn or Zillow. “We do a lot of our work online these days,” Hooks says.
As for the gizmos? One can tell you if a house or business is being bugged. Another allows you to track the license plates of surrounding cars in real time, the better to know if you’re being followed. Hooks looks at the floor. He sighs. “I hate it when this equipment becomes obsolete, because it is so expensive to replace.”
Who even needs this stuff, other than foreign spies? Or officers at three-letter government agencies? Private investigators need it. People like Hooks. The owner and CEO of Interprobe in Fairfax, the 61-year-old Hooks has been a PI in the DC area for decades, establishing himself as a reputable professional in an occupation that has long played a crucial role in the city’s information ecosystem—and long been misunderstood.
se your imagination. Picture a private eye. What do you see? A gumshoe in a trench coat and fedora, snapping photos from the shadows, tangling with femmes fatales, and getting into frequent fistfights, all while working for shady clients?
In Hollywood, you’re still seeing investigators picking locks, going places they shouldn’t be. That kind of thing doesn’t go on.
No, no, no: That’s dime novels. TV. The movies. A pastiche of tired—if entertaining—caricatures, loosely rooted in a bygone era. “In Hollywood, you’re [still] seeing investigators picking locks, going places they shouldn’t be, having a conversation with somebody and sticking a transmitter to the bottom of the chair they’re sitting in,” Hooks says. “That kind of thing doesn’t go on.”
These days, real-life PIs have a lot more in common with white-collar desk jockeys than with Sam Spade. Sure, they still hit the streets to, say, tail people whose spouses suspect infidelity. “We handle maybe 320 to 380 cases like that a year,” Hooks says of his firm. But much like K Street lawyers and Capitol Hill reporters, they spend a good portion of their time in front of screens, chasing data and documents. “A lot of what we do involves research,” Hooks says.
DC is one of the most unique places for being a PI, heavy on information at a war-room pace. There are more opportunities to specialize.
It’s not just the methods that are modern. It’s the clients—and the cases. PIs help insurers scrutinize dubious claims and Wall Street firms evaluate high-stakes mergers. They investigate identity theft, search for missing persons, and perform background checks. Here in Washington, where politics, policy, and power can hinge on finding out things others don’t want you to know, PIs are an important tool. They were part of the Senate inquiry into Watergate. They worked with the New Republic to get to the bottom of Stephen Glass’s plagiarism. Remember the so-called Steele Dossier, the controversial report about Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia that became one of the biggest stories in politics? It came from political opposition research conducted for Fusion GPS, a local private research company.
“DC is one of the most unique places for being a PI, heavy on information at a war-room pace,” says Ed Ajaeb, a local PI and president of the National Council of Investigation and Security Services, a trade group for investigators and security professionals. “There are more opportunities to specialize in things like crisis communications, opposition research, lobbying and policy research, research into dark money and financing. We’ve had a few cases of think tanks and nonprofits reaching out to get background on a prospective donor—is there anything in their background that would create public embarrassment?”
The work can be hard, and investigators don’t always crack the case. (Again, remember the Steele Dossier?) When they do, however, the impact can be felt. “We do a lot of behind-the-scenes work that gives us a mysterious feel with the public,” Ajaeb says. “But that moment in the movies where Perry Mason is holding up some evidence in court and asking someone on the stand, ‘Isn’t it true that ten years ago you did this?’—in real life, that probably came from a PI who dug it up.”
rowing up in Northern Virginia, Hooks wanted to work in federal law enforcement. While riding around in his father’s construction truck, though, he’d see an office building with a sign in red and white letters reading private investigations. “I wanted to know more,” Hooks says. “You couldn’t Google stuff back then, so I looked in the Yellow Pages.”
Three firms stood out, each headed by a charismatic investigator known for taking on mysterious assignments for elected officials and assorted government types who sometimes wanted others to wade through the muck—all so their own reputations could remain pristine. The first was Dick Bast, whose Washington was “peopled with Mafiosi, philandering bureaucrats, corrupt Pentagon officials, careless FBI agents, double-dealing private eyes, back-stabbing informants, and bitter spouses,” according to a 1983 Washingtonian profile. Bast got his start “breaking down doors of cheating spouses for divorce lawyers.” But by the time this magazine caught up with him, he was living in suburban respectability in McLean, neighbor to a former cabinet secretary and a congressman whose wife “sometimes gumshoed” for Bast’s firm.
Next came Donald Uffinger, also known as “Uff,” described by an early-1990s Washington Post story as a “big cheery cub who’ll sucker punch your lights out.” Reportedly weighing 230 pounds and sporting a 20-inch neck, he drove a flashy black Cadillac, had his initials stitched on custom shirt cuffs, and had been charged with assault “11 or 12 times.” (He was convicted only once, and that charge was later dismissed.) The author Kitty Kelley retained Uff’s services for her biographies of Jacqueline Onassis and Frank Sinatra. Like Bast, he lived comfortably, in a “splendiferous Tudor” in Fairfax.
Then there was Nicholas Beltrante. A beefy ex–DC cop with a law degree, he owned one of the most successful—and most celebrated—firms in the area. After the Watergate burglars were nabbed, the Democratic National Committee hired him to debug their headquarters. He worked for Republicans, too, doing background investigations for high-level Ford-administration appointees.
In 1977, Beltrante was featured in Time magazine. The piece is a doozy. It has Beltrante admitting he “breaks the law almost every day”; boasting of “illegal sources in state and federal law enforcement agencies, banks and credit bureaus”; and claiming he could “call upon friendly congressional aides to pry out private reports on people from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.” Give him someone’s full name; date and place of birth; and Social Security number, Beltrante bragged, and he could “find out anything else I want to know.”
Before landing a job with Beltrante, Hooks worked for Equifax, one of the major national credit-reporting agencies. Back then, he says, the company “actually kept manila folders on millions of people, for the use of insurance companies. I did a lot of legwork, gathering information to add to those files.” He also worked for a company called Bail DC, tracking down people who skipped bail. Hooks next started his own company, Locate Services, leaving business cards at area courthouses. He says Beltrante found his card and called him.
“He gave me a hard time, asking who I was, telling me I had to have a PI license,” Hooks says. “About two days later, he called back to see if I could come work for him.”
Every day, Hooks would put on a suit and tie and show up at Beltrante’s office in Alexandria, where he would sit “eight to ten hours a day, whether there was anything for me to do or not.” Sometimes, Hooks would make copies, or go to the Library of Congress to look through old phone books. “If Nick sent me to pick up his dry cleaning, that was okay with me because I was learning the whole time,” Hooks says. “I’d listen to him talking to clients and potential clients and lawyers—all of it.”
Before long, Beltrante was sending Hooks out on cases. “We’d go to a bar at happy hour near the phone-company building and make friends with the people who worked there to get access to telephone information,” Hooks says. “There were no computers. Everything was knowing people who could be beneficial to you.” Building those relationships proved challenging. “PIs in those days were retired cops—like, all of them,” Hooks says. “I was not. I was young, not respected. Nobody knew me. It was really hard. I had people in my family telling me to get a real job.”
I first met Hooks around that time. It was the mid-1980s, and the congressman I was working for, Ron Paul of Texas, had left his seat to mount an unsuccessful bid for the GOP Senate nomination. Knowing I’d be out of my job come January—and would need another way to pay rent and bar bills—I took the Commonwealth of Virginia’s private-investigator licensing course. After passing the exam, I ended up working a few cases for Beltrante.
The work I did was nowhere near as exciting as depicted in his Time profile. I once went “undercover,” using an assumed name, folding towels in a hospital’s sterile-processing unit to determine if one of my low-level coworkers was dealing drugs on the job. (Best I could tell, he wasn’t.)
I didn’t stick with private investigation—I was far more interested in writing articles and books. Hooks, by contrast, was serious about making it his life’s work. One early case sealed the deal. A woman in her sixties—born and adopted in DC during World War II—had spent decades looking for her biological mother. Multiple PIs had been unable to help her—even Beltrante told Hooks the case was unsolvable. But Hooks knocked on doors. He dug through old utility bills and city directories. Eventually, he found the woman’s deceased mother, who was buried in Ocean City. He also located the woman’s father, and even a sister she never knew she had. The discoveries left the woman in tears.
“The reward of that, the feeling like you made a difference?” Hooks says. “At that point, it was it for me.”
One night in the mid-1990s, Hooks found himself climbing into a dumpster behind a downtown office building. The hour was late. And he wasn’t alone.
“There were rats the size of alley cats in that dumpster, and I was to go through the trash bags to find any mail or other records,” he says. “I remember one bag I didn’t tear into—because it was moving.”
At the time, a knockdown financial fight was raging within a prominent and prosperous local family. Some journalists covering the story needed more intel than they could gather on their own, so they hired a law firm. The law firm in turn hired Hooks to do the literal dirty work of digging through the family patriarch’s garbage. It was the kind of assignment that wouldn’t be out of place in the tough-talking, two-fisted world of Beltrante, Bast, and Uffinger—a world that has since vanished, like smoke from the barrel of Philip Marlowe’s Colt 38.
By the end of the 1980s, Hooks had left Beltrante to start his own agency. Even then, he could see how the industry was changing. PIs were becoming more professional, more mainstream. Today, investigators still tend to come from law-enforcement backgrounds, former cops and retired FBI agents. In Washington, however, they’re joined by ex-journalists, plus people with experience on Capitol Hill and K Street and inside federal agencies.
A pair of former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters started Fusion GPS. The late Terry Lenzner, who served as chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, founded the Investigative Group International, a high-powered area firm that once counted former journalist Brooke Shearer among its PIs—that is, before she became an aide to Hillary Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign. (Shearer died in 2009.) Previous IGI head James Mintz spun off his own firm, the Mintz Group, in 1994. The company now has nearly 300 investigators, while Mintz teaches journalism at Columbia University.
Ajaeb’s career path is illustrative. After studying government and political science in college, he moved to Washington with the intention of applying for law school. Working as a paralegal for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, he helped investigate complex business mergers. That led to a private-sector job as a security analyst, monitoring social media for threats. When Ajaeb launched his own company, Nighthawk Strategies, in 2016, focusing on vetting people and performing due diligence, he realized he needed a PI license—not because he couldn’t do the work without it but because the attorneys and law firms he was pitching expected as much. “It was a way to meet potential clients where they are at,” he says. “They are probably not looking for a research specialist, but they are looking for a licensed PI.”
Once upon a time, Hooks says, PIs largely operated like old-school family physicians: Whatever problem you brought to their office, they’d try to solve it. Nowadays, they’re far more likely to specialize. “It’s like how you go to your ENT, your spine doctor, your cardiologist,” Hooks says. “The clients have so many different needs.” The Mintz Group offers a smorgasbord of white-collar investigatory services, including looking into potential executive hires, researching legal opponents, and gathering evidence for internal-fraud and workplace-misconduct investigations. IGI does similar work and also offers political opposition research and appointee vetting.
DC-area PIs, Ajaeb says, might draw on government backgrounds in tax fraud or international asset tracing or computer forensics. Broadly speaking, he says, “some are fanatics with records and documents and getting into the research weeds,” while others are “fantastic with surveillance but don’t want to sit in front of a computer.”
Though Hooks’s firm, Interprobe, does both, he personally prefers getting out in the field. In recent years, he’s traveled to Germany, Greece, Dubai, and Kuwait to shadow defense contractors. (Nondisclosure agreements prevent him from sharing specifics.) Back home, he’s been hired to check embassies and politicians’ offices for eavesdropping devices; to tail political candidates and see what lobbyists and business interests they’re meeting with; and to help campaigns figure out if they have a mole.
“Or say you’re a politician from a different state who’s visiting our area,” ostensibly on public business, Hooks says, describing a recent assignment. “How are you spending the public’s money and time? Are your kids here? Did you bring along your brother and family” to mostly vacation at taxpayer expense? “We document that.”
According to Ajaeb, investigators can earn somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 a year, depending on their level of experience and the type of cases they work: Complex financial investigations can pay more than $200 an hour, while assisting court-appointed criminal-defense attorneys might pay an hourly rate of $60.
Much of the PI work in the area remains nonpolitical—a bit less glamorous, perhaps, but no less important to clients. Interprobe checks out insurance claims, which can mean exercising in the same gym with someone claiming to be disabled—but who’s also running on a treadmill. Domestic cases require following husbands and wives; these can account for more than two-thirds of the firm’s work in a given year and have taken a toll on Hooks’s ability to trust anyone. “I no longer take what people say at face value,” he says. “You can’t. You learn to question what people are telling you and why they are telling you something.”
Hooks doesn’t always know what comes of the information he uncovers. “You’ll have a campaign manager’s lawyer hire a lawyer who hires another lawyer who hires a PI to do opposition research, and they’ll hire us to do the street side of it,” he says. “We turn our reports over and never hear about it again.”
There are big stories where a lot of the information has been developed by a firm like ours. I find out when my phone rings and someone I work with will say, ‘Did you see the news?’
Sometimes, though, Hooks sees how his work makes a difference. In the early 2000s, he was approached by members of a church whose clergyman they suspected of embezzlement. Outside of a few community-college courses in criminal justice, Hooks is mostly self-taught; he told the members he knew next to nothing about that sort of crime. They hired him anyway—because, Hooks believes, “they were impressed by how I listened to them. And then I bought and read a lot of books on church finance.”
Hooks says he found evidence of wrongdoing, “things like purchases of beach condominiums in South Carolina.” He gave a report to his clients, who in turn gave the clergyman a choice: Exit quietly or face criminal charges. The clergyman left. “Lots of private investigation is like that,” Hooks says. “People don’t want to go to the police.” Other times, he says, his findings end up with law enforcement, journalists, or both. “There are big stories where a lot of the information has been developed by a firm like ours. I usually find out when my phone rings and someone I work with will say, ‘Did you see the news?’ ”
One evening last fall, Hooks stopped his car in the parking lot near the tennis courts at a public park in the Northern Virginia suburbs. It was here on a September morning, he told me, that a group of pickleball players discovered the body of a 25-year-old man and called the county police. A rental truck the dead man had used was in the parking lot, and his keys and his cellphone were in the truck.
What exactly happened to the man was a mystery. There were no signs of foul play. Police were trying, unsuccessfully, to access the contents of his phone. An in-progress toxicology report was potentially months from completion. The man’s mother and her husband, who live in McLean, felt like things weren’t adding up. So they hired Hooks.
Hooks is adamant that he’s not working against the police: “This is not some Humphrey Bogart movie where the cops are lazy and incompetent and the PI has to save the day. We will gladly share whatever we discover.”
On this particular case, there was a lot that seemed suspicious. The dead man’s body and hair were soaking wet when police arrived, Hooks says—but the grass where he was found was dry. The dead man’s mother said he had an expired driver’s license and lacked a major credit card. Somehow, he was still able to rent the truck.
The dead man’s mother also says he had been in rehab “six or seven times.” Hooks has a working theory: On the night of his death, the man might have overdosed. He was possibly with a friend, or friends, who put him into a bathtub in hopes of reviving him. When that didn’t help, they may have driven his body to the park, dragged it into the grass, and then fled—perhaps on foot, or in a second car, or by rideshare.
And that’s not all. Hooks and the dead man’s parents believe he was with a particular friend that night, a second man they call “the Egyptian.” The two had met in a local rehab program, the dead man’s mother says, and had been working together picking up rental scooters around Washington, apparently using the same rented truck found in the parking lot.
Hooks knows the apartment building where the friend lived. Interprobe combed through its tenant list, looking for names of Middle Eastern origin. The firm also obtained security-camera footage from a public library a short walk from the tennis courts, hoping to identify other vehicles on the road around the time the truck arrived. That didn’t pan out: It was too dark to see anything, and anyway, the camera was too far from the road. There, for the time being, the investigation stalls.
A good PI, Hooks says, is the sort of person who enjoys Rubik’s Cubes. The job is rife with dead ends: doors that remain shut, leads that go cold, gathered evidence that doesn’t offer answers. “It takes ingenuity,” he says. “I was taught years ago that there is always, always a way to get it done—if you can’t figure it out, it’s because you’re settling for what you got.” When Hooks sits down to write “negative” reports—that is, on cases in which an investigation didn’t provide an answer—he often realizes that his efforts are simply incomplete.
“You run through every step, every bridge you crossed, every person you talk to, and when you look at what you’ve done, what you’re really seeing is what you haven’t done,” he says. “That’s when you go back and figure out how to resolve the case.”
Weeks later, Hooks calls with an update. He’s seen the rental agreement for the truck: Four people are on it, all with Middle Eastern names, all using the same cellphone number, three using the same Social Security number. Hooks and his colleagues have them under surveillance. He’s also trying to get the dead man’s cellphone back from the police so he can download its contents with the help of a forensics expert. This sort of work is tedious, and frequently frustrating. It’s also what real-life private investigators mostly do. Hooks hardly sounds discouraged. “Things are progressing,” he says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
It could be one of any number of offices in the Washington area.
There are thousands just like it—the desks, the file cabinets, the bookcases, the cubes and laptops, an office manager’s space, and a small kitchen down the hall. There’s the boss’s desk, which is larger than the others, with leather and suede couches in front of it, forming a kind of comfy conference room for closed-door meetings where confidentiality is required.
Then you begin to notice the ways in which this office is not like others. Mounted on the wall near the conference-room couches are four flat-screen TV monitors. Techy-looking gizmos are on the floor. The laptops are loaded with apps for OSINT and SOCMINT, which sound like classified programs.
The screens don’t get much use anymore, explains Kevin Hooks, who runs this operation: “We used to use them to watch—in real time—four different surveillances that were in progress. We can do that now on our cellphones.”
OSINT, Hooks continues, is short for “open-source intelligence.” SOCMINT stands for “social-media intelligence.” These are methods of perfectly legal snooping and sleuthing, of sifting through posts, databases, and other public records to compile dossiers on people. The apps themselves have intel-gathering capacities that far exceed those of LinkedIn or Zillow. “We do a lot of our work online these days,” Hooks says.
As for the gizmos? One can tell you if a house or business is being bugged. Another allows you to track the license plates of surrounding cars in real time, the better to know if you’re being followed. Hooks looks at the floor. He sighs. “I hate it when this equipment becomes obsolete, because it is so expensive to replace.”
Who even needs this stuff, other than foreign spies? Or officers at three-letter government agencies? Private investigators need it. People like Hooks. The owner and CEO of Interprobe in Fairfax, the 61-year-old Hooks has been a PI in the DC area for decades, establishing himself as a reputable professional in an occupation that has long played a crucial role in the city’s information ecosystem—and long been misunderstood.
se your imagination. Picture a private eye. What do you see? A gumshoe in a trench coat and fedora, snapping photos from the shadows, tangling with femmes fatales, and getting into frequent fistfights, all while working for shady clients?
In Hollywood, you’re still seeing investigators picking locks, going places they shouldn’t be. That kind of thing doesn’t go on.
No, no, no: That’s dime novels. TV. The movies. A pastiche of tired—if entertaining—caricatures, loosely rooted in a bygone era. “In Hollywood, you’re [still] seeing investigators picking locks, going places they shouldn’t be, having a conversation with somebody and sticking a transmitter to the bottom of the chair they’re sitting in,” Hooks says. “That kind of thing doesn’t go on.”
These days, real-life PIs have a lot more in common with white-collar desk jockeys than with Sam Spade. Sure, they still hit the streets to, say, tail people whose spouses suspect infidelity. “We handle maybe 320 to 380 cases like that a year,” Hooks says of his firm. But much like K Street lawyers and Capitol Hill reporters, they spend a good portion of their time in front of screens, chasing data and documents. “A lot of what we do involves research,” Hooks says.
DC is one of the most unique places for being a PI, heavy on information at a war-room pace. There are more opportunities to specialize.
It’s not just the methods that are modern. It’s the clients—and the cases. PIs help insurers scrutinize dubious claims and Wall Street firms evaluate high-stakes mergers. They investigate identity theft, search for missing persons, and perform background checks. Here in Washington, where politics, policy, and power can hinge on finding out things others don’t want you to know, PIs are an important tool. They were part of the Senate inquiry into Watergate. They worked with the New Republic to get to the bottom of Stephen Glass’s plagiarism. Remember the so-called Steele Dossier, the controversial report about Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia that became one of the biggest stories in politics? It came from political opposition research conducted for Fusion GPS, a local private research company.
“DC is one of the most unique places for being a PI, heavy on information at a war-room pace,” says Ed Ajaeb, a local PI and president of the National Council of Investigation and Security Services, a trade group for investigators and security professionals. “There are more opportunities to specialize in things like crisis communications, opposition research, lobbying and policy research, research into dark money and financing. We’ve had a few cases of think tanks and nonprofits reaching out to get background on a prospective donor—is there anything in their background that would create public embarrassment?”
The work can be hard, and investigators don’t always crack the case. (Again, remember the Steele Dossier?) When they do, however, the impact can be felt. “We do a lot of behind-the-scenes work that gives us a mysterious feel with the public,” Ajaeb says. “But that moment in the movies where Perry Mason is holding up some evidence in court and asking someone on the stand, ‘Isn’t it true that ten years ago you did this?’—in real life, that probably came from a PI who dug it up.”
rowing up in Northern Virginia, Hooks wanted to work in federal law enforcement. While riding around in his father’s construction truck, though, he’d see an office building with a sign in red and white letters reading private investigations. “I wanted to know more,” Hooks says. “You couldn’t Google stuff back then, so I looked in the Yellow Pages.”
Three firms stood out, each headed by a charismatic investigator known for taking on mysterious assignments for elected officials and assorted government types who sometimes wanted others to wade through the muck—all so their own reputations could remain pristine. The first was Dick Bast, whose Washington was “peopled with Mafiosi, philandering bureaucrats, corrupt Pentagon officials, careless FBI agents, double-dealing private eyes, back-stabbing informants, and bitter spouses,” according to a 1983 Washingtonian profile. Bast got his start “breaking down doors of cheating spouses for divorce lawyers.” But by the time this magazine caught up with him, he was living in suburban respectability in McLean, neighbor to a former cabinet secretary and a congressman whose wife “sometimes gumshoed” for Bast’s firm.
Next came Donald Uffinger, also known as “Uff,” described by an early-1990s Washington Post story as a “big cheery cub who’ll sucker punch your lights out.” Reportedly weighing 230 pounds and sporting a 20-inch neck, he drove a flashy black Cadillac, had his initials stitched on custom shirt cuffs, and had been charged with assault “11 or 12 times.” (He was convicted only once, and that charge was later dismissed.) The author Kitty Kelley retained Uff’s services for her biographies of Jacqueline Onassis and Frank Sinatra. Like Bast, he lived comfortably, in a “splendiferous Tudor” in Fairfax.
Then there was Nicholas Beltrante. A beefy ex–DC cop with a law degree, he owned one of the most successful—and most celebrated—firms in the area. After the Watergate burglars were nabbed, the Democratic National Committee hired him to debug their headquarters. He worked for Republicans, too, doing background investigations for high-level Ford-administration appointees.
In 1977, Beltrante was featured in Time magazine. The piece is a doozy. It has Beltrante admitting he “breaks the law almost every day”; boasting of “illegal sources in state and federal law enforcement agencies, banks and credit bureaus”; and claiming he could “call upon friendly congressional aides to pry out private reports on people from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.” Give him someone’s full name; date and place of birth; and Social Security number, Beltrante bragged, and he could “find out anything else I want to know.”
Before landing a job with Beltrante, Hooks worked for Equifax, one of the major national credit-reporting agencies. Back then, he says, the company “actually kept manila folders on millions of people, for the use of insurance companies. I did a lot of legwork, gathering information to add to those files.” He also worked for a company called Bail DC, tracking down people who skipped bail. Hooks next started his own company, Locate Services, leaving business cards at area courthouses. He says Beltrante found his card and called him.
“He gave me a hard time, asking who I was, telling me I had to have a PI license,” Hooks says. “About two days later, he called back to see if I could come work for him.”
Every day, Hooks would put on a suit and tie and show up at Beltrante’s office in Alexandria, where he would sit “eight to ten hours a day, whether there was anything for me to do or not.” Sometimes, Hooks would make copies, or go to the Library of Congress to look through old phone books. “If Nick sent me to pick up his dry cleaning, that was okay with me because I was learning the whole time,” Hooks says. “I’d listen to him talking to clients and potential clients and lawyers—all of it.”
Before long, Beltrante was sending Hooks out on cases. “We’d go to a bar at happy hour near the phone-company building and make friends with the people who worked there to get access to telephone information,” Hooks says. “There were no computers. Everything was knowing people who could be beneficial to you.” Building those relationships proved challenging. “PIs in those days were retired cops—like, all of them,” Hooks says. “I was not. I was young, not respected. Nobody knew me. It was really hard. I had people in my family telling me to get a real job.”
I first met Hooks around that time. It was the mid-1980s, and the congressman I was working for, Ron Paul of Texas, had left his seat to mount an unsuccessful bid for the GOP Senate nomination. Knowing I’d be out of my job come January—and would need another way to pay rent and bar bills—I took the Commonwealth of Virginia’s private-investigator licensing course. After passing the exam, I ended up working a few cases for Beltrante.
The work I did was nowhere near as exciting as depicted in his Time profile. I once went “undercover,” using an assumed name, folding towels in a hospital’s sterile-processing unit to determine if one of my low-level coworkers was dealing drugs on the job. (Best I could tell, he wasn’t.)
I didn’t stick with private investigation—I was far more interested in writing articles and books. Hooks, by contrast, was serious about making it his life’s work. One early case sealed the deal. A woman in her sixties—born and adopted in DC during World War II—had spent decades looking for her biological mother. Multiple PIs had been unable to help her—even Beltrante told Hooks the case was unsolvable. But Hooks knocked on doors. He dug through old utility bills and city directories. Eventually, he found the woman’s deceased mother, who was buried in Ocean City. He also located the woman’s father, and even a sister she never knew she had. The discoveries left the woman in tears.
“The reward of that, the feeling like you made a difference?” Hooks says. “At that point, it was it for me.”
One night in the mid-1990s, Hooks found himself climbing into a dumpster behind a downtown office building. The hour was late. And he wasn’t alone.
“There were rats the size of alley cats in that dumpster, and I was to go through the trash bags to find any mail or other records,” he says. “I remember one bag I didn’t tear into—because it was moving.”
At the time, a knockdown financial fight was raging within a prominent and prosperous local family. Some journalists covering the story needed more intel than they could gather on their own, so they hired a law firm. The law firm in turn hired Hooks to do the literal dirty work of digging through the family patriarch’s garbage. It was the kind of assignment that wouldn’t be out of place in the tough-talking, two-fisted world of Beltrante, Bast, and Uffinger—a world that has since vanished, like smoke from the barrel of Philip Marlowe’s Colt 38.
By the end of the 1980s, Hooks had left Beltrante to start his own agency. Even then, he could see how the industry was changing. PIs were becoming more professional, more mainstream. Today, investigators still tend to come from law-enforcement backgrounds, former cops and retired FBI agents. In Washington, however, they’re joined by ex-journalists, plus people with experience on Capitol Hill and K Street and inside federal agencies.
A pair of former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters started Fusion GPS. The late Terry Lenzner, who served as chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, founded the Investigative Group International, a high-powered area firm that once counted former journalist Brooke Shearer among its PIs—that is, before she became an aide to Hillary Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign. (Shearer died in 2009.) Previous IGI head James Mintz spun off his own firm, the Mintz Group, in 1994. The company now has nearly 300 investigators, while Mintz teaches journalism at Columbia University.
Ajaeb’s career path is illustrative. After studying government and political science in college, he moved to Washington with the intention of applying for law school. Working as a paralegal for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, he helped investigate complex business mergers. That led to a private-sector job as a security analyst, monitoring social media for threats. When Ajaeb launched his own company, Nighthawk Strategies, in 2016, focusing on vetting people and performing due diligence, he realized he needed a PI license—not because he couldn’t do the work without it but because the attorneys and law firms he was pitching expected as much. “It was a way to meet potential clients where they are at,” he says. “They are probably not looking for a research specialist, but they are looking for a licensed PI.”
Once upon a time, Hooks says, PIs largely operated like old-school family physicians: Whatever problem you brought to their office, they’d try to solve it. Nowadays, they’re far more likely to specialize. “It’s like how you go to your ENT, your spine doctor, your cardiologist,” Hooks says. “The clients have so many different needs.” The Mintz Group offers a smorgasbord of white-collar investigatory services, including looking into potential executive hires, researching legal opponents, and gathering evidence for internal-fraud and workplace-misconduct investigations. IGI does similar work and also offers political opposition research and appointee vetting.
DC-area PIs, Ajaeb says, might draw on government backgrounds in tax fraud or international asset tracing or computer forensics. Broadly speaking, he says, “some are fanatics with records and documents and getting into the research weeds,” while others are “fantastic with surveillance but don’t want to sit in front of a computer.”
Though Hooks’s firm, Interprobe, does both, he personally prefers getting out in the field. In recent years, he’s traveled to Germany, Greece, Dubai, and Kuwait to shadow defense contractors. (Nondisclosure agreements prevent him from sharing specifics.) Back home, he’s been hired to check embassies and politicians’ offices for eavesdropping devices; to tail political candidates and see what lobbyists and business interests they’re meeting with; and to help campaigns figure out if they have a mole.
“Or say you’re a politician from a different state who’s visiting our area,” ostensibly on public business, Hooks says, describing a recent assignment. “How are you spending the public’s money and time? Are your kids here? Did you bring along your brother and family” to mostly vacation at taxpayer expense? “We document that.”
According to Ajaeb, investigators can earn somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 a year, depending on their level of experience and the type of cases they work: Complex financial investigations can pay more than $200 an hour, while assisting court-appointed criminal-defense attorneys might pay an hourly rate of $60.
Much of the PI work in the area remains nonpolitical—a bit less glamorous, perhaps, but no less important to clients. Interprobe checks out insurance claims, which can mean exercising in the same gym with someone claiming to be disabled—but who’s also running on a treadmill. Domestic cases require following husbands and wives; these can account for more than two-thirds of the firm’s work in a given year and have taken a toll on Hooks’s ability to trust anyone. “I no longer take what people say at face value,” he says. “You can’t. You learn to question what people are telling you and why they are telling you something.”
Hooks doesn’t always know what comes of the information he uncovers. “You’ll have a campaign manager’s lawyer hire a lawyer who hires another lawyer who hires a PI to do opposition research, and they’ll hire us to do the street side of it,” he says. “We turn our reports over and never hear about it again.”
There are big stories where a lot of the information has been developed by a firm like ours. I find out when my phone rings and someone I work with will say, ‘Did you see the news?’
Sometimes, though, Hooks sees how his work makes a difference. In the early 2000s, he was approached by members of a church whose clergyman they suspected of embezzlement. Outside of a few community-college courses in criminal justice, Hooks is mostly self-taught; he told the members he knew next to nothing about that sort of crime. They hired him anyway—because, Hooks believes, “they were impressed by how I listened to them. And then I bought and read a lot of books on church finance.”
Hooks says he found evidence of wrongdoing, “things like purchases of beach condominiums in South Carolina.” He gave a report to his clients, who in turn gave the clergyman a choice: Exit quietly or face criminal charges. The clergyman left. “Lots of private investigation is like that,” Hooks says. “People don’t want to go to the police.” Other times, he says, his findings end up with law enforcement, journalists, or both. “There are big stories where a lot of the information has been developed by a firm like ours. I usually find out when my phone rings and someone I work with will say, ‘Did you see the news?’ ”
One evening last fall, Hooks stopped his car in the parking lot near the tennis courts at a public park in the Northern Virginia suburbs. It was here on a September morning, he told me, that a group of pickleball players discovered the body of a 25-year-old man and called the county police. A rental truck the dead man had used was in the parking lot, and his keys and his cellphone were in the truck.
What exactly happened to the man was a mystery. There were no signs of foul play. Police were trying, unsuccessfully, to access the contents of his phone. An in-progress toxicology report was potentially months from completion. The man’s mother and her husband, who live in McLean, felt like things weren’t adding up. So they hired Hooks.
Hooks is adamant that he’s not working against the police: “This is not some Humphrey Bogart movie where the cops are lazy and incompetent and the PI has to save the day. We will gladly share whatever we discover.”
On this particular case, there was a lot that seemed suspicious. The dead man’s body and hair were soaking wet when police arrived, Hooks says—but the grass where he was found was dry. The dead man’s mother said he had an expired driver’s license and lacked a major credit card. Somehow, he was still able to rent the truck.
The dead man’s mother also says he had been in rehab “six or seven times.” Hooks has a working theory: On the night of his death, the man might have overdosed. He was possibly with a friend, or friends, who put him into a bathtub in hopes of reviving him. When that didn’t help, they may have driven his body to the park, dragged it into the grass, and then fled—perhaps on foot, or in a second car, or by rideshare.
And that’s not all. Hooks and the dead man’s parents believe he was with a particular friend that night, a second man they call “the Egyptian.” The two had met in a local rehab program, the dead man’s mother says, and had been working together picking up rental scooters around Washington, apparently using the same rented truck found in the parking lot.
Hooks knows the apartment building where the friend lived. Interprobe combed through its tenant list, looking for names of Middle Eastern origin. The firm also obtained security-camera footage from a public library a short walk from the tennis courts, hoping to identify other vehicles on the road around the time the truck arrived. That didn’t pan out: It was too dark to see anything, and anyway, the camera was too far from the road. There, for the time being, the investigation stalls.
A good PI, Hooks says, is the sort of person who enjoys Rubik’s Cubes. The job is rife with dead ends: doors that remain shut, leads that go cold, gathered evidence that doesn’t offer answers. “It takes ingenuity,” he says. “I was taught years ago that there is always, always a way to get it done—if you can’t figure it out, it’s because you’re settling for what you got.” When Hooks sits down to write “negative” reports—that is, on cases in which an investigation didn’t provide an answer—he often realizes that his efforts are simply incomplete.
“You run through every step, every bridge you crossed, every person you talk to, and when you look at what you’ve done, what you’re really seeing is what you haven’t done,” he says. “That’s when you go back and figure out how to resolve the case.”
Weeks later, Hooks calls with an update. He’s seen the rental agreement for the truck: Four people are on it, all with Middle Eastern names, all using the same cellphone number, three using the same Social Security number. Hooks and his colleagues have them under surveillance. He’s also trying to get the dead man’s cellphone back from the police so he can download its contents with the help of a forensics expert. This sort of work is tedious, and frequently frustrating. It’s also what real-life private investigators mostly do. Hooks hardly sounds discouraged. “Things are progressing,” he says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
This article appears in the March 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
