In the years since Peterson had worked for Marvin Davis and John Masek to find out who was pilfering oil from their pipelines, the business partners had been involved in an acrimonious parting of the ways. As is often the case in such disputes, they devoted much of their time after the split to suing each other.
When he wasn't fighting Masek in court, Davis was busy diversifying his vast wealth into hotels, restaurants, golf courses and the Aspen Ski Corp. He bought and sold the 20th Century Fox film studio, sold many of his oil holdings and eventually shifted his base of operations from Denver to Beverly Hills, where he could hobnob with movie stars.
Because Peterson, too, had shifted some of his interests to California, he dropped Davis a line to let him know that he was still around and available. In January 1992, Davis and his attorney James Regan took him up on the offer. (Davis, who is notoriously closemouthed about his personal life and financial dealings, did not respond to Westword's request for an interview. Attorney Regan didn't return phone calls.)
Like the FDIC, Davis coveted Peterson's asset-tracking skills. The billionaire had won a $20,000 judgment against Masek in Wyoming, and he was suing his ex-partner in yet another case in that state. Masek, however, claimed that he was tapped out and had no money with which to pay Davis. Though Masek had made millions back in the late 1970s, he claimed in depositions that he was living a hand-to-mouth existence, surviving only with the aid of loans from friends and family members.
Davis was understandably suspicious of Masek's claims, and he hired Peterson to find Masek's funds. Peterson says Davis told him that he "was certain" Masek had money in secret offshore bank accounts, most likely in the Cayman Islands.
Peterson and his staff--which consisted of a secretary, a string of unpaid paralegal "interns" and a small number of "contract employees"--quickly turned up evidence to substantiate Davis's suspicions. Masek, they found, had offices in a downtown Denver highrise. He'd plunked down $25,000 in cash for a one-year lease on a half-million-dollar home on Lookout Mountain. And he and his girlfriend were tooling around town in brand-new vehicles--he in a GMC pickup and she in an Audi Quattro. Peterson and his staff eventually found a paper trail leading to a series of banking institutions in Wyoming, New York and Grand Cayman. Masek later paid his debt to Davis in full.
In April 1992, Masek later testified in court, he began to suspect that someone had been surreptitiously looking into his bank accounts. He believed his file cabinets and office drawers had been rifled. He hired an electronics expert to sweep his office for bugs, and he hired Denver private investigator Rick Johnson to discover who, if anyone, was after him.
Johnson's work eventually led him to Pete Peterson's front door. ("Johnson," Peterson says with a sneer. "He couldn't find his butt using both hands.")
Johnson, however, found enough to put the identical portion of R.W. Peterson's anatomy in a sling. Masek filed suit against Peterson's company later that same year, accusing the P.I. of burglary, invasion of privacy and "intentional infliction of emotional distress by extreme and outrageous conduct." He sought relief under the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act, which was established to guard against racketeering.
During the course of the nonjury trial, held before Judge Hufnagel in December 1993, Peterson's investigative methods were put under close scrutiny. Peterson admitted to using "accounting ruses" to obtain information about Masek's bank accounts (according to testimony from a bank employee, a man identifying himself as Masek called and asked for a printout of recent account activity). Peterson also acknowledged that some of his contract employees might have used subterfuge to obtain information, posing as employees of an accounting firm.
Peterson identified those contract employees as Kevin Stymiest and Alex Jaeckel. The 46-year-old Stymiest came to the Peterson agency with a less than stellar record. He had two burglary convictions to his name, as well as arrests for car theft and hit-and-run. Peterson says Stymiest was up front about his criminal record when he hired on in 1991. And Stymiest has only nice things to say about Peterson, who he says gave him a second chance when no one else would.
Jaeckel, 40, had hired on as a contract investigator only the year before. She says she originally went to Peterson to learn the tricks of the trade in order to protect herself against a "vindictive" ex-husband.
During the course of the trial, it was revealed that in investigating Masek, Jaeckel had contacted a Grand Cayman private investigator by the name of Claude Myles. According to court documents, Jaeckel identified herself to Myles as Masek's daughter, Lisa Moore. She told Myles that she would soon be arriving on the island, and she provided him with a list of information she wanted to obtain about Masek's assets there. It was only after Jaeckel arrived in Grand Cayman, Myles claimed in an affidavit, that Jaeckel gave him her true name and identified herself as an investigator.
"I was suspicious of the way she was conducting her business," Myles, a former police officer, said in the affidavit. "I did not like the fact that she had not been honest and given me her true name from the beginning. This is not the usual practice of private investigators when dealing with each other."
According to Myles's affidavit, when he demanded money up front before proceeding, Jaeckel told him she'd have to check with Peterson first. When Myles heard back from her several days later, he said in the affidavit, she'd already left the island. Jaeckel claims that she fled after receiving veiled threats from thugs wearing gold chains and piloting a cigarette boat. She says they warned her about asking too many questions about the wrong people.
The trial in Masek's suit against Peterson concluded in mid-December 1993. It would be almost fifteen months before Hufnagel would render her judgment in the case.
While Peterson waited to learn his fate, he took on a job for Denver's financially struggling Yellow Cab Company. Initially, Peter-son simply swept the company's office for bugs. Then, Peterson says, Clark Trammel--the company's court-appointed receiver--asked him to help the company in a civil suit it had filed against Karen Mathis, an attorney who had been the receiver prior to his tenure. As it turned out, Hufnagel was the judge who'd appointed Mathis receiver after earlier infighting at the taxi firm. His investigation, Peterson says, included making visits to the Mayan Theater on Broadway in an attempt to track down rumors that Hufnagel and Mathis were secretly meeting there to discuss the case. Peterson says he handed out his business cards to theater employees, asking them to call if they spotted the judge and Mathis together.
Peterson says he realized that investigating a judge who was about to rule in one of his own court cases was unusual. He says he told his attorney in the Masek case that he had come across Hufnagel on another investigation and was concerned that his work for Yellow Cab might pose a conflict of interest for the judge or for himself (even though Hufnagel presumably had no way of knowing he was looking for her at the Mayan). But he says his attorney told him "he didn't want to piss off the judge," who had yet to rule on Masek's claims, by raising the issue. Peterson went ahead with his snooping operation.
Peterson's S&L work continued to serve as his bread and butter well into the 1990s and was his most consistent source of favorable publicity right up until August of last year. That's when Peterson took the national media by storm with his claim that he'd been hired by a group calling itself "Friends of Nicole." His job, he announced at a Los Angeles press conference he'd called himself, would be to do everything possible to bolster the State of California's case against O.J. Simpson.
Peterson told Newsweek he was looking for evidence of spousal abuse and "eighteen other angles." He told USA Today he was attempting to nail down suspicions that O.J. Simpson had been stalking his estranged wife for weeks prior to her murder. And he told the Denver Post he planned to provide the prosecution with information that would discount allegations of racism leveled against Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman.
That Nicole Simpson's friends would hire Peterson puzzled many people in the private-investigation community, particularly because Los Angeles is chock-full of P.I.s, many of them former police detectives with solid backgrounds in homicide investigation and crime-scene work. Peterson, however, says it made perfect sense for Nicole Simpson's friends to turn to his firm. "We're good and trustworthy and dependable," he says. "And they were looking for someone who wouldn't sell the story to the tabloids"--ironic reasoning, perhaps, given that up to that point Peterson's only real claim to fame had been tracking down Roseanne's daughter for the National Enquirer.
When pressed to name who hired him, Peterson says that the Friends of Nicole have requested anonymity. "Larry King begged me to have them on his show," he adds.
One well-known Los Angeles private investigator tells Westword that numerous private eyes, some of them working for national media outlets, have attempted to determine who hired Peterson. They got nowhere. "No one who knows her had ever heard of [Peterson] before his press conference," says the investigator. "All her friends say they didn't hire him and don't know who did. It's hard to refute a negative."
Uncovering the identity of the Friends of Nicole has been made even more difficult by media reports in which Peterson has been quoted as numbering the group that hired him at anywhere from two to four people. He's also put the number of Nicole Simpson's "close friends" in the group at different times as one or two.
Even Lou Brown, Nicole Simpson's father, says he doubts Peterson's claims that he's working for someone who was close to Nicole. "He's not legitimate as far as we're concerned," Lou Brown told Westword in a phone interview from California. "Who are those `friends'? I think he's just a person who's exploiting the name and making money on the side."
Peterson dismisses Brown's skepticism. Nicole Simpson's friends don't trust Lou Brown or, for that matter, anyone in the Brown family, he says. "All of them were on O.J.'s dole." (Many members of the Brown family did receive jobs and/or money from O.J. prior to Nicole Simpson's murder.)
And that Peterson has been investigating the case is not really in doubt. He has surveillance tapes of Kato Kaelin and A.C. Cowlings, though they consist of such mundane scenes as Kaelin giving an unidentified woman a quick kiss and Cowlings getting into his car outside his chiropractor's office and talking to a friend at a yogurt shop. Peterson has provided the press with regular updates on his findings, and he's gone to the L.A. district attorney's office with some of what he's found.
"Like thousands of other people who've tried to give us information, [Peterson has] done the same," says D.A.'s investigator Mike Stevens. "We did have a meeting with him. He said he had a witness who might have observed O.J. Simpson stalking [murder victim] Ron Goldman. It turned out that the information was of no benefit to us."
Peterson, says Stevens, had "sugarcoated" the information he'd presented to investigators, laying out a scenario that wasn't entirely backed up by the man's statements. But Stevens says he's reluctant to say more about Peterson's witness, just in case a higher-up changes direction and decides to put the man on the stand.
If Nicole Simpson's friends should choose to forgo his services, Peterson says, he'll probably still go forward with his investigation, even if it means working for free. "I want to crack the O.J. case," he says with a laugh. "That would be a real claim to fame."
In April 1995, more than a year after the Masek trial, Judge Hufnagel finally issued her findings in that case. She came down hard on Peterson and his cohorts, finding that the evidence showed they had trespassed at Masek's business and indulged in "wanton conduct." The judge added that Peterson had displayed "utter disregard for the truth" in his testimony. Hufnagel ordered Peterson's firm to pay Masek's company in excess of $120,000 and may yet force the private eye to cough up Masek's attorney's fees. The judge says she can't comment on the case. Peterson says he plans to appeal.
The following month, Peterson lost another civil case. He and Stymiest were named as defendants, along with a podiatrist named Stephen Albert, in a suit filed by Denver doctor Gerit Mulder, who has since left town. Although the court files have been sealed at Mulder's request, the doctor's attorney, Phil Pearson, says the action was a slander-and-defamation case.
The court fight began when Mulder sued Albert for allegedly telling people that Mulder had AIDS and abused cocaine. Peterson and Stymiest were added as defendants only after Albert hired them to assist in his defense. According to Pearson, a witness said that Stymiest, posing as an investigative reporter, told her Mulder was "on drugs." Peterson denies ever slandering Mulder and says he only asked potential witnesses questions about Mulder's personal habits.
The jury found for Mulder but decided that Peterson, Stymiest and Albert should pay just $1 each in damages. The panel, however, awarded Mulder $28,000 in attorney's fees. According to attorney Pearson, Mulder has since requested a new trial in an attempt to recover financial losses he says he suffered as a result of the slander.
Peterson was angry about the judgments in both cases, and he responded in typically blunt fashion. First, he requested that Hufnagel recuse herself from the Masek case, even though she'd already rendered her decision. The basis for his request: Hufnagel had a conflict of interest in that before she'd ruled, Peterson had begun the Yellow Cab investigation of her and Karen Mathis. Hufnagel refused to step down.
Next Peterson accused Hufnagel of turning Judge Markson against him in the Mulder case. Then he set up what he calls the Committee to Unseat Hufnagel. To build ammunition, he took out advertisements in local newspapers seeking other dissatisfied defendants. To date, he says, only a few people have climbed aboard. The reason for the lukewarm response, he says, is that people are afraid of Hufnagel.
On June 2 Masek filed yet another suit against Peterson, alleging the very same facts that he had presented in the earlier trial. That suit, however, names not Peterson's company but Peterson as an individual. Masek also names Stymiest, Jaeckel and Marvin Davis as defendants.
As if that weren't enough, Jaeckel found herself the subject of a May 9 Ward Lucas "I-Team" investigation. Jaeckel, Lucas determined, had been involved in a traffic altercation with a woman named Margaret Clausner in a parking lot earlier this year. According to Lucas's report, immediately following that altercation, Jaeckel pulled Clausner's motor-vehicle registration information. Within 24 hours, Clausner's phone service, utilities and cable had been turned off, reportedly at the request of a woman identifying herself as Clausner.
Jaeckel told Lucas (and later Westword) that she'd only tracked down data on Clausner for a client. But she declined to identify the person. In his televised report, Lucas mentioned Jaeckel's involvement in the Masek case, including the fact that she "took the Fifth" when asked if she'd ever represented herself as someone else.
But before the piece ran, Lucas says, he received a late-night call at his home from Peterson. According to the newsman, Peterson started out civil but became more and more "outrageous. He said that if I mentioned his name in a story about Alex that he'd come after me," Lucas says. "He said she wasn't acting as his employee [in the Clausner incident]. Then he started getting goofy. He said he knew a lot of personal information about me and that he could let people know. He said, `I know for a fact that you intercept people's calls and go through people's garbage.'"
When the Jaeckel piece finally ran, Lucas told viewers that Peterson had tried to coerce him into dropping the story. Peterson denies threatening the newsman and accuses Lucas of being biased against him. "We're going to sue Ward Lucas over the piece," Peterson says.
Peterson claims to be undisturbed about yet more bad news--that the Denver district attorney's office is investigating possible criminal charges against him in light of the ruling in the Masek case. "Hufnagel probably put them up to it," he charges. "Or Rick Johnson. Anyway, the statute of limitations has run out."
His current difficulties, he says, are simply the result of owning a successful, high-profile business. "The higher the eagle flies," he says, quoting an acquaintance, "the more hunters it attracts."
For now, it appears that Peterson will stay in the eagle business. He denies one published report that he wants to ditch the P.I. business to become a radio talk-show host. "What I really want," he says, "is to be the Marvin Davis of the private-investigation business."
end of part 2
