But there is not much of the old "gumshoe" image about the flashily - dressed 37-year-old Monte. He looks like a businessman with an Italian fashion designer's streak. A red kerchief cascades out of his dark blue pinstriped suit, and he wears about him an ostentatious display of $40,000 worth of personal jewellery: a huge diamond-encrusted sapphire ring, a heavy $22,000 bracelet, a gold Rolex watch and cufflinks. He also flashes a 24-carat gold money clip which Monte says was a gift from Sheik Rashid of Dubai for whom in 1975 he organised a force of 400 mercenaries - former Royal marines, SAS commandos and Australian Vietnam veterans - to guard the sheikdom's oilfields.

Monte says there are two reasons for this walking display of wealth. The first: When his family fled from Egypt, after the Suez crisis, where his Italian-born father was with the British Army, they had to carry all their worldly goods with them. The second reason is a message to potential clients: hat other people pay Frank Monte, and pay him well for what he does. On his desk are three bundles of $50 notes totaling $15,000, thrown down carelessly by a client who had that morning requested a job to be done, "no questions asked."

Monte says he has set out o dominate the Australian debugging industry, ad his eye-catching advertisements, "Beware-bugging", appear frequently in the financial press. Frank Monte admits that he also imports and sells bugs to the local private investigation and security industry. He has formed a National Association of Investigators, partly as a move to generate a wider market for this business. He claims that at leas this way reputable agents can keep a check on who is getting the equipment, and that his group keeps a register of questionable sales. But this aspect of his activities is sometimes regarded as controversial.

On the morning he was interviewed, two policemen called on Frank Monte for advice on an inquiry, and one of them said in what Monte described as "a smart kind of way": "You sell lock picks, don't you?" Monte replied: "Yes, and if I didn't, somebody else would."

Frank Monte broke off a law course at Sydney University after doing part-time investigation work, mainly in matrimonial cases, and in the mid-60s did a year as a plainclothes man with the NSW police. He got into electronic surveillance and counter measures in a big way after 1973, when he says he founded a bug in the boardroom of Dick Dusseldorp's Lend Lease Corporation and another in a NSW politician's office. He employs about 12 people, including some former SAS commandos, and up o 20 other part-time men. Their work includes personal protection of executives and overseas visitors, infiltration, surveillance and what Frank Monte calls "confrontation work."

In the early 70s Monte was hired to mount a private search in Papua New Guinea's Flky River region for the remains of missing bank-fortune heir Michael Rockefeller He says that there have been a number of attempts on his life in Sydney because of his connections with the Middle East politics.

Each of these finds was made by a well-known Sydney private investigator, Frank Monte, who says that he has set out to "dominate the debugging industry in Australia." He also markets bugging-which is more or less attacking the market from both ends.(see accompanying story)

Monte says he was called in to White Industries at the insistence of its Japanese partners, Mitsubishi Development Company, after a barrister was overheard discussing a point which the directors themselves had only raised the previous night.

Strangely, once bugs are found, Monte says that companies tend to close up and want no further services from the debugging firm. But one of his best and most consistent clients was the late Peter fox of Adelaide Holdings. Monte says that his men found a ceiling bug in Fox's Macquarie Street offices just at the time Fox was moving out of the current round robin tax scheme into film industry tax shelters, and that fox was "absolutely paranoid" about his form of security. Monte says: "He was paranoid that his competitors and his former staff were listening to him. I was doing his telephones and his offices, and after we found something the first time he had us in regularly to do sweeps once a month or once every two months. He was worried about people who worked for him and then left to start their own tax schemes. He was worried about competitors-and he had a good reason to be."

Our inquiries for this article covered four private inquiry agencies, three major security firms, corporate executives, Telecom, the NSW Corporate Affairs Commission, and senior officers of the Victorian and NSW police. Officials concede that there is cause for concern because debugging devices of varying sophistication are now sold virtually "over the counter" in Australia and elsewhere, however there was a wide divergence of views on the incidence of bugging in Australian businesses. For example, officials could not recall any prosecutions in the past five years, under the federal Telephonic Interception Act or the states' 1969 Listening Devices Acts.