FULL-ON MONTE

"I NEVER wanted to be a private eye. I don't like the people in the business. I think it's full of idiots. I don't have any private-eye friends. You'd have to be really weird to want to look through people's windows.

People say to me, 'Oh, I really like following people.' I go, 'Yeah, right...Why? What sort of person follows a stranger? Get your own life. Go and sit on the beach.'

I was interviewing people in Sydney this week, for a job in Washington. They're all doing a TAFE course and, Jesus Christ, all they talk about is repossessing cars. I've never done that in my life.

I had a woman who wants to leave her kids in somebody else's care because she wants to be a private eye. She thinks those people have got no right to keep cars that somebody else owns.

I'm like, 'You want to help out a finance company?'

A lot of Americans take the job when they leave the Marshall's office, or the sheriff's, and they don't want to get anybody, they just want to do a job.

Here, there are all these mean people who just want to follow people.

I was a cop in Sydney in the '60s. I thought I'd become a prosecutor then finish my law degree, but I never made it. I ended up being pulled out on my first day of duty in Darlinghurst, and being sent undercover. I didn't look at all like a cop. they put me in the vice squad, then in licensing. In the first six months, I never spent a day in uniform.

I spent a year and a half as a cop, and ended up getting beaten up really badly. On my days off from undercover work on the midnight to dawn shift in the Cross I was a bit burned out, so they gave me an easy job - being in charge of the cells under the Court of Sessions. I was looking after the cellblock when four Maori bankrobbers broke out.

They were fairly handy boys. They thought I had the keys to the back door, where the paddy wagon used to pull up from Long Bay, but the sergeant had the keys and he'd gone for lunch. Two of them beat me with the big padlocks they used to put on the cells. All my teeth were gone. My cheeks, jaw and nose were fractured. I was in hospital for a month. I was awarded a medal that I never got, because I quit six months later.

I was going back to law school when I saw an ad that said, "Private eyes wanted". You got 90 cents an hour as a waiter, and a bit more as a private eye. After a couple of years, I became manager of the place, because I was the only bloke who could both read and write. The others were all these old Irish coppers - tough guys, who did surveillance. They all wore hats.

There was a lot of rough work around. A new lock had come out, called Schlage, which in those days was very fancy. I figured out how to pick it. Before that, nobody picked a lock, they just threw a garbage bin through a door. These were big, burly ex-coppers, usually chucked out of the cops for being drunk and disorderly or something. They thought picking locks was sissy - you do a man's job and kick the door in.

We had to get pictures for divorces. We'd go in with a husband or wife, we'd catch the people screwing and we'd say, 'Do you recognise these two people here?'

I got hit a heap of times. People hit me on the head with milk bottles. A bloke broke a chair on me. I've been hit with a Fijian war club - it was a little heavier that I though. People used to punch me in the nose when I wasn't looking, or when I had my camera up against my face. So I've been hit by a camera, but [while] I was holding it.

During a raid at Balmoral, I knocked out a woman who had just finished stabbing her husband. This woman jumped out of bed, went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and stabbed him in the stomach.

Personal stuff is always a lot more dangerous than criminal. I've seen seven deaths, just on divorce raids. Look back through The Sydney Morning Herald in those days. 'Private inquiry agent shot', 'Private inquiry agent thrown off building', 'Private agent stabbed in caravan park'.

The year I started on my own, I had two deaths - a woman killer her husband in a football club car park on Sunday night. Two or three months later, a bloke killed his wife and her boyfriend in the car park of Newtown RSL.

The worst violence was in the Dubai business in 1975, when we had the mercenaries. That was full on, with mortars and machine guns, and I was completely helpless with bullets whizzing by. Even if they're not actually firing at you, you can get shot by friendly fire, or pieces of metal flying off into the air.

It had only been a few years since the British left, and the same year the Saudi Arabian king was murdered by his nephew. The United Arab Emirates wanted a bunch of people to protect their oil pipeline, but the Communist Yemenis wanted some of the money, and they kept on crossing the border and blowing up the pipelines.

The Emirates was... just a lot of desert, an oasis, and three or four roads. They didn't have an army.

They said, 'We want armed security people, but we don't just want idiot security guards. We want people who've been in the army and have seen combat.'

I started travelling. I went to Marseilles and San Francisco and Amsterdam. Nobody in history had put an ad in the paper saying, 'Mercenaries wanted', but I did, in all the papers around the world.

We landed 400 blokes in Dubai, and they wanted to vet them. The ones who wanted to stay were accepted all in one night.

There was a bloke working with us who had been the bodyguard to 'former Ethiopian emperor' Haile Selassie, and once the sheikh's people met him, they took his word.

I was running around being the figurehead. They figured the South Yemenis might want to kill me, to prove that you can't have a guy bringing mercenaries into their territory.

It wasn't easy. Nothing worked. The sheikh hadn't been ready to receive so many people. We were all billeted in the airport. But it looked good. There were a lot of fully armed soldiers everywhere. We mainly ended up with Germans, Rhodesians, Dutch, Belgians - all short, squat, older blokes. We had some Australians, not a lot of Brits, some Scotsmen - and a platoon of Pakistanis. they were a lot of trouble. They just wanted to the their own thing all the time, not follow protocol, and kept complaining about everything.

They all dies or ran away one night. Oh well... said it was. They'd given the rest of the crew a real lot of trouble.

I'd go out on patrols sometimes. I had to show my head now and again - plus it was boring. There were no movies, no women, nothing to drink, nothing to do. On the worst night, we went out and got caught in the middle of an ambush our other people were setting. We took the wrong road and went into the airport where a plane was about to land.

Everybody was shooting at us. Nobody knew who we were. Nobody was listening to their walkie-talkies.

One day, we were driving out to one of the planes, and mortars started coming out of nowhere. I remember thinking, 'This is not like the movies.' It's not as loud as the movies. It's closer, and in the movies you never got the smell, or the heat of the blast.

I've seen grown men wet themselves out of shock. Your ears don't work. I've seen people walking around with blood pouring out of their ears.

Plenty of people got killed in my time there. I got to the stage where I didn't have any more to vomit, having seen so many bits and pieces of bodies.

Mind you, some nights around Kellett Street [Kings Cross] weren't much fun, either.

The early '80s were big on corporate espionage, finding out who's stealing what and where it's going.

Corporate espionage is about negotiating, and getting intelligence and using intelligence to pressure people. It's detecting people who aren't supposed to be meeting. Are your competitors colluding to buy your company, or to sell your company? That's why New York's so wonderful - they're always doing that. They were always aware of industrial espionage, whereas Australian companies were more sceptical.

Internationally, we get a lot of bodyguarding work. We don't do it here [in Sydney]. We don't bother doing anything here, because of all the silly licensing and police involvement. It's still a crooked town. The cops want to get into anything you're doing.

It's [police corruption] happened a little bit in New York, but it's never happened in Los Angeles - and I've had up to 17 different franchise offices up and down California. Sydney is the place it's happened most in my life. They're open about it. They come to the door, they get off of the problem that they want to see you about, and they usually drop the phrase, 'Ah, look, you're making all this money, we're just working.'

I went through a divorce and got custody of my kids. I never saw my ex-wife again. I spent time bringing my kids up, with a big house in Paddington, a housekeeper, a cook and a chef, and a couple of assistants. It was a nice life, but it got a bit boring.

In 1989, I started going back to the US and doing some work, and I moved to Hollywood in the early '90s. [But] I got sick of the Los Angeles mentality - all the drugs and bullshit. I was about to come home, then I got a few jobs in New York, and I never left Manhattan Island for the next four years. I was that busy.

Within two years I got names 'Manhattan's Best' [by Manhattan File magazine]. In the same year I was called 'America's Premier Private Eye' [by Gallery magazine]. I was on all the shows - Larry King Live, Leeza and the Howard Stern Show. There were pictures of my girlfriend on the front page of the New York Post and the Daily News. She was the female spy, I was the man.

For the first time in my life, I was really happy and fully occupied.

A big telecommunications company was taking over the workings of a cable company, and they wanted to find out what it was really worth, as opposed to what the figures were cooked up to be. We had to infiltrate a cleaner, a secretary and a receptionist. We ran a temp agency so we could push people in there.

We were very tight about what we were doing. We didn't steal things, we read things and looked at things.

I've never stolen a 'secret', like a perfume or a Schweppes formula. I'm always looking to confirm figures - sales figures, turnover figures, banking figures.

The average copper wants to arrest somebody. In my business, I never want to arrest anybody. I just want to know things.

In my office yesterday, I had a woman job candidate who kept on saying, I've bought some handcuffs.'

Who're you going to arrest? Evildoers?

Send'em the bill, that's what it's all about. It's not an ego thing. It's get paid, make money, go and buy a yacht."

As told to Mark Dapin