What good is an honest sleuth if he can’t balance the books? New Zealand private investigators are remarkably incorrupt, but sorely lacking in business nous, says top PI Ron McQuilter.
Story by Andrea O’Neil, photograph by Isaac de Reus

SHERLOCK Holmes. Hercule Poirot. Taggart, Barnaby, Morse. The British love for all things sleuth is reflected in their films, television series and novels. New Zealand, however, lacks a cultural fixation on professional and amateur detectives. We don’t make films starring hard-boiled private investigators, and the few detectives to grace our TV channels are invariably foreign.

Where does the Kiwi indifference come from, when a quick glance at the yellow pages reveals the country is full of detectives? One of our top PIs, Ron McQuilter, has a theory. We aren’t fascinated with sleuths because, unlike Britain, we haven’t experienced a history of rogue PI behaviour. “In New Zealand, private investigators are definitely different to anywhere else in the world,” McQuilter says. “When you go to court in New Zealand and you say you’re a private investigator, people tend to think that you’re a credible person. Overseas when you say you’re a private investigator, people still look at you [warily].”

McQuilter should know. He began his career in his native Glasgow as a policeman, but directing traffic wasa far cry from his dreams of being an  where he witnessed what he calls “cowboy” tactics from his peers. “It was the wild west,” he says.

“It was a setup. You would get guys to get divorces, you would be kicking in doors and taking photographs, and doing all sorts of things. It was horrible.”

It wasn’t ethics, however, but rather love that brought McQuilter to New Zealand in 1983. He booked a two-week holiday to visit his Kiwi girlfriend – now wife – and never went home. Within a month he was working for Armourguard, stunning the firm by completing two weeks’ worth of work in two days. “Just because people would talk to me,” he says. “You ask them questions, and they’ll answer you. Whereas in Britain if you ask somebody a question they won’t want to answer you, or they’ll shut a door in your face, or worse.”

But working hard is typical immigrant behaviour, McQuilter says. Prejudice against his “funny accent” and not having a strong personal network only made him strive harder. “I managed to latch a couple of clients who supported me really really well. And I gave them great service.” It wasn’t long before he set up his own business, The Investigation Bureau, renamed Paragon in 2004. The business quickly emerged as an industry leader, handling fraud cases worth millions of dollars and securing top corporate and government contracts. McQuilter has become the public face of private investigation in New Zealand, chairing the New Zealand Institute of Professional Investigators and appearing regularly in the media and on television’s Missing Pieces.

Three cases stand out in McQuilter’s career. He investigated abuse claims made by former Lake Alice psychiatric patients. He nabbed a Lord of the Rings employee trying to sell the film online before its release.

And more recently, he solved a cold case concerning the disappearance in 2003 of UK-based New Zealander Lee Sheppard. Sheppard’s family, frustrated the case remained unsolved by British police, hired McQuilter, who used evidence from Sheppard’s coworkers to prove he had been killed by machinery at his workplace.

Corporate crime makes up a large percentage of McQuilter’s work, and is as serious a problem here as back in the UK, he says. “Our dollar’s worth half the British pound, I know that, but it’s still [costing us] millions, just millions and millions.” His advice to company managers is to call in professional investigators as soon as a problem is identified. Businesses which try to deal with the problem internally can destroy evidence and give fraudsters time to escape, he says. “They’ll try and do it themselves, and all of a sudden it’s like ‘oh shit, we need help’.”

Anticipating fraud and creating a strategy to deal with the inevi- table can save a chief executive from having to take the blame when money disappears. “I dealt with one which was a $500,000 theft in a company, and the CEO fell on his sword, and resigned,” McQuilter says. “The CEO didn’t know about it, but he didn’t know how to deal with it. He knew if he told the shareholders he’d lose his job.”

Most PI businesses do not succeed like Paragon has. Investigators, 99 per cent of them former cops, just don’t have the business know-how to strike out on their own, McQuilter says. “The police don’t teach you to run a business.” He recently employed a full-time business mentor to help him expand into security work and improve Paragon’s online presence. “I realised that even though I’d been doing it a long time, I still need business help,” he says. “Probably I’m one of the half a dozen who want to be cops, or private investigators,but we also want to be business people. And that’s kind of the formula for success.”