Introduction

Tell me, I'll forget. Show me, I may remember. But involve me and I'll understand.

— Chinese Proverb

It was a sweltering day in early September 1969. I was twenty-four years old. I had served two years in the United States Army, and after receiving an honorable discharge, I returned home and joined the DeLand Police Department. Six months after coming out of the police academy, I was involved in a gun battle with three bandits. I was a young rookie patrolman, checking a used-car lot at about two o'clock in the morning, and surprised the three burglars attempting to steal a vehicle off the used-car lot. When I exited my vehicle, shots were fired at me. I returned fire. I captured one of them, a nineteen-year-old man from Orlando. The other two fled and were later captured in another state. Thankfully, I was truly blessed. God was with me. Nobody was injured. And the three bandits were convicted in court and served time in prison.

I enjoyed my job as a police officer.

One year, I earned Officer of the Month six months in a row. That had never been done.

After three years as a young police officer, I was recruited by the Florida State Attorney's Office as an investigator and became the first African American in the state of Florida to be so fortunate.

During the early 1970s, racial tension was high, and I struggled to maintain a friendly, collegial relationship with my colleagues and fellow investigators. It wasn't easy listening to racist jokes relating to African Americans. My white fellow law enforcement officers and I would go out fighting crime together and get involved in discussions; unfortunately, in my mind these sessions just reinforced the racism that black people faced.

I remember, when I was a very young police officer in DeLand, Florida, freshly out of the military (US Army), fighting for my country, a fellow police officer (white) and I drove to a pool hall approximately twelve miles south of DeLand. The town was Debary, Florida. He and I had walked in to play a game of pool when the white female employee called him over and told him that he could play but "the colored man had to leave." He told her that we were police officers. She said it didn't matter. We left.

Can you believe I, who had recently received an honorable discharge from the US Army, where I fought for my country during the Vietnam era, and was now a police officer, fighting crime for everybody and having to fight racism, was treated like a second-class citizen? I realized then that integration and social equity for black people would not happen quickly in the United States, and I became increasingly disenchanted with how black people were being treated.

I worked many years with the state attorney's office, conducting all types of investigations, including murder, white-collar crimes, robbery, sex crimes, burglary, fraud, forgery, and juvenile felonies. When I was promoted to assistant chief investigator, my role changed, but not that much. I still worked cases and supervised fellow state attorney investigators. I had added-on responsibilities. I would review cases with each investigator, assign the cases to investigators, and sign off on them at the conclusion of their investigation reports.

Subsequently, I retired as assistant chief investigator and tested the private sector. I opened my own private investigative agency, called Jake Ross Detective Agency.

While working as a private investigator, I discovered my niche: criminal defense investigation. It is one of the most important assignments a private investigator can take. It's about freedom and justice.

I enjoy working civil cases, such as personal injuries, accident, missing persons, custody, business, and insurance fraud cases. They all are important cases, but most of them have to do with money.

Criminal cases, on the other hand, involve something much more important than money. They involve liberty. To us Americans, liberty, or freedom, is the single most-cherished right we have. Our system of justice demands that the government acting for the people prove that a person has committed a crime before that liberty is restrained or taken away.

Back in 2006, I wrote a book titled Jake Ross, Private Investigator, in which I used four cases to illustrate the way a private investigator works. I included details on the type of research that goes into a case, an explanation on how those details are tediously organized into a series of factual conclusions, the hard work involved, and the successful conclusion of a case. I attempted to give the reader the true aspects of the profession.

The book sold well, and I think it may have served a real purpose by establishing a different image of the real-life private investigator. That book was published more than six years ago, and I still get calls from people who have read or heard of the book.

Clearly, a lot of people want to know just what it is a private investigator does and how he does it. One thing I have learned over the years is that, at one time or another, everyone will have the need for the services of a professional private investigator. No one plans on getting a divorce or getting into a settlement dispute or custody battle, but it happens every day. People have accidents, their kids run away, they go into business with other people, they inherit estates, they lose property, and on and on. That doesn't mean that everyone goes out and hires a PI (business isn't that good), but a PI's help will make many specific situations a lot easier to handle.

These, of course, are only a few of the problems people bring to me each year. There are many more, including criminal matters.

I'm the last resort. By the time they get to me, they've been to the cleaners. They've been through all the friends of friends and the cousins and Uncle Fred, who knows this lawyer, and Charlie down the street, who has had the same thing happen to him, and finally, the corporation lawyer, who is supposed to know how to get things done, and then the brother always knows a guy who used to be a cop but had had some trouble back there that had to do with money or drugs. And when they finally find out even the godfathers are only in movies, they have absolutely nowhere else to go; when the gypsy fortune-tellers have rolled the rugs onto the roof of the Escalate and have disappeared over the St. John's River Bridge, then they come to me, and I get them.

Jake Ross is a private investigator, a real private investigator. He has been one for over forty years. He serves as a board-certified criminal defense investigator, homicide investigator, insurance fraud investigator, missing persons investigator, corporate investigator, consultant, and guide to clients enmeshed in the loophole madness of the judicial process. His primary job is to give his clients peace of mind, to ease them through a system that is characterized by indifference, corruption, and sloppy paperwork. He believes in education. He attended Daytona Beach Community College (now Daytona State) while he was working as a police officer, where he received his associate degree in law enforcement. He then attended the University of Central Florida and later transferred to Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University), where he received his bachelor's degree in criminology/sociology, a double major. He graduated with honors, cum laude.

Prior to attending...