When Dave Olson started his private investigation business in Wheaton in the summer of 1989, he outfitted an office in his home and sat back waiting for clients to call.
The first day, he sat behind his desk and the phone never rang. The second day, the same thing. The third day, the phone rang.
“In my best professional voice I said, `J.D. Olson and Associates,’ ” he recalled. “And the caller said, `Oh, wrong number.’ “
Olson, 46, has come a long way since then. Today, his quarters are in a modern Wheaton office building. He drives a Rolls-Royce Silver Spur II and an Infiniti, flies a Beechcraft Bonanza, maintains a skybox at the United Center and employs a staff of four full-time and 17 part-time investigators.
If it all sounds a bit like a real-life version of TV’s “Burke’s Law,” in which actor Gene Barry dabbled as a private eye when not tooling around in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow or romancing beautiful women, you don’t know Olson.
This is one industrious guy, say current and former associates, one of whom is Norman Kubish, Olson’s supervisor when he was a tactical sergeant for the Wheaton Police Department. Kubish is currently an investigator with the internal affairs division of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, Department of Corrections.
“He can probably put 10 hours into an eight-hour day,” Kubish said with a chuckle. “He’s very thorough and persistent. . . . He does a hell of a job.”
Steve Siegel, a security consultant for Wells Fargo Guard Services in Chicago, met Olson when the latter was regional manager for investigations with Wells Fargo from 1986 to 1989. “He was hard working, always willing to help, and if he didn’t have an answer, he’d research it and get back to you,” Siegel said.
Olson also is able to assume a wide array of undercover roles, Siegel added. “He can be a bum on the street or come across as a millionaire,” he noted. “Sometimes you have to go to that upper end role, which most private investigators can’t do.”
Olson had to call upon his role-playing skills a couple of years ago in an embezzlement case.
“We knew a party had embezzled about $6.5 million from his family,” Olson recalled. “They wanted to recover but preferred to make sure he didn’t wind up in jail.”
The man, who was in his mid-30s, had recently put up for sale his North Side Chicago condominium. Olson placed him under surveillance for about a week, and he and his investigators determined he hadn’t put much, if any, of the $6.5 million in financial institutions.
Suspecting some of the largess had been stashed at the condo, Olson contacted the real estate agent handling the sale.
“We had a male and a female investigator visit the condo, posing as a married man and his mistress,” Olson recalled. “They must have driven the agent nuts, looking under beds and in closets. Of course, they were actually searching for cash, jewelry and bonds.”
Olson posed as the chauffeur of his own Rolls-Royce, which had delivered the “executive” and “mistress” to the condo.
“I put on the chauffeur’s jacket, but I refused to wear the cap,” he remembered with a laugh.
While the two investigators were drawing a blank upstairs, the subject’s two sons came out to walk their dog and began admiring the Rolls idling outside. The friendly chauffeur chatted with the kids and soon learned that the family had recently traveled out West, where their father had stored some items.
“By getting the phone records, we were able to track down a storage place outside the town they’d visited,” Olson reported. “He had used his real name, because it was out of state.” The family won a court order to have the storage locker opened, and about $6 million of the missing $6.5 million was recovered.
“It was, like most investigations, a combination of hard work, skill and luck,” Olson said. “That’s how they’re solved.”
Another credo might be “whatever it takes to get the job done.”
A 1992 case involving an American beauty queen, a suspect European count and a bit of Old World muscle supports the axiom.
Olson was contacted by a family from the western suburbs whose daughter was a past winner of a beauty pageant in a southern state. “She had met a man of alleged royalty on a European tour,” Olson said. “They got married after a whirlwind romance in which she’d been swept off her feet by this guy, much to her parents’ concern.
“After a period of living with him in his country, she alleged he’d become abusive, so she wanted to leave him. he made it clear she would not be able to leave without his consent.”
Olson sent an investigator, then got in touch with the country’s American consulate.
“We contacted a provincial commander of police and by basically recruiting his services, we were able to get him to convince the husband to let her go,” Olson said. “He had an attitude-adjustment session with the husband, after making it clear he didn’t want our investigator with him. I made it a point to tell him what we needed and to not ask how he did it.”
In a scene right out of a few 1940s-era screen thrillers, the commander actually delivered the woman to Olson’s investigator, who escorted her back to the U.S. “Her parents were very happy that she was able to safely return to this country,” Olson recalled.
But the bulk of Olson’s cases, of course, take place a lot closer to home, some right in DuPage County.
“As a sign of the times, we’re being hired by companies concerned with laid-off employees coming back in with and shooting up management,” he reported. “In DuPage, we have a lot of corporate and regional headquarters. Usually, it’s a case of spending a couple of days with management prior to the layoffs, advising them on how to handle the terminations, what to say and what to do.”
Olson encourages firms to allow him and his investigators to sit in on the terminations to observe reactions. If those reactions raise concerns about the possibility of violence or if managers express qualms about their own safety, Olson’s company can provide protection for both the manager and his family.
That protection may include squiring managers to meetings in the Rolls, accompanied by a driver and a bodyguard. Olson acknowledges, however, that there’s not much that can be done to ward off an attack by a disgruntled former worker who comes back months or even years later to exact revenge. The cost of providing such long-term security would be prohibitive.
“There’s just way, way too many guns in this country,” he said.
More frequently, however, companies call on Olson to look into problems involving theft, drug abuse and trumped-up worker’s compensation claims among their employees. In these cases, Olson sends in an undercover investigator to get close to workers.
Undercover surveillance in the workplace can cost from $10,000 to $20,000, he said.
“I never go undercover myself; I don’t fit the profile,” Olson explained. “Most people I send in are full-time investigators in their 20s. That’s because most of the problems are with the younger employees. They’re often the ones involved in drugs, and almost always if you see drugs, you’ll see theft, and vice versa.”
Olson employs investigators of both genders and different races in an effort to help them blend in. Most are college educated, have a criminal justice background and are attempting to build experience that will help earn them a career in law enforcement.
Olson usually suggests that a company place an investigator in a janitorial post. The position allows him to move around and talk to many other employees, most of whom, Olson said, view him as merely “the stupid janitor,” and readily divulge information.
“What we do is open the door of opportunity to those employees being investigated,” he said. “The undercover employee might ask another worker, `Do you ever get high?’ If the answer’s yes, the next question might be, `Ever do it here on the job?’
“What you find is the majority of employees are honest, and that helps keep us sane. And a lot of times, once we’re done with a job and the people have been terminated, those good employees will come up to management and thank them.”
Olson’s success is pretty remarkable for a man who says he “just kind of fell into” law enforcement. Born in Texas, he moved with his family to the Chicago area early in life and grew up in Worth.
After graduating from Orland Park’s Carl Sandburg High School in 1967, he attended College of DuPage to pursue a business degree. Moonlighting as a night-shift dispatcher for the Wheaton Police Department led to his taking and passing the department’s officer test.
Olson became a Wheaton patrol officer in early 1969 but was drafted into the Army the following year. He spent his two-year hitch in military intelligence, stationed in San Francisco.
The military experience led to his promotion to the detective division upon his return to the Wheaton Police Department in 1972. He spent four years as a detective, then was promoted to sergeant and head of the tactical unit in 1976. In 1979, he made shift commander, a post he remained in until retiring in 1986.
He then joined Wells Fargo, heading up 11 Midwest offices as regional manager of investigations. It was at this time that he began thinking about becoming his own boss.
“I was working my tail off and it was good money, but 90 percent was being sent to Wells Fargo headquarters,” he recalled. “I thought that if I had my own company, I’d be getting 100 percent of the profits. But I left on very good terms, and I still get referrals from Wells Fargo.”
Among those who hire him frequently is Bernie Greenawalt, vice president of Borg Warner Protection Services, the corporate parent of Wells Fargo Guard Services. “He’s done an absolutely outstanding job,” Greenawalt said. “He’s consistently performed above our expectations and those of our clients.”
Olson, who is single, lives in Wheaton with two German shepherds, but he looks forward to a more exotic place to call home.
“I want to retire and move to Hawaii as soon as possible,” he said. “That’s my goal, and I’d like to do it by the time I’m 55. But I’d still like to retain the company and come back on occasion to advise on on-going cases. Once you get investigations in your blood, it’s very difficult to totally let go.”
