The phone rang while Ernie Rizzo was watching TV. On the screen was Michael Jordan announcing his retirement, again, this time for sure. On the line was a tabloid reporter who knew Rizzo had dug into rumors about Jordan’s personal life.
The reporter was jetting to Chicago from New York. He wanted to meet Rizzo right away; wanted the details of Rizzo’s work; would pay for it.
There was Jordan on TV, polishing his high-gloss image as one of the most beloved sports heroes of the century. And there was Ernie Rizzo, playing out another of the many unsavory scenarios he has been part of for nearly four decades.
“As soon as he left the Bulls, he’s John Q. Citizen,” Rizzo said blandly of His Airness. “Then the vultures come out.”
So, what did Rizzo do?
He met the reporter. For dinner at Gibsons Steak House on Rush Street. The reporter paid. Rizzo talked.
Ernie Rizzo is, after all, what he is–a private detective, and one of the most notorious in the country. Some, most notably Rizzo himself, say he is among the best. Others deride him as little more than a bumbling publicity hound, an imposter even, in a profession striving to elevate its reputation above the Rizzos of the world.
But Rizzo survives and adapts, like the coyotes that roam the field next to his west suburban house. And he has a way of percolating in the news.
“I work somewhere between 007 and Inspector Clouseau,” he likes to say.
He should amend that slightly, to somewhere between U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), one of the nation’s most venerable and influential congressmen, and Ed Vrdolyak, attorney, onetime Chicago alderman, former radio talk show host and political fixer.
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Rizzo, 57, has a soft handshake for a man in such a rough business. He wears a toupee and has a tanning bed that gives a year-round, eerie tint to his already leathery, deeply wrinkled skin.
He claims he has worked for and against some of the most prominent people in the world. President Clinton’s attorneys, he says, paid him to find and talk with Paula Jones’ father, and CBS hired him to perform electronic voice analysis on Clinton when he denied having “sexual relations with that woman,” Monica Lewinsky. Yoko Ono hired him to find a daughter, Rizzo says, and a tabloid employed him to determine whether Bing Crosby’s much younger widow had driven him to an early death.
He definitely worked against Michael Jackson, and he plied his craft against former Bulls forward Horace Grant in a divorce case. He provided services for a messy marital split in the Walgreen family and investigated the murder of candy heiress Helen Brach.
And it’s tough to doubt him–partly because he has survived and even thrived in the business 37 years, partly because you want to believe his rich and naughty stories, partly because he leaves enough holes in a tale to make it nearly impossible to check. Then he moves to the next story.
“I had a judge once who was a real outdoors guy, and I needed a favorable ruling from him on a case,” Rizzo said. He trailed the man to a fishing lodge in Wisconsin and became friendly with him, never mentioning anything about the case.
“Four months later, I’m sitting in his courtroom on my case,” Rizzo said. “He ruled for me. To this day, he never knew the whole thing was a setup.”
That’s the incongruity with Rizzo and many private detectives. The nature of their business often dictates that they be discreet, which typically means deception at the very least.
But they like to talk, must talk, really, to make connections.
Ernie Rizzo loves to talk. And, if the situation demands more than a teensy deception, he is willing.
In the case of Henry Hyde, Rizzo took his deception too far, worked a bit too recklessly, and got nailed for it. In the process, he smeared Hyde and brought himself, indirectly, to his current, uncomfortable predicament–being muzzled on a hot story.
Tim Anderson, a former bank consultant from Libertyville, has spent years and $35,000 trying to show that Hyde used his influence to escape responsibility for the 1990 failure of Clyde Federal Savings & Loan of North Riverside. Hyde is a former director of the institution, which collapsed at a cost of $67 million to taxpayers. The board members paid a settlement, except Hyde, who refused, maintaining that he was blameless. He had left the board in 1984.
In late 1995, Anderson got a phone call from an independent TV producer interested in the story.
“The guy’s name was Ray,” Anderson recalled. “Ray something.”
“Ray” was Rizzo, working for Hyde’s attorney, James Schirott, who wanted Rizzo to find out as much as possible about Anderson and what information he had on Hyde.
Anderson met “Ray” at a restaurant near O’Hare and gave him 388 pages of material and other information. They talked. Ray said he’d be in touch. Then he faded. “I just wrote him off as a strange guy who couldn’t figure it out,” Anderson recalled.
Finally, in October, a reporter called Anderson and informed him of Rizzo’s ruse.
Hyde initially denied that he or anyone working for him had hired Rizzo. About two weeks later, Hyde changed his story, saying that his attorney hired Rizzo without Hyde’s knowledge.
All of this was overrun by the presidential impeachment story until the “Skinner & Ski” radio show on Jan. 30. Rizzo had agreed to appear on the Saturday show on WLS-AM, followed by Anderson. On Friday, host Nancy Skinner phoned Hyde’s office for comment.
In less than two hours, Rizzo called her three times, Skinner said. He was being squeezed by political heavyweights from Chicago to Springfield to Washington, D.C. They insisted he miss the show. They threatened his license. They said he’d never work in Chicago again. Vrdolyak faxed her twice, implying that he was Rizzo’s attorney and scratching Rizzo from the radio show. Attempts to reach Vrdolyak before presstime were unsuccessful.
“Hyde supposedly was working on an impeachment hearing on a Friday afternoon,” Skinner recalled, chuckling, “and he broke away to take care of this. Didn’t he have more pressing things to do that day? To me, that says there’s something here.”
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Rizzo started in the detective business after growing up on Chicago’s West Side. As a boy, he learned to play the trumpet. As an adult, he learned Latin dancing, which he still loves.
While selling suits for a Loop department store, he showed a knack for catching fraudulent credit card users. He was moved to store security and then began working for a security company.
In 1962, he became a cop, working in Lincolnwood and later Franklin Park until 1973, when a five-year dispute with his supervisors over allegations that Rizzo knowingly possessed a stolen car ended with Rizzo leaving the force. He became a private detective full time, and found himself in trouble part time.
In 1977, Rizzo was convicted in federal court on 13 counts of illegal wiretapping in divorce cases. He lost his license and served 30 nights in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. In 1988, he was indicted, then acquitted of charges of portraying himself as a licensed professional.
Five years later, he regained his license but eventually became entangled in a legal imbroglio with another private detective, Terry Cornell of Chicago, who began working with Rizzo in the late 1980s. Their shaky professional relationship crumbled in 1991. Things got personal, and now they are fighting with each other over allegedly defamatory statements.
According to Cornell’s suit, filed in 1993, Rizzo notified Cornell’s contacts that Cornell was working as a government informant and had his own mother killed. Rizzo, who filed suit in 1994, contends that Cornell sent letters to lawyers, police and the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation claiming that Rizzo was stalking Cornell’s clients and making illegal wiretaps.
He is pursuing Cornell and others responsible for that suit with a tenaciousness that is almost frightening. And, in fact, some people do fear Rizzo.
“I’ve been told not to talk,” said one attorney.
“I don’t know,” said a former client who claimed that Rizzo defrauded him out of $5,000. “I think Ernie knows people. I’d rather not talk.”
Los Angeles private detective Anthony Pellicano, who used to work in Chicago, will talk. He and Rizzo have tangled since the 1970s, their latest tussle occurring in 1993. Pellicano worked for Michael Jackson, who had been accused of molesting the son of a dentist. Rizzo worked for the dentist.
Back then, Pellicano called Rizzo “an insignificant fruit fly.”
Things haven’t changed.
“He’s a fruit fly,” Pellicano said recently when asked about Rizzo. “What you do is you brush him away from your hand and hope he goes someplace else. You don’t go out and get a shotgun and whack the guy. He’s not significant enough.”
Rizzo said Pellicano “loves to play up that detective stuff. He’s seen The Godfather’ one too many times.”
Pellicano contends that he routinely gets clients who have soured on Rizzo after he failed to complete the job. One of those was Dr. Norman Miller, a Chicago psychiatrist who hired Rizzo to find Miller’s daughters after Miller’s ex-wife fled with the children to Europe, Peru, then Ecuador in mid-1997.
“He did reasonably well,” Miller recalled, “but when he went down to Peru, he was in over his head.”
Rizzo managed to determine that the ex-wife and daughters had gone to Quito, Ecuador, but he refused to follow them there. Miller hired Pellicano, who orchestrated a successful recovery of the ex-wife and children.
“He’s very sophisticated, international and high-powered,” Miller said of Pellicano. “I think he’s the Michael Jordan of private detectives.”
And Rizzo?
“I just let him go,” Miller said.”But I hold no animosity toward him. He is what he is.”
Rizzo called Miller “a psychiatrist who’s crazy.” He said Miller kept failing to pay and continued asking Rizzo to follow the trail, from Switzerland to Germany to Peru and then Ecuador.
Pellicano and Miller notwithstanding, many people like Rizzo’s work. Attorneys have used him for everything from tailing estranged spouses to retrieving children whisked away by a parent. Clients say he has a particular knack for finding hidden money. He has set up business contacts in foreign countries and tailed freelance geologists for an investor who wanted to verify that they were finding oil.
In February, he was in Cuba shadowing a client’s prospective business partners. About the same time, he was working with Chicago-area car dealers trying to fight an attorney who allegedly was gouging them.
“What ingenuity this guy has,” said prominent divorce attorney Bernard Rinella, who has been working with Rizzo for nearly 30 years. “He’s tenacious. That combination is very good for the type of work he does.”
One of Rinella’s favorite Rizzo stories dates back to the mid-1980s, when the detective rented a helicopter to catch a philandering husband in an apartment on the 87th floor of the John Hancock Center.
Rinella also likes to tell how Rizzo, despite a broken leg, trailed an unfaithful wife and her boyfriend to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Rizzo rented a beach villa next to theirs and became friendly. Before they parted, Rizzo had a handful of photos showing the couple kissing and frolicking in the water.
“I’ve used Ernie Rizzo in the past, but only in very difficult situations,” said Jeffrey Leving, a prominent attorney specializing in fathers’ rights. “He will do things that certain private detectives won’t do.”
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Affable in many ways, Rizzo is soft-spoken, quick to laugh–and is an insufferable self-promoter. “I think recognition,” he said, “is more of a draw than the money.”
His silvery holographic business cards display the black silhouette of a spy and six phone numbers, including one to his boat, the Fantaseas, and another labeled “International.” The license plates on his black sports car spell out “THE SPY.” He divides his time among four homes: two in the western suburbs, one on the Chain o’ Lakes near northwest suburban Antioch and one in Acapulco.
He frequently pops up on talk shows and TV news magazines. He has served as an adviser in Hollywood. He even made a cameo in “Lethal Weapon III.”
“He’s a local private detective who is very good at getting publicity,” said Miller, the psychiatrist who once hired Rizzo. “He’s much, much better at getting publicity than he is at being a private detective.”
But a few things about Ernie Rizzo are very unsettling–most notably the technology he uses and its threat to people’s privacy.
He works every day, all the time, he said, and has been known to return pages at 3 a.m. He claims to get about four hours of sleep a night.
A scanner in his car allows him to tune in nearly any cellular phone conversation within a 10-mile radius. His favorite stretch, he says, is Lake Shore Drive. Less interference and lots of rich people talking on cell phones. The gadget even allows him to lock a specific cell phone number into the scanner and drop in and out of the conversation completely undetected.
Rizzo uses a transmitter slightly larger than a pager that can be attached nearly anywhere on a car in seconds. The transmitter beams a signal to a device tracking the car’s movement, and noting the time at every location. When Rizzo wants to find his “target,” he calls an 800 number that provides the location.
He has at his call a “pinhole camera” with fiber-optic lenses hidden in eyeglasses and hooked to a VCR. He also has used a device that allows him to clone a pager number so that he receives a page every time his target does.
All of it is legal, Rizzo says and other investigators confirm, provided he restricts his bugging to the open airwaves.
“I don’t break any laws,” Rizzo says with a smirk. “I may bend them a little.”
But one of his favorite ruses is a simple one: He prints up stationery depicting himself as a phone company representative sending prospective customers a cell phone for a free trial. Then, he listens to their phone conversations. He does the same thing with baby monitors rigged to transmit to him.
“I’ve done it maybe 50 times,” he said, laughing. “Works every time.”
He also likes garbage–“the best thing in the world,” he said. “You can find out what the guy eats, how he lives, everything.”
He’ll use modern technology, but believes street smarts and experience are the real keys to gumshoe success.
Neil Holmes Jr. sees things differently. Holmes is a private detective. He also has a college degree in history and a curriculum vitae that includes lectures he has given on eavesdropping countermeasures and controlling workplace violence. He speaks to the Kiwanis Club and Catholic Charities, wears a suit and almost never carries a gun. He prefers a laptop.
“At cocktail parties, I always tell people I’m a businessman, or a consultant,” said Holmes, 35, chairman of the World Association of Detectives, an international organization of investigators and security professionals. “If I tell them I’m a private investigator, then people ask, `Ooh, do you carry a gun?’ “
Holmes said the private investigation industry has been changing steadily for about 15 years, as computers and other technology shrink the world. That evolution created a demand for investigators with highly refined skills in accounting, computers, business, research, foreign language and related technical fields–men and women who were as comfortable in Chicago as they were in San Francisco or Paris, but in boardrooms, not bordellos.
“We really want to be thought of as a professional service,” Holmes said, “like any accountant or doctor or architect would be. We don’t want to be considered cowboys.”
“They’re mickey mouse guys,” said Rizzo, who says he always carries a gun. “I don’t care if you’ve got all the laptop computers in the world. If you don’t have basic street smarts, they ain’t going to do anything for you. Outwitting your opponent is more important.”
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Nancy Skinner went on the air with her radio show Jan. 30, and decided to hammer away at Rizzo’s absence. The show created a news story with legs. Columnists mentioned it. Out-of-town reporters started calling. Skinner received more than 20 requests for tapes of the show.
Then station management dropped “Skinner & Ski” from its Saturday lineup, leaving only the Sunday broadcasts. Management has declined to comment. Skinner said her live Saturday show was put in place only for the life of the presidential impeachment story.
Anderson says Rizzo’s silence has backfired and is helping to keep the story alive.
“If they hadn’t shut down Ernie, Ernie would have given just a mild interview,” Anderson said. “You know what I think it is? Ernie doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and they don’t know what Ernie doesn’t know. They’re paranoid.”
The kettle may simmer a little more in mid-May, when a 200-page expose, “Henry Hyde’s Moral Universe: Where More Than Space and Time Are Warped,” by Dennis Bernstein and Leslie Kean (Common Courage Press), is set for release.
Meanwhile, Rizzo says he is getting two calls a day from reporters tracking the Hyde and Clyde story. He refers all of them to Vrdolyak.
“All I can tell you is that I can’t talk about anything,” Rizzo said.
Rizzo has put on weight in recent years and is tired more often. But he says he still loves the business. Every time he tries to slow down, he says, somebody calls and his interest is piqued.
“Sure I get tired, but two things motivate me: my fear of construction work and the thrill of the chase,” Rizzo said. “I’d be a terrible construction worker. I like to live well.”
Added Holmes, chairman of the detective association: “You just don’t know. What I’m afraid of is that people like myself are going to be the dinosaurs. There probably always will be a place for the Ernie Rizzos in the world.” He paused. “I think there will always be a place for the iconoclast.”
A day or two after Holmes made his observations, Rizzo noticed the coyotes that roam the field next to his home in the western suburbs looked particularly scraggly. He bought a 50-pound bag of dog food and set it out for them.
“Couldn’t believe it,” Rizzo said a few days afterward. “They ate it all in one night.”
About two weeks later, he shot a deer–he said–and dragged it to the brush near the field for the coyotes. He checked on the carcass a few days afterward. Its fur ravaged, a dead eye rolled toward the heavens, the deer looked graceful and sad in the same moment.
“I don’t know,” Rizzo said standing over the deer, pondering why he did this. “It’s good for my image.” He walked a few steps and spoke to the ground.
“I guess I just feel sorry for the coyotes.”
