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ΆΡ More Article 4. 3, 1.
Detecting in stereo
Korean Quarterly, Summer 2005 issue By Martha Vickery
www.koreanquarterly.org
Private eye uses double set of skills
for international investigations
 Differences in systems of law enforcement can make cross-cultural
crime investigation and missing person location a big headache.
Bruce Kang knows this. After 15 years, he has learned both the U.S.
and Korean systems, and has made a living out of his ability to deal
with the idiosyncrasies of both.
But it
hasn't been easy. Back in June 1990, before he was a licensed
private investigator, he was operating a skip-trace service in
Chicago.
Skip-tracers locate people through records, usually people
who have disappeared after leaving large debts behind. An inquiry
from an official of a major corporation in Korea threw
Kang into the investigation business head
first.
The request was to find the perpetrator of a
major corporate financial crime. The subject of the investigation,
Byung Ki Yum, a former official of the Daesung Corporation, had
hidden $7 million of the corporation's assets in a U.S. bank, and
then had escaped Korea for the U.S.
Yum was traced to
the Chicago area. Daesung sent a board member to Chicago to find
the perpetrator, but, at a loss, the board member found Kang from an
advertisement, and the two met. The case had similarities to a "skip," but with major financial and international
implications. Kang accepted.
Locating Yum
was difficult. He was not in Chicago, as the Daesung board member
originally thought. Through family members in Peoria, Kang
located him, finally, in Los Angeles, where he was staying with an
uncle who also had left Korea under questionable circumstances. It
took nine months.
After finding his man, Kang made an
unpleasant discovery ---- that neither government was
prepared to go to the next step.
U.S. Immigration was
willing to deport the person, Kang said, but would not charge him
with a crime ---- none had been committed under U.S. jurisdiction.
Of course, deportation was not acceptable to his client.
Working
with the Korean court system, Interpol, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and other federal agencies in the U.S., and
the Korean Consul General in Chicago, a deal was arranged whereby an
arrest warrant would be served, along with the order for
deportation. This would allow INS officials to have
the person arrested, escorted out of the country, and turned over to
Korean police once in Korea.
This all took more than
three months. In the meantime, Kang had to continue to watch the
subject closely, without being seen, to make sure he
would not become suspicious and skip out again. It was a long,
stressful wait, but he eventually got his man and sent him to face
the music in Korea. "Right now, every case
is over $10 million," he said. "But back then, this $7 million case
was big news in Korea."
Today, a plaque from that
company is displayed in his Chicago office along with
other plaques and certificates from grateful corporate customers,
and from some Chicago Korean American civic
organizations.
Kang still specializes in tracking
fugitives, but the logistics of it have become easier.
"These days," he said, "I send for an arrest warrant, through
contacts, and they send the warrant by DHL. It takes about three
days."
Long-range observations
Kang has built his unusual career by a combination of work and
academic experience, and taking advantage of opportunities. He
started out his intelligence career in the Korean Army when he was
assigned to the intelligence unit as part of his mandatory military
duty. He learned to use the high-tech equipment of the day, like
night vision lenses, to observe North Korean military on the other
side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). "We had special equipment for
watching 40 miles away. Now, that technology is old stuff. At the
time, it was very high tech."
Kang said he had been
trained as a studio photographer in his civilian life, and was at
least familiar with working in the realm of light and
lenses.
His team eventually discovered one long-range
cannon in North Korea, located in a cave, pointed out at the ocean.
They never would have seen it, he said, if not for a moment of good
luck. The North Korean soldiers opened the door to the cave after a
heavy rain, apparently for some relief from the heat
and humidity. The intelligence team sitting in South Korea got a
good view of it. This was an important discovery, Kang said,
because "at that time we did not believe the North Koreans had any
long-range cannons," he said, although there were some suspicions
about it.
Kang immigrated to the Chicago
area in 1981, after his army discharge. Other family members were
already here, living in Neenah, Wisconsin, a town which at that time
had a population of about 200. "We were the only Asians in that
town." In fact, he said, there were no other foreigners, no Latinos
or blacks either. The whole family moved to the Chicago area
shortly thereafter.
The news
business
The same year after moving to Chicago, he got a
call from the Joongang Ilbo (Korea Central Daily) and was asked to
be their photographer.
"There was a darkroom that no
one knew how to use," he recalled. Kang bought the
necessary equipment, set up the darkroom and did the newspaper's
photography for about three years, gradually building his skills in
photo journalism. He also learned writing and
editing.
After three years, the Hankook Ilbo (Korea
Times) scouted him and made him an offer, he said. As
a member of the Korea Times staff, he said, he went to
the New York branch for a few months, a large branch with about a
dozen reporters. He remained interested in investigations, he said,
but did not have the English language facility to work
with the police and court system for a few more years. Even working
for a Korean language newspaper in the U.S., he found
that it was necessary to be bilingual.
Eventually, he
began to learn techniques of regularly contacting cooperative beat
officers and other officials he knew. He learned what public
records he was allowed to access and under what circumstances.
"Sometimes police departments have what are actually public records,
but their policies are that the records are not open to the public.
There are too many people coming ---- so they are maybe
open to media only three times a week. Sometimes it is only to the
major media! Like the Chicago Tribune, or Sun Times. But I learned
to keep on asking, to insist, and they opened
them."
The skills he built over time as an investigative
reporter were helpful later on when he began private
investigations. "Private investigation or police investigation as a
reporter, it's all the same concept only with a different goal," he
observed. "The senior reporters, they taught me technique. I had
six months experience just under a senior reporter.
Just learning
how to investigate, how to write, how to talk. After six months, I
was really able to ask questions and talk to people. It's a Korean
tradition in how to talk to seniors and show your respect. When you
respect people, it makes a big difference. We are always dealing
with older people. Chairmen of organizations, people like that. I
learned how to deal with them and get information, to talk with them
as if they are the same level."
Becoming a
private eye
His first experimentation with private
investigation came when he and a friend decided to open a collection
agency. The friend was a lawyer, just starting out
after law school. "It takes about one year to get a
license.
Nobody had a collection agency license in the whole Korean
community in the U.S., so we didn't know how to do it," he
explained. "We researched how to get a license. We wrote letters,
and met with other lawyers and other collection agencies. That
helped a lot. We got a license after about one year, but my friend
could not wait even a year. He walked out right before we were
going to get our license."
Kang suddenly found himself with a
license to engage in a business he did not know how to do. "I
learned skip tracing from other private investigators. I
subcontracted with other private investigators and skip tracers, so
that after a couple of years I could do it myself." He calls what
he does now "high-level skip tracing," because, he said
"skip-tracing is really basic to all types of investigations.
First, you have to find the person, and then you can investigate
them and find out other information."
After
the high-profile 1990 case, Kang said, he found himself with many
requests for private investigations, but no investigator's license.
He found that getting the license first involved getting a permit,
then obtaining the required 6,000 hours, or about three years of
experience, followed by a difficult written exam. Only about 20
percent of applicants pass the exam on the first try,
he added. After working for another detective agency for more than
three years, he studied diligently for about three months, and
passed the exam, he said, with a 94 percent. "but
nobody believed me! Nobody ever gets more than a 90!"
Kang's firm Intersearch, was born shortly thereafter. Today, Kang
said, much of his work involves digging into records through data
bases. He does some stakeouts, watching for a person to make an
appearance, and does some "pretext" calling, where he
inquires about a person using a made-up scenario designed to get
them to volunteer key information.
Most of the time,
however, he said he is riding herd over a variety of data bases ----
residential data bases, court records, criminal records, corporation
records. "Mostly public records. We cannot go to court to have
them open papers. That's too complicated, too big a job." They pay
for the information, and the cost quickly adds up In
contrast to the U.S. where many different types of records are
public, only the government can officially access most records in
Korea. The level of information the government has, however, is
extensive. "Everybody must be registered. You can get the
information, but not officially. We use contacts over there, either
in the police department or district
office."
In another high-profile case, Kang cooperated
with the Korean prosecutor's office and KBS-TV in
locating people who were hiding stolen assets of bankrupt Korean
corporations in the U.S. "We cooperated with the Korean
prosecutor's office. We got information from them, and discovered
the assets, the TV station reported the information and we handed it
over to the prosecutor's office." It worked well for everyone, and
Kang got TV publicity along with the deal.
Typically, he said, financial fraud is committed like that, through
higher-level officials of corporations, who can set up paper companies
in the U.S. and send large payments for non-existent goods or
services to the false company's account. "Say they were
supposedly importing merchandise.
Actually there was no
merchandise. Just an empty box! They put money into the account as
payment," he said.
The call of the
missing
Kang never particularly wanted to be in the
missing persons business, but he was drawn by the dire need in the
Korean American community. Some years ago, he said, he started his
business after an unfortunate incident.
"A lady called
me, asking to find her father in Korea. She didn't have money, so I
refused. She was calling me maybe three, four times a day.
She said
'I will pay you back in the future.' But, I have so many calls. I
can't take them all. Even sometimes, if they have money, they say
they don't have enough... Most people think family reunion services
are free.
But it costs a lot."
The story
didn't end there. One day, maybe three months later, the woman came
back with the cash. "Not regular, you know, crispy money," he said.
"They were bills, one by one, she counted," he said demonstrating a
person handing over old, crumpled cash. "Maybe she was collecting
money for a long time."
"So, then I found
him, like, within a couple days," he related. "But,
her father had died about two or three months before that. If I had
done that for free, or trusted her word, she could have
seen her father before his death." He stops for a moment, with a
little shake of his head. "So, I was so sad, and had guilty
feelings. At that time, family reunion was not my
specialty. I was mainly doing tracing of fugitives."
As a kind of
payback, he said, he started doing missing person locations and
family reunion services for free, when the person is financially
needy. The level of information he can find is limited when he does
the service for free, he said, but he still tries to help when
possible.
Right now, the free part of the service runs
on extra money Kang gets above the regular fee that customers pay in
appreciation of Kang after a successful location of a family
member. "I've had people who were charged $1,000, pay
me $3,000 after locating a family member." So then that
extra money goes into the fund, he said.
Although it is not usually difficult to find missing persons, it is
not lucrative, because of the costs of information, including the
work of contacts in Korea, and the fees for databases. Kang decided
he needs a fund with a non-profit organization behind it to make the
idea work out.
Right now, the fund is "from my pocket," he said, but
he is working on getting a fund donated by the Korean government.
"I sent a proposal last year, and last week I visited Korea to talk
to them about it. So, we'll see."
Kang is
hoping that his good-will efforts are getting paid back in part
by some positive publicity he is receiving through a free family
reunion event he arranges through the newspaper Dong-Ah Ilbo. The
newspaper does an article on individuals in Korea looking for family
members. In exchange, the newspaper gets to do a story on the
reunion when it happens.
Kang gets a mention as the
Chicago private detective who made it all
happen.
Some of the people contacted in the U.S. through
the newspaper program are adopted Koreans, but not all
of them. Some are family members separated right after the war, or
through other circumstances, he said.
Kang said that at
one point he submitted a proposal to the North Korean government
through the United Nations in New York to ask about reuniting
families who were divided across South Korea and North Korea. After
six months, he said, the South and North Korean governments started
direct talks about reunion. "After that, they weren't interested in
our services any more," he said. He is leaving that
option open.
How to legalize investigation
Kang is also involved in advocating for a proposed bill which would
make investigation a licensed profession in South Korea. Right now,
he said, investigating individuals is illegal, but investigating on
behalf of a corporation is usually legal. Some kinds of
investigating are neither legal nor illegal, but in a kind of gray
area, he said. More legal structure is clearly needed to make the
profession more legitimate. The legislator who was his bill sponsor,
unfortunately was not reelected, he said, but he is confident the
bill will be introduced again, sometime in the
future.
Legalizing and regulating investigation, Kang
believes, can only help the profession and the clients in Korea "so
it can be a reasonable service done at a reasonable price," he
said. In the meantime, he is very cautious about what he is doing
in Korea. The office he had there is now closed, and he does his
work only through contacts.
Culture
lessons
In working with adoptees, Kang often finds
himself having to interpret Korean culture for adoptees and U.S.
culture for Korean birth families.
Commonly, he said, negative
feelings adoptees have about birth family come from a
cultural misunderstanding. "They have bad feelings about being
given up for adoption, I know, most of the time, giving up babies in
Korea has to do with having financial problems," he
said, particularly in the Korea of 20 or 30 years ago. "I try to
explain they were given up so they would have a better
life," he said.
Similarly, he said, "family in Korea,
when they look for an adoptee, they think about 30 or 40 years ago.
That baby they gave up. But adoptees here, they have been growing
up, changing for a long time." There was one case, he
recalled, of a birth brother in Korea who was trying to find his
sister, who was living in the Atlanta area. It was complicated, he
said, because the young woman did not know she had been adopted
through a deception. The person she always called her mother was
actually her aunt, who had stolen her from her mother
immediately before she immigrated.
The adoptee woman, after being
contacted by Kang, was too shocked to think beyond the
fact that the person she thought of as her mother was really her
aunt. She didn't want to deal with her brother or birth mother in
Korea, at least not right away. She rejected all offers. "The
brother was calling me, crying," Kang recalled. "I had to explain
the culture, and about the mother she knew, and what her life was
like in the U.S., > and how she may not want to live in
Korea."
The need for information
Kang shares the frustration of adoptees who are refused access to
their own files by adoption agencies. He has also been turned away
after getting permission to access the information by the adult
Korean adoptee.
"I can see them withholding information for minors,
but these are people who are 20, 30 and 40 years old!" he said. "I
think, legally, they have to open the record. Still, they sometimes
won't. But if a TV station goes over there, then they open it!
That's how Korea is."
Kang said he advises adoptees to
request their own records from agencies. He counsels persistence.
"If you keep asking, they eventually open it," he
said.
Sometimes, he said, he consults with a social
worker about how to handle a situation, and what to
expect before he starts searches for people. The support helps.
Asked if he ever gets personally involved, he answered
"Always!"
Kang has tried taking vacations in Central or
South America over the last couple of years, away from computers and
out of range of his cell phone.
He has decided he likes it. Whether
in Chicago, or in Korea, or someplace in between, being
a private detective is a 24-7 job. The cumulative effect of all
that urgent need is wearing.
On the other hand, he
understands about needing information. "People from
Korea, they forget what time it is here. They call at 3 or 4 a.m.
Especially reporters! Then they apologize, and I say 'forget about it.
I was a reporter too.'"
Kang's agency,
Intersearch, has a website at www.koreandetective.com
The family search site (in Korean) is at: www.familyinusa.com
Chicago News Feature by Martha Vickery
ΆΡ More Article 4. 3, 1. ΆΡ [The State SC] Finding brothers fills 'emptiness in my heart' 
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