M I'm Wolf Folden, and this is thrilliest explorers. Statistically, it only rains about thirty five days out of the year in southern California. But when I arrived at the Casa del Mar Hotel, the rain was coming down hard. The landscape was cold and misty. It was right on the beach, but I could barely see the Pacific Ocean through the palatial windows that lie in the hotel bar, where I found the man I was meeting wearing round, thin frame glasses, a light blazer and a surprisingly vibrant tropical button down underneath it all. So this is Hotel Casta del Mar Are. It's right on the beach in Santa Monica. It's an old, historic, beautiful building, classic style. We were doing a case here about ten years ago that involved the cheating spouse when we'd been hired by the wife of a businessman who was staying here to watch him while he's out here on a business trip. And so the client was saying, well, you know, can you do it? And I said, well, I'll do it, but I'll need a hundred dollar bar tab. Even if the rain is an outlier. In Los Angeles, the Moody atmosphere did feel very apt for the subject matter. My name is Bruce Robertson. I'm a private investigator. I've been a investigator in Los Angeles for over thirty years. I'm the CEO and founder of TriStar Investigation and we're located on the West side of Los Angeles. We have a full service detective agency, so we cover a broad spectrum of investigation. I am naturally inquisitive. I much rather be listening than talking, and that's one thing that does help have private investigator be good. It is because you're not going to get information if your mouth is running. Unfortunately for Bruce, his mouth is going to be running a lot during this episode. Today we're taking a look at the city of Los Angeles through the lens of two of the city's most established private investigators. The Fedora capped noir trope of the l A p I is burned into our collective consciousness. I think Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlon or Jake Giddies from Chinatown. And while the modern day analogs might operate a little differently, they still see the city through a different angle. They trail subjects on the one on one they stake out hotel bars and seed clubs. They record conversations with hidden microphones in pawn shops, and along the way they get to know Los Angeles, the old, the sketchy, the gentrified in a way that few other professions facilitating. So this is Los Angeles through their eyes. Well, Los Angeles is a unique town because it's so spread out. So that's kind of a challenge because there's no real cohesion, and you have to be extremely adaptive to go into every situation and try to blend in. It's not really a town. It's a huge conglomeration of small cities and neighborhoods. In doing investigation, you go across all kinds of strata of society. After sharing some coffee and it played of Wabos Rancheros, which I highly recommended, the cast of Del Mar we hopped in Bruce's car and drove around in the now pouring rain. And I remember one particular day a few years back, I had an interview in Beverly Hills with a business client and I was in one of these big, beautiful mansions and later that day I had to go find Witness and Boil Heights, and I was in a tenement apartment building with people living, you know, eight to a room. You know, that's the thing about being a private investigator. You just get such a wide view of society. And the other the thing is is that when you're if you're working under cover, you have to be extremely observant about what's going on around you. And so you tend to be more observant about what's happening around the city. First of all, you should prepare and dress the part. And secondly, you just have to be sensitive to who you're dealing with, what the area is like, how you can blend in. I even have kind of a natural ability to adapt like accents. I'll give you an example. I was working on a case out in the Inland Empire Riverside area of Los Angeles, that's about sixty miles east of here. There was a man who had been killed working on drilling water drill and he happened to be Navajo. And the whole crew, there was four of them, were Navajo, and we needed to interview the other people that were there, and nobody could get a hold of these people. They were living in a remote hotel out in the middle of nowhere. They didn't want to talk to anybody, and I happen to know something about the Navajo traditions. I've been out on the reservation, and one thing that they do is when somebody has died, they don't speak their name for three moons after they die because they don't want to bring them back from their journey in the afterlife. And so I finally found these uh men out at this remote hotel, and the first thing I said to him when I opened, when they opened the door, as I said, I'm here to talk you about the one who died. They knew that I was not speaking his name on purpose, and I was able to gain their trust and get what I needed. Well. Bruce does a lot of his in person meetings at places like Castle del Mall are big, plenty of people, nice, but relatively private. He definitely has an acute awareness of what we would consider old school l A, the classics, the kind of places I would actually want to go to as a tourist. The one place that I think just is such a fine example of old school Los Angeles bar slice dining is a place called Musso Frank's in Hollywood. That place is so beautiful, old school Walnut paneling brass, you know, immaculately addressed servers and um. You go into these booths that are red leather and have a cocktail and you can just there's pictures of the wall of all the movie stars going back thirty or forty or fifty years. You know, you can imagine the things that went on there, and you see pictures of you know, Liz Taylor and people like that on the wall inside the restaurant and just take you back. So that's one of my favorite old time let's call it film noir type bar in Los Angeles. Well, there's a place called the Smoke House out in I believe it's Burbank near the NBC studios, and it's an old time hangout for actors as well. And back in the day it was totally smoke filled, back when you could still smoke inside bars, and you could go there and at any given dates spot several celebrities and throwing back the martinis and cigars, cigarettes, etcetera. It was just like walking into the fifties. Well, there's a great Italian place called Laveckia that's in uh Santa Monica and it's old style. The owners are Italian and they've been in business for well, I've been going there for more than fifteen years, and it's just a great They have a huge bar so you can eat at the bar, and just really very friendly staff and amazing Italian food. There is a place called Jeffreys up in Malibu on the beach that has it just a beautiful view and if you go there at sunset, it's just amazing. Alright. So we asked a few private eyes in l A to help out with this episode, but by their nature they are well incredibly private, though a few who didn't appear were gracious enough to give us some more recommendations of old school spots that might help you, as a visitor feel that l A noir vibe. First up, The Prince in Koreatown, with dramatic lighting, dark red wallpaper, cozy booths, and oil paintings lining the wall. The print seems like an old school New York steakhouse, but they serve colorful cocktails and fried chicken. It opened as a different bar way back in the nineteen forties. They filmed the scene from Chinatown here. It's featured in an episode of Madmen, and also you might recognize it from the very non war show New Girl, but it definitely makes you feel like you're in classic l A. Number two the Angels Flight Funicular. You can find this incredibly short but one hundred and eighteen year old funicular between Hill Street and Grant Avenue on Bunker Hill. It's an incline and it claims to be the world's shortest railway. And while the ride only lasts a minute, tickets cost a dollar and you can definitely pretend you are in a truncated journey to confront the person who killed your wife or something. I don't know. Number three the Millennium Built More Hotel. If you really want to go all in on this theme, you can stay at this classically designed hotel established in nine designed by the architects who would later create New York's famed Waldorf Storia. Every room is bursting with golden details. They even used to hold the oscars here, and the bar room looks very much out of the shining with hopefully less murder, even though this place is obviously reported to be haunted. While all of these are classic slices of Los Angeles, there is no more quintessential l A experience than sitting in traffic let's go back to Bruce especially. You know, in the last ten fifteen years, traffic has just gotten incredibly bad here. It was never great. But you know, tailing people in heavy traffic is another real challenge. So when you're doing uh surveillance work and you have to follow people who are driving there, you're always juxtaposing two factors. Staying close enough to them to make sure that they don't you don't lose them, but staying far enough away to make sure that they don't notice you. And so you're constantly having to make split moment decisions as you're following them to weigh those two factors, and uh, just as the best you can. Don't try this at home, because it's a lot harder than it looks. It can be dangerous, uh, you know, you can be tempted to violate traffic laws, which we often have to do. There's one maneuver which we call on are you are? Whereas if you're following somebody and they go through a yellow light and you get stuck at the red light, it's called are you are? You make a right turn, you make an immediate you, and then you make another right and go ahead and get through that light that way if if traffic permits. And the other thing is, whenever you're doing undercover work, you have to have a cover, so that's the reason you're there. So for instance, when I was at the Hotel Cassa del Mar, sitting at the at the bar, you know, I had a story for the bartenders. In that case, Bruce told the bartender he was meeting a friend from college who would be checking in in a few hours. You know, we will budget several hours before we even do any work of just coming up with a credible cover story. I had a case many years back where we were working for a lawyer represented somebody who I thought that a particular production company had lifted their idea for the show, and so I was hired to go in undercover to try to get into their film vault to see if they had a copy of this treatment. And so I had to come up with a very lab brick cover story which involved being a graduate student at a particular university and I was doing a thesis on this genre of show and wanted to interview. And I actually got the producer to take me on and bring me in and uh and so that and then I even went to the extent of actually finding out who were the professors at the university, because that's the other thing about undercover work is you never know when you're going to get hit with a question that you're not going to be able to answer. So I went to the extent of even knowing who the professors were and actually enrolling so that if they checked, I would actually be on the on the books that I rolled in an extension class. You know, I love Los Angeles. The whether here is amazing. The light here is amazing that you know, it's beautiful sunsets. I mean, this is why actually Los Angeles became a film capital is because of the incredible light that's here. One of my favorite films is chinatowns Chinatown, and it's uh exquisitely filmed and every scene is just like a work of art. I heard that they actually waited like five days to shoot one scene just because the lighting wasn't right day after day. What filmed the do you think most accurately portrays your job. There was an interesting film called The Conversation which was about wire tapping that and that was very realistic as to you know, kind of the gritty part of Los Angeles. My favorite old time private investigator was Rockford because that guy typified an l A private an investigator totally outgoing, you know, charismatic and just able to put a smile on anybody's face and put them at ease. And that's one of those secrets to being a good investigators, to put people at ease and get them talking. Yeah, fortunately we were able to get briefe talking. Maybe I could be in l a private eye after all. Anyway, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we get back, we're heading to a crowded outdoor location in Culver City to meet Barbara, who might just be l A's pre eminent female private investigating She even served justin Bieber. We're gonna take a quick break, but lots more on that and plenty more stick her out. Well. Los Angeles can be a very scary place and a lot of people go missing and families will call me. It's just like you see in the movies. It's worse. It's a mishmash. You know. You could have a terrible neighbor right next to a two two million dollar home, And I just actually served one. He was a hoarder and it was two little bungalows, and all I could think of is, man, if they tore this place down. You know, a beautiful house to the right, beautiful house to the left, beautiful homes, and it's like, that's how neighborhoods are. I met our next private eye outside behind what's commonly known as the Culver City Steps in Culver City. I asked them to meet me in a place where they would actually meet a client. So we took some chairs in this public gathering space and found a quiet corner. We could see the crowd walking by. We were totally out in the open, but we were also pretty inconspicuous. Accomplishing this seemingly impossible feat is the first of many things she taught me during our interview. Okay, my name is Barbara and I own Kinsey Investigations, Incorporated, and we're based out of Marina del Rey, but we cover all of Los Angeles and Orange County. In the very beginning, I was a little bit intimidated about being a female, but I find it advantageous to be a female. My colleagues men hire me because I'm a woman, and there might be cases where they need somebody like me with children or we're easier to be on campus of schools. You don't want this creepy guy walking around, you know. And all of my people are very youthful. They kind of look like you, you know, you know, and we're not big scary X cops with the big bulky build and the intimidating you know, bodyguard. Look, you know what I mean. We blend in very easily. Barbara was wearing dark sunglasses least windbreaker. She is pretty much the most anonymous looking person you could ever imagine. You would not remember seeing her on the street. We just did something the other day. It was a jewelry store in Orange County and they needed a female to go in and try on, you know, rings and you know, pretended by diamonds and stuff like that. And then I had engaged fiancee and then he was secretly filming while I was trying the rings on, and they were telling me about diamonds and clarity and all that kind of stuff. But it was a divorce and the guy claimed he didn't make any money and he was a diamond broker. So we were there filming his interaction and he was the diamond broker. I guess that sells diamonds to jewelry stores. And he claimed he didn't have any money, he was not still working, you know, blah blah blah, which wasn't the case. Diamonds are expected. Well. One of the fun things that I like about where I am as in Marina Dorry. It's a very very small area, and the marina itself is quite large, but it's less than like one point five square mile, right, And there's all You wouldn't believe what I've been asked to repossess a boat. Um, we followed, uh cheating spouses on a boat. There was one I had to serve divorce papers to this guy. I had a yacht and so I pretended I was booking it and and then I asked I got there early, and I asked him if he could give me a tour, And so he took me down in the cabin and he introduced me to his girlfriend. I'm serving the divorce papers, right and and so I said. And so he came real close to me, and I said, I'm actually here to serve you said, I don't want to embarrass it. And he was. He was so scared, but he was so relieved at the same time, that I didn't make a big to do about it. You know. One of my favorite places is Tony Peace and it's been there forever, but I meet clients there. One part is a little dark bar, sports bar, you know, you can have a quiet conversation with somebody or up above they have a rooftop where it's very open and they have excellent food. It's like swordfish and you know, whatever you want, and of course cocktails when you're meeting a client. Um, you know, you mentioned it's a tiny dark bar or whatever. That's one part of it is that the kind of place you seek out. Is it a place that needs to be a little bit clandestine, yes, and like something like this. It's small, but it's out of the way. You know, it's very busy. There's a lot of people here. But look how we've found this little nook, you know. And that's the type of things that i'd like to look for when I meet people. Usually they're very nervous and they like to drink, like nicer bars like I don't know if you're familiar with Houston's chain here, but it's a steakhouse and they have a large bar area and I like this one area in South Redondo Beach. It's ht Grill, It's it's uh Hennessy's Tavern. It's open and spacious and they have good drinks. The Standard Hotel, which there is a branch downtown, and there is a branch on Sunset Boulevard, and the one on Sunset has a diner, so it's very easy to meet with clients and the diner, and they have a big foyer with couches and lounges and stuff, and I like that one very well. Well outdoors is what we typically like. Like. Um, I go to the Ritz and the Marina Dare all the time with the seals barking at me, you know. In the wintertime it's open and I meet clients there by the fireplace, so it's fine. I want to cut off Barbara really quickly. Sorry, Barbara, to give three more classic picks from our private stash of private eyes. First up Arts Deli in Studio City, l A. Might be known for its low key diners and doughnut shops, but for a big gas lunch that will certainly take you back to the old days. Arts, open in ninety seven, is an old school Jewish deli with a strawmy sandwiches and egg creams that can certainly go toe to toe with cats as in New York and might actually win. You can definitely come here in the mid afternoon to have a private conversation over some stellar matzo ball soup and make sure to check out the vintage glamour shots. If there's sandwiches lining the back wall, it's part of the whole experience. Number two, the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Show. Now, this only happens once per year in the spring. This year it was held in March, so we just missed it, but if you're a fan of this stuff, it's definitely worth planning a trip around. Located in the Glendale Civic Auditorium, a five dollar entry fee will grant you access to more than eighty vendors hawking thousands of vintage pulpy paperbacks with titles like Murder of the Circus Queen. You might just find some inspiration for your next screenplay here. And lastly, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Yes, this is an old cemetery in Hollywood, which should be interesting enough, but the grounds also host daily yoga sessions as well as film screenings, concerts, and stand up My Morning Jacket and David Cross both will be performing here this summer separately. But for those who would rather pay their respects to Hollywood royalty legends like Judy Garland and cecil Be the Miller buried here, there are daily tours of the cemetery, or you can just wander around on your own. Speaking of awkward run ins with celebrities, living or dead, let's go back to Barbara Um. I served Justin Bieber. I had to serve not only Justin Bieber, but his big, big gas bodyguard. And he had several bodyguards. And they were circling me in a parking garage and they're like, and I'm like, you touch me, It's a fine. And there was circling me like this, and then you know, I'm just like, you know, whatever, be stupid, you know. And I was inside my heart's beating. I could hear my heart beating. I was terrified. And so they let me go and I turned around and here comes this guy on his phone, and so I said, he and and he goes now and then he starts filming me, and I go, you want to see my credentials? And he goes, no, he goes. I just want to take your picture, and I go okay, and I said, I think you're and I gave him the papers. He just let him follow to the ground, so they just shut up and went away. I'm sure they settled on that case. It was about his bodyguard hitting a paparazzi guy in Hawaii and I guess he broke his jar or something. It was a big five million dollar lossuit. I'm sure they settled for something, but that was fine. Well, I've had a homeless missing girl. We keep finding her. She's addicted to drugs, but she loves the area of seventh and Figure Rowa. It's a big outdoor shopping area, and every time she goes missing, we go looking in that area. And the last time we found her at the USC. We find her on the campus because she looks like she blends in. And I'd say probably five times we found her. And she's from Boston, Massachusetts. And her mom calls me, can you go look for her again? You know? And we do, but she she introduced me to that area. I should say, Yeah, in your line of work, do you ever are ever the position where you are following someone, where you're tracking someone? I have two GPS is on a car. Two cars right now, and in the case I have right now, it's the same case. It's too two cars and they both belonged to the husband. And we're actually going to Peterson Museum. There's a fashion show next week. She says she's going with her mom. He thinks he's she's going with another man. So we got ourselves tickets, five tickets, and I get to go, and one of my guys gets gets to go, and we're gonna hunt for her and see, she might not be there. You don't know. She might be with her mom. We don't know. But that's gonna be fun. Being an investigator in Los Angeles, what do you see? That's a little bit different than someone who's an accountant, someone who's in aj And you know, how do you get to know the city a little bit more intimately because we go everywhere you could imagine. I just looked for Um Bentley at the Beverly Hilton and I went in, had a cocktail locked around Um Valet. I asked, Um, you know, if I had long term parking, my dad's going to come, you know, if he left his car here for a month and I had to find this vehicle, and I found the vehicle, But I mean, how often you get to go to Beverly Hilton. And I called my clients and texted him the pictures, and he's like, have a couple of cocktails on me, thirty dollar cocktails on me, you know. And ordinarily I wouldn't go to some place like the Beverly Hilton, you know. I wouldn't go to a fashion show at the Peterson typically, you know, But I get to do that. And on the subject of recording, which we were obviously doing, Barbara couldn't help mentioning her many secret recording devices, including a nondescript looking pen. Yeah. I just gave my pen to somebody yesterday at lunch. He's going to put it in a vehicle so he can hear the conversation. But it's voice activated, so it won't um play unless somebody's talking. But my thing was, I always listen to music in my car, So does that mean it's going to keep going? You know? And are you going to hear the conversation? So he says no, no, no, he says, I'm going to put it in the bedroom. He goes, when I'm not at home, Okay, t m i um. Do you have any other like guidets like that that you rely on. Yeah, I have a it's a USB port, it looks like a charger, and it's also a hidden microphone. We have hidden cameras, but we have one that's a lightbulb. We have one that is it looks like a smoke sensor and it's it's actually kind of expensive, but you have to have somebody install it, and so are guys. Will weare like a navy blue shirt and Dicky's pants and look like actual installers and they're actually putting in spywear in the house. What do you think people's biggest misconception about being a private investigator is that you're a cop and you're cop like and you walk around with a gun concealed weapon, and that's you're a man, you know, and so they never see me coming. This show is produced by myself and me a fast, edited and mixed by the other worldly Dean White and Abbey Austria. Special thanks to all of My boss is Jim Demiko, Megan Kursh, Brett Kushner, and Emily Felt. That's it for us. Put your trade tables up, leave your shoes on, and we'll see you next week. Five

M I'm Wolf Folden, and this is thrilliest explorers. Statistically, it only rains about thirty five days out of the year in southern California. But when I arrived at the Casa del Mar Hotel, the rain was coming down hard. The landscape was cold and misty. It was right on the beach, but I could barely see the Pacific Ocean through the palatial windows that lie in the hotel bar, where I found the man I was meeting wearing round, thin frame glasses, a light blazer and a surprisingly vibrant tropical button down underneath it all. So this is Hotel Casta del Mar Are. It's right on the beach in Santa Monica. It's an old, historic, beautiful building, classic style. We were doing a case here about ten years ago that involved the cheating spouse when we'd been hired by the wife of a businessman who was staying here to watch him while he's out here on a business trip. And so the client was saying, well, you know, can you do it? And I said, well, I'll do it, but I'll need a hundred dollar bar tab. Even if the rain is an outlier. In Los Angeles, the Moody atmosphere did feel very apt for the subject matter. My name is Bruce Robertson. I'm a private investigator. I've been a investigator in Los Angeles for over thirty years. I'm the CEO and founder of TriStar Investigation and we're located on the West side of Los Angeles. We have a full service detective agency, so we cover a broad spectrum of investigation. I am naturally inquisitive. I much rather be listening than talking, and that's one thing that does help have private investigator be good. It is because you're not going to get information if your mouth is running. Unfortunately for Bruce, his mouth is going to be running a lot during this episode. Today we're taking a look at the city of Los Angeles through the lens of two of the city's most established private investigators. The Fedora capped noir trope of the l A p I is burned into our collective consciousness. I think Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlon or Jake Giddies from Chinatown. And while the modern day analogs might operate a little differently, they still see the city through a different angle. They trail subjects on the one on one they stake out hotel bars and seed clubs. They record conversations with hidden microphones in pawn shops, and along the way they get to know Los Angeles, the old, the sketchy, the gentrified in a way that few other professions facilitating. So this is Los Angeles through their eyes. Well, Los Angeles is a unique town because it's so spread out. So that's kind of a challenge because there's no real cohesion, and you have to be extremely adaptive to go into every situation and try to blend in. It's not really a town. It's a huge conglomeration of small cities and neighborhoods. In doing investigation, you go across all kinds of strata of society. After sharing some coffee and it played of Wabos Rancheros, which I highly recommended, the cast of Del Mar we hopped in Bruce's car and drove around in the now pouring rain. And I remember one particular day a few years back, I had an interview in Beverly Hills with a business client and I was in one of these big, beautiful mansions and later that day I had to go find Witness and Boil Heights, and I was in a tenement apartment building with people living, you know, eight to a room. You know, that's the thing about being a private investigator. You just get such a wide view of society. And the other the thing is is that when you're if you're working under cover, you have to be extremely observant about what's going on around you. And so you tend to be more observant about what's happening around the city. First of all, you should prepare and dress the part. And secondly, you just have to be sensitive to who you're dealing with, what the area is like, how you can blend in. I even have kind of a natural ability to adapt like accents. I'll give you an example. I was working on a case out in the Inland Empire Riverside area of Los Angeles, that's about sixty miles east of here. There was a man who had been killed working on drilling water drill and he happened to be Navajo. And the whole crew, there was four of them, were Navajo, and we needed to interview the other people that were there, and nobody could get a hold of these people. They were living in a remote hotel out in the middle of nowhere. They didn't want to talk to anybody, and I happen to know something about the Navajo traditions. I've been out on the reservation, and one thing that they do is when somebody has died, they don't speak their name for three moons after they die because they don't want to bring them back from their journey in the afterlife. And so I finally found these uh men out at this remote hotel, and the first thing I said to him when I opened, when they opened the door, as I said, I'm here to talk you about the one who died. They knew that I was not speaking his name on purpose, and I was able to gain their trust and get what I needed. Well. Bruce does a lot of his in person meetings at places like Castle del Mall are big, plenty of people, nice, but relatively private. He definitely has an acute awareness of what we would consider old school l A, the classics, the kind of places I would actually want to go to as a tourist. The one place that I think just is such a fine example of old school Los Angeles bar slice dining is a place called Musso Frank's in Hollywood. That place is so beautiful, old school Walnut paneling brass, you know, immaculately addressed servers and um. You go into these booths that are red leather and have a cocktail and you can just there's pictures of the wall of all the movie stars going back thirty or forty or fifty years. You know, you can imagine the things that went on there, and you see pictures of you know, Liz Taylor and people like that on the wall inside the restaurant and just take you back. So that's one of my favorite old time let's call it film noir type bar in Los Angeles. Well, there's a place called the Smoke House out in I believe it's Burbank near the NBC studios, and it's an old time hangout for actors as well. And back in the day it was totally smoke filled, back when you could still smoke inside bars, and you could go there and at any given dates spot several celebrities and throwing back the martinis and cigars, cigarettes, etcetera. It was just like walking into the fifties. Well, there's a great Italian place called Laveckia that's in uh Santa Monica and it's old style. The owners are Italian and they've been in business for well, I've been going there for more than fifteen years, and it's just a great They have a huge bar so you can eat at the bar, and just really very friendly staff and amazing Italian food. There is a place called Jeffreys up in Malibu on the beach that has it just a beautiful view and if you go there at sunset, it's just amazing. Alright. So we asked a few private eyes in l A to help out with this episode, but by their nature they are well incredibly private, though a few who didn't appear were gracious enough to give us some more recommendations of old school spots that might help you, as a visitor feel that l A noir vibe. First up, The Prince in Koreatown, with dramatic lighting, dark red wallpaper, cozy booths, and oil paintings lining the wall. The print seems like an old school New York steakhouse, but they serve colorful cocktails and fried chicken. It opened as a different bar way back in the nineteen forties. They filmed the scene from Chinatown here. It's featured in an episode of Madmen, and also you might recognize it from the very non war show New Girl, but it definitely makes you feel like you're in classic l A. Number two the Angels Flight Funicular. You can find this incredibly short but one hundred and eighteen year old funicular between Hill Street and Grant Avenue on Bunker Hill. It's an incline and it claims to be the world's shortest railway. And while the ride only lasts a minute, tickets cost a dollar and you can definitely pretend you are in a truncated journey to confront the person who killed your wife or something. I don't know. Number three the Millennium Built More Hotel. If you really want to go all in on this theme, you can stay at this classically designed hotel established in nine designed by the architects who would later create New York's famed Waldorf Storia. Every room is bursting with golden details. They even used to hold the oscars here, and the bar room looks very much out of the shining with hopefully less murder, even though this place is obviously reported to be haunted. While all of these are classic slices of Los Angeles, there is no more quintessential l A experience than sitting in traffic let's go back to Bruce especially. You know, in the last ten fifteen years, traffic has just gotten incredibly bad here. It was never great. But you know, tailing people in heavy traffic is another real challenge. So when you're doing uh surveillance work and you have to follow people who are driving there, you're always juxtaposing two factors. Staying close enough to them to make sure that they don't you don't lose them, but staying far enough away to make sure that they don't notice you. And so you're constantly having to make split moment decisions as you're following them to weigh those two factors, and uh, just as the best you can. Don't try this at home, because it's a lot harder than it looks. It can be dangerous, uh, you know, you can be tempted to violate traffic laws, which we often have to do. There's one maneuver which we call on are you are? Whereas if you're following somebody and they go through a yellow light and you get stuck at the red light, it's called are you are? You make a right turn, you make an immediate you, and then you make another right and go ahead and get through that light that way if if traffic permits. And the other thing is, whenever you're doing undercover work, you have to have a cover, so that's the reason you're there. So for instance, when I was at the Hotel Cassa del Mar, sitting at the at the bar, you know, I had a story for the bartenders. In that case, Bruce told the bartender he was meeting a friend from college who would be checking in in a few hours. You know, we will budget several hours before we even do any work of just coming up with a credible cover story. I had a case many years back where we were working for a lawyer represented somebody who I thought that a particular production company had lifted their idea for the show, and so I was hired to go in undercover to try to get into their film vault to see if they had a copy of this treatment. And so I had to come up with a very lab brick cover story which involved being a graduate student at a particular university and I was doing a thesis on this genre of show and wanted to interview. And I actually got the producer to take me on and bring me in and uh and so that and then I even went to the extent of actually finding out who were the professors at the university, because that's the other thing about undercover work is you never know when you're going to get hit with a question that you're not going to be able to answer. So I went to the extent of even knowing who the professors were and actually enrolling so that if they checked, I would actually be on the on the books that I rolled in an extension class. You know, I love Los Angeles. The whether here is amazing. The light here is amazing that you know, it's beautiful sunsets. I mean, this is why actually Los Angeles became a film capital is because of the incredible light that's here. One of my favorite films is chinatowns Chinatown, and it's uh exquisitely filmed and every scene is just like a work of art. I heard that they actually waited like five days to shoot one scene just because the lighting wasn't right day after day. What filmed the do you think most accurately portrays your job. There was an interesting film called The Conversation which was about wire tapping that and that was very realistic as to you know, kind of the gritty part of Los Angeles. My favorite old time private investigator was Rockford because that guy typified an l A private an investigator totally outgoing, you know, charismatic and just able to put a smile on anybody's face and put them at ease. And that's one of those secrets to being a good investigators, to put people at ease and get them talking. Yeah, fortunately we were able to get briefe talking. Maybe I could be in l a private eye after all. Anyway, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we get back, we're heading to a crowded outdoor location in Culver City to meet Barbara, who might just be l A's pre eminent female private investigating She even served justin Bieber. We're gonna take a quick break, but lots more on that and plenty more stick her out. Well. Los Angeles can be a very scary place and a lot of people go missing and families will call me. It's just like you see in the movies. It's worse. It's a mishmash. You know. You could have a terrible neighbor right next to a two two million dollar home, And I just actually served one. He was a hoarder and it was two little bungalows, and all I could think of is, man, if they tore this place down. You know, a beautiful house to the right, beautiful house to the left, beautiful homes, and it's like, that's how neighborhoods are. I met our next private eye outside behind what's commonly known as the Culver City Steps in Culver City. I asked them to meet me in a place where they would actually meet a client. So we took some chairs in this public gathering space and found a quiet corner. We could see the crowd walking by. We were totally out in the open, but we were also pretty inconspicuous. Accomplishing this seemingly impossible feat is the first of many things she taught me during our interview. Okay, my name is Barbara and I own Kinsey Investigations, Incorporated, and we're based out of Marina del Rey, but we cover all of Los Angeles and Orange County. In the very beginning, I was a little bit intimidated about being a female, but I find it advantageous to be a female. My colleagues men hire me because I'm a woman, and there might be cases where they need somebody like me with children or we're easier to be on campus of schools. You don't want this creepy guy walking around, you know. And all of my people are very youthful. They kind of look like you, you know, you know, and we're not big scary X cops with the big bulky build and the intimidating you know, bodyguard. Look, you know what I mean. We blend in very easily. Barbara was wearing dark sunglasses least windbreaker. She is pretty much the most anonymous looking person you could ever imagine. You would not remember seeing her on the street. We just did something the other day. It was a jewelry store in Orange County and they needed a female to go in and try on, you know, rings and you know, pretended by diamonds and stuff like that. And then I had engaged fiancee and then he was secretly filming while I was trying the rings on, and they were telling me about diamonds and clarity and all that kind of stuff. But it was a divorce and the guy claimed he didn't make any money and he was a diamond broker. So we were there filming his interaction and he was the diamond broker. I guess that sells diamonds to jewelry stores. And he claimed he didn't have any money, he was not still working, you know, blah blah blah, which wasn't the case. Diamonds are expected. Well. One of the fun things that I like about where I am as in Marina Dorry. It's a very very small area, and the marina itself is quite large, but it's less than like one point five square mile, right, And there's all You wouldn't believe what I've been asked to repossess a boat. Um, we followed, uh cheating spouses on a boat. There was one I had to serve divorce papers to this guy. I had a yacht and so I pretended I was booking it and and then I asked I got there early, and I asked him if he could give me a tour, And so he took me down in the cabin and he introduced me to his girlfriend. I'm serving the divorce papers, right and and so I said. And so he came real close to me, and I said, I'm actually here to serve you said, I don't want to embarrass it. And he was. He was so scared, but he was so relieved at the same time, that I didn't make a big to do about it. You know. One of my favorite places is Tony Peace and it's been there forever, but I meet clients there. One part is a little dark bar, sports bar, you know, you can have a quiet conversation with somebody or up above they have a rooftop where it's very open and they have excellent food. It's like swordfish and you know, whatever you want, and of course cocktails when you're meeting a client. Um, you know, you mentioned it's a tiny dark bar or whatever. That's one part of it is that the kind of place you seek out. Is it a place that needs to be a little bit clandestine, yes, and like something like this. It's small, but it's out of the way. You know, it's very busy. There's a lot of people here. But look how we've found this little nook, you know. And that's the type of things that i'd like to look for when I meet people. Usually they're very nervous and they like to drink, like nicer bars like I don't know if you're familiar with Houston's chain here, but it's a steakhouse and they have a large bar area and I like this one area in South Redondo Beach. It's ht Grill, It's it's uh Hennessy's Tavern. It's open and spacious and they have good drinks. The Standard Hotel, which there is a branch downtown, and there is a branch on Sunset Boulevard, and the one on Sunset has a diner, so it's very easy to meet with clients and the diner, and they have a big foyer with couches and lounges and stuff, and I like that one very well. Well outdoors is what we typically like. Like. Um, I go to the Ritz and the Marina Dare all the time with the seals barking at me, you know. In the wintertime it's open and I meet clients there by the fireplace, so it's fine. I want to cut off Barbara really quickly. Sorry, Barbara, to give three more classic picks from our private stash of private eyes. First up Arts Deli in Studio City, l A. Might be known for its low key diners and doughnut shops, but for a big gas lunch that will certainly take you back to the old days. Arts, open in ninety seven, is an old school Jewish deli with a strawmy sandwiches and egg creams that can certainly go toe to toe with cats as in New York and might actually win. You can definitely come here in the mid afternoon to have a private conversation over some stellar matzo ball soup and make sure to check out the vintage glamour shots. If there's sandwiches lining the back wall, it's part of the whole experience. Number two, the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Show. Now, this only happens once per year in the spring. This year it was held in March, so we just missed it, but if you're a fan of this stuff, it's definitely worth planning a trip around. Located in the Glendale Civic Auditorium, a five dollar entry fee will grant you access to more than eighty vendors hawking thousands of vintage pulpy paperbacks with titles like Murder of the Circus Queen. You might just find some inspiration for your next screenplay here. And lastly, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Yes, this is an old cemetery in Hollywood, which should be interesting enough, but the grounds also host daily yoga sessions as well as film screenings, concerts, and stand up My Morning Jacket and David Cross both will be performing here this summer separately. But for those who would rather pay their respects to Hollywood royalty legends like Judy Garland and cecil Be the Miller buried here, there are daily tours of the cemetery, or you can just wander around on your own. Speaking of awkward run ins with celebrities, living or dead, let's go back to Barbara Um. I served Justin Bieber. I had to serve not only Justin Bieber, but his big, big gas bodyguard. And he had several bodyguards. And they were circling me in a parking garage and they're like, and I'm like, you touch me, It's a fine. And there was circling me like this, and then you know, I'm just like, you know, whatever, be stupid, you know. And I was inside my heart's beating. I could hear my heart beating. I was terrified. And so they let me go and I turned around and here comes this guy on his phone, and so I said, he and and he goes now and then he starts filming me, and I go, you want to see my credentials? And he goes, no, he goes. I just want to take your picture, and I go okay, and I said, I think you're and I gave him the papers. He just let him follow to the ground, so they just shut up and went away. I'm sure they settled on that case. It was about his bodyguard hitting a paparazzi guy in Hawaii and I guess he broke his jar or something. It was a big five million dollar lossuit. I'm sure they settled for something, but that was fine. Well, I've had a homeless missing girl. We keep finding her. She's addicted to drugs, but she loves the area of seventh and Figure Rowa. It's a big outdoor shopping area, and every time she goes missing, we go looking in that area. And the last time we found her at the USC. We find her on the campus because she looks like she blends in. And I'd say probably five times we found her. And she's from Boston, Massachusetts. And her mom calls me, can you go look for her again? You know? And we do, but she she introduced me to that area. I should say, Yeah, in your line of work, do you ever are ever the position where you are following someone, where you're tracking someone? I have two GPS is on a car. Two cars right now, and in the case I have right now, it's the same case. It's too two cars and they both belonged to the husband. And we're actually going to Peterson Museum. There's a fashion show next week. She says she's going with her mom. He thinks he's she's going with another man. So we got ourselves tickets, five tickets, and I get to go, and one of my guys gets gets to go, and we're gonna hunt for her and see, she might not be there. You don't know. She might be with her mom. We don't know. But that's gonna be fun. Being an investigator in Los Angeles, what do you see? That's a little bit different than someone who's an accountant, someone who's in aj And you know, how do you get to know the city a little bit more intimately because we go everywhere you could imagine. I just looked for Um Bentley at the Beverly Hilton and I went in, had a cocktail locked around Um Valet. I asked, Um, you know, if I had long term parking, my dad's going to come, you know, if he left his car here for a month and I had to find this vehicle, and I found the vehicle, But I mean, how often you get to go to Beverly Hilton. And I called my clients and texted him the pictures, and he's like, have a couple of cocktails on me, thirty dollar cocktails on me, you know. And ordinarily I wouldn't go to some place like the Beverly Hilton, you know. I wouldn't go to a fashion show at the Peterson typically, you know, But I get to do that. And on the subject of recording, which we were obviously doing, Barbara couldn't help mentioning her many secret recording devices, including a nondescript looking pen. Yeah. I just gave my pen to somebody yesterday at lunch. He's going to put it in a vehicle so he can hear the conversation. But it's voice activated, so it won't um play unless somebody's talking. But my thing was, I always listen to music in my car, So does that mean it's going to keep going? You know? And are you going to hear the conversation? So he says no, no, no, he says, I'm going to put it in the bedroom. He goes, when I'm not at home, Okay, t m i um. Do you have any other like guidets like that that you rely on. Yeah, I have a it's a USB port, it looks like a charger, and it's also a hidden microphone. We have hidden cameras, but we have one that's a lightbulb. We have one that is it looks like a smoke sensor and it's it's actually kind of expensive, but you have to have somebody install it, and so are guys. Will weare like a navy blue shirt and Dicky's pants and look like actual installers and they're actually putting in spywear in the house. What do you think people's biggest misconception about being a private investigator is that you're a cop and you're cop like and you walk around with a gun concealed weapon, and that's you're a man, you know, and so they never see me coming. This show is produced by myself and me a fast, edited and mixed by the other worldly Dean White and Abbey Austria. Special thanks to all of My boss is Jim Demiko, Megan Kursh, Brett Kushner, and Emily Felt. That's it for us. Put your trade tables up, leave your shoes on, and we'll see you next week. Five