The Rope Job: Memoirs of a Private Investigator

By James Curtis

Back in the 1960’s, the private investigators were able to disprove fraudulente injury claims by gaining the confidence of claimants and having them perform activities that they had the doctors, attorneys, insurance adjusters and courts convinced could not be performed. The millions of dollars saved by the insurance companies using the ‘Rope Job’ came to a sudden halt in 1970 due to claimants attorneys filing law suits against the insurance companies for invasion of privacy. The claimants attorneys stated their claimants could not be contacted by anyone representing the insurance industry once they became represented by an attorney. Since 1970, the insurance companies spend tens of thousands of dollars for surveillance on what they perceive to be bogus claims and often with no tangeble results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532083457

James Curtis

James Curtis was a senior executive in the health care and computer industries before turning full-time to writing. He is author of William Cameron Menzies: The Shape of Films to Come; Spencer Tracy: A Biography; W. C. Fields: A Biography (winner of the 2004 Theatre Library Association Award, Special Jury Prize); James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters; and Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges.

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THE ROPE JOB

MEMOIRS OF A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

JAMES CURTIS

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THE ROPE JOB

MEMOIRS OF A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

Copyright © 2019 James Curtis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-8344-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-8345-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019915083

iUniverse rev. date: 10/10/2019

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I   Let’s Begin

Chapter 1     My Early Years

Chapter 2     Dad and The Produce Market

Chapter 3     Caught In The Act

Chapter 4     The Produce Route

Chapter 5     My Church Years

Chapter 6     Housekeepers and Fallout

Chapter 7     Baxter

Chapter 8     Last Attempt at Education

Chapter 9     Bob Adams and Canada

Chapter 10   Gene House

Chapter 11   Phil Halpin

Chapter 12   51 Studie

Chapter 13   The Comanche

Chapter 14   Barfy’s

Chapter 15   Dave Bancroft and On To Denver

Part II   Getting Down To Business

Chapter 16   Training

Chapter 17   Going Solo

Chapter 18   Christmas Party

Chapter 19   Trainee and Future Partner

Chapter 20   Factoring

Chapter 21   Lucky To Be Alive

Chapter 22   The Partnership

Chapter 23   James F. Curtis Investigations

Chapter 24   Ricardo Vieyra and The Vieyra Shuffle

Chapter 25   Helen Carson

Chapter 26   Zorba The Greek

Chapter 27   $25,000 Pizza Parlor Down The Tubes

Chapter 28   Tiger Nella

Chapter 29   Black Day at Black Rock

Chapter 30   John Kazian

Chapter 31   Joyce Undercover

Chapter 32   Robert Mayor

Chapter 33   Roberta Leverington (Bobbi Greenteeth)

Chapter 34   White Trash

Chapter 35   Carole Mae Shultz

Chapter 36   Claude Redner-End of The Rope

Epilogue

INTRODUCTION

In late 1968, I was lying in bed with my sister in-law, Carolyn McCoy after an early afternooner. I told her I was going to write a book about my experiences as a private investigator over the last six years with emphasis on the evolution of the rope job.

When I arrived the next day for another afternooner, she handed me a sheet of paper on which she had written out a sort of outline on how to proceed with my book. Carolyn had taken writing classes while attending USC so she knew quite a bit about writing, although as far as I know, the only books she had written were fuck books for some second rate publisher.

When I started this book in 1969, I had tried to follow Carolyn’s advice as much as I could. However, over the years since I started, I wound up writing about my early years leading up to the time I went to work for my cousin. By the time I compiled all of the material, I found I had way more information than I needed – almost enough to compile a separate book. I decided to touch on the time lightly and get on with the real story.

The reader needs to remember to add one zero to all monetary amounts address in this story – i.e. $800 is $8,000 in today’s economy.

Remember – from Carolyn McCoy

"Reader knows nothing until you tell him. He doesn’t know anything about you, Cousin Bob, the insurance investigation business or about Roping. The greatest difficulty in writing in first person, which often makes this the most difficult to write, is the fact the writer assumes the reader knows what is in his mind and therefore, does not supply information necessary to enhance interest.

If I didn’t know you, I would wonder who you are, what you look like, why you’re doing this sort of work, how you justify it and what it involved in terms of making your life different from others – in other words, most work 8-5, your hours are different, etc. Do you take three cases at one time?

I would also want to know something about the X’s you are Roping. Why are they being Roped – what info do you have about them prior to Roping. Do you like or dislike the people you are Roping."

The 60’s were a freewheeling, gritty time for some of us private investigators, at least in the greater L.A. area. The insurance industry was wide open. Those were the days of 3-martini lunches, dinner and drinks, client parties and other excesses. Investigations could be elaborate and in those pre-Nixon days, recordings, films and pretext contacts were the rule of the day. Just about anything went when it came to the investigation of possible insurance fraud; thus the birth of the Rope Job.

We called them Rope Jobs because we like to say we gave the claimant enough rope to hang himself. That is a polite way of saying that we approached a claimant usually with a young woman of obvious allure, gained his confidence, and introduced him to a group of investigators who would become his best friends until the investigation was complete. Most claimants were swept away by the attention lavished on them. They shed their claimant role that involved exaggerated and usually non-existent symptoms of injury and engaged in parties, picnics, sports activities and general group fun while all their activities were captured on film - activities they would later deny being able to engage in. This film that astounded doctors and judges (referees in those days) alike was the rope that would hang a claimant.

In the midst of it all, I was working, or otherwise involved, seven days a week for months at a time. We worked hard and played harder. It was my ideal job. I had my own agency and a staff of investigators. Every day was different and above all, I had no bosses to contend with. Of course, I had to keep my clients, the insurance adjusters happy but that was only a matter of those long, boozy lunches and dinners and other evening entertainment. Our rope jobs made adjusters look great in the eyes of their superiors.

Our claimants always had the opportunity to decline the invitations. Most did not and were happy to spend time horseback riding, playing football, soccer and baseball and so-called grab-ass with my bikini-clad investigators. Anything to impress their new found admirers and out-do the male investigators. We danced, swam, partied, took claimants to Vegas, Disneyland and other attractions, all the while filming the show. All that rope …

Sometimes, during the calmer surveillance cases that mostly involved sitting in a car listening to music and doing a crossword puzzle waiting for a claimant to do something, I wondered how I ended up with such a wild, crazy job. I have a natural gift of gab and can swap stories with the best of them, but am sufficiently cynical to question the sob stories I read in my clients files. Looking back at the way I bounced through life as a youngster and young man, it’s not difficult to understand how I got here.

PART I

LET’S BEGIN

CHAPTER 1

MY EARLY YEARS

On May 2, 1937 I was born in a house at 937 E. Acacia St. in Glendale, CA. I arrived before the doctor got to the house so my Uncle Art Stillman delivered me. I was the fifth of nine children born to Lyall Dorman and Elizabeth Margaret Curtis.

My family roots on my father’s maternal side date back to the Revolutionary War. The Palmers and Pattons both served under George Washington and one of them was with him at Valley Forge. The paternal side consists of Irish and Dutch ancestors.

My mother’s maiden name was Sullivan. Her father’s roots are Irish. Her mother’s maiden name was Diexter which is Dutch.

When I was still an infant, my parents moved the family to 1119 E Windsor Rd. The house was three blocks from the previous address and was located across the street from the Glendale Community Hospital.

The first six years of my life were the happiest of my childhood. It wasn’t only because I was my mother’s favorite, but we had a normal family life. I’m not sure if I was my mother’s favorite because I was the only child that had dimples or if it was because I was the first born after my older brother Emmett died at the age of three months which was eleven months before I was born.

I was the only one out of the whole batch to have a baby book. At the last get together with my brother and sisters a couple of years ago, I was delighted to get the book out and pass it around so they could all see how special I was to mother. Talk about rubbing it in!

At the age of two and a half, I learned to play the wind up phonograph. I would place an apple box (they were all made of wood back then) by the crank and wind it up. Then, I would get down, move the box to the front and release the spring lever and place the tone arm on the record. I developed an early appreciation for music that exists to this day.

In 1942, I stated kindergarten at Horace Mann Grade School. The first day of school I noticed this cute little blonde girl, Nancy Hall. After school, I walked her home and when we got there I gave her a goodbye kiss on the lips. Jesus Christ, all of a sudden her mother stormed out of the front door, took her by the hand and led her into the house. I can still picture her mother in my mind. She had red hair and looked as Irish as they get. That was the first and last time I walked her home!

For the next three years during WWII, we had periodic blackouts because of the threat of a Jap attack by air. Everyone had to turn out their house lights or hang black curtains over the windows. The air raid wardens would patrol the neighborhoods to make sure everyone complied. All the automobiles had to have the top half of the headlights painted black so no light would reflect skyward.

When I was in the first grade, I went home one day at lunch time and told my mother I didn’t feel well. I actually wanted to play hooky. Unfortunately, I had to go to the bathroom while I was there. My mother told me to not flush the toilet when I was through. She came in and checked and said, ‘You march right off to school young man. You are not sick!"

The reason I mention this episode is because fifty years later, I was in town with my wife visiting her uncle who was undergoing treatment for colon cancer when he mentioned that the doctors had asked him if he had noticed blood in his stool. He made the comment, Jesus Christ, do they think I’m going to look in the toilet and check my shit? I wondered how he could be so fucking stupid. He only lived another year. If he had caught it sooner, he might have lived another five or ten years.

In 1943-44, my life turned into a living hell. We had neighbors move into the house next door on the west side. They happened to be members of the church that was located a couple of blocks around the corner on Adams Street. They started working on my mother and got her to go to church. They had my mother convinced my dad was possessed by the devil because he wouldn’t go to church.

These neighbors moved after a few months and I’ll be god damned it some fucking Pentecostals moved in and they were worse! They were evil to the core. They worked on my mother, threatened my father and even fired a pistol through the floor of their house as a warning to my dad.

Shortly after my youngest sister was born in June 1944, my mother went loco. The county had to come and haul her away to the mental hospital in Camarillo. They picked her up just before the lunch hour. None of us kids had gone to school that day as things were in a turmoil, to say the least.

Right after she was gone, I started crying and didn’t stop until the next night. Right at that moment, I knew my life had changed forever. I had a headache for two days afterwards and haven’t had one since except for two minor ones after vehicle accidents.

My dad farmed out my baby sister to his cousin and wife who live in El Monte. For the next year or so my dad would pile all us kids into the back of his pickup two or three times a month and drive to El Monte for Sunday dinner and visit my sister. When my dad decided she was old enough to come home, his cousin Fulton Beaty and his wife Elberta did not want to give her up. They didn’t talk to my dad for fifty years.

CHAPTER 2

DAD AND THE PRODUCE MARKET

My father was a vegetable man. He came about it naturally as his father had been a vegetable man dating back to the 1890s in the horse and buggy days.

My dad had worked for Sparkletts Water for two or three years and became a route supervisor. After a while he came to realize that the only people who reached top management with the company were all family members. Soon after that, he left the company. The only thing positive that came out of his work at Sparkletts, was he met my mother on one of his delivery routes where she had been staying with her aunt in Compton.

Six mornings a week, my dad arrived at the wholesale produce market located between 7th and 8th Streets on Central, in L.A. around 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. Starting at the age of 10, I went with him just about every Saturday. This was as much to help him as it was to keep me from getting into trouble at home. This routine continued as long as I lived at home.

The produce market was literally a melting pot of southern California. The market was basically a rectangle of continuous two story buildings except for an entrance/exit on the west side of Central and one each at the north and south ends. The building on the east side had a railroad spur adjoining it. There were two covered open air vendor areas running the length of the interior with driveways and parking areas. There was a break between the covered areas where access from Central traversed to the east side. In the very center of the market above this roadway was a huge clock with Roman numerals. It was supported by beams mounted on the corners of the four structures.

My dad always parked in the center just south of the clock. That way, all the guys (swampers) could easily find where to deliver his purchases from the various wholesalers. When he made the purchases he would leave instructions to have the swampers deliver the produce to the green and black 1939 International pickup near the clock. When I was at the market, I was supposed to wait for the deliveries and load them into the truck.

Sometimes, my dad would take one or the other of my sisters with him to show them off to all the people he knew. I had those Saturdays off.

Our family tradition of taking the kids to the market dated back to the early part of the 20th century when my grandfather took his kids with him to help with the loading. My Uncle Leo spent time at the market in this way and he frequently came with us on our Sunday drives. He sat in the back of the pickup with us and entertained us with his Indian yells and speaking what he assured us was Chinese, complete with intonations and facial expressions. We believed him.

About fifty years later, Leo took his grandchildren out for Chinese food. He began his Chinese routine for them. All of a sudden, the waiter appeared at the table and told Uncle Leo in no uncertain terms there was no swearing allowed in the establishment. Apparently his "market Chinese wasn’t about food.

When I was a regular at the market, I discovered it was more fun to wander around and watch all the different activities. Some of my wandering took me outside the market and into a nearby Skid Row area. I was oblivious to the neighborhood because I discovered a Goodwill store that had a used record department. I was in seventh heaven. I just had to figure out how to get some money so I could buy some of the 78’s.

I learned I could sell the empty wooden boxes from dad’s truck. A lug box was worth ten cents, apple and orange boxes 20 cents, a lettuce crate 15 cents and a cantaloupe crate 15 cents. I could usually sell enough to have 50-75 cents in my pocket to spend on records at that Goodwill store. I usually purchased ten to fifteen records at a time.

I was drawn to that Goodwill store and its supply of 78 records. I began to develop a taste for different kinds of music that ran from Frank Crumit to Enrico Caruso and everything in between. This was before the era of progressive jazz. I never developed a taste for that except for Ramsey Lewis music.

My purchases were wrapped in Manila paper and tied with string. I wondered at the time if that was to prevent me from adding any jewels to the package on my way out? I wandered back to the market where I hid the package under an empty box in the truck when my dad wasn’t near the truck.

After market, when we got home and my dad was busy in the house, I retrieved the package. Then I waited until he was out on his route to crank the phonograph and listed to the gems that were my latest purchase. That crank phonograph I had learned to play when I was two years old certainly had a workout!

My dad always sang while he drove his produce truck to and from the market and on each of his routes. Through him, I developed an ear for Mexican music. He had an excellent baritone voice which stayed with him until his nineties. In his eighties, he was entertaining at a piano bar in a hotel near Del Mar race track with songs sung in both English and Spanish. Once in a while, he threw in a song in German. The last time I heard him sing, he was serenading a Hispanic nurse in his retirement home. He was 94 years old. He died the next year. Never figured out how he memorized so many songs.

I continued collecting records and 50 years later, my collection numbered in the thousands, not counting the 45s, LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs I added as technology evolved. Of course, I also began to collect the old phonographs to go along with the older records in the collection.

I developed a taste for County and Western (as it was called then) when the various housekeepers gathered us around our big Philco upright radio every Friday night to listen to the Top Twenty Countdown. We listened to Tex Ritter, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Spade Cooley, Tex Williams and Hank Williams. I liked them then and still do now.

Most of the produce sold at the various houses located in the rectangular building around the outer edge of the market, came from out of the area. There was the potato house, the banana house and of course, the L.A. nut house. (The sign on the back of their delivery trucks read Follow me to the Nut House.) Some sold fruits, some sold vegetables and some sold mostly tomatoes.

The stalls in the two center aisles were just about all operated by the So. Cal. area truck farmers.

The Salvato brothers sold only avocadoes. I got to know them pretty well, but was never able to understand how two totally different guys could be brothers. One was tall, slim and had a full head of black hair. The other was short, stout and had brown hair with very little on top.

The potato house had a couple of resident cats to help keep the rat population under control. They were tough looking characters and had scars from fighting the rats. One time, dad came home from the market with a fresh box of yams from the potato house. As soon as he parked in the driveway, a huge rat jumped off the truck and headed for our garage. Dad had to buy a rat trap to catch the damn thing.

The banana house not only had a cat to catch mice and rats, but they also had to watch for fruit bats that would hide in the stalks and hitchhike from Central America on the ships.

During the war, there weren’t many bananas coming into the market because of the threat from German U-boats and Jap subs. The price of the bananas was so high, dad didn’t carry any on the truck until well after the war.

A lot of the melons came in from Imperial Valley over by the Arizona and Mexico borders. I liked to hang out at the melon wholesaler when the swampers were unloading the watermelons. They had a relay system with the first guy up in the semi-trailer. He would throw the melon to the next guy on the ground. He would throw it onto the next guy until it got to the swamper who was stacking them. These were not small melons. They weighed from fifteen to twenty-five pounds each. Every once in a while, someone would drop one and it was first come, first serve. I’d grab a chunk along with all the winos and bums standing by just waiting for a drop.

A lot of the lettuce and celery was grown in the Salinas area just south of Frisco. The growers would hire the wetbacks. (This was a derogatory name for the illegal Mexicans who crossed the Rio Grande River to get into California for the harvest.) The lettuce and celery would then be driven to the packing sheds where it was crated, loaded on a truck and driven to L.A. where it would arrive at the market early the next morning.

Up until early 1942, there were a lot of Nisei farmers in the Gardena area south of L.A. When they were all rounded up and sent to the concentration camps, the whites took over the land and it wasn’t long before all the building contractors got hold of the land and that was the end of most of those truck farms.

By 4:00 a.m., the market would be humming like a beehive. The buyers from the various supermarkets & chains would be making their purchases so the produce would be at the store by opening time. A little later, the peddlers would start straggling in and making their purchases. As the morning progressed, the price of the produce went down. By late morning, whatever wouldn’t keep till the next day had to go! A flat of strawberries that started the early morning at $2.00 would now be $1.50 or $1.25. A crate of corn would go from $4.00 down to $3.00 or $2.75. The non-perishables like potatoes, yams, winter