Mike Spencer (ACBA) - Private Eye

Louis Goodman / Mike Spencer – Transcript

00:03 Louis Goodman 
Welcome to the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. I'm Louis Goodman. Today we welcome private investigator Michael Spencer to the podcast. Spencer Legal Investigations serves attorneys in civil, criminal and family law matters. Mr. Spencer's services include surveillance, witness location, background checks, and process of service.

He's been voted best skip tracer private investigator by the readers of the Recorder legal newspaper. He started his career as a journalist and sees clear connections between journalism and investigations. He's written a book called Private Eye Confidential. Mike Spencer, welcome to the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast.

01:00 Mike Spencer 

Thank you for having me today. 

01:02 Louis Goodman 

It's a pleasure to have you. Where are you talking to us from right now? 

01:06 Mike Spencer
Today, I am at my home in Alameda. 

01:10 Louis Goodman
How long have you been in the private investigation business? 

01:15 Mike Spencer
I moved back to the Bay Area from a newspaper job in Florida in late 1994. Right after I moved back, pretty much, I started getting part time work as a private investigator.

So it's coming up on almost 30 years and 27 years of having my license and my own business. 

01:41 Louis Goodman
Can you describe your business for us?

01:45 Mike Spencer
I primarily serve trial lawyers in civil cases, criminal defense, and some family law. I do the basics of witness interviews, witness locates, scene inspections, scene investigations. I am the eyes and ears in the field for my lawyer clients.

02:13 Louis Goodman
Where are you from originally? 

02:14 Mike Spencer
I grew up in a town called Wilton, Connecticut, which is Fairfield County, Connecticut, and about an hour from New York city. Pretty close to a Long Island sound. 

02:24 Louis Goodman
Can you give a brief history of your educational background? 

02:29 Mike Spencer
Sure. I'm the youngest of seven kids. And one thing that I have that my older brothers and sisters didn't have is I never had to change school systems.

So from kindergarten to high school, I went to Wilton public schools, good public schools. I went to a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Franklin Marshall College, majored in English and a minor in political science. I worked at newspapers a couple of years and I was finally accepted to the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

All the time after college and after UC Berkeley, up until I was about 30 years old, I was, I was working in daily journalism. 

03:15 Louis Goodman
What prompted you to seek a career in journalism? 

03:18 Mike Spencer
I sort of knew when I was about 17, 18, 19, that I wasn't cut out for office work or desk work. I had a bit of probably like a lot of young men, a bit of hyperactivity. So I always needed before I could even do any kind of schoolwork or studying. I had to have exercise and I just, I just sort of knew that I was not office material. So, and I always liked to write. So I figured I'd sort of marry the two by going into journalism, which would allow me to be out of an office setting.

03:59 Louis Goodman
And then what prompted you to leave journalism for private investigation? And can you talk a little bit about how your journalism background has helped and influenced your profession as a private investigator? 

04:17 Mike Spencer
Working in journalism, I was covering police, and that got me interested in criminal justice issues.

I like to report not just what police told me but go out and get other parts of the story. And one thing I used to do as a reporter in Florida is I would interview defense attorneys and that would send the cops sometimes in defense.

Louis Goodman 04:45 
In what way? 

Mike Spencer 04:46 

An outspoken defense attorney would tell them what the problems were with their case.

And police, they're somewhat used to being authoritarian. So to read in the paper that some local defense attorney was calling them out and making their case, they just didn't like that. So I became aware as a reporter of the need for both sides of the story and at the criminal defense perspective is just as valid as the police and prosecute prosecutorial respect.

05:22 Louis Goodman
Okay. So you're in Florida, you're working in Sarasota as a newspaper. And how does that then translate into an interest into private investigation? And what's the actual step from one to the next? 

05:39 Mike Spencer
Necessity is the mother of invention, Louis. So I was, I was not terribly getting along well with my editors.

Uh, you're, you're going on 29, 30 years old and you don't want to cover the boat parade or the cat show or all the other dregs of general assignment reporting. So it happened that at the time I had a journalism classmate who was getting out of her apartment in North Berkeley. And she told me, Hey, my apartment's open. Do you want it? And I just said, yes. And I just moved without a job. One day I answered an ad. I was sort of doing a little bit of straying for, for papers, but one day I answered an ad in the Oakland tribune. And it was for, uh, airy Siri. Investigator, which stands for arising out of employment, condition of employment.

Basically, it was a worker's comp investigator. I didn't do the surveillance, but I interviewed a lot of the claimants and the witnesses, and that's really what got the career rolling. 

In investigations a lot of times you're, you're not getting a full 40 hours a week. So in addition to doing that job, I would work under other private investigators, sometimes two and three at a time to get my hours.

07:00 Louis Goodman
And what sort of work were you doing for them? 

07:02 Mike Spencer
It was also workers comp, but I also started, there was a guy in Oakland. I don't know if he's still around. His name is Michael Rosenblum. Michael was both a lawyer and a private investigator. And Michael used to get in court appointed cases from Alameda County bar. And this is like 1995, 1996. So I started doing those at the time too, I was working under another private investigator by the name of John Nazarian. And John was doing court appointed criminal cases in San Francisco for Richard Schickman and Eric Safire. So I got to work criminal defense too in San Francisco, and as the years go by, you pick up a lot of knowledge.

07:46 Louis Goodman
What is it that you really like about doing private investigations? You've been doing it a long time. 

07:52 Mike Spencer
It is this basic search for the truth. And what I like about it too as a private investigator is I'm not the advocate. I get to, you know, report just the facts. So I don't feel pressure to reach a certain outcome.

I feel, you know, my job is to gather facts and you guys as the attorneys, you're the ones who make the arguments. So I like that distinction. I feel like it sort of frees me up to do my work. 

08:26 Louis Goodman
What's your experience been like in terms of working with attorneys? 

08:30 Mike Spencer
I can honestly say I've enjoyed, you know, 90 to 95 percent of it.

A lot of them are very passionate and very hands on. I think the best ones have, and they're trial lawyers, is they have just a genuineness about them. They want to win, but they're also very good people. 

08:52 Louis Goodman
What can we as attorneys do in order to use private investigators more effectively? 

09:00 Mike Spencer
The first step is identifying that you have the right private investigator for the job.

For example, I do surveillance. I am capable. It is not my specialty. So if someone came to me with an insurance defense matter, I'd say, look, I know a couple other guys who are really good at this. If you have a real heavy duty, sort of like white collar case background investigation, also not necessarily my specialty, but I can put you in touch with investigators who are very, very good at it.

So like attorneys, we also have specialties within private investigations. 

09:46 Louis Goodman
So how can lawyers use the investigator more effectively? 

09:52 Mike Spencer
It should be a collaborative process. The lawyer needs to sort of determine what's at stake here. The scope of the case is it a, you know, potential 5 million settlement, or is it less complex with maybe just one witness and on to the next one, like a very simple auto case? So determine the scale of it. And if it looks somewhat substantial, commit the financial resources to the case, and then ask the private investigators, say, Hey, why don't you give me a list of steps that you think we need to take? And a good private investigator can give you those steps and say, well, Hey, this is more important than that. This is sort of very ballpark, how long it will take.  

10:49 Louis Goodman
If a young person were thinking about a career, would you recommend going into private investigations? 

10:55 Mike Spencer
I would say, know thyself. You have to figure out, okay, can I deal with what happens when I'm not getting paid on time? That's a very real thing. It takes sometimes a while to get the business up and running. Just like the legal world, there's a difference between what you do and running a business. But I'd also tell them, well, there are definitely avenues, if you want full time employment and a little bit more normal lifestyle, like my employee that I part time employee that I had for six years, Angela, she became a full-time investigator with the Contra Costa Public Defender.

So within government, there are some very good jobs as an investigator. So my own explore those two, you know, Public Defenders Offices or, you know, federal public and public defender. 

11:52 Louis Goodman
What's involved in terms of the licensing process? What's, what do you need to do in order to get a license in the state of California?

12:00 Mike Spencer
Well, in California, you need 10,000 hours or three years full time of work on someone's payroll. And then you pass an exam. It's about a two-hour exam. I successfully argued that my journalism experience should, should count. I think for like more than a year, I think you can. There was a while where they did away with that, but I think they're back to doing that.

For example, they'll, they'll take your hours if you were in law enforcement. 

12:34 Louis Goodman
You have written a book, and the book is called Private Eye Confidential Stories from a Real PI. I'm wondering if you'd talk a little bit about the book and what prompted you to write it. 

12:48 Mike Spencer
Sure. What, what brought about the book is all these years, our profession, my profession, is just chronically misunderstood. You know, your family doesn't know, your parents don't know, everyone just thinks like it's like the show Cheaters. So, that was sort of the genesis of the book, and one of my friends growing up, he's an academic and he has a publishing company.

It's called 99 the Press. I'm a fan of short, condensed writing and his publishing house does short, condensed books. So it was sort of the perfect project for that publisher. And it allowed me in 99 pages to give a very brief look at what the job is like. 

13:37 Louis Goodman
If someone listening to the podcast wants to get a copy of the book, how do they go about doing that?

13:43 Mike Spencer
That would be on Amazon. Private Eye Confidential. It's in Kindle, and I think the physical book might be getting a little bit harder to come by, but you can still probably get a copy of it on Amazon. 

13:55 Louis Goodman
Now, in addition to your writing, I have a soft spot in my heart for you because you also have a podcast. You did a really interesting podcast about a particular investigation that you did having to do with a situation in Oakland and in San Francisco with virtually every geographic location that you mentioned in either city is someplace that I have some familiarity with, but I'm wondering if you could tell everybody else about your podcast and also about that specific case?

14:30 Mike Spencer
Sure. The podcast is called the Gary Murphy assassination, and it is one of the most sporadic podcasts you will ever listen to as it does not really have a production schedule because I do my recording in my own time. So I never really know when another episode is coming out, but the podcast stems from an old case of mine and it is very much a cautionary tale for private investigators, but also for attorneys about you really better be careful about your client. 

I took on a family law investigation in early 1998 for a grandmother who was trying to get custody of a six-year-old granddaughter, and at the time I was not exactly wise to the fact that some people can be evil.

So I took on this case, trying to help her get custody. And in the course and scope of this. I had a gentleman under the name of Gary Murphy under surveillance for her. Murphy's daughter was six years old and the little girl's mother had died of a methadone overdose. So there was this custody battle between Murphy, who was a biker and a convicted drug dealer, and my client, the grandmother. 

As this sort of went along, the grandmother became threatening, credibly unstable. So I had a former partner, I was working on it at the time, we both mutually decided to fire her as a client because we couldn't work with her. Three months after we fired her, I read in the paper that Gary Murphy was managing a halfway house in San Francisco and a gunman came, shot him at least twice in the back and fled in a waiting car. As I learned in the case now, 26 years ago, police never made an arrest. And I always wondered what was going on in the case. How come police couldn't make an arrest? So the podcast has been, I've been unearthing facts in the case. And that's what the podcast is about. It's four episodes. And it's about the evolution of how I thought, well, you know, Hey, maybe someone from, from Mr. Murphy's past, and just then realizing, no, it was very more than likely my former client. What I also uncovered is that Murphy's murder is related to a week later, there was a home invasion and a sexual assault of a pregnant mother in Piedmont. The gentlemen, I won't call them gentlemen, the guys who killed Murphy also committed that crime. 

17:45 Louis Goodman
It's interesting that you took on as a client, a grandmother who wanted to investigate a biker with a prison history, and yet it, it, it turns out that really it's the grandmother who is the person who is really guilty of something here, and the biker with the prison history is kind of the hero of things.

18:13 Mike Spencer
Yes, it's quite the case study in stereotypes. One of the people who wrote an article about the case for the Bay Guardian in 2004 is investigative reporter. AC Thompson of ProPublica, Thompson joins me on the podcast, and he makes that very distinction just about how people can be so different based on their appearances, and that's sort of the, at the heart of this case.

18:46 Louis Goodman
The name of the podcast is called the Gary Murphy Assassination. 

What about the business of private investigation? How's that gone for you? And how's that either matter different from your expectations about it? 

19:01 Mike Spencer 

It takes a long time, like any, any attorney with their own practice is you have to sort of realize the rhythms of the business, especially once you start having an employee or two, you have to know what funds are coming in the door, what types of cases paid fastest.

You're always, if not on a daily basis, a couple of times a week, you're always sort of have an eye on the horizon for what's being paid. What's your new work is like, it's a, it's a real discipline. 

19:37 Louis Goodman
What do you think's the best advice you've ever received and, or what advice would you give to a young person just starting out in the investigation field?

19:47 Mike Spencer
I think one of the best pieces of advice was from the old private investigator. I used to do some work for John Nazarian. He basically said, look, you really got to value your own services. We are solving problems. So if not necessarily for the attorney, then for their clients, John's message is value what's your worth. And then the, the advice I'd tell anyone else, some person starting out in it is always be open to learning. Whether it's through, I happen to be a member of, of many bar associations, just because it gives me access to real experts. Like I can go and take a class on auto accident reconstruction, or I can take a class on body language or any number of things that are accessible.

So I'd tell any young person, this is a very changing industry, so be on top of resources that are out there.

20:52 Louis Goodman
Let's shift gears here a little bit. What sort of recreational pursuits do you have? What sorts of things do you do to get your mind off of business and investigations? 

21:03 Mike Spencer
Well, Louis, I'm, I'm a retired club rugby player. And that, that ship sailed the contact, the hard contact that ship sailed about 15 years ago. I took up golf like 20 years ago. So I just enjoy the solitude of being able to just go out and walk on a golf course and just that can be real nice escapism. 

21:25 Louis Goodman
Let's say you came into some real money, 3 or 4 billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life?

21:33 Mike Spencer
All I know is work. So I think I'd, I'd still be working in private, investigating in some capacity, and then the other time would be, of course, figuring out what's, what's the best way to help people with that money. 

21:52 Louis Goodman
Let's say you had a magic wand. That was one thing in the legal world, the investigation world, or just the world in general. What would you want to change if you could wave that magic wand? 

22:03 Mike Spencer
Every criminal defendant gets a decent investigation on their behalf. Doesn't matter if it's court appointed, doesn't matter the charges. Everyone should have the same access. You hear about these cases like in Mississippi, where the poor Public Defender is like 60 cases and they're falling asleep at their desk.

I'd want the, the law to be much more equitable. 

22:31 Louis Goodman
Let's say you had a Super Bowl ad, someone gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl. You could say anything that you wanted to a really large audience. What would you want to say on your 60 second Super Bowl ad? 

22:46 Mike Spencer
I'd probably gear it to like gun control, common sense, uniform, gun laws to the effect that no one's trying to take away your guns, but let's just make this all safer for everyone. 

22:58 Louis Goodman
I have a few more questions for you, but before we get there, I would like to give some of the other people who are on our call with us an opportunity to, uh, ask you a question or comment on what you've already said.

Let me start with Rosie Reith. Rosie, can you unmute and join us? 

23:20 Rosie
Sure. 

23:21 Louis Goodman
Have you used any private investigators in your practice? 

23:25 Rosie
We have, we have. 

23:28 Louis Goodman
And what's that experience been like? 

23:31 Rosie
They're great. The guy we like best who will remain unnamed is not getting any younger. And that was sort of the source of the interest in Mr. Spencer, but it's, it's been great working with private investigators and they're always fun to talk to. 

23:46 Louis Goodman
Gary Dubrofsky, Gary, can you join us? And do you have a question or a comment for Michael Spencer? 

23:53 Gary
Sure. It's been, it's been a few years since we've worked together. But fascination with your world, how you guys are able to come upon information that is very, very helpful to us in our representation of our client.

I know better than to ask sometimes how it is that we have the information that we do. It's a fascinating thing. Can you talk like a little bit about what, I guess, challenges you face or benefits that you see from the explosion of, you know, smartphones, tablets, all these devices that we carry with us everywhere, which broadcasts a whole lot of information about us all the time? 

24:49 Mike Spencer
I would say that most private investigators are not digital experts. If there's a fairly law case where you started having smartphones, laptops, recording devices, that really starts to go into the direction of someone who's like a digital forensics expert. 

25:13 Louis Goodman
Rachel Horger. Do you have a question or a comment for Michael Spencer? 

25:19 Rachel
I have two. One is, what is the most tedious part of your job? I feel like with being a private investigator, we all imagine the like, exciting, sexy part, but what are the really, like, grinding bits? Whether it's filling out paperwork, or sitting outside someone's house for hours at a time or anything else? 

25:41 Mike Spencer
I had a very difficult serve four or five months ago. No one could get this guy. Totally hiding. They, the lawyers had used other private investigators who had failed. So I probably went out for this guy. He, he lived up in the Oakland Hills. I went out on this guy most often it would be in the rain and you never sit right in front of someone's house.

Basically, what you want to do is know the automobiles and this guy was rotating cars. So eventually. I figured out a place to sit where I could tell like if his garage door went up in one night, that garage door went up and I zapped him, but that was after I served him, but that was after like, you know, 15 to 20 hours of off and on spot surveillance. And that's just the way it works sometimes you just have to put in, I tell clients, you know, it's like hunting and fishing. You can go down to the lake three times and never get a bite. But then on that fourth time, there it is. 

26:48 Rachel
Okay. And then one other question, which is, I feel like public investigations are took in journalism sometimes it helps to have a background in the subject matter. Do you think that private investigators, particularly those who are working in a legal space would benefit from having a JD or at least some partial legal education? 

27:12 Mike Spencer
I think so. One of my colleagues is private investigator Avi Klein in Oakland and Avi has a law degree and he's just very, very savvy about how things work, just as far as like investigating business fraud and legal issues.

He's, he's very sharp. 

27:35 Louis Goodman
Just before you leave us, Rachel. Can you just tell us what sort of work that you do? I see that you are with Bay Area Legal Aid. 

27:43 Rachel:
Yeah, I'm with Bay Area Legal Aid. So, we're a nonprofit legal aid organization that provides free legal services to low-income folks around the Bay Area, and I'm in our reentry unit.

So, we work specifically with folks in Alameda and Contra Costa counties who have arrest or conviction records. And we help people with, address a lot of the different civil legal barriers that they encounter based on a criminal record, whether it's expunging a conviction, restoring a suspended driver's license, addressing employment or housing background checks, et cetera.

28:17 Louis Goodman
Thank you. Steven Richardson, can you unmute with a question or a comment for Michael Spencer? 

28:25 Steven
I'm sure it's probably contained within your book, which I would definitely take a look at sounds interesting, but to back to what Mr. Goodman was saying about the younger generation and thinking about, you know, being a PI, et cetera, I realize you haven't done the job I'm going to make the analogy with, but you've done this job for long enough.

I just wondered if you could speak to many young people may think, Oh, well, that's something I could do later once I'm a detective in a police force. Obviously detectives are to set out to try to figure out who did this. You guys aren't so much trying to figure out who did it. But would you agree that there is a, if someone went that route, that the base forensics and tactics that you have employed, that it would be helpful or that the two are actually really not as related as most people think they are?

29:31 Mike Spencer
We have. As opposed to police, they have very different job functions. Police is to basically affect and arrest. Police probably, especially with the training, whether it's military or police, they're probably going to have better technical training, whether it's digital forensics than most private investigators.

You know, for a young person, I definitely say there's, there's no substitute than, you know, working at it. And if you, within law enforcement, you're, you're probably going to get a lot better training. 

30:13 Louis Goodman
Thank you, Mr. Richardson. Appreciate everybody's input. I have a few more questions here. We have a little more time.

I'm wondering if there's any book or movie that involves private investigation, you've seen that you could recommend to any of us as having some aspect of it be realistic? 

30:36 Mike Spencer
Sure. It's the old classic. It's Chinatown. To this day it still holds up. That is. A wonderful account. Granted, it's a very sexy case, but that movie just sort of nails the spirit of what a private investigator does. It's low tech. The great scene in the in the deed office where he coughs and tears the piece of the deed book, or whether it's putting a little crack into the taillight so we can follow the vehicle at night, it just gets the spirit just right and times change, you know, that's what a 50 something year old movie.

But it's a classic for a reason. 

31:29 Louis Goodman
If someone wants to get in touch with you, an attorney, who's listening to this, that needs a private investigator or someone who wanted to reach out to you for some professional reason, what's the best way to get in touch with you? 

31:47 Mike Spencer
The best way is just the website, which is spencerpi.com and it's got my phone number on it. The email contact is a little bit wonky, but the phone number is good. So spencerpi.com. 

32:02 Louis Goodman
Very well. Mike, is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven't touched on or we haven't discussed anything at all that you'd like to bring up? 

32:13 Mike Spencer
Just a little bit of cautionary stuff. For lawyers to get the best from a case and a private investigator is don't, don't do your own investigation, right? I wrote an article a while ago about how to work best with a private investigator and, and Rick Simmons, who was a great personal injury attorney, he said, look, you know, the lawyer is the general contractor, and he brings in the special specialists to build the house or build the case.

So I just say, use us. That's what we're here for. We do nothing but investigate each and every day. So, and then there's probably legal reasons why you should never be your own investigator as an attorney. So that's just my little soapbox. 

33:03 Louis Goodman
Michael Spencer. Thank you so much for joining us today at the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

33:14 Mike Spencer
Louis, thank you so much. I've enjoyed it. 

33:18 Louis Goodman

That's it for today's edition of Love Thy Lawyer in collaboration with the Alameda County Bar Association. Please visit the lovethylawyer.com website where you can find links to all of our episodes. Also, please visit the Alameda County Bar Association Website at ACBAnet.org, where you can find more information about our support of the legal profession, promoting excellence in the legal profession and facilitating equal access to justice.

Thanks to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman. 

34:08 Mike Spencer
Breaking news and...

34:14 Louis Goodman
It's not a podcast unless a dog is barking.