Bruce Kang didn’t think he’d chase anyone hinkier than the average deadbeat debtor when he opened a collection agency in a small office on Lincoln Avenue. It was the winter of 1990 and the former news-hound for the expat Korean press had contacts all over Koreatown and back home. He figured he’d found his slot, and was surprised six months later when a suit from a big Seoul-based utility walked in the door looking for help.
The trail cold, Kang went back to his computer. He searched database records on relatives and friends of the two men. “You own a house, you have to register it with the county,” says Kang. “Your name and phone number is registered. Also, you have accounts with the telephone or electric, credit card. Without your ID you can’t do anything. That’s our system.” He followed paper trails for nine months, looking for clues in birth, court, and driver’s license records. Bupkis.
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Since Kang got his PI license in 1997 he’s snooped more international cases than he’s allowed to talk about. But he’ll let on about a few. In 1998 he teamed up with a Korean TV crew and nosed out the secret Los Angeles vacation homes of CEOs of bankrupt Korean corporations. Checking property records, he found one mansion–the former digs of Sylvester Stallone–that was owned by a corporation. Funny, he thought, the deed holder, listed as the company’s president, has a Latin name. He tracked her down in LA, establishing that she was a teenage friend of the real CEO’s daughter.
He did the first few for free. But those databases, mostly available only to PIs and law enforcement, cost cabbage. The trickier the search the more expensive it gets. So Kang made a special offer. For $200 down he’d track a family member or friend–legal U.S. residents only. Quarry in Korea might run extra.
As the years go by Kang guesses this business will drop off. Kids these days, with their computers and cell phones, don’t lose each other anymore. But he’s working other angles. He goes back to Korea a lot to get together with old army buddies and teach investigative techniques at a private university and at the police academy in Seoul. He also hints that he does some work for Korea’s Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths, which investigates the allegedly government-sponsored murders of activists involved in Korea’s democratization movement years back.
