Fraud investigator follows a money trail.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Pulling the Strings - Dickerson Financial Investigation Group Inc. - Brief Article

JOE DICKERSON PICKS UP WHERE LAWYERS AND JUDGES LEAVE OFF.

He Specializes in finding hidden or diverted assets of companies or individuals who owe someone or some company money. It's a ripe field, he says, since 80 percent of civil judgements are never collected and in criminal cases in which there's a restitution order, less than 3 percent result in payment.

"In most cases when they say they can't (pay), it means they don't want to says the president of Denver-based Dickerson Financial Investigation Group Inc. His firm handles about 10 cases a month and about 130 a year.

"You walk out of court with a piece of paper called a 'judgment and lo and behold, there's nobody standing in the hall to write the check," Dickerson says. "So it's our job to find the off-shore bank account, the condo in Vail in the girlfriend's name, the Mercedes, the children's trust and all the straw corporations, and extract that from the bad guys and give it back to the good guys."

Dickerson's firm also does pre-judgment work -- investigations for companies or individuals who are thinking of suing a company but first want to know whether that company has enough assets to make it worthwhile. "We do a preliminary investigation, and if it's not there, it's my job to get the client out as quickly as possible and not let them continue to put good money after bad," Dickerson says.

He also gives seminars, usually to lawyers or other investigators.

"There's more work out there than we can do," he says, "so we don't mind at all sharing our skills and techniques with other professionals who want to help the good guys."

Dickerson got into his line of work after 11 years on the Houston Police Department, mostly as a detective in white-collar crime. Later he worked as an investigator in the oil and gas industry. In 1975, he founded the Oil & Gas Crime Prevention Bureau, which he operated for 10 year.

"We were chasing oil-field thieves both white-collar and blue-collar," he says. But you have to understand the stealing business relates to supply and demand like any other segment of our economy. So when the bottom dropped out of the oil market there was no demand for drilling, so...