G-man turns into fee man.

• Position: Private financial investigator Thomas J. Brereton - People

As a private financial investigator, Thomas J. Brereton is Br'er Hound on a paper chase through U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The former FBI agent says that his white-collar quarry usually trip once they begin to think they own the whole brier patch: "It's a mind-set. They say, 'What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine.'"

Brereton, 55, found a wide-open field when he started Thomas J. Brereton and Associates in Greensboro in 1988 after 20 years as an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (His associates are other retired agents he uses from time to time.) Most often, for $50 an hour he works for trustees of companies seeking protection under Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. He determines if any assets were fraudulently transferred or otherwise squirreled away.

One of his more notorious jobs was checking out potential buyers of Jim Bakker's defunct PTL Ministries for the bankruptcy court. Recent assignments include Pilot Freight Carriers Inc. in Winston-Salem and Imperial Food Products, the Hamlet chicken processor where 25 workers died in a fire last year.

The Bronx-born Brereton quickly bailed out of his business courses at Fordham University with a bad aftertaste for ledger books. He switched to humanities and graduated with a degree in sociology in 1959. He served eight years in the Army, including two tours in Vietnam, where he earned the Bronze Star as an infantry captain.

He joined the FBI in 1968 and was sent to Swain County, where part of his job was to police the Cherokee Indian Reservation. Transferred to Greensboro in 1971, he began working with William...