TROUBLE IS MY BUSINESS.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Ron Guerette and his Guerette Investigations Inc.

And business has been good for Ron Guerette, a private investigator often in the public eye.

When he's alone in his office at the end of a narrow corridor on the first floor of the old Charlotte National Bank building, just a block from the jail and courthouse, Ron Guerette keeps the door locked. His is the closest to the parking garage, he explains, and people wander in to ask directions. The locked door keeps them out, but it doesn't deter clients who bring Guerette Investigations Inc. the Queen City's biggest cases -- the PTL scandal, the Loomis Fargo heist, Charlotte Hornets owner George Shinn's sexcapade, the murder trial of ex-pro football player Rae Carruth. He's worked them all.

In a city whose mean streets are sticky from the gumshoes of more than 180 private investigators, Guerette is the alpha shamus. An ex-cop who never made sergeant, he commands the kind of money lawyers get -- the cheaper ones, at least -- charging $100 an hour to provide ammo for courtroom gunslingers. "Every time my price went up, I got more work," he says. "To a lot of people, the more you charge, the better you must be. So I figured I might as well make myself better."

With his slicked-back, silver mane and Italian-cut suits, Guerette, 57, looks like he'd be more comfortable sipping a cognac on the Riviera than digging up dirt in Charlotte's seedier haunts. When he started in the business in the early '80s, he made a few hundred dollars a month, begging for work serving subpoenas. That was before he got in with Bill Diehi, known for his aggressive courtroom style, and other big-name lawyers. Now he seeks -- or, at least, makes no effort to avoid -- the limelight in a profession that most practice in the shadows.

In the trial of Carruth, the former Carolina Panther convicted of conspiring to kill his pregnant girlfriend, he was on the stand so often the lead prosecutor dubbed him "pop-up Ron" in closing arguments. When a promised defense witness never materialized, he went on TV news to explain why. Throughout the three-month trial, which Court TV carried live, he was behind the defense table every day. "If he wasn't a superstar already, this made him a superstar," says James Exum, the Charlotte lawyer representing Michael Eugene Kennedy, a co-defendant who testified against Carruth.

What sets him apart? It's simply his ability to talk to people, he says, to get them to open up to him, something most private eyes, especially the former law-enforcement officers who make up about 80% of the state's 1,073 licensed investigators, have trouble doing. "They have had to rely on their badges and not their minds. All you have to do is be natural. If you try to be phony, you are not going to be successful."

"His people skills are great, but it goes beyond that," says David Rudolf, the Chapel Hill lawyer who defended Carruth and has used Guerette on other cases. "What Ron...