Miramar Sleuth’s On The Trail Of Scammers-  The Herald – 1996

All Lee Goldwich needs to do his job is a video camera with powerful zoom lenses and a whole lot of patience. Goldwich is owner of Colt Services, a private investigative firm in Miramar. For the past 11 years, he has been checking up on cheating spouses, insurance scammers and the occasional political candidate to check if their tales match their real-life exploits.

“A lot of it is routine,” he says. “ When you’re on surveillance, you can be sitting for 12 to 15 hours straight. You’re just sitting watching a parked car, waiting for the owner to arrive.” Like the hour-to-hour pace of a police officer’s beat, the mundane routine is offset by moments of heart-pounding drama. You go on foot, by boat, in airports, taxis,” Goldwich says. “Wherever the people take you.”

In 1988, he was hired by a candidate who ran for Dade County Commissioner. The candidate’s campaign paid Goldwich to watch his opponent after suspicion arose that the opponent didn’t live in the district he championed. “We took pictures of him leaving in the morning for work from a house outside the district, but he claimed he never lived there,” the investigator recalls. “That’s one of my favorite cases.”

Goldwich says the job is full of surprises. “You’ll be following someone and he’s driving around,” he says. “You don’t know where they’re going. The next thing you know, they’re on the turnpike heading north and you end up in Orlando.”

Occasionally, a curious neighbor alerts police about an investigator’s activity, but that doesn’t happen often if the investigator is experienced, says Lt. Bill Guess, spokesman for the Miramar Police Department. “If it’s a good, professionally run organization, they get good cooperation from the police,” Guess says.

Goldwich, who began honing his skills while working as a criminal investigator in the Air Force, has a staff of four. [His firm] handles about 500 cases a year, most referrals from insurance companies fighting injury lawsuits or workers’ compensation claims.

“It’s amazing,” Goldwich says. “They show up at the mediation with a cane, a brace and crutches. They’ll be walking real slow, sometimes limping. They, when you follow them, all that changes. You don’t see the crutches anymore. They go to the gym, to the mall. You see them lifting things whey they say they can’t work. Those are the good ones.”