NASHVILLE PRIVATE EYE MAY BE WATCHING YOU

Investigator Uses High Tech Equipment Police Departments Can't Afford

FAYETTEVILLE, Tenn. - By the time the bad guys see Ray Abernathy, it's too
late.

By that time, the private investigator from Nashville has the tapes or
pictures or computer record evidence that will lock them up.

Abernathy stopped by Fayetteville Wednesday on his way to a meeting with
Franklin County investigators. An expert in electronic surveillance, he has
worked with many rural police departments, including Fayetteville's and
Pulaski's. But he's also worked with departments as big as Los Angeles',
with corporations concerned about theft or corporate spying, with
celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, and with the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration.

He has equipment and electronic capabilities small departments could never
afford, for instance, a $60,000 machine to clarify audio tapes with lots of
background noise, a van loaded with infrared cameras and microphones
mounted behind the turn signals - microphones sensitive enough, he said,
"to pick up a bird chirp a block away."

And he has the skill even many large departments lack, and access to spying
equipment he's invented.

So Abernathy, 52, a private investigator going on 28 years, never bothered
with the self-defense classes, the boxing lessons that some fictional
detectives take. A Marine for six years who was assigned prisoner escort
duties, he knows something about fighting skills, and he sometimes carries
a pistol, particularly when he's working on drug cases. But those are
skills he never plans to use.

His goal is to get close without the subject ever knowing he was there.

No privacy left

He can get pretty close.

"A lot of what your see on TV is old technology or hype," Abernathy said.
"If you could see the new technology, it would scare you to the death.
You'd wonder if there's any privacy left."

Few people have any privacy left if Abernathy is hired to investigate them,
he says. And what he's learned means he shreds all of his own personal
papers and bills before burning them. Otherwise, he says, a person's
garbage can become the basis of their biography.

"We can start with just a name and end up with a whole history," he said.

And in cases where they have access to someone's computer - say a husband
wants to see if his wife is writing juicy e-mails to someone other than him
- - Abernathy and his assistant, Stephanie King, can install a spying
software on the computer. That software can order the computer to send a
blind copy of selected e-mails, keyed by target words, to another computer.

"Even people who deal with computers on a regular basis can't find it,"
Abernathy said.

"It's totally invisible," King said, joining Abernathy in the van he uses
for surveillance.

From the outside, it's just another slightly battered work van; inside
it's equipped with switches and toggles, cameras and tapes.

A camera hidden in a small roof mount can pan around the van and zoom in.
One-way glass panels can accommodate infrared cameras for night-time taping.

The van itself can change its appearance at night - switches allow
Abernathy to kill one headlight, say, or change out the running lights so
that a person glancing in a rear-view mirror wouldn't think the same
vehicle was still behind.

Most of the time these days, Abernathy's work is the technical sort: wiring
a room where the drug sale will take place, walking through a crowded bar
with a camera hidden in his ball cap to catch a convicted felon violating
probation, or doing computer searches. He outwits the bad guys.

Abernathy's work brings praise from local officers who have worked with him.

"I would love for us to have some of this equipment, it's amazing," said
Capt. Joyce McConnell, investigator for the Lincoln County Sheriff's
Department. "Ray's brilliant."

"He's got high tech equipment and stuff - things you see in a lot of these
spy movies," said Franklin County Mike Foster, speaking from his office
Friday morning. "We can't afford them, so we use Ray for his equipment and
his expertise."

'Dumber than rock salt'

Little of the work he does these days, he says, is scary. Even when he
helps to catch scary people, many times the evidence he gives to
prosecutors is so convincing that the accused will agree to a plea bargain
and skip the trial altogether, missing a chance to catch a glimpse of the
average-looking fellow with sandy-colored hair who put together much of the
case's evidence.

And that's fine with Abernathy, who still remembers the terror of one of
the biggest cases he's worked: busting two leaders of a Colombian drug
cartel with a load of cocaine worth over $200 million on the streets.

Abernathy, who is a pilot, was introduced as the fellow who could fly the
specially modified plane the drug runners wanted. The plane, made for 10
passengers, had been emptied and a large gas tank installed along with
booster rockets on the wings, making it possible to take the plane into the
air after only 500 feet of runway.

"I acted dumber than rock salt," Abernathy said. "I was just a pilot
willing to do it for the money."

For the money, Abernathy had also equipped the plane with a tracking
device. A U.S. customs official in Colombia somehow got wind of the
operation and tipped the bad guys.

"He like to got a lot of people killed, including me," Abernathy said.

Back home in Nashville, he sent his wife to another state for six months
until everything settled down and the convictions were completed.

Being sneaky, Abernathy said, isn't something that comes naturally to him.

"I learned to be sneaky because it pays well," he said. He charges $125 a
hour, with a 24-hour retainer required up front.

Getting the Information

King, 25, says she was sneaky even before she joined Abernathy's company.

"Sneaky is in my nature," she said. "I'm kind of fearless when it comes to
this stuff."

King, who does some on-the-spot work for Abernathy, didn't want her picture
taken. Her two sons, 6 and 8, think her work, even though it takes her away
from home for extended hours sometimes, is very cool.

A few weeks ago, she was able to take them a newspaper report of the trial
of one of the cases she had investigated with Abernathy.

"My 8-year-old is just learning to read, but he read the whole thing," she
said. "He only had trouble with a few words like 'allege' and 'convicted.' "

King has worked for Abernathy's Surveillance Equipment Inc. for two years.
The work, she says, is more interesting than her former job as a researcher
and paralegal for a Nashville law firm. She loves the computer
investigation work and also enjoys the times she's carrying the small
leather purse that conceals a camera capable of shooting high-quality video
from a lens no bigger than the tip of a pencil.

Abernathy can do just about anything, he said, except work for the bad guys
or go outside of legal bounds.

"I do it within the law, but I get the information," Abernathy said. "The
only thing I can't do is to make someone guilty or innocent."