As people know, I’m serving my seventh consecutive term as Chair of the Board of Directors of the California Association of Licensed Investigators (CALI). As a natural consequence, I know a few things about what goes on in the private investigator world.
A rival organization was founded by some former dissident directors of CALI years ago. It started out hostile to CALI, then voted in sane leadership and morphed into a still-rival but competent organization.
Fast forward. In its last elections, there is a knock-down, drag-out fight between factions. The new faction that gets in, reinstalling one of the founders to leadership (i.e., the guys who founded the group with one of its goals being to prevent a “good ‘ole boy” style of leadership from becoming entrenched.
So, who gets appointed as the group’s legislative leader, the person who’s supposed to influence the legislature about what bills to pass and which ones to defeat and how to amend bad bills into good ones? A guy who has publicly referred to prominent members of the legislature on both sides of the aisle as “whores,” accusing them of taking unlawful payoffs for legislation. Not just publicly, but PUBLICLY!!! This is a guy whose behavior was interpreted to be so bizarre and outlandish that a prominent legislative staffer thought it prudent to talk to the legislature’s sergeant at arms about him, wondering if she had to fear for her safety at a legislative hearing.
Remember Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People? Well appointing this guy as legislative chair is worse than talking dirty!
