Editors’ Note

Richard “Bo” Dietl was a New York City police officer and detective from June 1969 until he retired in 1985 when he founded Beau Dietl & Associates. He was appointed as Co-Chairman of the National Crime Commission in 1989 by President George Bush. In 1994, Governor George E. Pataki appointed him to chair of the New York State Security Guard Advisory Council. He served as Security Consultant to the National Republican Convention and as Director of Security for the New York State Republican Convention. In 2010, Dietl formed Beau Dietl Consulting Services (BDCS), which recruits temporary and permanent placements in IT, finance and business for global leaders and Fortune 500 companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Citibank and Ernst & Young. He has also been a Fox News and Business contributor for the past 10 years and his commentary is called upon countless times for his expertise on current events. For the past 30 years he has been a weekly guest on Imus in the Morning and appears on several other Fox shows on a regular basis.

Company Brief

Beau Dietl & Associates (investigations.com) was founded in 1985 by Richard “Bo” Dietl, one of the most highly decorated detectives in NYPD history. For more than 30 years, BDA has provided security services, consulting services and investigative expertise to private and public clients throughout the United States. Headquartered in Midtown Manhattan with offices in New Jersey, Miami, and Beijing, BDA’s senior staff is comprised of experienced former senior law enforcement and military officers, security and investigations professionals. Utilizing an “all-hazards” approach, BDA understands each client’s unique security needs and provides customized solutions, including hand-selected personnel and state-of-the-art countermeasures, to effectively and efficiently mitigate risk and provide safe, secure and welcoming environments. BDA’s team of highly-trained analysts can also perform in-depth due diligence for any situation and currently supports Fortune 100 companies, major financial institutions and top law firms around the globe.

Will you discuss your vision for creating Beau Dietl & Associates?

As far as private investigating and private security companies go, we have something many of them don’t have. We just reached our 34th year in business, which is a very big plus.

Many people have started businesses like ours. Many have been acquired or have gone out of business, but we have done networking that I think is unique. Since I retired from the police department in ’85, I ran for United States Congress in ’86 and then ran for New York City mayor in 2017. This helps keep the name and the brand up front.

We bought the domain investigations.com about 28 years ago – at that time I think we paid $20,000 for it. I’ve since been offered $1 million dollars for investigation.com, but it’s behind our brand and our name and it’s something that we have continued to promote as part of our very in-depth investigations.

We have been at the forefront of big investigations on illegal drugs coming into the United States. We also headed up the investigation of the Iron Workers’ Union concerning the takeover of the unions. Today, we’re working on a triple murder of a federal witness in Kentucky where we were able to facilitate a conclusion and people involved with the murder of a federal witness are now about to be arrested. There aren’t too many types of cases that we have not been involved with.

Part of our strength comes from having an international network of people that we’ve been utilizing for the last 34 years who have been proven to be really good information finders around the globe. If we received a phone call right now and needed surveillance in London four hours from now, we have the capabilities to do it.

We are now becoming involved in some new areas. For instance, with the advent of the MeToo Movement, I’ve tried to ascertain how we could get involved, because this issue is not going away; it’s going to be a key issue for a lot of corporations. It seems that many employees who are victims of sexual harassment, discrimination or who see bad things going on in the corporation have no way to report it. They feel as though if they report it to HR it’s going to affect their position and their employment and their chances for elevation within the corporation.

We have now put together a secure website for corporations that allows people to report what is going on and choose to remain anonymous should they so desire. Then we investigate the claims. We use Title VII investigators who are required to do these types of investigations. We then bring our findings to HR, the general counsel or, in some cases, right to the CEO. This is something that I think corporations have to be well aware of – it could take a corporation down.

We have also developed another AI technology. We now have security cameras in buildings and CCTV but people don’t realize that, with the advent of AI, you now have smart cameras. A person sitting on a console watching different cameras is only effective for about 20 minutes. With the addition of AI, you put criteria into the system that causes an alarm to go off so if a specific person is somewhere they are not supposed to be, AI enables smart CCTV cameras. Many residential and commercial buildings have security guards and we could cut that price in half by using more AI cameras. They are as efficient, if not more efficient, than a physical guard and they can be monitored from a remote location.

We have a remote command center in New Jersey and are developing a mobile command center in Lower Manhattan that will be able to monitor 200 to 300 buildings through the use of AI. The future is about using technology that allows for better security than can be provided by just utilizing physical security guards. Many variables affect physical security guards and AI can help mitigate these issues.

Another area that I’ve been actively involved in is keystroke encryption. I ended up buying the three patents relating to keystroke encryption. Whenever you use a mobile device or your laptop computer, every time you strike a key there is a risk of that keystroke being stolen. In one case, a CEO of a major drug company had his paycheck diverted to another bank account and didn’t know what happened. Keystroke encryption can help prevent this.

There are people out there called day loggers who utilize the dark web to steal information. People will knowingly open up an e-mail they think is from a friend or colleague. Day loggers infect these e-mails and invade your system where they can install malware and then remain dormant and watch your activity. They might not do anything right away but, once you start your online banking, they record keystrokes and can get account numbers and passcodes and all of a sudden you have a problem. We got another call recently where someone sent $150,000 of security monies to their brokerage and it was rediverted to another account.

Those utilizing our keystroke encryption technology, even if they are breached and malware is installed, still cannot see any of your security codes or account numbers. You can’t always stop hackers from getting in, but our technology will prevent them from gaining any pertinent information.

Part of our strength comes from having
an international network of people that we’ve been utilizing for the last 34 years who have been proven
to be really good information finders around the
globe. If we received a phone call right now and
needed surveillance in London four hours
from now, we have the capabilities to do it.

You have described a number of the activities you are involved in. How broad is the list of services you provide at BDA?

We handle litigation support, corporate due diligence, internal investigations, surveillance and insurance investigations, and we also provide a whole array of security.

We have physical security and armed security, but we have also now embarked on the CCTV AI cameras for buildings that I mentioned earlier. We do security assessments including casino security in Las Vegas as well as the Miami World Center security. We’re able to take on almost any and all projects.

We are also involved in litigation investigations. Right now, we are involved in one against Ford Motors and another against Qualcomm involving patent infringements.

With our 34 years of experience, there is not much that we can’t handle today.

How critical is it for the C-Suite to take a very serious and comprehensive approach to security?

Many people don’t understand that CEOs of corporations have the fiduciary responsibility of overseeing the whole company. Whether they have a cyber security breach or they have a scandal about sexual harassment within the corporation, it’s the responsibility of the CEO. If public companies don’t stop a problem before it becomes big, it could destroy their entire corporation.

How concerned are you about the adversary relationship between the public and law enforcement today?

I support police out there who are out there every day. The majority of them try to do the right thing, and they’re under such scrutiny now. They all have cameras. They can’t do anything without being on video and they have multiple systems of checks and balances.

We have a great city like New York, but we also have many with mental health issues that law enforcement ends up dealing with on the streets every day. These need to be addressed in our correction facilities and even in our classrooms. Mental health issues have to be dealt with.

This has led to many bad police shootings so there needs to be an alternative to guns in these cases. There is the Taser but it has killed almost 1,000 people since its development. There is now a new device called BolaWrap which was developed by Wrap Technologies Inc., which I’m a shareholder of. It is a non-lethal technology that is about the size of a cellphone. From about 15 to 18 feet away, it shoots out at about 500 feet per second two thin Kevlar ropes with a four-prong fish hook that wraps around a person’s arms or wraps around their legs. If officers are addressing an emotionally disturbed person with a knife, they have an alternative to shooting him.

This is another piece of technology that could save a person’s life in the community. I’m behind it not just for the officers, but I’m behind it for the community because you have a lot of mentally disturbed people that I don’t want to see shot by cops. We need cops to have an alternative other than the Taser, which hits you with 50,000 volts.

The former CEO of Taser just joined the board of Wrap Technologies. He loves this technology, because it is non-lethal. That’s what we need. We need cops to be out there with technology that helps them save people.

Is public service and politics still something that you plan to pursue in the future?

Never. As far as politics go, they don’t like me because I don’t lie, I’m not a backstabber and I tell people the way I feel. I’m not cut out for politics. The only person in politics that I really like, although he has some pitfalls, is Donald Trump because of his forwardness and his non-political approach. He’s out there telling it like it is and trying to cut through the crap.

As a matter of fact, I met with him recently about a number of issues in this country that I’m really concerned about. We talked about infrastructure in this country. There’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t have construction consultants who, when they bid on billion-dollar jobs, get the job done for what they bid.

Construction consultants should utilize the talents of forensic accountants to make sure if you bid $1 billion to build a tunnel, you’re going to do it for $1 billion, not $1.8 billion. With the advent of big infrastructure spending in the country, this is so important. If we are going to put $100 billion into infrastructure, it shouldn’t turn into $180 billion.

Another concern is the murder rate in Chicago. I think they’re up to 5,600 over the last ten years and no one seems to care about it. There are answers and I talked to people in the White House about utilizing the federal criminal RICO laws. If the federal government was more involved in this then we could go into Chicago and stop those murders.

For instance, when you get caught with a gun in Chicago they should give you a one-year sentence. There are people who have been arrested there 15 times for gun violations and they keep getting sentences of less than a year. We have to deal with this because I’m concerned about the 5,600 murders in Chicago, the majority of whom were African Americans. Why don’t we care about them? I told the President he should care and he should address this and bring in initiatives for our inner cities to try to stop these murders. These are things I’m interested in as a human being.

Are you able to take moments to celebrate the wins or are you always looking at what is ahead?

I’m a CEO who is hands-on. I really believe you’ve got to keep thinking and bringing business in. If you lay back and celebrate on how well you did on something, you’re not going to be in business too long.

I think the success of my company here is that we keep looking ahead. I tell people we have to think about tomorrow. We have to think of new initiatives to bring into the business and continue building the business because that business is the lifeblood of any corporation.