William Finnegan, Profiles, “The Secret Keeper,” The New Yorker, October 19, 2009, p. 42
ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF DETECTION about Jules Kroll and corporate intelligence. In 1972, Jules Kroll launched J. Kroll Associates, which eventually became Kroll, Inc., the world’s preëminent detective agency, with three thousand employees, countless subcontractors, and offices in sixty cities in more than thirty-five countries. Last October, Kroll, aged sixty-eight, spoke to a crowd of students and faculty at Cornell, his alma mater. According to the history professor who introduced Kroll that day, Kroll, Inc., specializes in “pursuing crime, particularly financial crime, across international borders.” And so Kroll told stories about recovering the wealth plundered by dictators, among them Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, and Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier. Kroll’s stories were nearly all morality tales. But breaking up extortion rings, nailing dictators—that’s the Marvel Comics version of Jules Kroll’s career. Kroll really made his living, and his name, on Wall Street.
