Cape Coral Confidential

When a brawny enforcer confronted Dennis Fahey by name in the restaurant at his Cayman Islands hotel, the private investigator knew he was in trouble.

“Have you been in the water?” the anonymous visitor asked him. “You need to be careful if you’re swimming. The tides are very treacherous.”

“I have no intention of going swimming,” Fahey responded.

“You may have no choice,” the intimidator told him. “You have a pleasant stay.”

At that point, Fahey admits in hindsight, he probably should have taken the not-so-subtle hint and left. But the Army veteran, who was decorated with two Purple Hearts as a tank commander in Vietnam, isn’t easily daunted. So on this job in the early ’90s, he stayed to work a few more days—a decision he says nearly got him killed.

As president of Cape Coral-based Physical Evidence Consultants, Fahey serves as an investigator and expert witness on a gamut of cases, from multimillion-dollar thefts, to suspicious accidents, to high-profile homicides.

A native of Newark, N.J., Fahey’s familiarity with the law is inherited—both his father and grandfather were policemen, and portraits displaying his law enforcement lineage adorn his second-floor office. Fahey, too, was a cop until an injury from a bad car accident forced him to retire in 1982. It was a tough transition; law enforcement defined Fahey. “The only thing I know is cops and robbers,” Fahey recalls. “I didn’t know anything else.” It was then that his brother-in-law suggested he start his own agency.

“I have an unusual business,” the 61-year-old says, now with decades of experience as a private investigator behind him. “It’s been fascinating over the years. It’s been exciting. It’s been sad. It’s been dangerous.”

Perhaps no case was more dangerous than his experience in the Cayman Islands. Despite his visitor’s “friendly” warning, Fahey remained at work. He was collecting evidence for a $3 million insurance fraud case when, by chance, he stumbled across an operation smuggling stolen trucks from Miami. It just so happened he had a contact in the U.S. looking into the matter. In return for Fahey’s tip, that investigator agreed not to seize the stolen trucks until Fahey completed his own job.

In spite of the threats, Fahey had work to do on the insurance fraud case, and he couldn’t be coerced into leaving.

He befriended a young, local detective in the islands who had warned Fahey to be careful and not to use the hotel phone, which might be tapped. When he told the detective about the threat, his new friend gave clear advice: “You’re leaving tomorrow morning,” the detective told him without hesitation. “I can’t guarantee you one more day. That hotel door will open, and they will take you and dump you offshore.”

Ignoring the advice, Fahey stayed a little longer until he completed his investigation. He proved that a woman claiming disability was perfectly healthy, living and working in the islands. As a result of Fahey’s work, she was eventually nabbed for $3 million in insurance fraud. He also handed over to the Miami investigator the information he had uncovered about the smuggling operation.

But when Fahey arrived at the airport, prepared to leave the islands, he didn’t get very far. “Go back to your hotel,” the customs officer warned him. “We’ll notify you when you can leave.”
The young detective came to his aid. Using his authority, the detective insisted that Fahey be allowed on the plane to leave the country. Eventually, the customs officer reluctantly complied.

Not all of Fahey’s stories involve potential peril, though he has countless interesting tales. There was the young man in Nova Scotia whom police said died of “dry drowning,” or shock from very cold water. Through a medical examiner’s analysis of the victim’s lungs and bone marrow Fahey proved that someone placed [the victim’s] body where it was found, suggesting his death was a homicide.

And there was the jewelry store in Naples robbed around 2003. Hired by Lloyd’s of London, Fahey tracked down two of the perpetrators in New York and another in Puerto Rico.

Fahey also worked on the high-profile Caylee Anthony case, helping to oversee evidence for the defense team representing the deceased child’s mother, Casey Anthony. Fahey believes the overabundance of media coverage has complicated the case. “They’re polluting the jury pool,” he says. “They couldn’t care less about due process; it’s all entertainment. First Amendment rights are in place all of the time, but people need to be responsible. You can’t trample over other people’s rights.”

Colleague and friend John Holloway, a Naples attorney, knows better than to waste Fahey’s time and expertise on minor investigations. Unlike many private investigators, Fahey doesn’t take the typical cheating-spouse cases.

“If he is working a case, it’s because it needs to be worked,” says Holloway, a partner with the firm Garber, Hooley & Holloway LLP. “The more the client is important to me, the more likely I’ll use Dennis.”

Fahey’s expertise earns him a wide variety of cases. It also makes him a good candidate to teach, which he does at Edison State College in Fort Myers. Around 75 students each year take his classes, which cover everything from properly surveying a crime scene to using such technology as 3-D modeling to recreate the scene of a car accident.

“It’s hard to find such a versatile area of expertise in one individual; I think that’s what’s so striking,” says Susan Snow. A retired police detective from Suffolk County, N.Y., she now works as Fahey’s assistant. “You can have an anthropologist and you can have a medical examiner, and they’re wonderful, but their scope is so limited. I think it’s just amazing to be able to have someone from law enforcement who is a crime-scene expert, who’s an accident reconstructionist, who knows about firearms and who, when he is at the crime scene, is thinking like a police officer.”

Fahey is also something of a celebrity, appearing regularly on national TV as an expert on high-profile cases. An interrogation he conducted was even portrayed in a made-for-TV movie, Deadly Betrayal: The Bruce Curtis Story, based on the Nova Scotia homicide, although he describes the depiction as completely inaccurate. Fahey works in the real world, where investigations aren’t anything like the popular CSI television shows.

It isn’t a job for everyone. “This is a dirty, filthy business that some days you wish you never got into,” he says. “Literally Dumpster diving—jump in. You walk into a crime scene with, literally, blood coming off of the roof, dripping down. It’s your worst nightmare come true.”

Successful private investigators need to have a “switch” that they can flip off when they leave work at the end of the day. With that in mind, Fahey often asks his students if they enjoy gruesome horror movies; usually, most say they do. “‘That’s nothing compared to what you are about to see,’” he tells them. “‘That’s fantasy. This is real. These are your true-life nightmares.’”