Field Notes: Origins of Kingfisher

I grew up in Naples. My first job was at the Marriott on Marco Island. Nothing glamorous, just clocking in, learning how to work, how to deal with people, and how to notice details. Funny enough, that part never changed, no matter where I went next.

Family and Service

There’s a long line of service in my family, all the way back to the American Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion. Both of my grandfathers served in World War II. In my generation nobody had worn a uniform until my brother did. Watching him step up is what pushed me to follow.

Afghanistan

I joined the Army as a Warrant Officer and pilot. Early on I was just flying line missions. Nothing special. But when I deployed to Afghanistan, things shifted.

At first I got stuck in the planning shop, junior guy duties. Briefings, re-briefings, PowerPoints, watching everyone else fly. Every once in a while they would throw me a bone and let me take a ring route, shuttling people and gear around for hours.

Then a call came down for a planner to support a JSOC task force. I was volun-told, as they say. I packed a bag and took a short flight from Kandahar Airfield into the city on an old Russian Mi-17 helicopter.

They dropped me at what used to be Mullah Omar’s compound. The founder of the Taliban. Crumbling walls, sandbags everywhere, and yet the original gardener was still there keeping a beautiful little garden alive. The food was the best I’d had in country. It was surreal.

That assignment was my first real exposure to the intelligence side of things. We had piles of raw data; phone intercepts, radio chatter, drone feeds, HUMINT reports. Most of it looked like noise. Somebody had to figure out what mattered. I found myself caring less about flying the mission and more about why the mission even existed.

The Next Step

Toward the end of my Army career I had a shot to assess for a small, quiet unit people rarely hear about. The ATO operates out of sight, providing discreet aviation support for special operations. I was not there long enough to fly anything beyond a simulator, but I was deeply involved in the strategic side of some pretty interesting off the books missions. My work was about orchestration, lining up the ground pieces, planning routes, coordinating contacts, and making sure the logistics were tight so that when the team touched down everything already worked. It taught me to think several moves ahead, to build redundancy into every plan, and to make complicated things look effortless.

Choosing a New Path

When my Army time was winding down, I thought seriously about moving into the Agency’s Air Branch, staying in the intelligence community but keeping that aviation side of the work.

But I was also finishing up a master’s at Johns Hopkins in global security studies and intelligence. One of my professors suggested the FBI. It’s still intelligence work, he told me, but you’ll have a badge, a gun, and a direct impact here at home. That stuck.

What really drew me in was the investigative side of the Bureau. The mix of intelligence and law enforcement, figuring out puzzles and building cases. It felt like something I could sink into. And it’s the same mindset I use now in private investigations: collect the pieces, figure out what matters, and build the picture until it makes sense.

The Bureau

I was assigned to the flagship New York City office, my first stop was the Violent Crimes Against Children Task Force. Heavy work, but it gave me the classic FBI experience: online tracking, going undercover, surveillance, executing warrants, knocking on doors at three in the morning, testifying in court. All of it.

Eventually I moved into counterintelligence, which was where I wanted to be all along, the Russia squad. The senior guys tossed me a dusty old file and said, Here you go, new guy, see what you can do with this.

That file was about Russian paramilitary organizations. At the time it was obscure, kind of niche. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Overnight the thing I’d been buried in became front-page news. Suddenly I went from the rookie with the forgotten case to the guy everyone wanted to talk to.

Running human sources, following money, untangling arms deals, tracking mercenaries. High stakes, complicated, never the same day twice. Exactly what I’d signed up for.

Back Home

After a few years life pulled me back to Florida. I started consulting for corporations and families, planning travel and coordinating security, making sure people could get in and out of riskier places without incident.

That’s when it hit me. Florida has plenty of PIs. Most come from local law enforcement, and they’re good at what they do. But my background was different. Special operations, federal investigations, global intelligence. It gave me a perspective you don’t see much in this space.

Kingfisher

That’s how Kingfisher Investigations started. Part of it was wanting to work for myself, to build something from the ground up. Part of it was wanting to bring something back to Naples, the place that gave me so much. And honestly, part of it was thinking about my girls, hoping one day they’ll see what I built and know it’s possible to take an idea and turn it into something real.

The Kingfisher bird has always made sense to me. It waits, it focuses, and then it moves fast when the moment is right. That’s how I try to work. Whether it’s surveillance, intelligence, or protection, the idea is the same: clarity through focus.

I never planned it this way, but every stop along the path — the Army, the Bureau, the consulting — gave me something I still use today. And now it all comes together here.