Field Notes: Trust, But Verify

Some of the cases that stay with me have nothing to do with Russian operatives or foreign intelligence. They are about families here in Florida, trying to protect the things that matter most.

The Nanny

One family I worked with had two little kids. Their nanny had been with them from the beginning. Seven years. She went on vacations with them, they paid for her schooling, she was basically part of the family.

Then one day it started to unravel.

She had picked up a side gig delivering food. While she was supposed to be watching the kids, she would drop them off at her own house with her husband and head out. The parents had no idea this was happening.

What they also didn’t know, until it was too late, was that her husband had been abusing the children for several months. They found out after the fact. That was when the bottom dropped out and they called me.

The way they had gotten into this mess was simple. She came recommended by friends. That was good enough, and they never dug any deeper.

When I came in, my first step was to gather everything: dates, timelines, recollections. I interviewed her, ran checks on both of them. She came back clean, but he didn’t. Domestic violence. Aggravated assault. The kind of history you never want around kids.

The part that never sat right with me was why. Why take a side job when she could have asked for a raise? Why stay with a man who hurt the children she was supposed to protect? Eventually the detectives confirmed what I suspected. She wasn’t just looking the other way. She was complicit.

I tried to take as much of the load off the parents as I could. I worked directly with the sheriff’s detectives, kept the family out of the back-and-forth, and started searching for a new nanny.

This time I left no stone unturned. Background checks, criminal, civil, and financial. Multiple interviews. Re-checking references. Knocking on doors and canvassing neighborhoods just to see who the candidates really were. By the end I had a shortlist of solid options. Once the family chose, I stayed involved for months, checking in quietly until things felt normal again.

The Contractor

Another family had a very different problem. Their Florida house had been hammered by a hurricane. Flooded, gutted, everything needed to be rebuilt.

They hired a general contractor with a good reputation. He did his part. The issue was everything swirling around him.

Construction sites are chaos. Subcontractors, vendors, inspectors, delivery crews. Garage clickers and gate codes passed around like candy. After the storm their cameras and alarms had never been reset, so there was no real way to know who was in and out.

When the work was done the family thought the hard part was over. Then the house was robbed.

They called me from out of state. My role became part investigator, part liaison. I opened the house for the police, dug into records, tried to map who had been on site and when. But subs hire other subs, schedules overlap, and paperwork ends up scribbled on clipboards or stuffed in gloveboxes. Reconstructing a clean access log was nearly impossible.

We never did pin down the theft. But it forced the family to rethink their security. Together we built it back properly. Monitored alarms. Gate and door codes they could change remotely. Access logs for every person who set foot on the property. If they wanted me to run checks on those people, we could do that too.

Now even from another state they know exactly who is in their home.

The Lesson

On the surface, those two families had nothing in common. One had a nanny they’d known for years. The other had a contractor rebuilding their house after a storm.

But both had trusted without checking. And when that trust broke down, it hurt.

That was the reminder for me. Protective intelligence isn’t always about hostile actors overseas. More often it is about the people and places closest to you — who is caring for your kids, who has access to your home, who’s walking through your front door.

It isn’t about paranoia. It’s about understanding who’s in your orbit and what level of access you’re giving them. Trust is important. In my experience it works best when you can verify it too.