Media & Press
A sample of the many profiles, articles, and interviews that have appeared in the media and press about Ed Ciriello, founder and president of Global School of Investigation.
Private Eye Makes Public Show
(From Hampshire Gazette July 11th, 2005)
NORTHAMPTON - A red barn on a quiet street doesn't seem like the kind of place that a former intelligence officer would work to train private eyes.
But for the past eight years, Edmund Ciriello has worked from his office there, sending out correspondence courses that explain everything from how to interrogate a witness to how to pick locks.
It was also in this office that he wrote his new self-published book, ''The Reluctant Warrior,'' in which he recounts his 50-year career as a spy and private investigator.
Much of that time, and for all of his past eight years in Northampton, Ciriello has run the correspondence course for those looking to learn his craft.
He started Global School of Investigation as a hobby in 1973.
''I'm amazed. Here we are, 2005, and it's still going,'' Ciriello, 70, said while sitting behind his desk, flanked by books with titles like ''How to Be Invisible.''
Over the years, he said, about 10,000 people, including several in the area, have taken the course.
The reward is in getting letters from people who took the course and are now working in the field.
Travis Maltese, of Edna, Texas, said he took the course two years ago and he thought it was good and well-detailed. He hasn't found use for it yet in his small town but hopes to get in the field in a city.
Ciriello himself starting learning how to do detective work through a correspondence course when he was 14.
Two years later he forged a birth certificate and was out of Belmont, Mass. and in a U.S. Army intelligence unit.
His first assignment was to catch a thief at the base department store.
Before he turned 17, the Army caught him for enlisting at too young an age.
After being Honorably discharged from the Army, Ciriello legally enlisted in the U.S. Navy when he was 17, ''figuring, 'hell, I'd already done the Army,'' he said.
For the next three years, he worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence, now called the Naval Investigative Service.
As a civilian he worked for Pinkerton's National Detective Agency in Chicago in the 1950s, eventually becoming an assistant manager.
But even as he worked at Pinkerton's, he kept his hand in government intelligence work and would be contracted to do assignments from them for the rest of his career.
One mission involved him going to South Vietnam undercover as a band manager.
An agent for the North Vietnamese was working undercover as a bartender in a bar frequented by American servicemen and was having them killed, Ciriello said.
''So we went and returned the favor,'' he said.
Some of the things he did working undercover haunted him, he said, but writing the book was cathartic.
Before writing the book, he discussed it with his wife, Bobbe, and she said that she was a bit scared about her husband exposing his missions. ''I think as a wife I'd be concerned that he'd get himself in a position where someone would just track him down and pop him off,'' she said.
Still, she said, writing the book is something he's wanted to do for a long time and it only reflects ''a slice of his life, certainly not all of it.''
The couple has no children.
Ciriello himself said that he was somewhat reluctant to write the book but figures that the events it describes happened so long ago that he's safe.
''Now that I'm 70 years old, it's OK; I can blow my cover and it's OK,'' he said, adding that there's more danger of falling off a barstool than there is of writing about missions that happened decades ago.
On Ciriello's wall hangs a framed, badly typed letter from Mickey Spillane, calling ''The Reluctant Warrior'' ''One hell of a great read.''
This recognition thrills Ciriello, who used to read Spillane's detective novels as a kid and even began smoking Lucky Strikes because that's what Spillane's hero, Mike Hammer, smoked.
He said Spillane was a big influence in his desire to be a spy.
Although he said he doesn't trust the government, he wanted to be a spy and they were ''the only game in town.''
Ciriello likens himself to the horses that used to pull fire trucks and would still be itching to go long after their retirement if they smelled smoke.
''I hear gunshots,'' he said, ''and I want to go.''
Here are some excerpts from Woman's World, Entrepreneur, and the Boston Herald.
Rebecca Hickman's quest to recover her little daughter could have come right out of the pages of an international spy thriller.
The cast of characters included an American school teacher, an Iranian follower of the Ayatollah Khomeini, diplomats, and a former intelligence agent.
The story began in Garden City, Kansas, where Rebecca, an elementary schoolteacher, married Hossein Zamani, an Iranian engineering student at Kansas State University.
Within a year, Iran was torn by revolution, the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini installed in his place. In the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, 52 Americans were held hostage. The revolution also spelled the end for Rebecca and Hossein's marriage.
Rebecca was reunited with Mariam after 23 months of heartache. "I grabbed her and hugged her," Rebecca says. Cuddled up to her mother on the plane back home to Kansas, Mariam, almost six, wrote her name in English and drew pictures of her war torn life in Iran.
"I looked at the little girl she'd become. For the first time in two years, I felt no pain," says Rebecca. They live now with Rebecca's parents in Overbrook, Kansas, where Mariam is in kindergarten.
"She suffers because of things she saw," says Rebecca. "Some of her father's relatives were killed in the war and she used to see ambulances."
Rebecca wrote to President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz. Months later, she found out the State Department had taken no action.
At her wits end, Rebecca turned to the want ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine. There she found Ed Ciriello.
Have you ever thought about being a private investigator? Living the glamorous life, like Magnum P.I., racing your way through high-speed chases in a Ferrari, slowing down only for a shootout with this week's bad guy?
Well, real PIs dream of that lifestyle, too - because most of them never have such adventures. Though television shows like "Rockford Files" and "Magnum P.I." don't portray the real lifestyles or job functions of the contemporary PI, they are one of the reasons why this industry is growing at such a fast pace.
According to Ralph D. Thomas, founder and director of the National Assoc. of Investigative Specialists, the number of private investigators in the U.S. is increasing at a rate of 10 to 15 percent annually. Today, Thomas estimates that there are about 26,000 PI agencies throughout the U.S. And, with the average agency employing 2.5 private investigators, that adds up to over 65,000 PIs in the nation. But that doesn't mean that the competition is getting stiff. Thomas says, "There's still plenty of business for everyone." All that business means that PIs are bringing in big profits with their investigative talents. Thomas claims that today's average agency grosses about $75,000 to 100,000 and since overhead is so low in this business, an independent PI can bring in net profits of approximately 75 percent.
Ed Ciriello, well-known private detective and owner of the Global School of Investigation, the country's largest and most respected PI school, agrees that the field of private investigation is "wide open." Mostly, this is due to the increasing variety of cases today's private investigators handle. Once hired mainly to spy on erring spouses, private investigators now locate missing persons, investigate insurance fraud cases, find missing heirs, track down people who have skipped out on loans, do background checks on prospective employees, find people's hidden assets and screen potential tenants.
(From the Boston Herald - Sunday, Feb. 9th, 1986 (condensed from a feature article))
This was James Bond with a Boston accent and a shot of Robin Hood. But no romance.
Straight-arrow even though a globe-trotting investigator, Ed Ciriello did pretty 26 year-old Elayn Ahmed, an Akron waitress, the favor of her life - snatching her kidnapped daughter out of Egypt and the clutches of a vengeful husband. "But you don't get your honey where you get your money," said Ciriello, 51, raised in east Boston and Belmont and now living on a yacht in Boston Harbor.
Edmund R. Ciriello started out as a Pinkerton agent and did the overseas suitcase shuffle for more than 30 years - mostly on security and intelligence assignments for U.S. corporations and government agencies as well as foreign governments. He also runs Global Security Services, a home-study detective school based in Hanover and California.
In a profession famous for bristling egos, Ciriello is refreshingly low-key.
"Romance only complicates a case. It's movie stuff," said Ciriello, tall, street smart - a guy who doesn't cuss a lot or carry a gun. A man with four ex-wives he says were not left angry.
Two of his former spouses are so friendly they threw a party in California for Ciriello on his last birthday. "My wives got sick of the over-seas living. Iran to Indonesia. That was most of the problem," he said.
From 1971 to 1973, Ciriello was an intelligence advisor to the Iranian Security Service while employed by Northrop Inc., during construction of a nationwide microwave system.
He had similar intelligence assignments that took him to countries from Indochina to Italy in 1961-1971.
Elaine Ahmed calls Ciriello "a caring, considerate man. First class. A number one. He charged me only expenses. He used his own American Express card. Said he couldn't put a price on my daughter. I sent him $2,200, and I had never seen him. Other detectives wanted $25,000 up front and asked if I cared if my husband got hurt."
