Rapp showed how privacy is a thing of the past

Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 24, 2006 at midnight

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James Rapp achieved national notoriety in the 1990s for his skill in impersonating others to get confidential information about the rich and famous, people ranging from Monica Lewinsky to John Ramsey to Michael J. Fox.

At its peak, his million-dollar, information-broker business was thought to be one of the largest of its kind in the country, with some 10 employees working the phones in a boiler-room type atmosphere - at Sixth and Broadway in Denver - and later in Aurora.

Rapp, who now lives in Elizabeth, said he was in a Lakewood halfway house serving his sentence for pleading guilty to racketeering in 1999 when America's Most Wanted told the final chapter of his con-artist days.

Rapp is an example of how the lack of regulation of private investigators in Colorado has helped make the state a flash point for the selling of private information. By the time Rapp entered the business, he already had a felony conviction on his record.

In an interview last week, the 46-year-old Rapp said he has talked to congressional investigators, including about his business relationship with state Rep. Jim Welker in the 1990s.

Rapp, who maintains he's no longer involved in the business, said he was one of the first to broker such information in the early 1980s.

Rapp said he got interested in the business while in prison for violating probation in connection with a car theft when he was 18. He said he stole the car to visit his then-girlfriend.

At Cañon City, he helped fellow inmates track down people, such as former girlfriends.

"That's when it started. There was no money; it was just for fun, avoid boredom," Rapp said, adding he enjoyed the research.

At his height in the 1990s, Rapp said he had a 250-page manual and would travel across the country, giving training sessions to other information brokers for $1,000 a pop.

Rapp said he justified what he did by reminding himself he often was working for a greater good.

He said he did work for a Canadian group to help track down children taken by estranged family members.

In separate cases, he said, he remembers about a dozen times when he tracked phone numbers to a battered women's shelter but refused to give the information to the client, who he presumed may have been an abusive husband or boyfriend.

"Somewhere we had morals," he said.

He said his downfall was that he would work for just about anyone who asked. That included helping private investigators track down information about celebrities and about people such as Monica Lewinsky and Katherine Willey, two women connected to President Clinton's sex scandals.

The work "kept us in a national spotlight and you want to keep a low profile," Rapp said. "In our business, I should have been more reserved and stayed with clients I knew."

Authorities who raided his Aurora office in the late 1990s found a client list of more than 1,200 private detective agencies who were buying private information about people ranging from Hollywood stars to debtors.

Some information had been used by supermarket weeklies such as The National Enquirer and The Globe, and there were indirect connections to more mainstream press.

But Rapp insisted he seldom knew who the exact client was because he was hired by private investigators.

Things came to a head locally when Rapp and others at his company impersonated John Ramsey, the father of murdered 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet, to find out information about his finances, airline tickets and such.

Rapp's attempt to impersonate Ramsey to find out what he had bought at a Boulder hardware store set off a chain reaction that led to police casing the store and tracking down Rapp. They got a search warrant and raided Rapp's offices.

Some say Rapp distracted Boulder prosecutors from the JonBenet case because they spent so much time trying to track down how information was leaking. But Rapp said he had no regrets about his work, which found its way into supermarket weeklies.

Said Rapp of the day Boulder authorities raided his office: "These guys were good - they had me convinced that I killed JonBenet."

And although he gained access to financial records, including John Ramsey's, Rapp said, "I never committed fraud in taking a penny from anybody."

Rapp said he was referred to Welker by a company in Florida.

"I used their traplines," he said.

With that service, Rapp could dial a pager number, and the return call would go into an 800 trapline set up by Welker's firm. Rapp then would get the land-line number the person was calling from and start his work to identify the person.

Rapp got the attention of authorities nationwide after he tracked down the addresses, phone numbers and pager numbers for an undercover Los Angeles police unit. An Israeli connected to organized crime allegedly used the information Rapp collected to try to identify informants and to threaten some of the detectives and their families.

Police discovered that Rapp had provided the information after seizing records from a private detective. "We never knew what they wanted the info for," Rapp said of his client, the private investigator.

Rapp said it's not that difficult to pose as another person to get confidential information such as phone records. It's not that people are gullible, he said, but that they want to help you.

He said if a customer-service representative asked for a Social Security number to identify the account, he could usually convince the person the wrong number was in his file. Back then, one technique he used was to persuade a customer- service agent that he needed to know all the calls he had made so he could get reimbursed by his employer. He had the agent read the calls over the phone.

"Faxing we limited because that could be traced back to you," he said.

Now, Rapp said, phone companies are victims of their own technology.

"Now you can always re-establish a password, get a copy of the bill, and print it online" from a computer in a public place. "As much as Verizon, Cingular are upset about this, they are creating the problem by putting them (the bills) online," Rapp said.

Rapp is vague about how he makes a living today. Investigators are skeptical he is completely out of the business. He refers to teaching adults at a church and working in southeast Denver, where he said he's taking care of his ailing mother full time. He said legal fees stemming from the criminal case in 1999 took most of his savings.

"If I had still been in it in 2001, I'm sure I would have been working on the terrorist angles," Rapp said.

But the bottom line, he said, is that while it was fun, he couldn't justify it any longer.

"I felt guilty," he said. "How do you rationalize lying?"

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