The thing that Mineola private investigators Thomas Allen and Thomas LoFaso most enjoy about their work is its unpredictable nature and the variety of people they encounter.
“It’s interesting, something different all the time. Never the same,” said Allen, who first started a company known as ACI Investigations in 1987 after 20 years in the Nassau County Police Department.
He and LoFaso, his son-in-law, re-established the company as the Allen Group at 244 Mineola Boulevard last year, concentrating on both civil cases and criminal defense work that added to the list of the unusual situations.
There was the case of the cross-dressing professional man that turned into a divorce case. And there was the case of the husband who stole his ex-wife’s master poodle.
“Her home was broken into and the only thing taken was the dog,” Allen said.
Knowing the husband would walk the dog in the morning, Allen said he and the man’s wife followed the husband’s car – with the dog in it – to the dry cleaners one morning.
The ex-wife had the keys to the car, which she actually owned, so they took the dog and left the car two blocks away, Allen said. She left a profanity-laced message on he ex-husband’s cell phone telling him where he could find the car – minus the dog.
“The dog was in the backseat trying to bite me all the way back from Yonkers,” Allen recalled.
These days much of the Allen Group’s work consists of personal injury cases, including auto and construction, and insurance fraud.
In this high-tech era when a wealth of information about individuals can be accessed online, a lot of their time is still consumed by the time-honored practices of the prototypical gumshoe.
“Surveillance is huge as far as insurance fraud is concerned,” LoFaso said.
When Allen started ACI, the focus was telecommunications fraud. He specialized in uncovering companies producing illicit cable boxes and the customers who purchased them in doing work for Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems Corp.
“We found a niche in telecommunications theft,” Allen said. “We went after wholesalers all over the country.”
He estimated his company had confiscated 500,000 illegal cable boxes wired to receive pay-per-view cablecasts to avoid the viewer fees. In two separate cases, with the assistance of local U.S. marshals, he recovered 41,000 cable boxes in one bust and 50,000 boxes in another. He said the boxes would be destroyed and sales records of the companies seized to go after customers who bought the boxes.
Allen estimated that his company also helped recoup $10 million for the cable companies from the companies in a five-year period between 1990 and 1995, including $4 million in a settlement with one company in Nebraska.
In 1996, Allen went to work for Time Warner as vice president of investigations and security, a position he held until last year. His three sons ran ACI, which continued to do investigative work for Time Warner, while Allen worked for Time Warner.
LoFaso had worked with ACI as a field investigator between 2000 and 2005. From 2005 to 2010, he was senior investigator for a special investigative unit of the Nassau County Department of Health and Human Services focusing on abuse of Medicaid and other entitlement programs. He briefly operated his own private investigation firm, Five Point
Investigations & Security, between 2011 and 2012 before teaming up with Allen.
“In a lot of ways, we help a lot of people,” LoFaso said of their current practice.
He said assisting people in personal injury cases is a particular source of satisfaction for them. And insurance fraud has become big business.
Allen said he continues to favor working on cases that are close to his roots in the police department, where he was a homicide detective before he retired.
“I like criminal cases. That’s my forte,” he said.
Lofaso said the partners have relationships with attorneys in the building where their business is located at 244 Mineola Boulevard and said it’s also “a good fit” for their line of work.
“It’s a pretty big hub for law enforcement,” Lofaso said.
Allen and Lofaso are members of the Mineola Chamber of Commerce. Lofaso is on the board of directors for InfraGard-LI, an FBI public-private sector alliance that share information on security issues.
