Everybody has a story to tell. This is a bit of mine

I was born in Massachussets, but moved around quite a bit. By the time I turned 18, I had lived in Boston, Denver, Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico. By the time I hit 30, I added Bolivia, Peru, Panama, Georgia, Texas and Miami to the list, not to mention an additional 20 or so countries to which I had traveled.

My father was the son of an Italian immigrant who grew up in an Italian community east of Boston. As a kid, he spent his summers in Scituate, a seacoast town in Plymouth, Mass, where he hung out with other kids, several of whom were the sons and daughters of a major Italian crime family. My father would later in life play a key role in arresting these individuals when he was a Special Agent with the Internal Revenue Service, which precipitated his departure from Boston.

In 1970, my father was the first DEA agent assigned to Latin America (actually, back then, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs – BNDD, the predecessor agency to DEA). He later went on to open every DEA office in Latin America. I went along in tow.

Spanish came naturally to me, as languages do to most 8 year-olds, and before long my Spanish was as good as my English (which, some days is not all that stellar). In addition to the language, cultural issues also came naturally as it was easy to see things from other perspectives if you are experiencing them in person.

After graduating college with a degree in Latin American Studies, I felt the calling and joined DEA, where I spent the next fifteen years of my life doing my damndest to stop the flow of drugs entering the U.S. Considering the state of things now, I largely failed. But I learned a lot about investigating along the way.

I left DEA after 15 years (I like to say that I got tired of doing drugs) to take a job as Head of Investigations for Microsoft Latin America. I loved my time at Microsoft and also learned a lot about corporate investigations. But after two years, I was quite frustrated with the level of the investigative support that we were receiving and the lack of any type of parity in terms of quality investigations across all of the countries in the region. So back in 2003, I jumped ship and started MIC Worldwide with my wife and business partner, Dafne.

Our first office was the balcony of our small apartment. We enclosed the 6-feet by 3-feet space, and Dafne and I worked back-to-back during the first 6 months. As the business grew,, we rented an apartment in the same building and hired our first employees. A couple of years later, we moved to a professional office building, and later opened additional offices in Miami and Paraguay, bringing on more employees.

Today, we have completed over 6,000 successful investigations for our clients around the world. And more importantly, Dafne and I are still going strong after 27 years, with two wonderful boys, both in college.

There’s a lot more to my story that I will likely be sharing in the near future. But at this juncture, I’d love to hear your story. Feel free to add as a comment to my blog, of if you’d prefer, you can drop me a line at [email protected].