Cullen Johnson was a top Toronto cop.

Elaine White was a dogged investigator at a downtown accounting firm.

Now the husband and wife team of private detectives are accused of forging and selling bank records that make clients believe an ex-spouse, friend or employee has millions of dollars stashed offshore.

Like a financial striptease, the detectives gradually reveal secret accounts to clients eager to get their hands on money they consider theirs.

"We were sucked in by these promises, paying more and more each time," said Barry Kornhaber, a retired executive who was looking out for his daughter in an acrimonious divorce.

Detectives billed Kornhaber a total of $60,000 for a "banking sweep" on Jeff Rival, Kornhaber's son-in-law. They identified $2.6 million in the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas – which Kornhaber now realizes was bogus information. Rival, a Toronto realtor, fought two years to clear his name.

"I just want my kids to know that I did not do this. I did not have these millions," said Rival.

In one case, a well-respected retired provincial politician was falsely accused of having $2.3 million offshore.

In another, a Toronto school employee suspected her good friend and lottery partner schemed her and two friends out of a $5.7 million jackpot. Despite a raft of authentic-looking bank records conjured up by the detectives, the allegation was untrue.

Johnson and White run private detective agencies at the centre of a widening scandal that shows the Ontario government has no control over wayward investigators. A provincial licence can be obtained for $80 – there isn't even a test – and no investigator in recent years has had a licence taken away.

Internal Affairs is Johnson's company, with offices in Newmarket and Nassau, Bahamas. Before he retired in 1996 he was a detective sergeant on the Toronto Police Force and his online biography says he served as executive assistant to two former police chiefs.

Global Solutions is White's company. She was an investigator with a subsidiary of Lindquist Avey, a forensic accounting firm in Toronto, and is remembered by a former boss as a digger who delivered results.

White did not respond to interview requests. She and Johnson are in the Bahamas.

In emails to the Star, Johnson said he will be vindicated.

"There is no truth to any of the allegations in question. I intend to defend myself vigorously in relation to these matters at the appropriate place and time." Johnson also stressed that he and White run "distinctly separate businesses."

Private investigators are licensed by a division of Ontario's Community Safety and Corrections Ministry. The Star's investigation concluded that the Private Security and Investigative Services Branch (PSISB) run by Jon Herberman has failed to protect the public. About 60 complaints have been filed in the last four years against various investigators but Herberman's branch has never taken away a licence.

The branch looked into one complaint against Johnson but, according to Johnson, concluded his company "was not involved in any wrongdoing."

Four days later the Ontario Provincial Police charged Johnson with three fraud charges and White with five fraud charges. A trial date has not been scheduled.

Herberman would not agree to an interview with the Star.

Johnson and White are a striking couple. He is 60 years old, six feet tall, and weighs about 250 pounds, hard cop muscle gone to paunch, favouring colourful shirts and gold jewellery.

White is 64, not much over five feet tall, often well dressed, choosing fur coats and hats in cold weather, lots of jewellery and long painted nails.

In Newmarket, Johnson works out of a downtown basement office, watched by security cameras. Johnson's Internal Affairs website boasts about his time on the police force probing murders and frauds. It gives a laundry list of jobs his private detectives (the site says many are ex-police officers) can take on, from "cheating spouse" and "adultery" probes to DNA investigations and using tracking devices to tail someone for a client.

Offshore asset probes are a specialty.

"Internal Affairs can locate and identify assets anywhere including Canada, the United States, Central or South America, the Caribbean, Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, or the Far East," his website states.

That claim attracted Karen Joice, a Toronto woman involved in a divorce action with her husband, Wayne Wilbur, the chief executive officer of printing company Astley Gilbert.

Joice believed Wilbur had more money than he was admitting to. A friend introduced her to the detectives and she met them at a restaurant in the fall of 2007.

Johnson and White sat down at Joice's table, ordered lunch and told her it was their job to protect women.

They seemed warm and encouraging. For a down payment of $2,000, they would use a secret network of banking insiders to get a list of his accounts. This was exactly the kind of information Joice wanted. She paid by Visa.

A few days later White called with good news. She had conducted a "banking sweep" in Canada and found at least 20 accounts held in regular and private banks and brokerages. If Joice paid an additional $5,000, White could uncover the actual dollar amounts and then look offshore. Joice paid $5,247 to World Solutions, on Nov. 15.

Over a four-month period, Joice shelled out $25,000. She received reports showing her ex-husband had $2.1 million in accounts from Switzerland to the Bahamas to the Cayman Islands. Details included account numbers, locations and specific information, such as a notation that Wilbur closed a Bahamas account on May 19, 2007 and moved $100,488.22 "via wire to Pictet & Cie, Geneva, Switzerland."

Joice grew suspicious when she paid $5,000 for Wilbur's offshore "signature card," but White stalled on handing it over. Eventually, White promised to send it by mail in a plain envelope, wearing gloves so no one could track her fingerprints. When it arrived – by fax actually – the signature was a forgery.

"I was so furious with myself," Joice said. "They took advantage of me and I would really like to see them stopped, so they cannot do this to anyone else."

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In an interview with the Star, Wilbur said he was surprised when Joice's lawyer told him he had secret accounts. He knew they did not exist and said so. The matter has been resolved – Joice said it was an embarrassing incident – and Wilbur said it points out how little control the province has over investigators.

"When (private investigators) are in a position of trust with the public, they should be able to be trusted," Wilber said. "When they prove that they can't be, the government should step in and stop them from practising."

Johnson and White often meet clients together, but have different roles. Johnson is the gumshoe, the licensed investigator White handles documents. She gave up her private investigator licence in 2004, the same year she incorporated World Solutions. White tells clients not having a licence means she can do things – like bribe foreign bankers – licenced detectives can't do.

Type "private investigator Toronto" into a Google search and Johnson's Internal Affairs is one of the first hits. That's how three of four lottery pals hired the private detectives in 2006.

For many years, four employees of the Toronto Catholic District School Board pooled their money and played the same lottery numbers. Lorraine Teicht, Robert Carlisi, and sisters-in-law Aurora and Silvana Pincivero were great friends. In 2004, Teicht took one of their 6/49 tickets to a small convenience store. The clerk said sorry, no winner this time. But they had won – $5.7 million – and the clerk palmed the ticket, closed his shop, then bought a $1 million mansion, a Tim Horton's franchise for his son, and some new cars.

Six months later, one of the friends did a random check of their numbers on the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. website and discovered the win. Suspicious of Teicht, Aurora Pincivero eventually hired Internal Affairs. With her two friends she paid $13,356 for a financial "sweep". The detectives reported picking up traces of the money, in accounts owned by Teicht from Toronto to Barbados and Switzerland.

When they confronted Teicht, she broke down, telling her friends where she had checked the ticket but insisting she did not steal the winnings and stash them offshore. The group complained to the OLGC, who brought in the OPP. Investigators arrested the shop owner on charges of fraud and theft and his trial is pending.

The OPP investigation uncovered the phony reports of offshore holdings and in 2007 passed the allegations on to the provincial agency that oversees private investigators, run by Jon Herberman. The agency took no action, according to its own internal documents.

The lottery agency has doled out the winnings to the four lottery buddies, plus $788,000 interest. With various parts of the case still before the courts, they declined to speak to the Star.

The group's lawyer, Greg Harris, was himself referred to Cullen Johnson and Elaine White when he had concerns about a former bookkeeper his firm thought had stolen money. For a fee of $28,832, the private detective duo dug up information revealing the bookkeeper had secreted firm money in the Bahamas, Channel Islands, Hong Kong, Macao, Dubai and Switzerland.

When Harris retained a law firm in Hong Kong he learned that "the bank account information provided ... was non existent," according to provincial government documents. Harris did not return calls from the Star.

One man who has spent a great deal of time and money battling the investigators and trying to fix the system is Eric Cunningham, a former Liberal MPP from Hamilton (1975 to 1984) who went on to a career in public relations and then was vice-president of a large water services company.

Cunningham said it took a huge emotional and financial effort to prove in the courts that his ex-wife, Joan Montgomery, and detective Elaine White were wrong when they alleged he had $2.3 million offshore in accounts flung as far as the Cook Islands, Panama, the Bahamas, Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands.

"I was happy to be vindicated but this whole thing has beaten me down, had a huge and negative effect on my life," said Cunningham, 60, who has his small consulting business to pay the bills. "What I would like to see is some serious oversight of private investigators by our government."

His story began in 2005 with what should have been a simple divorce case. The couple separated in 2002 after 22 years of marriage. Allegations by Montgomery of hidden assets led to a 25-day trial in 2007, where reports by Elaine White and other detectives were presented.

Two Superior Court of Justice judges have ruled all of this as false. One stated that the claims by Joan Montgomery and Elaine White were "fraudulent." Recently, almost five years after it started, Cunningham has been awarded legal costs in the matter, for the $313,000 it took to clear his name. In the judge's ruling he noted that Cunningham's ex-wife (her father funded much of this) estimated she spent $1 million on lawyers and private detectives.

On Sept. 14, 2009, Elaine White pleaded guilty under a provincial offences charge to one count of acting as a private investigator when she was not licenced, in connection with the Cunningham/Montgomery case. She was fined $750 and put on probation for one year.

White and Johnson are to appear in court Dec. 18 in Toronto to face the criminal charges.

Together, they are charged with defrauding Aurora Pincivero (lottery case) and the law firm of Harris and Harris (bookkeeper case). Johnson is charged with defrauding a women in another divorce case.

White is charged with defrauding Karen Joice and Barry Kornhaber, and one other women (all divorce cases).





Kevin Donovan can be reached at 416-869-4425 or kdonovan@thestar.ca.