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.
Here are some excerpts from Woman's World and Entrepreneur.
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.
