Jennifer Harlan

It’s a tale as old as love itself, or at least as old as the internet. Girl meets boy. Girl falls for boy. Girl starts to suspect that boy may secretly be a married father of two in Buffalo.

That’s where Marie Schembri comes in.

Schembri has been a private eye for more than 30 years, tracking down grifters, liars and cads from her Brooklyn base. When The New York Times first met her, in 1995, she was a queen of disguise. With a wig, a pair of glasses or some prop bubble gum, Schembri transformed herself into a high-powered businesswoman, a dowdy schoolteacher or a casual, 20-something persona she called “Queens woman.”

When we ran across the Times photos decades later, we had to track her down.

Twenty-four years later, she is still investigating. But the get-ups that were once the tools of her trade are gathering dust and rarely called into action. These days, all Schembri really needs to do most of her sleuthing is a cellphone and an internet connection.

“You don’t have to sit outside someone’s house to see when they’re coming and going,” she explained. “You can track them from anywhere.”

From “The Batcave” — the third-floor office in her Boerum Hill brownstone, which was made to look like a medieval chamber, its sky-blue walls dotted with gold fleurs-de-lis around a mural of a 15th-century French countryside — Schembri trawls the internet looking for that telltale Venmo charge, the contract of sale for that secret apartment in the city, the great-uncle’s obituary that lists a wife and children.

And as her work has gone from cloak-and-dagger to point-and-click, her clients have changed as well: There are fewer jealous husbands trying to sniff out infidelity, she said, and more women who, on the verge of a relationship, are trying to protect themselves from a broken heart, a scam or something much worse. Women are far more likely than men to be abused or stalked by an intimate partner, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For Schembri, a married mother of two and a professed feminist, the clientele shift was a welcome change. “It used to be the men had all the money, and they hired all the lawyers and picked on the women and went after them,” she said. It ate at her, especially when she was starting out.

“I wondered, ‘Would I be on the right side of the fight?’” Schembri recalled. “That haunted me. Because you’re a hired hand. You work for who hires you.”

Schembri fell into the investigative profession almost by accident. After graduating from Hunter College in 1980 with a degree in economics, she worked for New York City as a tax investigator, specializing in real estate cases. After five years, she was ready to try something new.

While looking up records at the courthouse, she ran into a friend of her husband who was working for a private investigation group. He had been hired by a congressional committee to investigate Ferdinand Marcos, then the president of the Philippines, and his family’s real estate holdings in the United States.

“They had all these documents, but they didn’t know what they were looking for,” Schembri said. So she took a week’s vacation, went to Washington and locked herself in a room with the boxes. She said she came out with proof that the Marcoses owned four high-rises in New York, and with a new career.

Schembri said she was initially drawn to the painstaking — what some might call the mind-numbing — labor of investigation. She loved sorting through page after page of documents and records, searching for that needle in the haystack.

“I told them I didn’t want to do cloak-and-dagger stuff,” she said.

But she said when she did start to do the surveillance and tailing and subterfuge traditionally associated with the trade of a professional snoop, she was surprised by how good she was at it.

A spy’s job depends on the ability to make herself invisible, to inhabit the background of someone’s day. It’s a skill Schembri seemingly perfected. With a change of clothes and the swap of a wig, she could transform herself from a downtown punk to an uptown dame. She could sometimes cycle through several personas a day, adding and removing glasses or a hat, shedding a jacket to unveil a bright top, peeling that off to reveal a plain T-shirt.

“When people are looking at you, what they predominantly see is your torso, so that’s what you change,” she said. “You can leave jeans alone. Everyone wears jeans.”

Clothing can also be an investigative tool, she said, a way to put witnesses at ease when you have 10 seconds between their answering the door and either inviting you in or slamming it in your face. “If people look like you, you’re more likely to trust them,” she added.

Schembri is petite, with long brown hair and a pliable face that can transform from detached cool to almost cartoonish befuddlement to beaming delight in an instant. Her diminutive frame, she said, means she is frequently underestimated or overlooked — which, in the spy game, works to her advantage.

“You don’t come across as the stereotype of the private detective,” she said. “You’re not who people are looking for.”

Her gender also comes in handy when trying to blend in. If the person she’s tailing is walking with someone else, engaged in a conversation she wants to overhear, she said, she can get close enough to eavesdrop without raising alarm bells. “I don’t think you’d be able to do that if you’re a man,” she added.

The stereotypical PI — Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, say — is tortured, masculine, likely to be found skulking in a dark alley and sporting a trench coat. But female private eyes have been around almost as long as the profession itself. Allan Pinkerton, who founded the first private detective agency in the United States in 1850, hired the country’s first female investigator in 1856.

Schembri recalled that in 1995, when The Times first interviewed her, the industry was still a boys’ club that clung to noir stereotypes of what makes for a good snoop. Now, she said, “I think the field has opened itself up to more people.”

Data from New York’s Society of Professional Investigators backs this up: Today, about 40% of its members are women, and about 40% are people of color, according to the group’s president, Bruce Sackman. But those numbers have “increased dramatically over the last 10 years,” he said.

In pop culture, examples also abound, from “Veronica Mars” and “Jessica Jones” to “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.”

Nowadays, Schembri’s referrals (she relies only on word-of-mouth) skew more toward blossoming relationships. A generation raised on the internet and surrounded by headlines trumpeting catfishing and high divorce rates has learned to be wary, to trust but verify when it comes to matters of the heart.

Schembri can’t blame people. She knows firsthand how calamitous the consequences of a toxic relationship can be: In 2001, she was hired by Ted Ammon, an investment banker in the middle of a messy divorce and custody battle, to dig up dirt on his estranged wife’s new boyfriend. Days before the divorce was to be finalized, Ammon was bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton, New York, home by the boyfriend, an electrician named Daniel Pelosi, who is now doing 25 to life in the state’s Attica prison.

“That was awful,” she said. “That was like, I don’t want to be in this business, I don’t want to do this anymore.” It’s the case that has stuck with her more than any other, and it’s why she now avoids nasty divorces or custody cases.

“It took me a long time to recover from that,” she said.

Schembri doesn’t do much surveillance anymore. (As she put it: “I’m 61 years old. I can’t sit in cars waiting for people to come out of buildings.”) For in-person jobs, she usually contracts out to a team. But as technology advances, those cases are becoming few and far between.

When once she would sit in her car outside a person’s building all day, now she can stick a camera to a lamp post and monitor her target from the comfort of her desk. And as cameras have increased in quality and connectivity, they’ve also decreased in size: The ones her team uses, Schembri said, are the size of a pencil eraser and can easily stick on the lid of a coffee cup.

And it’s not just the latte on an adjacent table that you should be aware of.

“People walk around with their phones all the time,” she said. “You can just film something with your cellphone, and not only is the footage recognized even in the federal courts as legitimate, but you can download it and it’s time-stamped.”

So, with the advances in tech, and the ease of using Google and social media, why would someone need to hire a sleuth?

Schembri understands the skepticism. But whether the information people find with a few taps is good or bad, she said, is a question often best left to someone with decades of experience.

“Social media can be a rabbit hole,” she said.

A good private eye, she added, should possess a dogged fastidiousness and a well-honed sense for when a story does not add up — both traits that come in handy when separating the shiny cyber facade from the truth. Meaning, you can’t believe everything you and your friends dig up over a round of margaritas.

While the cases and techniques may have changed, Schembri approaches her work much like she always has.

“You have to let the documents tell you the truth,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

This Investigator Used to Stake Out Women. Now, She Tails Men Online.

(Past Tense)

After Ed Dwight’s journey to become the first African-American in space ended, Maj. Robert H. Lawrence Jr. was selected, on June 30, 1967, for the Defense Department’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. But on Dec. 8 of that year, he was training another pilot when their F-104 Starfighter jet crashed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Lawrence was killed.

When the Nixon administration canceled the program, many of the astronauts under age 35 — which Lawrence would have been — transferred to NASA, where they all went on to fly space shuttles. It would be 16 years after Lawrence fell from the sky before one of those shuttles would take an African-American beyond Earth.

At a ceremony honoring Lawrence 50 years after his death, Robert D. Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center, said: “Major Lawrence truly was a hero. He took that first step setting the stage for what was to come.” These are the African-American men and women who came next.

Guion S. Bluford Jr.

In 1983, Bluford became the first African American to make it to space, aboard the Challenger space shuttle. A retired Air Force colonel today, he flew three additional shuttle missions.

Frederick D. Gregory

Gregory, now a retired Air Force colonel, became the first African American to pilot a shuttle mission, in 1985, and the first to command a shuttle mission, in 1989. He became deputy administrator of NASA in 2002.

Ronald E. McNair

A physicist who specialized in lasers, McNair flew his first mission in 1984. On Jan. 28, 1986, he and six other astronauts died when the Challenger exploded over Cape Canaveral.

Charles F. Bolden Jr.

Bolden, a retired major general, started in the Marine Corps before becoming an astronaut. After flying four missions, he became the administrator of NASA — the 12th person to lead the agency and the first African American to do so.

Mae C. Jemison

Jemison, a physician and engineer, was the first African American woman in space. On her single mission, in 1992, she conducted bone cell research while completing 127 orbits of Earth.

Bernard A. Harris Jr.

Harris, the first African American to do a spacewalk, flew two missions, as a mission specialist in 1993 and a payload commander in 1995. Before he went to space, he conducted research on how human bodies adapt to extended spaceflight.

Joan E. Higginbotham

Higginbotham helped oversee 53 shuttle launches before going to space herself. Her mission, in 2006, was the first to include two African American astronauts (the other was Robert L. Curbeam Jr.).

Leland D. Melvin

An engineer and former professional football player (he was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys but was injured before he could play an NFL game), Melvin worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center before becoming an astronaut.

Winston E. Scott

Scott was a captain in the Navy, flying helicopters and fighter jets before heading to space. Over the course of two missions, he performed three spacewalks and traveled roughly 10.2 million miles.

Stephanie D. Wilson

Wilson worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before joining the astronaut program. As a robotic-arm operator on three spaceflights, she oversaw spacewalk support and the transfer of more than 15,000 pounds of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station.

Robert L. Curbeam Jr.

Curbeam was a captain in the Navy before being selected for the astronaut program. He flew three missions and performed seven spacewalks before going on to work in NASA administration, where he oversaw spacecraft communications and astronaut safety.

Michael P. Anderson

On his second mission, Anderson and six other astronauts were killed when the space shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas, just 16 minutes before its scheduled landing, on Feb. 1, 2003. Before joining NASA, Anderson was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.

Yvonne Darlene Cagle

Cagle was a colonel in the Air Force who provided emergency rescue support for space shuttle missions before joining NASA. While she completed astronaut training, she never flew, working instead in research and administration.

Benjamin Alvin Drew Jr.

Drew went to NASA from the Air Force, where he was a colonel. In 2011, on his second mission, he became the 200th person to walk in space and the last African American to fly onboard a space shuttle.

Robert L. Satcher Jr.

Satcher was an orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago before becoming an astronaut. He flew one mission to the International Space Station before leaving NASA to pursue cancer research.

Jeanette J. Epps

Before joining NASA, Epps served in the CIA for seven years. While she has not yet flown a mission, she has served as a crew support astronaut for two expeditions and as communications lead in mission control.

Victor J. Glover Jr.

Glover, a commander in the Navy, was working as a legislative fellow in the U.S. Senate when he joined NASA. He is training for a flight on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and a mission aboard the International Space Station.

Jessica Watkins

Watkins, a geologist and former member of the USA Rugby Women’s Sevens National Team, was selected as part of NASA’s most recent astronaut class. She started training in August 2017 and is expected to graduate in the coming months, at which point she will be eligible for a flight assignment.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/african-american-astronauts.html" id="6108c12b-78d0-3492-ab9f-b453bfe4cdb2">The New York Times</a>.

Here Are the 18 African-American Astronauts

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Jennifer Harlan

Articles written by the author

This Investigator Used to Stake Out Women. Now, She Tails Men Online.

Here Are the 18 African-American Astronauts