So You Want To Be A Private Eye?

So You Want To Be A Private Eye?

Bruno Strebel spends his days tracking missing persons, insurance scammers and white-collar criminals. The former cop founded a detective school that teaches others to do the same.

By Valérie de Graffenried

LE TEMPS/Worldcrunch

ZURICH — He takes out an old leather briefcase and points to a tiny hole on the side the size of a pin head. “That’s where the camera is. Invisible from the outside,” says 60-year-old Bruno Strebel, head of Zurich’s Private Detective Academy, “the only school of this type in Switzerland.” This diminutive man is also the chairman of the Professional Detectives Association, and his cold blue eyes try to assess people quickly. He weighs every word he speaks.

We’re meeting at his academy’s offices in the Zurich neighborhood of Höngg. A former airport police officer, Strebel became a detective in 1977. “A man was watching me at my workplace,” he explains. “One day, he came up to me, told me I could be doing much better and gave me his detective card. A few weeks later, intrigued, I called him, and we started working together.”