pany’sLAoffice.He’sfunny,high-energy,
and talks nonstop, like an undercov-
er-world version of Michael Scott from
The Office.
“I’m a crazy genius,” he says. “When I’m
in the office sometimes I take off my
pants and I’m carrying a sword. I play
country music and I get my creative juic-
es flowing. I get everyone talking and
j o k i n g .”
Jason, whom Rob calls the “disciplinar-
ian” to his class-clown CEO, runs the
firm’s operational side from Dallas, help-
ing oversee the company’s 10 employees
and more than 50 operatives worldwide.
The company’s been headquartered in
North Dallas since 2008 when the eco-
nomic downturn sent them in search of
an up-and-coming city with a strong lo-
cal economy. A few years later, Rob and
his wife moved back to Los Angeles, and
Jason stayed on in Dallas.
Six years Rob’s junior, he’s more even-
keeled, weighing each word. “I’m defi-nitely more grounded,” Jason says. “He’s
the one who rushes into somewhere and
I’m the one who pulls his collar back and
says, ‘Let’s look and make sure there’s
nothing dangerous there’.”
When Rob married his wife, Nastassia,
he’d use a trick from his parents’ playbook,
taking her with him to stores where hewander street markets and comic con-
ventions, convincing vendors to reveal
their fake Gucci bags and bootleg Star
Trek video cassettes.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Jason
had graduated to high-octane enforce-
ment raids with his dad. Along with a van-
guard of off-duty law enforcement
officers, the skinny Converse-footed
teen spent his formative years jump-
ing out of vans and busting open
locks in Chinatown.
“The ’80s and ’90s was the wild
Wild West,” Jason says. Shopkeep-
ers would employ “thugs” to pro-
tect their stores from street gangs,
adding to the tension of the raids.
“We had people coming at us
from behind the register with
homemade weapons like you’d see
in prison. We had the street erupt
during one raid; they were coming
from all directions, throwing quarter
sticks of dynamite under police cars,
running at us with chairs. It was a crazy
t i m e .”
Despite the chaos, Jason never felt in
real danger. Robert was always looking
out, even when they weren’t on assign-
ment. Jason remembers a walk the two
of them took through housing projects
one night as they headed from his fa-
ther’s office near the West Side Highway
to the apartment he stayed in when he
worked in the city.
“[Dad] thought somebody was following
us,” Jason recalls. “He pulled me behind a
barrier and he had his pistol in his pocket
pointing out, and we just waited for the guy
to pass us. As a teenager you don’t think
about that stuff; it’s just your dad.”
L
IKE his elder brother, Jason
eventually veered from the
family way of life in search of
regimen and order. Instead of
Bible college, he enlisted in the
navy where he spent more
than a decade serving in the US and Eu-
rope. But on weekends and holidays he
always drifted home, joining his dad for
enforcement raids during his downtime.
Jason says this line of work is “in his
blood”. When he came to the end of his
military career in 2006 and Rob suggest-
ed he join the burgeoning company he’d
started five years earlier in his tiny Los
Angeles apartment, working together
again felt right.
Today,Rob(47)worksoutofthe com-
(Frompreviouspage)‘You have to trick people
into showing you what’s
under the table’
spected counterfeit goods were
shed behind the counter.
Having a guy walk in and ask
a Chanel purse isn’t the right
file,” Rob observes. “My wife
uld come in wearing her fancy
clothes,designer this and designer that.
She fit the part, and she’d ask if he had
anything nicer.”
These days, the sting operations have
gone from the streets to the web. Much
of Rob’s work is done online and on the
phone. His secret weapon is his knack for
engaging with people. There’s an art to
finding out what people are hiding, he
says. “You have to trick them into show-
ing you what’s under the table. For that
you need charm.”
He’ll adopt an alter ego and call up sus-
pected counterfeiters – say, someone
hawking designer watches or handbags –
tricking them into giving out information
about their location, merchandise or other
details to help build a case against them.
All you need to do is ask the right questions
and keep them talking, he says.
“You come up with a reason to call
someone that’s different than the pur-
pose you have; you just chitchat until the
right time comes and bam, you hit them
with that question. I’ll bury it in the con-
versation, and afterwards they’re proba-
bly not even going to remember they
mentioned it to me.”
Once, hunting down informationon
anunreleasedtechproductfora patent
infringementcase,heturnedtoCraigs-
list, where one of the company’s employ-
ees was selling his bike. Rob picked up
the phone. “Half an hour into the conver-
sation we’re chatting about everything
else and I got him to talk about work. He
was able to give me enough information
to take me to the next level. He had noOVE: In 2016, the Holmes broth-
s celebrated 10 years of working
gether at IPCybercrime. LEFT:
ther and sons in 1991 (from left)
on, Robert Snr, Rob and his wife,
stassia.82 | 29 AUGUST 2019 you.co.zaYOU NEWS