Hi,

Last week I ended up at a friend’s birthday in Auckland. There are good birthday parties, and there are bad birthday parties. This was a good one. Not a dud human in sight.

At some point in the evening, I ended up in a conversation with someone I’d never met before, Daniel — and Daniel told me a story that was utterly engrossing.

Various people tried to drunkenly interrupt us, as people tend to do at parties — but I wasn’t having it. I was engrossed. An outsider would have looked at this busy room of moving bodies and just seen the two of us locked in conversation for about 45 minutes.

So imagine me delight when Dan told me he’d written this whole story down, but never published it anywhere (for reasons that become apparent in his story).

Imagine my delight when I found out Dan loved Webworm, and would be happy for me to publish his story here.

But first, I asked Daniel to describe how this story came to be. To provide some context for the chaos that follows. This is what he said:

“My name is Daniel, I am from New Zealand. 

In 2019 I was living in Los Angeles and had a gig as an unpaid intern at the semi-prestigious Los Angeles Magazine. Once the magazine figured out I was a terrible fact-checker, but a decent writer they made a game out of sending me on strange excursions and fool’s errands so that I could write small columns about it from my quaint, antipodean perspective. I tried strange and disgusting ice cream flavours, visited haunted mausoleums with limping psychics, and drank 40-ounce Olde English Malt on the corners of South Central.

Then one day I was scammed out of almost USD $4000 in a rental fraud. I convinced the magazine to hire Brian Wolfe, Private Investigator to help me track down my scammer and bring him to justice. I had seen Brian in his appearances in Nathan For You, and his own Discovery Channel TV show Cry Wolfe and thought him tough, belligerent, and just the man for the job.

Me and Brian went on multiple adventures together, which I outlined in the picaresque article below. 

But the magazine never ran the story. Probably running a proper feature article written by an intern, would have set a dangerous precedent that may have toppled the magazine.

So for years this story sat on my computer, and was nothing more than the best party tale in my repertoire. I am grateful it is finally seeing the light of day.

It is fucking insane, but I swear it is all true.”

The Crook, The PI, and the Kiwi Journalist Stuck in the Middle.

Part One: A serious, bonafide, knucklehead.

by Daniel Smith.

It began with a knock on the door.

Silence, shuffling, before a man bursts into the hallway like a crazed jack-in-the-box. His eyes bulge and his arms pinwheel wildly. He wears a dirty white singlet covered in paw prints. The culprit of the prints, a rabid pomeranian, yaps aggressively from between his heels, kept at bay by a leash wound tight around his hand.

This person had just burst from what I had assumed was my house.

“Are you James’s friend?” I asked nervously.

The man jerked the Pomeranian into submission, then blurted dismissively, “You’ve been scammed.”

In 2019, I joined that shamefaced and angry club that many Angelenos blunder into; I became a victim of a rental scam. 

The scam was an elaborate property con by a man named James Pamphile. He had seemed nice enough. He was tall and athletic, who told me in a soft voice it was his dream to open a vegan restaurant. I think that’s what got me. He was a vegan. In what world could such an upstanding moral citizen be a scammer?

He showed us around the apartment with a quiet nonchalance. The rent was good but not suspiciously so. He had given us keys which worked, and presented us with a lease that seemed to check out. We also had to move out of our sublet in a week and had exhausted all other options. So to secure the place we paid him the first month and bond. 

I found out the rental was a scam, when after days of no response I went to re-test the keys. After knocking on what I thought was my door, I was met with the wild-eyed man and his rabid Pomeranian. 

The real owner had legitimately rented his apartment to Pamphile for two weeks, then arrived home to find a stranger naked on his couch and in this way discovered his apartment had been used in a property scam. 

He allowed the stranger to get dressed, kicked him out, and thought that it was the end of it. But then came a whole train of people knocking on his door, thinking they had rented his house. I, a bumbling New Zealander, was only one of five people caught up in the fraud.

I was angry, but the police and the bank said there was nothing they could do. So seeking retribution, I took my troubles to a man who means business, Brian Wolfe, P.I.

Brian Wolfe speaks hard and fast in a tough Boston brogue. I first heard of him through his appearance on the comedy central show, Nathan for You, on which deadpan comedian Nathan Fielder roped unwitting business owners into trying out his zany marketing concepts. In Brian Wolfe’s case, Nathan Fielder challenged the P.I. to track him down, and attempted to bamboozle him with 11 “Nathan Fielder” doppelgangers.

Following this TV appearance Brian Wolfe finangled his own show on Discovery Channel, Cry Wolfe. The show’s press release described scenes as doing everything from “using from elaborate disguises to digging through the trash, Wolfe uses his tried-and-true P.I. tactics to uncover the reality behind his clients suspicions.” 

Brian stomps through the scenes, gruffly investigating. This was no soft-faced internet sleuthing ala Catfish. Brian Wolfe was the real deal. A hard-nosed investigator who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

This was the man for the job.

Brian Wolfe hadn’t heard of Los Angeles Magazine and was unimpressed by my credentials. He told me he was currently working on a case involving a certain Grammy award winning singer whose name rhymes with Cluno Bars, but any further details Wolfe was sworn to secrecy.

What Wolfe would say was that he had been shot over ten times, stabbed over twenty and if I wanted to embark on an investigation with him, I would have to sign a declaration to surrender my right to legal action should anything happen to me. 

The declaration, hastily concocted in my amateurish legalese read; “I, Daniel Smith, on my own volition, will attend a “ride-along” with Brian Wolfe... If anything should happen to me (such as being shot, stabbed, punched, attacked, harmed physically or emotionally etc.), then it is not the fault of Mr. Wolfe... I have no legal standing to seek recompense from Mr. Wolfe should anything go wrong. If anything goes wrong, it is my fault alone.”

This settled, we arranged to meet the next day.