It was a routine Sunday afternoon for Thomas Gilbert Sr., the founder of a multimillion-dollar hedge fund and a longtime fixture on Wall Street. After playing two strenuous rounds of tennis at the River Club, he was relaxing in his bedroom watching a football game. Three days earlier, on New Year's Day 2015, the tall, athletic financier had quietly celebrated his seventieth birthday and showed no signs of slowing down.
Next door in the living room, his petite wife, Shelley, was chatting with friends on her laptop when the doorbell rang around 3:15 p.m. It was a surprise, as they weren't expecting anyone, and their doorman usually called to announce visitors.
Shelley opened the front door to find her son, Tommy, outside, wearing a hoodie and carrying a duffel bag. It was the first time she had seen him in five months; they had a difficult relationship, and he usually kept his distance. Shelley was delighted to see him, hoping it might be an encouraging sign of a better relationship between him and his father.
?He said it was real important,? Shelley recalled. ?He wanted to talk to Dad about business. I was thrilled.?
As Tommy strolled into the apartment, he asked if his younger sister, Bess, was there. Shelley told him she was at church.
Then he said he was hungry and asked his mother to go to the store and buy him a sandwich and a Coke. He told her to come back in an hour, so he would have enough time with his father. Unsure whether they should be left alone together, Shelley offered to make him a sandwich, but Tommy insisted she go.
As his sixty-five-year-old mother laced up her sneakers to leave, she looked up at Tommy and thought, I don't like hoodies. They're a little creepy.
***
Thomas Strong Gilbert Jr. was born into a world of wealth and privilege.
He had an impeccable social pedigree, growing up in a mansion in Tuxedo Park, New York, before moving to a Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue and a town house on the Upper East Side. He had the finest education money could buy, going to the Buckley School and then Deerfield Academy, where he shone at varsity football, basketball, and baseball. A straight A student, Tommy had an IQ of 140, was fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and excelled at higher mathematics.
?He is an excellent role model for our younger students,? his Deerfield Academy college adviser wrote. ?He will only get better as he continues to mature.?
Known to everyone as Tommy, his movie star looks turned women's heads. Blond, blue-eyed, and six feet three inches tall, designer clothes framed his muscular body, carefully sculpted from daily workouts in the gym. He followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps to attend Princeton University, where he majored in economics and graduated with honors.
Like a modern-day Jay Gatsby, he moved in the rarest of social circles, the epitome of the rich, successful man-about-town. He was frequently seen in the society pages, squiring a beautiful socialite to a Manhattan black-tie event or attending a charity event in the Hamptons.
?He has the pedigree of this incredibly sophisticated person,? explained a friend. ?But the mind and the skin are two different things.?
Underneath the carefully groomed façade was a socially anxious man with a long history of drug abuse and psychiatric illness.
After leaving Princeton, his much-anticipated career in high finance had failed to ignite. He told friends he was starting a hedge fund with his own secret algorithm, even registering the name Mameluke Capital with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But after twice failing the Chartered Financial Analyst Level II exam, essential for entrée to Wall Street, he had been reduced to a series of short-lived bartending jobs and giving surfing lessons to kids.
At the age of thirty, Tommy was still being supported by his father, who paid the rent for his Manhattan apartment as well as a generous $800 weekly allowance. He also paid for his sporty Jeep, expensive club memberships, and all other expenses.
At the end of 2014, Thomas Gilbert Sr., whose Wainscott Capital Partners hedge fund was itself struggling, had started cutting his son's weekly allowance, hoping to force him to get a real job.
On the morning of Tommy's visit that fateful Sunday, he had slashed it down to just $300 a week and knew his son would not be pleased.
***
After leaving her tony Beekman Place apartment building, Shelley Gilbert walked around the block. She felt uneasy, knowing her husband and son would be discussing the latest cut in Tommy's allowance. She wondered if it had been a bad idea to leave Tommy alone with his father, in case they argued.
So turning on her heel, she headed straight back to her apartment building, taking the elevator up to the eighth floor. Nervous about disturbing them, she first listened at the door, but could not hear anything. She paced up and down the hallway, trying to make up her mind what to do.
Finally, Shelley unlocked the door with her key and walked in. There was no sign of Tommy, although she'd only been gone a few minutes.
Crime investigation is a daunting process. It involves numerous hours of tedious and meticulous gathering and analyzing of physical and trace (forensic) evidence, searching for and interviewing witnesses, as well as figuring out the motive, and, in some cases, the mod us operandi. After and only after the evidence is conclusively verified would the offender be tracked down and arrested. Circa 1990, before the World Wide Web (www) was made a public domain and became an integral part of our everyday life, crime was viewed as a tripartite affair. An affair confined between the victim and family, the perpetrator and accomplices and the investigator (police). Some may say, the mainstream media?radio, television and print?is also a party, the fourth party but their role was more reporting what was fed to them by the police. In a way, it could be said that a crime investigation was the concern of the police and the police alone.
Initially the internet was a Godsend to crime investigators. A powerful tool for them to search, communicate and share information between agencies, states, even countries?information at their fingertips. However, with the internet came the smartphone and free applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and many more. The old adage that crime was the concern of the police and the police alone was no more true. Crime reporting was now open to the general public.
In a recent incident in Malaysia, a Chief Minister was spotted by a passerby test-driving a car, an activity that should have been forbidden during our Covid-19 lockdown. The witness uploaded a video on social media, causing public outcry and forcing the police to investigate it as an offense. This is just one example of how irresponsible conduct can be investigated through civilian action.
At the same time, the internet offered offenders a new avenue, a virtual playground. Criminals shifted their activities from the streets to cyberspace. Physical traditional crimes such as identity theft, bank fraud, and scams took on new and more sophisticated digital forms as cybercrime. The internet that was initially looked upon as a powerful crime-fighting tool for the police turned into a nightmare for investigators. Predators were able to remain ?ghosts' in the virtual world, to erase their tracks, and disappear into thin air by a press of a button.
These new challenges were expected by enforcement agencies. In response they set up Anti-Cybercrime units staffed with IT experts, equipped with state-of-the-art hardware and software. Primarily, cybercrimes are investigated in cyberspace, where evidence is collected, forensically analyzed, and the offender identified. From about the year 2000, cybercrimes grew in volume, but it cannot be said to have complicated crime, since it merely took on new forms.
There is, however, another aspect of the internet?its ability to affect both investigations and public perception.
The internet opened the floodgate to Internet criminologists, psychologists, investigators, conspiracy theorists, forensic scientists, activists and what not: Netizens with smartphones and lots of time on their hands. When a crime goes viral, they post comments, upload visuals, and speculate. These include conspiracy theories, personal accusations, info-dumping and doxxing, convoluting the investigation. The police do to some extent use social media to gather information on the victim and events that led to the crime. However, when internet detectives start posting accusations, theories, false leads, and uninformed suggestions, things do get chaotic and may even mislead investigators.
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