This American Life fans should recall the recent story of the 'P.I. Moms,' which aired last fall, and which was based on a story originally broken in Diablo Magazine. It involved a totally sketchy private investigator named Christopher Butler from Concord who hired East Bay housewives to help investigate people, and who was subsequently featured on Dr. Phil and the Today show and then he did this crazy thing where he reenacted investigations and/or created them wholesale for the Diablo journalist, Peter Crooks, unbeknownst to him, and then tried to scare a teenager straight by pretending to arrest him on drug charges, and stealing his ecstasy to resell it. Well, Butler's back in the news this week as the lawsuits against him are mounting from ex-husbands whose wives hired Butler to entrap them into DUIs.
On behalf of women going through divorces, Butler allegedly hired seductive women to get the husbands drunk, then get the behind the wheel, and Butler would then tip off a police officer he was colluding with to pull them over for a DUI in order to give his clients an upper hand in divorce and child custody proceedings. Butler confessed to orchestrating these arrests, but his alleged co-conspirator, former Danville cop Stephen Tanabe, has denied any involvement. At least three men are currently suing Butler in civil court over the incidents, and two of them had their DUI charges dismissed in court.
Meanwhile, as the CC Times reports, "the U.S. attorney's office is pursuing a separate case against Butler and former Central Contra Costa Narcotics Enforcement Team Commander Norman Wielsch on a range of felony charges, including selling stolen drug evidence." That case stems from a situation in which Butler entrapped and kidnapped a teenage kid in order to "scare him straight," only to steal all his ecstasy and Xanax without turning him in. Then, he and Wielsch got deeper into the business of reselling drug evidence out of a Contra Costa County drug locker, including methamphetamines, marijuana, steroids, and prescription pills.
Anyway, interesting guy! The screenplay, no doubt, is pending.
