The Comma Sutra: For Private investigators, Punctuation Can Be a Special Friend

Contrary to what many might believe about a day in the life of a corporate investigator, it isn’t all secret spy stuff, and it can often be quite the opposite that helps us crack a case. This weekend (September 24) is National Punctuation Day, and at 221B Partners one of our special cloak-and-dagger skills is knowing that something as basic as punctuation can sometimes help in identifying a hidden asset, unknown corporate entity, new legal case naming our subject, or a notable social media post. The placement – or the lack – of punctuation can reveal a writer’s “tic,” change the meaning of a litigated business contract, or be used to try to pull the wool over an investigator’s eyes.

Comma Placement (and Hamilton’s “comma sexting”)

To put the importance of comma placement in context (one unrelated to investigations), consider Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius use of “comma sexting” in his Broadway hit Hamilton. In the song “Take a Break,” the audience hears about a letter Alexander Hamilton wrote to his wife’s sister Angelica Schuyler, with whom he had been flirting for years. Angelica sings the following about the letter – and her quandary over the placement of a single comma:

“In a letter I received from you two weeks ago I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase. It changed the meaning—did you intend this? One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days. It said, ‘My dearest, Angelica,” with a comma after dearest. You’ve written, ‘My dearest, Angelica…’”

Without the comma, the word “dearest” is part of a common salutation, but with it it becomes a term of endearment, leaving Angelica to wonder if she – and not her sister – is the one Hamilton truly loves.

Another example of comma placement making a big difference is seen in a 2014 legal dispute in Maine involving the use of the so-called Oxford comma, which, if used, is placed after the penultimate item when writing out a list of items. The case involved three truck drivers who sued the dairy company they worked for, seeking four years of overtime pay they said they’d been denied. An appeals court awarded the drivers $5 million after ruling the relevant state law was unclear based on the placement of the comma (Maine’s legislature has since cleared up this issue through the use of none other than semicolons).

The Punctuation “Tic”

In one internal investigation we worked on, an employee suspected of stealing more than $1 million from his company had what might be called a punctuation “tic.” The fraud was made possible, in part, through the creation of fake vendor invoices that the employee submitted to the company and which the company paid (not realizing that the employee was siphoning the money). The suspect created letterhead for a number of phony but seemingly legitimate companies as part of the scheme, but when doctoring the invoices the employee’s punctuation tic came out (periods after each letter in a state abbreviation), and over and over again he left the same mistake as his punctuation fingerprint. It was the same punctuation tic reflected in his everyday writing in company emails, so it wasn’t very difficult to make the connection. Our investigation went much further than simply this punctuation tic, but it was certainly nice corroborating evidence to find.

The Search Strategy

Another area in which punctuation takes on a crucial investigative role is online searching.

In our line of work as investigators and researchers, the devil is in the details – details a human might notice even if a computer does not. We find these small details not just in our review and analysis of documents, but in the methodology of our searches. As investigators, we use a variety of search tools, including the public records database behemoths Lexis and Westlaw, wherein we sometimes build Boolean search strings nearly as long as this blog. If we don't search for information the right way – including using the proper punctuation or leaving a character out – we might miss something.

For example, some court portals require the use of an asterisk (as an extender) at the end of the party’s name when searching records online. Of course, many of these sites offer no notes or instructions for the user about search language and search operators, but we’ve been doing this long enough to know to search multiple ways, including this seemingly unnecessary character. So if we are searching for civil lawsuits naming ABC Company LLC and we simply search “ABC Company” without the “LLC” some court records sites will show no hits, whereas if we search “ABC Company*” we will get hits!

Also, if we are looking for undisclosed or hidden assets, or at a like-sounding company name used to commit fraud, we’d better be sure our research picks up numerous versions of the company name (e.g. with or without a comma before LLC and with or without periods after all the letters in LLC (L.L.C.)).

I also know of at least one court site where, if you happened to mistakenly type a blank space after the word “Company” in the example above you would not get any hits that otherwise should appear (it reads the space as a character in the name). This happens more than one would think, across hundreds and hundreds of publicly searchable government records websites and platforms that each have their own nuanced search language yet don’t explain to the user what that language is. This is why experience doing this type of work is key, as we see almost daily through such search nuances.

As you can see, proper punctuation isn’t just an important tool in writing. It’s important in research and investigative work as well, so we don’t take these commas, colons and periods for granted. After all, paying attention to them just might help us solve a crime.