The instant you lay eyes on the guy, you know exactly how Sherman "Tank" Jones got the nickname. The resemblance is remarkable.
With the body of a bulldozer and head like a wrecking ball -- let's just say you'd be ill advised to diss his mama.
Yet a big part of his job requires being invisible. Him and his size-15 alligator shoes.
As a private investigator, Tank Jones sees what isn't meant to be seen, hears what isn't meant to be heard, knows what is supposed to be secret. He's pretty sure, for example, that a client's boyfriend who ducked out the door at 5:30 for an early-morning run didn't mean to be videotaped indulging in a little side-dish activity on top of a picnic table in Elderberry Park.
"In the beginning, I used to say, 'I can't believe they did that,' " Jones said. "I don't say that anymore."
After 47 years on this planet, and more than 20 years as a "private eye," there's one thing Jones is absolutely certain of: Love can make people really, really stupid.
With a degree in criminal justice from the University of Alaska, Jones has a day job doing criminal and civil investigations, mostly for defense attorney Rex Butler. The fooling-around stuff, he does on the side.
"Is YOUR partner, husband or wife CHEATING?" hollers the ad he runs in the Anchorage Press. "Having an AFFAIR or FLING? Let us uncover the truth. Tank Jones Investigations: Discreet, confidential."
Suspicious boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives keep this man busy.
"Right now," he says, "I can't hardly keep up with the demand."
Jones charges $65 to $175 an hour, with those higher rates kicking in once he has to travel outside the Anchorage area, stay in motels and rack up other expenses.
Before taking a case, he says, he asks potential clients why they're suspicious, why they don't just come out and ask. Sometimes he'll give suggestions on how to gather evidence on their own.
If they decide to hire him anyway, he'll make an appointment for a consultation. More often than he likes, once they sit down and start talking there's no shutting them up.
"People go into their sex lives deeper than ... it's more than I want to know," Jones said.
Judging strictly from his caseload, women cheat more than men, and they're harder to catch.
"I'm gonna tell you something, doing this for over 20 years, women are very, very good. Oh, yeah. Men, we don't have a clue. We're too busy beating our chest like King Kong."
Men cook up the dumbest excuses too. Like the guy who claimed his affair with an old girlfriend was for charitable purposes, to keep her from committing suicide.
And the lamest lies: That man seen with another woman? "Wasn't me, just someone who looks exactly like me."
CHEATS AND LIARS
In a shared office at Butler's Fourth Avenue law firm, dressed in a sleek gold suit, a diamond pinkie ring the size of a postage stamp and a gold watch so big it would take him straight to the bottom should he fall in the Inlet, Jones ran through a few of his more memorable cases:
The suspicious bride-to-be who learned her fiance had a boyfriend.
The traveling husband who found out his wife didn't have a boyfriend after all. She had three.
The woman who fainted when Jones discovered two weeks before the wedding that her fiance was doing, let's just say, The Funky Chicken without clothes, with one of her best girlfriends.
That wasn't even the memorable part, Jones said. The memorable part was they got married anyway. He saw their wedding announcement in the newspaper.
I'm like, 'Oh my good? ness,' " he said.
When it comes to men who cheat, it's typically their lack of organizational skill that nails them, Jones said. Like the guy who faithfully got both his wife and his secret lover spendy "undergarments" every Christmas, until one year when he mixed them up. When the wife opened her present, she found undies not only in the wrong size but the wrong gender. The boyfriend was equally dissatisfied with his Christmas gift, and showed up at a family dinner to return the bra and panties.
All this exposure to the tawdry side of love takes a toll on one's personal life. Jones is single, and he thinks that's for the best.
"You know, if I got into a relationship I probably would investigate that person," he said. "I probably have. Now, I won't admit whether I have or not. But I probably would, and that's not good."
When doing infidelity work, Jones may pull the old hidden-camera-in-the-baseball-cap trick. Or the situation may require a stakeout, sitting with cameras ready in a parked car for hour after mind-numbing hour. Jones says he never gets bored.
"I love surveillance. I could be sitting there for six hours and nothing happens. But that seventh hour ..."
The way he describes it, it's like getting hungrier and hungrier the longer you sit there, then suddenly a steak dinner appears on the dashboard.
His best score?
It wasn't an infidelity case but involved the same fundamentals -- lying, deceiving and performance art.
Jones was hired by an insurance firm to follow a guy who'd won a large settlement after being injured on the job and claiming to be disabled by chronic back pain.
"So they hired me to watch this guy," Jones said. "I watched him for maybe a month and he was not moving a hair. He would come out, get the mail and go back in the house.
"And this one particular day I'm watching him, he comes out with luggage and I follow him to the airport. He's catching a flight. So I find out what flight he's on and I book that flight too."
Somehow Jones ended up sitting right next to him and struck up a friendly conversation.
"I said, 'Hey, where you going?' He's going to California. I was like, 'Hey, I'm going to California too.'
"Then he said, 'I'm going to a volleyball tournament at the beach.' I said, 'Really? You going to participate?' He said, 'Yeah, we're going for the championship.' I was like, 'I would loooove to see something like that. I've only seen it on TV. If you want me to, I'll take pictures.'
"So I went to the tournament and this guy was the center. I mean he was spiking and falling on the sand. ...
"So I got all these pictures and I gave him copies.
"I gave him copies and came back and gave copies to the insurance company.
"Oh yeah, that was some luck."
Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney.
