Who We Are

One could trace Talia’s nearly decade-long career as an investigator all the way back to her childhood years spent reading her mother’s collection of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. Since then, Talia has cultivated a natural curiosity, a keen sense of skepticism and a strong desire to keep digging for the truth, which have allowed her to successfully serve a variety of clients’ investigative needs.

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Talia first met many of her colleagues at 221B Partners at the Chicago-based security and investigations consulting firm Hillard Heintze, where she began her investigative career as an analyst and worked her way up to becoming an associate director. There, she supported and later led a wide range of cases including pre-investment due diligence, litigation support and threat intelligence gathering to serve clients including law firms, investment firms, HR and security teams, and high net worth families. She then spent two years working as a senior consultant at Control Risks, a London-based global risk consultancy, where she further expanded her skills by managing complex, multi-jurisdictional investigations, asset traces and threat work.

Prior to entering the corporate investigations space, Talia contributed to award-winning investigative projects at local news outlets including The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times and The Chicago Reporter, where she conducted interviews, reviewed legal records and summarized key findings for ground-breaking stories concerning environmental issues and police misconduct. Talia earned her Bachelor of Science degree in English and her Master of Science degree in investigative journalism from Northwestern University. She is certified as a financial crime specialist (CFCS) and is a member of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP). Talia is also a member of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Justice Council for the Center on Wrongful Convictions, through which she has provided pro bono investigative services in support of wrongful conviction cases.

When she takes a break from sleuthing, you can find Talia trying to keep up with her book club reading, exploring Chicago’s vibrant food scene and collecting as many stamps on her passport as possible.

Like his colleagues, Chris’ career path was influenced by early exposure to fictional problem solvers including Encyclopedia Brown, The Three Investigators, Sherlock Holmes and John Grisham’s protagonists. When he wasn’t busy reading, you could find Chris tinkering: He sent his first email over a 14.4 kbps modem, was providing “tech support” to family members by first grade and, years later, programming his TI-83+ graphing calculator to do his homework in high school. As an investigator, he has been able to merge these interests.

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Combining a passion for identifying and unraveling clues and solving puzzles with technology led Chris down a path focusing not only on traditional due diligence, background and corporate investigations but also open source (OSINT) research, analysis and investigations utilizing technology when and wherever possible. From geolocation of photos and video to writing Python scripts to web scraping to link analysis of thousands of data points, he has put these skills to use to collect, analyze and visualize data for countless investigations.

Chris met Jennifer at Hillard Heintze where he learned from her and went on to manage the firm’s largest, high-volume due diligence client and team encompassing over 1,000 background investigations per year. He also provided investigative and OSINT support for complex investigations, threat investigations and security assessments for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, private equity, faith-based and non-profit organizations, government entities, academic institutions, private clients and family offices.

Earlier in his career, Chris oversaw nationwide surveillance and background investigations as the operations manager for an insurance investigation firm. There he oversaw a team of background and field investigators nationwide and acted as liaison between clients, attorneys and staff investigators.

Chris holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Law Enforcement and Justice Administration from Western Illinois University, is member of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, the Federal Bureau of Investigation InfraGard and is Open Source Certified (OSC) by the OSMOSIS Institute.

In the practice of corporate investigations, Andrew discovered an unanticipated outlet for the tools he nurtured and relied on as a restless expatriate and journalist more than two decades ago. 221B Partners’ clients benefit from his tenacious curiosity hitched to his storytelling ability. He combines these with the professional and interpersonal improvisational skills, all of which were developed as he navigated the fluid and shifting social and economic landscape in Russia, where Andrew began his career.

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Like many practitioners in the corporate investigations industry, which a former boss and mentor aptly characterized as a bit more art than science, Andrew started out in journalism. He worked, first as an intern and later as a bureau manager, in the back office of the editorial operations at Time magazine in Moscow, Russia and Chicago in 1990s. He transitioned from journalism to corporate investigations when he joined Kroll, where he met and shared an office with 221B Partners’ Jennifer Mackovjak.

Andrew likes to apply his search, analytic, and composition skills to solve challenging research propositions and Gordian knot cases that present seemingly complicated and intersecting dynamics. These include multi-jurisdictional asset searches involving layered corporate structures and multiple corporate and individual actors; esoteric queries on behalf of investors whose information objectives cannot always be sourced to discrete public records; and, corporate contests where the identification of governance issues in the backgrounds of company directors and director nominees is of critical importance.

Andrew also has deep experience conducting pre-transactional M&A due diligence, business and market intelligence research, and background investigations in support of clients in litigation. During his investigations career, he has worked at Kroll, FTI Consulting, and Hillard Heintze. Andrew is a fluent Russian speaker and reader. He graduated from the University of Missouri – Columbia with a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Studies and holds a Master of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Andrew is a licensed private investigator in Illinois. A kinesthetic thinker, Andrew can be found noodling complex issues on long runs and bike rides, which also allows him to indulge fully in his love of sweets.

Throughout his 25-plus-year career, Craig has conducted and led a wide variety of domestic and international investigations in the corporate and public arenas. Whether he is conducting due diligence on executives, vetting potential business partners, or investigating misconduct of an elected government official, Craig leverages his interviewing expertise, along with his deep knowledge of traditional and obscure public records and open-source information, to connect the dots so clients can make confident decisions.

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Before joining 221B Partners, Craig spent 15 years with the global investigations firm The Mintz Group, most recently as a managing director, where he specialized in transactional and enhanced executive due diligence for private equity and corporate clients, as well as complex litigation-related investigations for law firms. Prior to Mintz, Craig spent nearly seven years in the banking industry, where he rose to vice president of a private bank and led internal and external investigations at more than 30 affiliate banks.

Outside of his corporate work, Craig’s wide-ranging experience includes investigating accusations of public corruption into a sitting U.S. Attorney General, investigating the trafficking of ghost guns into major U.S. cities, and working on behalf of the Inspector General of a major public school system to investigate complex matters including bid rigging, prevailing wage violations and minority front companies.

His passion for investigations also led Craig into the world of mistaken identity and wrongful conviction cases, where for the past 15 years he has worked with several organizations, including Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, to re-investigate murders on behalf of individuals believed to have been wrongly incarcerated. Craig is also a guest lecturer at Northwestern University’s law school, where he teaches students how to prepare for and interview witnesses in wrongful convictions cases.

Craig received a Bachelor of Science degree in criminal justice from Illinois State University, is an Illinois licensed private investigator, a graduate of the Chicago FBI’s Citizens’ Academy, and a former member of the Chicago Crime Commission.

Rebecca has dedicated her career to uncovering hard-to-find information, asking the right questions, and writing about complex topics, first as a news reporter and later as a professional investigator.

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She joins 221B Partners after spending more than seven years at Hillard Heintze, where she worked her way up from Senior Analyst to Associate Director and later Director. There, she managed the firm’s largest litigation support client; investigated historical allegations of wrongdoing for various clients; conducted and managed due diligence investigations; and provided investigative support for threat assessments.

Prior to joining the corporate investigations industry, Rebecca worked as a journalist. She likes to say she started her journalism career in the fourth grade as the co-founder of a neighborhood newspaper called Kids News. She began her first “real” journalism job in 2009 as a reporter for the Killeen Daily Herald — a daily newspaper near Fort Hood, Texas, one of the largest military bases in the world. There, she contributed to the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the November 5, 2009, mass shooting at Fort Hood. Rebecca later worked at The Austin Bulldog, a nonprofit investigative news site in Austin, Texas, where she conducted in-depth background investigations on candidates running for a seat on the Austin City Council. In 2013, Rebecca reported on national security issues in Washington D.C. as the Center for Public Integrity’s first McCormick National Security Reporting Fellow. Her work was published by Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Salon, and others.

Rebecca earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism, with a Public Relations focus, from Baylor University and a Master of Science degree in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is also a Certified Fraud Examiner.

Rebecca is a member of the Justice Council for the Center on Wrongful Convictions and has provided pro bono investigative services for wrongful conviction cases.

Outside of work, you may find Rebecca creating colorful pieces of chalk art in neighborhoods around Chicago or spending time with her equally curious three-year-old daughter, who has already declared she wants to be a detective someday.

There were moments when Jennifer was investigating narcotics trafficking and violent crimes, insurance fraud, identity theft, homicides and arresting suspects in major crimes cases in New York City as a senior detective investigator in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office when she would stop and remember her bookshelf as a young girl in Cleveland. Lined across it were back-to-back copies of books detailing the heroics and imaginative sleuthing of Leroy Brown, the eponymous hero of the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries which inspired her as a young reader.

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For her corporate clients today, Jennifer finds her work locating people striving to remain hidden, untangling associations and actors across a complex web of fraud, or researching the ownership archeology of a parcel of land back to the 19th century, as compelling as her decade in law enforcement in New York City. Her combination of crime fighting experience with her 15 years in public records research and corporate investigations has made Jennifer a unique and indispensable resource for clients in need of a real-time, integrated approach to responding to threats to their interests and well-being.

Prior to founding 221B Partners, Jennifer was a senior vice president and segment leader for the investigations practice at Hillard Heintze, where she supported the needs of clients ranging from global law firms, multinational corporations, private equity, investment banks, faith-based organizations, nonprofits, government agencies and family offices. Before Hillard Heintze, Jennifer worked for Kroll, where she shared an office with 221B Partners’ Andrew Keith.

In her 25 years’ experience in the public and private sectors, Jennifer has worked on and managed corporate misconduct, fraud, pre-transactional and investigative due diligence, asset searches, harassment, threat investigations and litigation support cases, in addition to the variety of criminal matters. She has significant experience conducting international investigations both from her days in law enforcement and for her corporate clients.

Jennifer holds a bachelor’s degree in Criminology from Marquette University and a Master of Public Administration degree from DePaul University. Through the Innocence Project and Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions, Jennifer has provided investigative support on a number of wrongful conviction cases. She is a member of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, Association of Workplace Investigators, American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), Society for Human Resource Management and Council of International Investigators. Jennifer is a licensed private investigator in Illinois and holds the Certified Fraud Examiner designation.

Fortunate to have landed at an investigations firm early on in her professional career, Amanda was taught and mentored by some of the best investigators in the industry, including 221B founding partners, Jennifer and Andrew.

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Whether working on a complex investigation or a straightforward due diligence, Amanda utilizes her investigative skills developed for more than a decade to comb through and analyze the public record. She combines creative thinking, attention to detail and intuition to gather information in order to assist clients with making informed business decisions.

Amanda joined 221B from Berkeley Research Group, where she worked as a senior managing consultant with the firm’s Global Investigations practice. Prior to BRG, Amanda worked for Kroll as a senior director and Hillard Heintze as an investigative research analyst. In these roles, Amanda has worked on countless internal investigations, pre-transactional due diligence matters, asset searches and litigation support cases. She has conducted investigative work for major law firms, private equity companies, financial institutions, government agencies and regulatory bodies, among others.

Over the course of her career, Amanda has uncovered extensive hidden assets, revealed the true identities of individuals using alias names and her thorough research has helped clients avoid investing with crooked individuals.

Amanda holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Oneonta. She is a licensed private investigator in Illinois and holds the Certified Fraud Examiner designation.

While others run from complexity, Adam races toward it. In a career spent in corporate investigations and journalism, he has always embraced the challenge of understanding and communicating the deeper causes and dynamics at play in any given situation.

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This natural curiosity and drive to understand has served him well during his seven years as a professional investigator, first with Chicago-based Hillard Heintze, where he worked under Jennifer Mackovjak, and now with 221B Partners. As a Director in its Investigations practice, Adam managed and conducted litigation support, pre-transaction due diligence, background, threat, business intelligence and internal investigations for clients that included private equity firms, law firms, corporations, faith-based organizations and high-net-worth families. Cases ranged from quick-turn investigations taking just a few days to multi-year litigation support and everything in between.

Prior to joining the world of corporate investigations, Adam spent more than two decades in journalism, writing and reporting for newspapers, news magazines, websites and documentary television. He spent nine years as an informational graphics reporter at the Chicago Tribune, analyzing and presenting data and research in support of some of the paper’s highest-profile investigative and national news stories. He also taught journalism as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. After leaving newspapers, Adam spent nearly four years as a financial writer for investment research firm Morningstar.

Adam holds a master’s of journalism degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s in political science and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When not investigating for 221B Partners, Adam can be found spending time with his family, strumming on a guitar, and cheering on his beloved White Sox.