Steve Vender, flanked by Vladimir and Estragon
Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.
Vender read Becker in college, long before he found himself hunting witnesses in crack dens. “The people in this place were already dead,” he would realize afterward. “It would just take a little while for their bodies to catch up with them.” As an investigator for defense attorneys, he often had cause to remember Becker’s analysis of the unconscious fear of death that drives us. But Vender’s own fear was conscious, situational, and well-founded. He taught himself to control it, using the adrenaline to stay alert, focused, and hypervigilant. The more greed and violence he investigated, the better he understood Becker’s assertion that “all humanly caused evil is based on man’s attempt to deny his creatureliness, to overcome his insignificance.”
Vender once felt pretty insignificant himself, rattling around as a teenager bored by schoolwork, dabbling in drugs, aimlessly studying creative writing, and hanging out, worshipful, with the Beats in San Francisco, where he became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Vender needed older role models: his dad had been an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a local character, conspicuous by his absence in his son’s life. Vender’s mother never wanted children; she preferred to gamble, having come from a “large, chaotic, colorful, and slightly criminal Italian family.” She also accumulated plenty of swag, he adds, things that “fell off a truck”—which meant they were stolen goods.
An only child, Steve savored the fun of his “vulgar and profane” extended family. Across the railroad tracks, the lawns were manicured and the lives straight, narrow, irreproachable. He found it easier to breathe in his own gritty, unpretentious world, even when he was being beaten up by a bully. At fourteen, he started reading Henry Miller, and when he came to the line, “The successful ones bored me to tears,” it rang like a struck bell.
Still, there were hazards. “Growing up, I never got a straight answer,” he recalls. “Everything was always convoluted.” When I ask why, he looks at me blankly, then admits he never thought to wonder. “They were my family,” he says with a shrug. “They were dysfunctional and degenerate and I loved them to pieces.”
He grew up gambling like his mother—but with his life instead of his cash. His career as a private investigator would start later, but everything he did prepared him, even his summer jobs as a kid. At sixteen, he worked on the boardwalk near his New Jersey home. “The interactions were very brief,” he points out, “so you had to size people up fast.” He also worked fairs and hustled in carnival booths: “As a carny, you are never, ever at a loss for words. If you lose control, you’ll never get that last quarter!”
Depressed after a romantic breakup, Vender almost joined the Marines, but instead he read everything he could find about Viet Nam, realized the government was lying, and joined the antiwar movement. His hero was Carl Bernstein, who lived in the Adams Morgan neighborhood where Vender hung out while attending George Washington University.
The paradox of his life, he says now, “was my desire to believe in things, to believe in structure, in the rule of law, and the resulting anger and bitterness that comes with understanding that things are never as they seem.” After graduation, he left the U.S. to live in Paris, where he hung out in a bar owned by Algerians—and came to see how deeply American he was. He missed his country’s raw edge; Europe seemed “clean and safe and dull.”
So he came home. Earned a master’s degree in creative writing at San Francisco State, tried journalism, got disillusioned again and started bartending. He drank too much of what he served and snorted all the cocaine his customers offered him. “I kept the party going until I entered the realm of the hideous,” he would write later.
Once in rehab, he found a job as a courier. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he moved home to take care of her. The day she died, he vowed that he would not waste the life she had given him.
Back in San Francisco, he was introduced to an investigator for the State Bar of California. They were hiring investigative assistants. He spent five years in that job, then took the exam to get his private investigator’s license and began working for criminal defense attorneys.
Without his legwork, their cases would have melted away. The lawyers stayed in the air conditioning, and he hit the streets, digging up context, witnesses, and background for homicides, hate crimes, gang wars, and people framed or bullied by police. One defense attorney cursed when Vender informed him that for once, he might actually have an innocent client. “I hate innocent clients,” the attorney snapped. “When you have an innocent guy, you have to defend him with the truth. Nobody cares about the truth. In this business, there are only stories.”
But Vender did care about the truth. And now, at the end of a career even more colorful than his family of origin, he has quite a few true stories. In his memoir: Private Instigator: A Journey Through the Underworld of Disorganized Crime (and no doubt in the podcast about his career that is currently in production), you meet characters on all sides of the law, all of them damaged. He tells me about “a friend who was a skip tracer. He could have broken into the Pentagon by phone. But he was one of the most disturbed persons I’ve ever known.” Another guy “had an IQ of 160 and could recite vast swaths of Ulysses; he taught himself Russian, but insanity was in escrow waiting for him. One day he flipped out and thought he was a horse. When somebody asked his kids, ‘What’s your father up to?’ they’d say, ‘He’s running the six at the Aqueduct.’”
“Polite society bores me to hell,” Vender admits. “I took notes on all these people.” He has the makings for at least two more books, he says. Writing was his dream back in grad school, and now he has quite a lot to say. But this is a vulnerable time for somebody who made a living being tough. Vender was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and it causes him to tear up, involuntarily, spilling emotion in a way he never allowed himself.
He is also vulnerable with his wife, faithful to her for twenty-two years. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever been with that I haven’t cheated on,” he once told her. She raised an eyebrow and said dryly, “Ah, but you have the spirit of a bookie.”
He does play the odds. The risk-taking, plus his ability to establish rapport, helped the attorneys win their cases. But how does he wheedle truth from people used to hiding it?
“They sense that I’m similar, and it opens a door,” he says. “I tell them, ‘The only difference is that you’re wearing an orange jumpsuit, and I have better impulse control.’” He chuckles, then turns serious. “What kept me on the straight path was finding work I was meant to do. Being a PI encompasses so much. I’m a born role player—I love assuming different characters. And the roles I played had a lot of truth in them. In playing a role, you have to genuinely believe it, and your genuineness comes across as being truthful.” Which feels a bit…convoluted? He grins. “It has to be part of your character,” he explains. “I like people.” Chatting, he knows how to “start at Point A and take the circuitous route, talk about something else and get them to relax a little. The moment I sense that they are letting down their guard, I’m in.”
Vender’s doctor once asked him, “How can you do this work?” He shot back, “How could I not?” He believes in the rule of law, in due process as everyone’s right. He also believes in the ideas of Ernest Becker, with his pointed reminders about our existential fear of death.
“Let’s take a gang,” Vender says. “You have a leader who rises. What does he want? To be seen as all-powerful, which extends his mortality. And his followers get a piece of him and extend their mortality.” You play to that. And you remember that these gangs control the poorest parts of the city, “and the cops resort to all sorts of means to keep the peace.” Everyone is playing by their own set of rules.
True evil, though, Vender equates with psychopathy: “The world centers around a psychopath; no one else matters. Becker would say that the Nazis committed atrocities to make themselves as powerful—let’s go Greek here—as gods. Of course, in the Greek cosmos, once that happens you are displaying hubris, and you will be punished by the gods.”
Vender read a lot of Greek mythology as a kid. “Then I got older, and I understood exactly how cruel the gods could be.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
