Stan Young, P.I.
When one hears the name Federal Bureau of Investigation, secret files, wire-tapped conversations, complicated investigations and even the image of the symbolic Hoover Building in Washington, DC come to mind. A number of movie scenes and famous characters might pop up as well. The boundaries between reality and fiction in stories about the FBI are blurry because everything is top secret.
It is a sunny November afternoon and I am sitting at an Edmond coffee shop. In front of me stands a tall, energetic man in his fifties, wearing glasses, dark jacket and a light-blue shirt. His name is Stan Young and yes, he is an FBI agent.
“I enjoy investigations and talking to people. There are a lot of interesting people in this world and you never know who you’re going to come across.”
Young retired from the FBI last June after working as an agent for 28 years. He started his own private investigation company, Young and Associates, LLC.
He investigates insurance and mortgage frauds, conducts background investigations and provides surveillance as needed. Young stays in touch with former colleagues and works together with private investigators from across the country.
“If I need information, say, in Washington, DC, I know people I can call. It’s like working for the FBI, except since we are retired now, we work for ourselves. We network and help each other out.”
Last spring Young received a call from a former agent in Nashville, who is a security director for a famous country singer. The previous night someone with an Oklahoma license plate tried to break into the travel bus and the security director asked Young to track that person.
In another case, Young was investigating mortgage fraud. A lady who went through a tough divorce lost her job and home. “You see both sides – people who have bad luck and people who actually misrepresent the facts.”
“A lot of the criminals I’ve met, if they work as honest citizens they can make a lot more money instead of doing what they do, but it’s just that challenge of beating the system.”
While in high school, Young worked at a drugstore to pay for his flying lessons. He later graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s in Pharmacy.
While Young was a pharmacist at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, a high-school friend who was working at the FBI headquarters came to town. They had lunch together and he convinced Young to apply for a job at the bureau.
“The application goes all the way back almost to conception,” he said. “I think it was a 13-page application. They want to know your educational background, your work experience.” The FBI even ran background checks on his immediate relatives. After a series of tests and interviews Young was accepted and sent to the FBI training academy at
Quantico, Virginia.
He was later transferred to New Orleans, where he worked on some of his most interesting cases. Young and his partner embarked on a boat to reach a ship in the Gulf of Mexico and investigate a murder that occurred on-board. “One of the sailors on the ship went crazy one night and cut the throat of the first mate. He was a 6-foot-9 man and weighted 300 pounds. It took about 12 sailors to subdue him,”
he said.
A few years later Young was assigned to the FBI’s Special Operations Unit in Chicago. “If foreign intelligence agents would come to town, we would keep them under surveillance.”
Young and his colleagues followed an intelligence officer from a former Soviet bloc country as he traveled from Chicago to San Diego, Colorado and back. “I remember that he was driving a little Honda Civic, which got 35-40 miles to the gallon. We were driving big old Plymouths and Crown Victorias,” he said. “So he would keep going and we would have to stop and fill up. And then we’d have to run 100m/h trying to catch up with him.” Then one of the agents got a flat tire. “His jack had rusted and so he couldn’t change his tire. It was about three days before he caught up with us.”
Later Young was sent back to Oklahoma City to work on a drug diversion case. “People were fraudulently obtaining pharmaceuticals from various hospitals and clinics and then reselling them,” he said. “I would present myself as someone who bought the drugs they had obtained illegally. We had 25 convictions on that.”
He also worked on the investigation and the rescue efforts after the Murrah Building bombing. “It was a horrific day, a horrific time,” he remembers.
Young has now settled down in Edmond and plans to stay and grow his business. Although the PI life can be a little slower than life with the FBI, he’s glad to be here. “Edmond is a very good community. I can’t think of any other place I’d like to live.”
