RIDGEFIELD RESIDENT John Oatley recently shared his life story with a reporter at The Reflector. The 89-year-old Oatley has had a wide array of experiences in his lifetime. Photo courtesy of Viki Eierdam
From a background in theatre to a brush with two presidents and death itself, 89-year-old Ridgefield resident John Oatley has lived a life that movies are made of.
Growing up in Rockford, MI, Oatley’s family either owned or had half ownership in several different theatres. As a young boy he was an usher, worked the concession stand, took his turn as a doorman and ran the projectors. After time as a Naval Aviation Cadet in Corpus Christi, TX, and a few months at Great Lakes Naval Hospital recovering from a head injury, Oatley came back to Michigan in November of 1944 and went to work as the assistant manager for the largest theatre in Grand Rapids.
The theatre had about 2,500 seats and on the off days of the other managers he’d work the five other theatres located in the downtown area. He found himself with a wife, two children and a job working seven days a week. About four years into this routine his father fell ill and Oatley returned home to take care of the family theatres.
The introduction of the first black and white televisions saw a sharp decline in sales. Oatley realized quickly that his folks’ business could not support two families, so off to Hollywood he went.
Oatley was immediately hired by Warner Brothers to manage their five major theatres in the Hollywood area. There, he met stars of the day such as Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn.
At world premieres, Oatley would be required to travel to Georgia, New York and other theatre-heavy locations to handle advertising and parades for opening day. This would take him away from home for two weeks at a time. After one of these jaunts, he returned to an area premier that was doing quite poorly and Jack Warner himself solicited Oatley’s opinion on how to proceed. Unfortunately, Warner wasn’t keen on Oatley’s advice to double bill the movie and he was swiftly fired.
A neighbor suggested Oatley pursue law enforcement and he made that his career for the next several years. It was working for the Santa Ana Police Department (SAPD) that he was put in a class called Crime Scene Investigation with five other officers. They were the original CSI unit. The class taught them to take photographs of crime scenes, collect evidence, take plaster casts of tire tracks and a multitude of other skills necessary to accurately process a crime scene. Off the clock, Oatley would collect evidence for other officers. Through his experiences, he met several attorneys and district attorneys.
Oatley followed the natural progression to open his own private investigation business in 1962. Many of the people he’d met through his years with the SAPD started calling on him. He obtained a state license and became a member of the State Association of Private Investigators board that met monthly. Soon, he was at the Sacramento courthouse routinely due to meetings. One day he was standing in the hall when Gov. Ronald Reagan walked in and said, “What are you doing here? I thought you were at Warner Brothers.’’ Oatley explained his new career path and Reagan gave him a case.
“He gave me this letter on a steno pad written in longhand complaining about this fellow who’d taken $10,000 from a professor at Tulane University to set up a business to sell Lamborghinis in New Orleans,” Oatley explained.
Turns out a young Italian man had been hired by this professor to open a shop and, after several months of no sales, the young man returned the last $1,000 to the professor sighting New Orleans as a bad place to sell Lamborghinis and went back to California. This professor went to the New Orleans Police Department and filed a complaint against the young man, according to Oatley.
Oatley said he received no cooperation in his New Orleans investigation until he called a friend of his in Washington, D.C., – one Gerald Ford. Ford told Oatley he’d have someone pick him up the next day and, true to his word, the mayor’s secretary brought a car around. He was able to complete his investigation and when he presented it to Reagan, Reagan denied the extradition order based on Oatley’s findings.
Oatley learned early on that paying a fee for every court record for every homicide and major criminal case he investigated was costly, so he began purchasing court records. Forty in the State of California, the State Assessor’s records, bankruptcy records in Washington, D.C., aircraft and boat registrations nationally, county voting records, traffic stops, misdemeanors, four counties in Oregon, Seattle, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Chicago and New York until he had amassed 100 million people in his files. Soon he was selling the information to attorneys and banks. After 10-15 years, he had two full-time employees working in his office pulling records and mailing them all over the country.
Another high-profile case Oatley worked had a connection with the Onion Field murders. One of the six chief prosecutors for the case, Schulman, was a professional friend of Oatley’s.
“A case trial judge from LA called up and said, ‘I’ve got a case I want you and John to take,’” Oatley said. “’I want you to handle the Sirhan (Bishara) Sirhan case where he killed (Robert F.) Kennedy in the hotel and Marshall said, ‘I’m sorry. We can’t take it.’”
Schulman felt ethnicity issues would prove controversial. However, after Sirhan’s indictment, the same judge hired Oatley directly to investigate the background of all 19 people on the grand jury in California. The defense had filed a complaint that Sirhan had not been indicted by a jury of his peers. Oatley’s investigation cleared the jury to go to trial.
The California rolling labs case was the last high-profile case Oatley worked. Two brothers, Michael and David Smushkevich – one an engineer and the other a doctor – bought 35-foot vans, put all their X-ray and lab equipment into the vans, rented waiting rooms from legitimate doctors on weekends and conducted basic blood tests, X-rays, and EKGs on patients. The Smushkevich brothers would charge $5-$110 and then bill insurance companies like Aetna and Gibraltar thousands of dollars, according to Oatley.
Oatley and Schulman were hired to interview the patients to show there was no fraud. Since Oatley’s wife was a pathologist and they owned eight labs in Orange County he knew what a working lab should look like. One tour of the Smushkevich labs and Oatley knew he was looking at blatant fraud. He gave his findings to the defense and bowed out. People soon showed up at Oatley’s house and Schulman’s house threatening them. Oatley moved to Northern California, put all his holdings in his wife’s maiden name and has been leading a life out of the limelight ever since.
“Never in my wildest dreams would I ever think of anything like this. I just happened to fall into things at the right time,” Oatley said.
