Last update: February 15, 2006 – 1:09 AM

Electronic sleuth turns spicy bytes into business feast

A tech-savvy former police officer's firm specializes in gathering electronic data for evidence in court cases.

Dick Youngblood, Star Tribune

In mid-2003, the judge hearing a shareholder lawsuit involving Golden Valley-based AGA Medical Corp. hired computer maestro Mark Lanterman to recover some deleted e-mails related to the civil case.

The assignment quickly moved beyond the routine, however, when Lanterman's research uncovered an AGA employee's $1.6 million fraudulent billing scheme.

Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar was impressed: "The fraud would not have been discovered without [Lanterman's] help," she said. "He has unique skills that are badly needed in law enforcement these days."

A former police officer, Lanterman, 41, is founder and CEO of Computer Forensic Services Inc., an unusual Minnetonka company that grossed more than $3 million last year specializing in processing of electronic data for evidence in court cases and solutions to corporate security problems.

The AGA Medical assignment was not the only high-profile case in which Lanterman has been involved.

His electronic sleuthing also uncovered pertinent financial data in the case of former home builder Bruce Bren, who pleaded guilty in January to defrauding Twin Cities homeowners and subcontractors of more than $2 million.

"It was an octopus of a case, with so many strings, and Mark uncovered information that we would not have gotten otherwise," said Wayzata police Sgt. Mike Murphy, the lead investigator on the case.

More recently, Lanterman also retrieved data showing that employees of a major defense contractor had stolen weapon designs for a competitor. He declined to offer details because the case still is under investigation.

Lanterman insists that the work is "pretty boring -- sort of like searching for one sentence in a single book in the Library of Congress. But when you find it, it's a terrific feeling -- makes it all worthwhile."

Particularly when it saves an innocent man's job, as happened recently when a local executive was fired after corporate software that monitored employee Internet use showed he had downloaded a large amount of pornographic material.

Lanterman backtracked the Internet activity and confirmed the man's claim that the porn had appeared unbidden in rapid-fire popups after he had Googled the term "breast cancer" following his wife's diagnosis with the disease.

Here's my favorite part: The software that Lanterman uses as an essential element of his electronic detective work is an enhanced version of a search program he wrote for one of his college classes as a computer science major.

The software, which Lanterman views as more comprehensive than commercially available programs, not only allows him to recover deleted documents, but also to track user activity on a specific time line. As in the case of the porn downloads.

Volunteer work led to career

That software has led him on an intriguing career path since he used it as a volunteer helping police in his suburban Philadelphia hometown to identify a man who had hacked into a local bank's account data. That led to an offer of a job as a police officer, which increasingly involved using his expertise in computer data recovery.

He and his wife moved in 1995 to Minnesota, where he briefly had attended college, in search of a more kid-friendly atmosphere for their growing family. He landed a job with the Hopkins Police Department, where he was assigned to high-tech cases.

Seeking supplementary income as his family grew to six children, however, he won permission to begin accepting some of the requests he received from local companies seeking assistance with computer security issues. In 1999, he started Computer Forensic Services, which remained a part-time operation until he resigned from the Hopkins force early in 2003.

"My full-time job was getting in the way of my part-time business," Lanterman joked. In reality, he said, "I was spending all my free time on the business; there wasn't any time left for me or my family."

Working with a computer technician from the Hopkins Police Department, Lanterman grossed $1 million in the first year of full-time operation, four times the gross he collected in 2002 as a one-man operation.

Since then, revenue has tripled and employment has climbed to eight full-time and two part-time data analysts. Included on the roster: a retired FBI agent who specialized in electronic surveillance, a man who wrote security software for the National Security Agency, and a former Secret Service agent Lanterman met when they were members of the service's Twin Cities Electronic Crimes Task Force.

Murphy, the Wayzata investigator, said Lanterman's company is one of very few like it in the Midwest. It would appear, however, that there's a shortage of them nationwide.

While more than half of Lanterman's revenue comes from Twin Cities law firms and corporations, "about 40 percent of our business is out-of-state, 30 percent of it with New York City law firms alone," he said.

What's the attraction?

"He's eminently qualified," said Michael Cordera, an attorney with the Shearman & Sterling law firm in Manhattan. "And he has a unique ability to convey highly technical concepts to lay people," a plus when it comes to testifying in court.

Dick Youngblood • 612-673-4439 • yblood@startribune.com