Background Investigations.

Rick is the Team Leader for the BartlettJames Campus Police and Security Oversight team. Throughout his distinguished career as a Supervisory Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he amassed a wealth of investigatory experience, frequently in matters of national security and high-profile criminal investigations. Risk’s experience serves as the foundation for his oversight of all of our background investigations and police audit capabilities. Rick is a nationally-known expert on law enforcement policies, procedures and investigations. He has served for more than ten years in civilian police oversight/auditing roles around the nation. Rick is based in Utah.

After graduating from the U.S. Air Force Academy, Rick then completed flight school and became an F-16 fighter pilot. In his ten years of active service, he was an F-16 flight leader and he was also an instructor pilot in the T-38 aircraft. After the Air Force, Rick joined the FBI as a Special Agent where he remained for more than 22 years in a variety of high-profile assignments. He participated in thousands of successful criminal investigations as both a field agent and in leadership roles. As a Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI’s violent crimes/major offender squad, he designed and initiated the first Violent Crimes Task Force, consisting of agents and officers from six different agencies and departments. His example later became the model for tasks forces nationwide. He also investigated and supervised more than ten major kidnappings and numerous drug, gang, robbery, fugitive, extortion, and other violent crime cases, while also conducting multiple internal affairs investigations. As a field agent, he also periodically worked in undercover roles for the Bureau. Perhaps most noteworthy, Rick was selected to be the Supervisory Special Agent for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was responsible for the implementation of the FBI’s Olympic Security Plan and coordinated and led more than 1,400 FBI employees, and an additional 2,800 federal law enforcement officers from other agencies such as the Secret Service, the Defense Security Service, and the ATF.

Since retiring from the FBI, Rick has become a nationally recognized, NACOLE-certified, practitioner of police oversight. With more than 30 years of law enforcement related experience, and more than 17 years of direct oversight experience, he is sought out by police agencies and their oversight boards for his input on policies and procedures and auditing practices. He currently serves as an administrator with the Salt Lake City Police Civilian Review Board (for the past 13 years) and, before that, he served as a police auditor for the City of Fresno, California for four years. He has provided training to United States and international personnel on police oversight and auditing.

Rick graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy with a Bachelor of Arts in History. He has additionally completed or graduated from numerous specialty training courses related to his service with the FBI and the U.S. Air Force.

Bert is one of the two co-founding members of BartlettJames LLC. He serves on our Executive Committee. In addition to serving as an experienced Title IX investigator and administrative decision maker, Bert is also responsible for administration of the firm’s personnel and fiscal matters. He enjoys a national reputation as one of the preeminent trial attorneys in America, with vast courtroom and jury experiences that few can equal. He has served more than 35 years as a prosecutor, defense counsel or judge in administrative, civil and criminal matters involving the military, state and federal courts, and courts overseas. Bert is based in North Carolina.

Bert is retired from the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served for 22 years as a career infantry officer and judge advocate. Upon his retirement, he served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of North Carolina, before going into private practice in 2000. He has participated as either the prosecutor or defense counsel or judge in more than 750 jury trials and in more than 14,000 criminal cases, while he has supervised subordinate counsel and judges in many thousands more matters. As a military judge, he presided over several highly-publicized trials of national and international interest, including the 1998-99 court-martial of a Marine pilot for the deaths of 20 people in the Italian Alps, after a jet flew through a gondola cable and dropped them 356 feet to their deaths. Bert was also retained by the Associated Press to help defend Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist held by the U.S. military in Iraq as a terrorist. He and his team fought those allegations in the Central Criminal Courts of Iraq in Baghdad, ultimately securing Mr. Hussein’s release in April, 2008.

Bert has held above top secret clearances in the military and has participated or lead multiple investigations with Congressional and/or National Command Authority (NCA) interest. He is also a frequent lecturer on ethics, professionalism, and trial advocacy, and he has participated in more than 20 officer-involved-shootings (OIS) investigations.

Bert is a Distinguished Graduate of the University of Kansas with a Bachelors of Arts degree in Political Science and a Distinguished Graduate of the University of Kansas School of Law (Order of the Coif), where he served as an editor on both the Kansas Law Review and the Kansas Criminal Procedure Review. He holds an LL.M., with distinction, in Military Law with a Criminal Law Specialty, from The Judge Advocate General’s School, U.S. Army, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Bert was also the Distinguished Graduate of the 38^th Military Judges Course.

Gene leads our background vetting team. His more than 36 years of federal investigative experience routinely proves invaluable to BartlettJames clients. Not only has he conducted background vettings for some the most prominent recent hires in collegiate sports, Gene has also performed a series of sexual assault investigations on behalf of a globally-prominent sports organization. Gene is based in Ohio.

Gene served the United States for more than 20 years as a Special Agent with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations. In leadership roles, he conducted and supervised multiple special agents involved in over 5,000 investigations encompassing all major crimes, including multi-million dollar fraud investigations, nationally sensitive counterintelligence investigations, and lifesaving force protection investigations. Gene was specifically tasked to write the Air Force policy providing oversight for the Air Force Counterintelligence investigative missions. He also served as the Counterintelligence Staff Officer for the United States Forces, Korea. In that role, Gene was the counterintelligence point-person for the joint Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps missions conducted in South Korea.

Most recently, Gene has spent the past 16 years conducting federal investigations for the nation’s federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. He’s either directed or personally conducted more than 5,000 classified federal investigations, many including concerns related to terrorism.

Gene played football for and graduated from The Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice. He also earned an M.A. in Public Administration from Troy State University and an M.A. in Education from Fort Hays State University.