Investigative Experience for Our New Jersey Attorney
Mark S. Guralnick is not only an attorney, but a licensed private detective and a former investigative news reporter.
In his career as an investigative news reporter, Mr. Guralnick conducted successful investigations of many public and private institutions and agencies. For example, in the early 1980s, Mr. Guralnick went undercover as a student intern at the New Lisbon State School, a facility for mentally retarded boys in New Lisbon, New Jersey. Using a fake name and masquerading as a Temple University student studying social work, Mr. Guralnick discovered that the New Lisbon School had been holding a large number of boys or young men who were not mentally retarded. These patients had been lost in the court system, and had not been placed with foster families or other caretakers, but were being held sometimes for years at a time at the New Lisbon facility, where they were often drugged and sedated, even though nothing was mentally or physically wrong with them.
In another undercover investigation, Mr. Guralnick registered a private school in the state of Florida which did not exist. The address given for the private school was on a condemned property. There were no students; no teachers; no books, and no furniture and yet the sloppy state Education Department still permitted the school to exist. In a 17-part series which ran in the Fort Lauderdale newspapers, Mr. Guralnick detailed the unregulated and mismanaged system of private school education in the state of Florida.
Mr. Guralnick also solved two murders during his years as an investigative news reporter. In one case, Mr. Guralnick used strong interviewing techniques, confidential informants, and exhaustive fieldwork to lead police to the killer of a North Carolina businessman stabbed to death in the New Jersey woods. In another case, Mr. Guralnick was able to show that a woman arranged for the murder of her husband in order to collect his life insurance, a scheme she contrived to pay off her own personal debts.
To hone his investigative skills, Mark S. Guralnick has attended many seminars and professional programs dealing with crime scene investigations and forensic processes. He is certified as a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Examiners, and is an associate member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.