Tracking Hank Asher

Hank Asher is somewhere in Naples. But not for long.

"I'm about to step onto a plane," he says. "Can you call me in a week?" Asher is leaving for Amsterdam, it turns out, where he's at work on a cancer research project-one of the many balls airborne in his life right now. Asher is also starting a new data company here in Naples, which, among other things, will make identity theft obsolete within a year, he says. Those who know Asher and what he has accomplished believe him.

He may not be a household name, but Hank Asher probably could be, if that's what he wanted. Thirteen years ago, Asher linked together public record databases into an electronic program he called AutoTrack. It was the first of several Asher-created data-mining systems that would transform law enforcement, boosting the speed and efficiency of tracking criminals.

More recently, he developed the much more powerful database MATRIX, for Multi-state Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, which combines public records and investigative data. MATRIX has been used by the federal government to hunt terrorists and led to the 2002 capture of the Washington, D.C.-area snipers. In January 2003, Asher demonstrated MATRIX at the White House to an audience that included Vice President Dick Cheney, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and FBI Director Robert Mueller. The Bush Administration wound up allocating about $12 million to fund MATRIX on a trial basis. Asher is now dedicating much of his time to cancer research, using his supercomputer databases to link the Mayo Clinic with trial studies in Amsterdam and Costa Rica.

But Asher, who describes himself as "basically a recluse," does much of his work behind the scenes, often donating money and data systems without public recognition. Through a colleague, he reluctantly agreed to be interviewed by this magazine about another of his current projects-the opening of a Naples branch for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Asher has worked with the NCMEC since 1992, giving them free use of his databases and donating $7.9 million worth of stock to the center, according to director and CEO Ernie Allen. The Naples office will combine data-mining technology with preventive and education measures to create a model that will make Naples "the safest community for children in the country," says Allen.

Earlier this year, a "friend-raiser" was held at the Registry Resort to announce the new office. Among those attending were former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has worked with Asher, and John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted and a founder of the NCMEC. "I've known Hank for many years and I think he's going to do some really important things in Naples," says Walsh.

When he returns from amsterdam, though, Asher seems too busy for an interview. He wonders if it can be done by e-mail. Then he suggests that his wife do it. Also, he's about to fly out of town again. "I'll be gone for a couple of days. Call me Thursday morning."

On Thursday morning, Asher sounds ready to talk. "When do you want to do it?" he asks. But when a time is suggested, he hesitates: "I got in late last night and I'm going to have to look at my schedule. Call me in an hour."

An hour later, there is no answer.

He calls the next afternoon, from Shula's restaurant. "I'm having lunch right now. When do you want to do it?" He's about to get on an airplane again, he says, this time for a week-long trip to the Bahamas, where he plans to fish on his 95-foot boat. "Do you want to come over to Shula's or do you want to meet me at the house in an hour?"

The "house" is a new 14,000-square-foot penthouse apartment on Gulf Shore Boulevard, which Asher recently purchased for a reported $10.7 million. On a porch high above the Gulf of Mexico, Asher, 54, and his wife, Peggy, 40, discuss the new NCMEC initiative as their two Yorkies, Bruno and Franklin, inspect the visitor. Both the NCMEC office and Asher's still unnamed data company will be based in the Fifth Third Bank building on Vanderbilt Beach Road.

The Ashers talk, too, about Naples, which they have visited for years and where they moved late last year. "We like the whole feel of Naples," says Peggy. "It's a real community of caring people. There's a lot of day-to-day kindness that you don't find in other places."

Compared with Boca Raton, their former home, Naples "is a different planet," Hank says. "I grew up in Indiana and I feel a lot more comfortable here. It's more of a Midwest crowd rather than a Northeast crowd. Naples is a great place to live and work."

Hank, dressed casually in shorts and a red polo shirt, seems down-to-earth and cordial in person, although still a little restless. His language is occasionally salty. Peggy is personable and calmer. Their personalities seem to balance one another. Most people who know Asher describe him as big-hearted and driven. Says one long-time friend, "Even when he's telling a story, I sense his mind is working on problems"-although work is not something that Asher needs to do, at least not financially. Last year, Seisint, the Boca Raton-based data-mining company Asher launched in 1998, sold to LexisNexis for $775 million. Asher got about $250 million from the sale.

Elliott Singer, the managing director and founder of FairView Advisors and a neighbor of Asher's, says, "I think he's absolutely brilliant. Just look at what he's accomplished. He's a real good American. It makes you proud to know him."

NCMEC director Allen says, "He's a visionary. Hank sees the potential of technology not just to enable us to do faster work. He sees the power of technology to solve social and medical problems. I don't know of anyone anywhere who's doing as much to make a difference in the world."

Says Walsh, "What some people don't understand about Hank is that he's a patriot. A lot of what he does is out of a genuine desire to better this country."

But Asher is also trailed by controversy. Twenty-three years ago, before he began working in the computer business, Asher spent a brief period smuggling cocaine. He was never arrested or indicted, but details of the activity, which he acknowledges, later appeared in court records and were published in newspapers. The story has often resurfaced. Asher's MATRIX program also caused controversy. Although embraced by the Bush Administration, it was attacked by the American Civil Liberties Union, which called it a threat to privacy rights. (Asher's reply: "I don't think snipers and terrorists have an expectation of privacy.") The government's trial program was officially discontinued in April.

Among the ironies in Hank Asher's story is the fact that data dug up from his own past has been used against him. Also, that the pioneer of data-mining is himself a very private person. In a sense, Asher's life and career illustrate the thin line our culture sometimes draws between heroes and outlaws. Hank Asher embodies qualities of both.

Asher's bio reads like a modern-day version of the American Dream. He grew up on a farm in Indiana, dropped out of school at age 16 and soon had his own house-painting business. In 1969, he moved to Fort Lauderdale so he could work through the winters and created a company that painted high-rise condos. A self-made man, Asher became a millionaire in his 20s and retired, for the first time, at age 30. He had a plane, a boat and a house on Great Harbor Cay in the Bahamas-where a number of drug smugglers also lived. During the spring and summer of 1982, Asher reportedly flew seven loads of cocaine from Colombia to Florida on his Aerostar plane. The experience put him in the belly of the beast of drug smuggling, a place he didn't like. After he quit smuggling, Asher worked with the Drug Enforcement Agency to help clean up the drug activity on Grand Harbor Cay.

A theory sometimes floated about Asher is that his altruism is a kind of psychological redemption for his brief stint as a smuggler. John Walsh calls this "bullshit.That was long ago. It's irrelevant. He's a brilliant guy who genuinely cares and wants to give to society. A lot of people are jealous of what he's accomplished. They shouldn't be."

In 1988, running out of money, Asher began studying computers. He learned a new programming language that allowed him to tie together various databases of public records. He also discovered that he could purchase databases from banks, insurance companies and the Department of Motor Vehicles, even though they weren't available to the public. Asher wrote programming algorithms connecting the information in ways no one had before. He started a business, Database Technologies, or DBT, and a new program, AutoTrack. Soon auto insurance companies and police departments around the country were subscribing to it.

"When I started AutoTrack, I could have sold it to anyone," Asher says. "I decided to sell it only to people with legitimate investigative needs, which was law enforcement, insurance companies, attorneys, PIs and investigative reporters. Those were the only five industries I sold it to. I mean, I kept my marketplace to 2 percent of what it could have been. Morally, this was too dangerous. I didn't want a stalker to have access to this."

In 1992, Asher offered AutoTrack to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children free of charge. Says Allen, "What Hank did was give us a tool that 99 percent of police departments didn't have. At that time, the country was made up of 50 states that acted like they were 50 countries, with 18,000 police departments that didn't talk to each other. Hank gave us a tool to change that." Allen says 109 missing children were recovered between 1996 and 2004 because of Asher's systems.

It was the 1981 adam walsh abduction, asher says, that sparked his interest in missing children. "I lived a few blocks away from where Adam Walsh was kidnapped from a Sears Roebuck store in Hollywood, Florida. The whole community just held its breath, hoping for a good outcome. And, of course, there wasn't one. In 1992, when I started doing Database Technologies, I called up the center and offered AutoTrack, hoping it might help them, not knowing whether it would or not. And it became very valuable.

"That was kind of a paycheck for the soul," adds Asher. "It was a bigger paycheck than any dollar amount I could imagine." Of all he's done, Asher says, he's most proud of his work with NCMEC. "We've met 100 parents who've lost their children. I guarantee you, you look in those hollow eyes and you're seeing a hollow soul. People don't get over that. John's not over losing Adam 26 years ago."

But then word of Asher's drug-smuggling days began to circulate, and potential customers wondered if he could be trusted. Asher volunteered to take a lie detector test, which cleared him of any further involvement in drug activity. But the past would continue to haunt Asher. In 1998, after the FBI and DEA failed to renew contracts with DBT, the company bought out Asher's stock for $147 million (DBT is today part of ChoicePoint Public Records). Asher then started a new company called Seisint, for Seismic Intelligence, and another database system, Accurint. In 2003, he stepped down from the company's board of directors after the drug story surfaced again.

"At the root of any bitterness I might have," says Asher, "is that I went through a background check with polygraphs in 1993. Everybody accepted me. Then in 1999, they unaccepted me. Then in 2001 they accepted me, and in 2003 they unaccepted me. They need to get over themselves. This is the FBI, in particular. They accepted me when they needed my tools. John Ashcroft said it best. He said we're not in the business of excluding technology based on its author."

Inspired by the tragedy of 9/11, Asher created a new anti-terrorism database he called MATRIX. With MATRIX, Asher says, a user can type in a few personal details-height, hair color-along with a vehicle description, and photos of potential suspects will immediately appear on the computer screen. It is the most powerful data-mining program available. But to the ACLU, it is too powerful-an intrusion on privacy rights.

Walsh calls the controversy "unfair and wrong. It became trendy for irresponsible journalists to say MATRIX was the new Big Brother. It's not. MATRIX is a high-speed program that gets its information from public records. It's an important tool for tracking terrorists." When MATRIX shut down in April, only four states were participating. Walsh thinks it will be revived. "It's too important not to be. Every state should have this."

Asher says that if there had been another attack on American soil, people wouldn't be debating privacy rights. "I'm afraid it's going to take another attack and the country will run to these solutions."

Meanwhile, Asher has become increasingly involved in cancer research, pursuing experimental treatments with the same fervor he brought to assembling databases, say some friends.

"We have our own chief science officer," he says, "and we're compiling data sets." His cancer research project began as an effort to save the life of his sister, who suffers from bone-marrow cancer and also lives in Naples.

Daniel Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic and past chair of the NCMEC, says, "I have talked with him about his cancer work. He's very knowledgeable and very dedicated. He wants people to crush this thing. He's working with the researchers at Mayo the way he has with missing children. We need people like Hank Asher."

The naples office of the ncmec, expected to open in the fall, will begin modestly. But as the Ashers envision it, the Naples branch will eventually become a national model.

"We want to create something we can take to the government and say, 'This is what we need to do in the 3,143 counties in this country,'" says Asher. "This is a multi-year project. We see building this here forever."

Asher is writing software that will allow for faster and more thorough background checks on anyone who works with children-child-care workers, schoolteachers, Boy Scout and Girl Scout employees.

Peggy Asher, whose 15-year-old son lives with them in Naples (Hank also has two grown daughters), says education will be a major component of the Naples initiative. "When children are abducted and murdered, people get very angry; but there are a lot of things that go on every day that people should also be angry about and they're not. We're going to be working with the schools, developing awareness at all levels."

She cites the example of two girls missing in Naples at the time of this interview. "There are some kids in this area who know where those girls are. And part of the process is educating the children so that they know that this is not cool, this is very dangerous. Someone should come forward in order to help them. They're not giving them up, they're helping them. People have to be educated to understand that."

The NCMEC, which is based in the Washington, D.C., area, will send trainers to Naples to help coordinate the program. "Missing children is actually a local issue," says Allen. "What we want to do is take the message of the national center and have it resonate in the local community. So we will focus on Collier County and Naples because that's where [the Ashers] live now."

The Naples initiative will also involve partnering with local law enforcement agencies. Asher recently met with Collier County Sheriff Don Hunter and Naples Police Chief Steven Moore. "We're fortunate that we have a sheriff and a police chief aware of what the proper procedures are with a missing child." That wasn't true in the case of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia, who was abducted and murdered in Sarasota last year, he says. Her disappearance was initially entered as "runaway" in law enforcement databases. "That's something that law enforcement has to know not to do," he says.

"When we moved here, we thought what a great opportunity this could be for doing something that the community doesn't have and the country doesn't have," says Asher. "This is a great community. The NCMEC is a great organization. It's a natural fit."

A moment later, he looks at his wife. "We better get going. We have to get to the airport."

Walking toward the elevator, Asher is asked if he ever thinks about retiring a second time. "I don't do that so well," he says. "Sometimes I'll go out on my boat fishing for a long time, in places where other people don't go. But then I come back and start another company. You want to see the guest bedroom?"

He steps into a corner bedroom, which provides a breathtaking panorama that most Neapolitans never see: the coastline, the north Naples neighborhoods, the bays, the inland tracts.

"You get a pretty good view of Naples here," Asher says. Then the elevator opens, and he extends his hand. "Call me on the boat if you need anything else."