PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — There are a number of jobs that can follow a stint in a family car dealership, but we bet you didn't think one of them was "corporate spy."
Robert Kerbeck has written a memoir about his unconventional career path called “RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street.”
“We all know the Russians spy on the Chinese, and the Chinese spy on us,” Kerbeck said on KYW Newsradio In Depth.
“But what most people were shocked by with the book is that major American corporations are hiring spies, like I was, nearly every day to extract secret and private information from their competitors.”
Kerbeck initially left his family car business to become an actor. He graduated with a theater degree from the University of Pennsylvania and then moved to New York City. As he struggled to find acting gigs, he stumbled into a job that involved calling companies and Wall Street firms and manipulating them into giving up valuable information.
“What we would do — because we were actors, remember — is we would create personas and characters,” said Kerbeck.
“We would do accents. We would do all kinds of things to enable us to trick people into telling us things that they should not.”
He kept up this job, even while appearing on several TV series, including “ER,” “Melrose Place,” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” Corporate spying was more consistent, and ultimately more lucrative.
He started out making $8 an hour. Eventually, when he struck out on his own, he was bringing in about $2 million a year.
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Kerbeck is now in the process of turning his book into a TV series with Silver Lining Entertainment and A&E Studio.
He talked more about his journey, how he went about getting strangers to give away information, and how he grappled with the questionable ethics of his work on our KYW Newsradio In Depth podcast.
Listen to the full conversation in the player below.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to Robert Kerbeck as the heir to the extensive network of Kerbeck Dealerships which includes or included F.C. Kerbeck & Sons, Kerbeck Cadillac, Kerbeck Rolls Royce, Kerbeck Lamborghini, Kerbeck Aston Martin, Kerbeck Buick/GMC, Kerbeck Atlantic City, Kerbeck Corvette, Kerbeck Subaru and many others. Robert Kerbeck is not associated with this network of dealerships, past, present, or future, in any way.