A man steals hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large airline company where he works. It’s not out of reasons of pure greed, but the need to pay for rising medical bills for his family.

Raj Johal, a retired Bellevue Police detective turned private investigator, understands the plight of the man trying to provide for the family, but he has a job to do.

“He was under a lot of pressure,” Johal said. “He’s a good person, but he succumbed to financial pressures and made some bad decisions and did this over a period of three years.”

The case was one of Johal’s first, and most difficult investigations since he opened his own firm, Be Prepared Investigative Services and Survival Supplies, last fall. The California-born Johal combined his years in the police force, along with his emergency training, to build a business with a wide array of services.

Along with contracting for traditional PI cases, Johal also sells emergency supplies to help people build kits in the case of a disaster. He also served with the city of Bellevue as a compliance officer, giving him a strong knowledge of building code, housing and zoning issues. Johal’s prices depend on the type of case, but his bread and butter, white collar crime investigations, will cost clients approximately $100 an hour.

Johal’s variety of skills and interests date back to his childhood. Growing up in Los Angeles, he was always interested in police work, but another craft lured him as well: acting.

As a child, Johal said he starred in several commercials for Kool-Aid and did a number of infomercials as well. He even rode an elephant in the Disneyland parade. He thought about pursuing acting as a career.

But he was driven by the “service gene” that many in the public sector speak so fondly of. He had been a Boy Scout and Life Scout, and he enrolled in the Los Angeles Police Academy, where he learned paramilitary training that enhanced his survival skills. Soon after becoming a police officer it became clear he had a knack for interrogation.

He did not play the role of the rough, brash cop often seen on TV, but a sympathetic ear. His acting skills came in handy, and Johal presents a comfortable demeanor, which makes an open dialog less painful.

“The goal is to appeal to the goodness of their soul,” said Johal. “In every person there is good, so once you have struck that cord within their soul, you have opened the door of two-way communication. Everyone wants to purge themselves of guilt and wrong doing, and it’s a horrible thing to carry that in your body.”

Johal’s talent became clear during his time in Los Angeles. Johal moved to Bellevue in 1982 to be with his wife and was quickly scooped up by D.P. Van Blaricom, former Bellevue police chief. The chief knew Johal had abilities in pursuing white collar crime. After years of working together on the force, the former chief didn’t hesitate to use Johal’s services when he opened up shop late last year.

“He had always expressed an interest in economic crime and has well prepared himself to professionally assist clients in both victim prevention and recovery of already lost assets,” Van Blaricom said. “I personally used his services to investigate an elderly lady’s housekeeper, who was stealing from her, and the result was a criminal conviction with a sentence to prison.”

The other half of the business, survival supplies, just came to Johal in a dream. After visiting family in Utah, he thought of it as a good way to supplement his income while doing investigations. Johal is a one-man show, so he can only take on one, perhaps two cases at a time. From his website, Johal sells a number of kits and he wants to give back as well. For every sale of more than 20 items, he gives two to the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

Johal’s goal to build his one-man operation around a number of sources fits his overall personality of wearing a number of hats. During his 30 years at the city, he not only bounced between a variety of occupations, he even opened a coffee shop in Mill Creek.

“I was a crazy guy, just a workaholic,” he said. “I would get up at 3:30 a.m. and do paper work and go to work at city.”