As we mentioned back in mid-June, Jules Kroll - patriarch of the worldwide corporate investigative firm bearing his name, has announced his plans to retire from the industry he helped to found.

Julius B. Kroll, a graduate of Cornell and Georgetown Law, is a former Manhattan assistant district attorney. He founded the entity that would become Kroll in 1972 after an unsuccessful bid to become an at-large city councilman for Queens.

Originally aimed at corporate purchasing departments, Kroll Associate's focus continued to expand with time and need. A three-year detour into his father's publishing business exposed him to the corruption that infused that industry and led to his first white collar investigations.

Kroll began to offer his consulting services to clients in the publishing industry and beyond. Broader investigations and new markets followed, with Kroll tracing the ebbs and flows of big business - growing his firm by mitigating risk and uncertainty wherever it festered.

A tempestuous late-1990s merger with Ohio armored car manufacturer, O'Gara, failed to gel, but the brief union expanded Kroll's reach greatly through a dramatic series of acquisitions. By 2000, the firms had split off into two publicly traded companies, a lengthy legal battle leaving them both bloodied.

After September 11th, security was the thing and Kroll thrived in the new environment. Reflecting that success, Kroll was purchased by the insurance giant, Marsh & McLennan, in 2004 for nearly $2 billion. Kroll employees close to 4,000 people across 65 offices in 33 countries worldwide.

Quite the empire to walk away from...

Ben Allen, Kroll's president and chief executive has served as the interim head Kroll's consulting practice since mid-June, when Jules Kroll made the initial announcement that he was planning for a July retirement.

Jules Kroll's son Jeremy spent the last decade working for his father's firm. Since 2007 he has been acted as independent consultant to the firm. What role he will play subsequent to his father's retirement will be interesting to see.

There had been talk over the last few years that Kroll might be spun off again into its own entity but that has yet to come to pass even as some units of the now-leviathan firm were sold off, for example Kroll's security business to Garda in 2006.

Kroll continues as a wholly owned subsidiary of MMC.

-- MDT

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