When you are working with the wealthy, there are basically five criminal archetypes that your security consultants need to be intimately familiar with. They are the master, the predator, the professional, the opportunist and the terrorist. Exhibit one shows the general characteristics attributed to each type.

Master Criminals
Master criminals are primarily focused on pecuniary reward. At the same time, they seek a high level of power and control over their surroundings and over the people they interact with. In general, they are exceptionally intelligent and can be absolutely brilliant, very sophisticated and highly rational, though their logic may be distorted. They are very planning-oriented and can access extensive resources when they need to. Thus they come in all sizes, from those who are like CEOs managing wide-ranging criminal enterprises, to those running specialized crews to soloists.

In all cases, master criminals are extremely private, operating far below the radar screen. In fact, they often take exceptional pains to disguise their involvement in illegal activities. The master criminal might plan the crime in one country against citizens in another country who are living in a third country, using personnel from a fourth country and paying for them from a bank in a fifth country. They can easily be wielding state-of-the-art technology and weaponry that are often far more advanced than that available to most law enforcement agencies.

Predator Criminals
Unlike master criminals, predator criminals are those motivated by emotion-mentally damaged people operating in their own fantasy worlds. As such, they employ a calculus that other people usually have difficulty comprehending. Serial rapists, child molesters and other sexual predators-as well as the array of different stalkers-are all variations of the predator criminal.

Stalkers are the variation of predator criminal often confronted by the wealthy, who face three broad categories of this type:

Intimates. These are people who have had some relationship with the wealthy person who later can't let go, refusing to believe it when a relationship has ended. The general perception is that by pursing their well-to-do victims, they will win them over.

Delusional. These criminals have some false belief that keeps them tied to their victims. In erotomania, for example, the stalker's delusional belief is that they have a relationship with the moneyed victim-or that the victim loves him-even though she might never have even met him. Another type of delusional stalker might believe that he is destined to be with someone, and that if he only pursues the target hard enough and long enough, she will come to love him as he loves her. As all these stalkers act on their delusions, they become threats to the wealthy.

Vengeful. These stalkers become angry with their wealthy victims over some slight, real or imagined. High-profile people with strong expressed opinions, for example, are more likely to attract these kinds of stalkers. These stalkers also include disgruntled ex-employees such as celebrities' assistants who might target their renowned former employers.

Predator criminals, a diverse lot, have many different characteristics. Nevertheless, they are often of average intelligence and are moderately sophisticated, often being more clever than ingenious. Because of their motivations, they are not rational. Their planning orientation and access to resources vary to a large extent, and they operate in both the public and private domains.

Professional Criminals
These criminals can be part of a team or soloists. They range from armed robbers to jewel thieves and from smaller-time matchstick men to safecrackers. Their motivation is mainly money. Although we focus on master criminals as a separate archetype, they are actually a subset of this category. In fact, they represent its pinnacle, and we estimate that they account for less than 3% of professional criminals.