"The Rockford Files." "Magnum P.I." "Columbo."

How about "Nick Montano, San Francisco Private Eye"?

Three years ago, Nickolas Montano of Montano & Associates had just wrapped up a medical malpractice investigation for a Los Angeles lawyer. As the two sat down over a cup of coffee, the lawyer casually asked Montano if he could help "a friend" who hadn't seen her father in 32 years. Montano paused, then leaned across the table.

"It's you, isn't it?" he asked.

The embarrassed lawyer nodded yes. Montano made a phone call to his Sacramento office, and a half-hour later had assembled the entire life history of the lawyer's father.

Montano thought that was the end of it. But that night, he got a call from the lawyer's husband, Garrett Cohen, a television producer with DBA Entertainment Inc. He said he'd like to get together and talk about producing a TV series based on Montano's career.

While most people's brushes with Hollywood remain just that, Montano is hoping the industry, which earlier embraced fellow San Francisco gumshoe Hal Lipset, will also welcome him.

He's edging ever closer to small-screen immortality. HBO is interested in doing a documentary about the well-respected investigator. And Cohen's company, which has produced such real crime shows as "Unsolved Mysteries" and "LAPD," has purchased an option to acquire the rights to the story of an investigator who mixes intuition, experience, humor and access to computer databanks when it comes to conducting business. Montano, who has been commuting to Hollywood for weekly meetings about a possible series, is beginning to imagine his life transformed and packaged into a sequence of one-hour episodes. By mixing and matching events from real cases in order to protect the identity of clients, Montano has already come up with story lines for 12 shows. Cohen is busily shopping the proposed series to the networks, some of which have expressed interest. The two are also interviewing actors who might portray Montano as well as talking to writers and directors. "It's exciting," said Montano, who has been sleuthing in the Bay Area for 17 years. "I'm Hollywood's flavor of the month." Cohen is betting on Montano lasting much longer than a month. "As soon as I met him, I knew there were at least several movies to be made based on his cases and at least a dramatic series based on his life," he said. "His approach to his work is, to say the least, unorthodox. It's a little bit of 'Mission: Impossible:,' 'Sneakers' [the film] and 'The Equalizer' [TV series] all rolled up in one. He's got wonderful characters in his stories, and he's bigger than life."

What is likely to set the proposed series apart from previous private-eye shows is that it would be based on real cases and a central character who runs counter to the stereotype of gumshoe as brooding loner.

In real life, Montano is a gregarious personality who can trade off between swashbuckling drama and tongue-in-cheek comedy.

"A loner or a rebel can't play this part," said Montano. "You need someone who is, well, kind of out there. Someone who really cares, who gets along with people."

He envisions someone on the order of Jim Belushi or Danny DeVito to play himself. For complicated investigations, Montano likes to use a team approach, which is what prompted Cohen's reference to "Sneakers," a recent comedy-drama about a somewhat rag-tag group of sleuths.

In Montano's case, he might hire four or five friends, family members or "operatives" to help him gather information.

When he was hired recently by an employer to investigate a workers' compensation claim, he followed the employee to Hawaii, where the investigator posed as a tourist. The man had alleged he could not walk without experiencing pain.

Montano put on a loud Hawaiian shirt, black socks and tennis shoes, and, with his two daughters in tow, headed for the beach.

"At one point, the guy I was trailing asked me to use his camera and take a picture of him boogie boarding," said Montano. "That was the end of the case."

He has also traveled with his two daughters to the zoo and a 49ers game, on the trail of employees who said they had been severely injured on the job. At the zoo, he had his 12-year-old daughter videotape a man—who claimed to have trouble walking—freely traipsing about the place.

In another case, Montano hired his wife to gather information for a Southern California record store, which had lost about $800,000 worth of merchandise through suspected employee theft.

Montano's wife complained to a store clerk that she only had $50 to spend on Christmas gifts for friends. The clerk then offered to give her free CDs if she would agree to have a drink with him after work.

Montano, of course, showed up at the clerk's apartment and found close to $200,000 worth of stolen goods. Another case closed.

"There's no one I would want more on my side than Nick," said David Millstein, chief of the San Francisco District Attorney's special operations unit, who worked with Montano before joining the district attorney's office.

"He combines extraordinary initiative, imagination and dedication. He's very dogged, and extremely results-oriented," said Millstein.

It was Montano who was hired to investigate one of the most complicated child-custody cases in Contra Costa County. The daughter of a wealthy Georgia textile family fell in love with an anesthesiologist. The couple had a child and when they later separated, the husband abducted their child. The daughter's family hired Montano to locate the girl.

He turned to computer databanks—including National Vehicle Registration records and the Social Security Search index—to locate all of the man's relatives. Montano then deduced correctly that he'd taken the girl to his father's home in Reno.

One of Montano's pending investigations involves a prominent 60-year-old man and his 30-year-old wife. When the couple's house was robbed, the stolen loot included several videotapes that show the wife having sex with young men.

"The thieves don't know they have these tapes," said Montano. "If they get out, the couple's careers are over."

While Cohen's production company retains final approval over the scripts, Montano hopes at least some of the episodes might focus on such issues as sexual harassment, wrongful termination, or employment discrimination against gays or minorities. Montano said he's seen a large increase in these types of cases in recent years.

In a recent sexual-harassment case, Montano was hired by Millstein, when he was still in private practice, to help bolster the case of a female plaintiff who claimed she had been harassed by a male employer.

The case was complicated by the fact that the plaintiff had admitted to having an affair with the employer. Montano, however, relied on his intuition in helping to strengthen an otherwise iffy case.

Montano assumed there might have been others harassed by the same employer. He then got a list of all the employees who had left the company, finding six who claimed to have been harassed but had decided not to file charges. After Montano walked into the next mediation session with the other victims, the case immediately settled to the plaintiff's satisfaction.

If Montano's cases ever come to television, one episode could easily draw on his investigation into a string of patients whose conditions worsened after being treated in the hospital by the same physician. The doctor hired Montano to investigate after her professional competence was called into question.

Eventually, Montano focused on a respiratory therapist whose shift coincided with the visits by the complaining patients.

He hired someone to check into the hospital and pose as a patient. Sure enough, the therapist showed up in the middle of the night and started fiddling with the decoy's medication following treatment by the doctor.

It turned out the therapist had flunked out of medical school and sought revenge by targeting the physician, who had been one of his professors.

In another trait that sets him apart from other private eyes, Montano has a habit of taking at least one or two pro bono cases each month.

For instance, he has worked for the Sierra Club and the Rainforest Coalition in identifying and locating toxic dumpers. He has also donated his services to women seeking to locate children they'd previously given up for adoption.

He's also selective about the type of lawyers he chooses to work with.

"If a lawyer involved in a matter behaves in an unprofessional way, he spots that immediately and won't work with that lawyer in the future because of his or her ethics," said Sandra McCandless, a labor and employment attorney at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal who has worked with Montano for three years.

So what's Hollywood waiting for? Certainly not for a private eye—fictional or real—with a better-sounding name.

"The thing I hear most [among TV people] are comments about my name. They think Nick Montano is the coolest name for a P.I.," said the would-be prime-time hero.

"Every time I meet someone down there, they ask me if it's my stage name. That's my real name."

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