Ernie Rizzo, who died Sunday in Chicago at 64, was a wily, pugnacious private detective who worked on a dizzying array of high-profile cases, enough to keep tabloids both newsprint and video in material for years.

Among the many cases he claimed were assembling evidence of child abuse against Michael Jackson; searching for Paula Jones’s father on behalf of President Clinton; and examining voice evidence against Mr. Clinton on behalf of CBS when the president denied having “sexual relations with that woman.” Other files in his cabinet included work for or against Michael Jordan, Rep. Henry Hyde, William Kennedy Smith, O.J. Simpson, and Elian Gonzalez, the involuntary Cuban immigrant whom Rizzo planned to abduct and return to his father in Cuba, the detective told the New York Post.

Using a dizzying array of high-tech, brains, and chutzpah, he always got his man. Or at least that was how he portrayed himself in a seemingly endless string of appearances on television and in print.

“I think recognition is more of a draw than the money,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1999. Nevertheless, he claimed four houses and owned his own tanning bed to keep himself camera-ready.

Rizzo’s Web site features a photo of him wearing an Egyptian headdress and jauntily riding a camel for a child-recovery case in Israel. “Yes, he found her, and he brought her back to her mother in the U.S.,” the press release his public relations firm issued at his death reported. Even from 6 feet under, Rizzo tells a great story that might actually be true.

Rizzo grew up in Chicago, where he worked as a Montgomery Ward security guard. He said this was where he learned to spot check kiters.

“They shouldn’t have been buying those suits,” he told the Chicago Daily Herald in 2004. “They didn’t have the money.”

After a stint in the Army, he worked as a beat cop from 1962 and eventually became a police detective while taking private cases on the side. Eventually, he quit to be a private detective full time.

Rizzo’s first high-profile case was the 1978 disappearance of Helen Brach, the candy heiress. Hired by the animal foundation she left as her will’s primary beneficiary, he failed to find her body. He did discover that one of her employees had purchased a meat grinder shortly before her disappearance.

Even then, he was operating at the edges of the law, working without a private eye’s license because his had been revoked after a felony conviction for placing illegal wiretaps the year before. (Over the years, he would boast of placing microphones in petunias and child monitors, even sending out “free trial” cell phones to people he was investigating.)

Domestic cases were probably his most common, and Rizzo developed a raffish indifference to their human costs. “It gets to that when a guy comes to me and says he thinks his wife’s got a thing going with someone, I want to say either forget it or get a divorce,” he told the Tribune in 1982.

“Aren’t there any wives who don’t cheat?” the reporter asked.

“Very few,” Rizzo replied.

In one often-recounted instance, Rizzo hired a helicopter to get photographs of a cheating wife in a luxury apartment high in the John Hancock Building. In another, he rented a beachfront villa and befriended the unfaithful couple next door, using his holiday snapshots as evidence for his client, the husband.

Like any of the fictional gumshoes on TV, Rizzo’s plot lines sometimes involved strange coincidences. In 2005, he was arrested after testifying against a man whom he served with an unrelated mortgage foreclosure that very day at the courthouse.

In the 1993 Jackson case, Rizzo worked on behalf of a child who brought a suit against Mr. Jackson for child abuse. The case was ultimately settled out of court, but not before Rizzo splashily claimed in national reports that a certain bodily appendage of Mr. Jackson’s was striped “like a barber’s pole.”

The case remained his favorite, he told the Daily Herald in 2004. “With these cases, you learn so much about how the giants live and work and how phony they really are,” he said. He did not disclose what percentage he received of the reported $20 million settlement.

Rizzo testified in the Laci Peterson murder case that her husband, Scott, could not have thrown his wife’s body overboard without capsizing his boat. Rizzo even prepared a video to demonstrate.

He claimed that the woman who accused Kennedy Smith of rape in 1999 had approached tabloids to sell her story. He posed as a producer for “20/20” to gather information from a critic of Mr. Hyde’s during the Clinton impeachment hearings. The cases went on and on, and the stories did, too, told to TV hosts like Geraldo and Phil Donahue and any number of others. He claimed to have posed as an Arab sheik, a Mexican terrorist, an FBI agent, and a telephone repairman. He had a camera in his eyeglasses, a universal cell phone interceptor in his car, and a special printing machine for creation false letterheads.

“I work somewhere between 007 and Inspector Clouseau,” he told the Tribune in 1999.