For many years, he rendered investigative services (specializing in industrial espionage) for Kroll Associates as an independent contractor "who brought the ghosts of Longie Zwillman, occupied Germany and Swinging London straight into the corporate boardroom.
According to journalist Eamon Javers, his paternal grandfather (also named Thomas Corbally) "had been an Irish beat cop in Newark who worked his way up to detective and then founded his own private investigative firm in the early ’20s: the Corbally Detective Agency, where Tom’s uncles and father all worked as private investigators at various points in Tom’s childhood.
Corbally later maintained that his teenage exploits as a trans-Atlantic stowaway partially inspired onetime acquaintance James Cameron's Titanic.
[2] During World War II and its aftermath, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force until 1943 before working in Allied-occupied Germany as a civilian employee of the "War Department Detachment" (believed to be a front for the Office of Strategic Services, the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Army Counterintelligence Corps) through at least 1949.
[4][5][6] Throughout his career, his circle of friends and associates allegedly encompassed such disparate figures as John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Bob Hope, Faye Dunaway, Lee Iacocca, Roy Cohn, Heidi Fleiss, Jordan Belfort and members of the House of Saud.