All bounty hunters like a good adventure, it comes with the terrain, and for Scott MacLean it was that time in North Carolina when a fugitive held a 9mm handgun to his forehead.
Steady nerves and quick reflexes -- he describes a nice move of using his forehead to slide back the safety catch -- saved his life.
It was also a learning experience, one that MacLean can pass on to other would-be bounty hunters who sign up for his course at the Virginia-based National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents.
The prey had been fast asleep when the bounty hunter walked into his mobile home at 4am. Unluckily for MacLean, the man slept with a gun wedged between the bed and the wall. "That taught me a lesson," he said. "Always check their hands before you wake them up."
Among bounty hunters -- bail enforcement agents to use the designation MacLean prefers -- near-death experiences, betrayal, police obstinancy and personal blunders are common fare. He has encountered more than his fair share of scrapes, clocking up about 860 arrests of bail jumpers since November 1999.
But he was at great pains to point out yesterday that what was uncommon were the unorthodox methods deployed by the bounty hunter Duane Lee Chapman -- or Dog, as he prefers to be known -- in the capture of Andrew Luster, the cosmetics-kingdom heir convicted in absentia on 86 counts of rape.
Luster had eluded police for six months when Chapman, two of Chapman's sons, Chapman's agent and a television crew, wrestled him to the ground at a taco stand in the resort town of Puerto Vallart on Wednesday. Not everyone was impressed.
Although some tributes arrived at Dog's Web site yesterday, other contributors showed little sympathy for Dog and his crew, who spent the day in a Mexican jail.
The FBI said it would not intervene on Dog's behalf, and many of his fellow bounty hunters just winced in annoyance.
Cowboys, sniffs MacLean. "If you do bail enforcement correctly there is no drama," he says. Had he been hunting Luster, he would have immediately notified the US embassy, and handed him over to the authorities.
The way he sees it, bounty hunters are a dying breed in America, unsung heroes making the streets safe for law-abiding citizens, and practitioners such as Dog give them a bad name. And according to MacLean, America's criminal justice would be unsustainable without bounty hunters.
MacLean's idols in the bounty business are self-motivated, independent types, who think on their feet and are skilled at deception. They can come from all walks of life -- he is a former mechanic. Most have a healthy disrespect for police, who are not known for their co-operation with bounty hunters.
Although there are a few celebrities out there -- such as Chapman, and a pint-sized redheaded woman named Mackenzie Green who was profiled in the New Yorker earlier this year -- the real hunters work in the shadows; they are loners.
Most are restricted to a geographical area of the US, where they rely on a steady bank of contacts among petty criminals or the police. A few high-fliers may spread their base of operations further, or trade cases and information coast to coast. But they do not appear to be doing it for the money.
Of the 3,000 members in MacLean's National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents, he estimates all but 300 are part-time operators, who earn perhaps US$10,000 to US$20,000 a year working nights and weekends. MacLean puts himself into a different category altogether.
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