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.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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.
He won't reveal his income -- bail enforcement is a cash business -- but notes, "My wife drives a BMW and I have two Harley-Davidsons. I do very, very well."
Unlike Britain, America has operated a system of commercial bail since the middle of the 19th century. It is a way of life that could be on the wane as some US states outlaw the practice of bounty hunting, and courts in some jurisdictions assume the role of bail bonds, removing the profit incentive for the hunter.
Until then, however, there will be commercial bondsmen, who will post bail for the accused, usually once they produce evidence of collateral: a house, a car. Sometimes, they can't, and that is where the bond business becomes risky. If the accused fails to turn up for the court date, the bond agent becomes liable for the sum posted.
That is where the bounty hunter comes in, tracking down the fugitive for a typical fee of 10 percent of the value of the bail bond.
They have become a sort of institution in America -- although a largely unregulated one. Nowadays, 20 percent of America's felony defendants jump bail. Almost all are eventually brought back for trial -- not by the police, but by the bounty hunters who track down 88 percent of the fugitives who eventually turn up in court.
That, argues MacLean, shows that the police are either too uninterested or too overburdened to track down bail skips -- particularly those charged with minor offensives. He says the bounty hunters make America safer, preventing criminals from bringing down neighborhoods by returning to their old haunts, and they save the taxpayer money.
That version of the dogged, hardworking investigator has yet to make any imprint on the popular impression of bounty hunters as larger than life romantic figures -- embodied by Chapman's credo of "born on a mountain, raised in a cave, arresting fugitives is all I crave."
The day-to-day work of real bounty hunting is far less glamorous. It starts, say the bounty hunters, with a phone call. The vast majority of people who fail to turn up for court are afraid, or absent-minded, says Solomon Hamilton, a bail agent in the Washington area. Once alerted, most come in of their own accord, although he readily admits to using subterfuge.
"It's a lot better to fool them in than to fight them," he says. "Make the initial phone call, tell them a lie. That's what I tell my people: lie, lie, lie. Bribe, bribe, bribe. Do not pull a gun. Do not fight. Lie."
But almost always -- despite the histrionics of men such as Chapman and the efforts at professionalism of men such as MacLean -- in the end it comes down to the most basic of tactics: tapping the fugitives friends and relations to see who is willing to talk.
"There is always a Judas," says MacLean. "There is always somebody somewhere doesn't like you. My job isn't to find you, my job is to find the person who doesn't like you. Nine times out of 10, you don't even know who that person is."
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS