Gilroy’s recovery agents track fugitives across the country
Gilroy – Don’t call them “bounty hunters” – at least not to Susan Shapiro.
“It sounds too rogue,” she said. “We’re recovery agents.”
To be sure, Shapiro doesn’t look like the bounty hunters on television: the muscle-bound, mulleted Duane “Dog” Chapman, or the gun-slinging vigilantes of the Old West. With her low ponytail, gray sweatshirt and stud earrings, Shapiro looks like she’d be more at home shuttling young soccer players around town in a minivan. She coaches girls’ basketball. She prays with her husband. She even hangs out at Starbucks.
But between shooting hoops, Shapiro and her husband, Gary Cates, tail fugitives from San Jose to Hawaii, tracking high-priced felons who’ve skipped court dates, or just plain skipped town. They’ve rifled through garbage, sweet-talked felons’ mothers, and even prank-called with pizzas to get the bad guys back into custody.
“In this business,” she said, “you’ve got to get creative.”
That is, she cautions, within the law.
Since 1999 California’s recovery agents are subject to new training requirements, passed under the Bail Fugitive Recovery Persons Act. To track down “skips,” agents take more than 52 hours of coursework and secure licenses as private investigators. TV’s Chapman, an ex-convict, couldn’t pass muster here. A felony conviction bars a recovery agent from working in California. And if Mel Barth had his way, felons would be barred from the business nationwide.
“The industry has changed for the better,” said Barth, executive director of the National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents, from his office in Falls Church, Va. The association boasts more than 3,000 members across the country. “It’s become regulated throughout the U.S. We’re is a baby industry that’s been waiting for 300 years to straighten out.”
Yet bounty hunters retain significant powers, granted under the contract a defendant signs to secure a bail bond and get out of jail. Here’s how it works: If a person can’t afford his own bail, he can pay a bondsman to post bail for an upfront fee – usually 10 percent of the total bail amount. When the defendant goes to court, the bail is returned to the bondsman, and the agency keeps the initial payment.
But when criminals bolt, the bondsman is left footing the bill – unless a recovery agent like Shapiro can reel in the skip. Unfettered by the need for search warrants, recovery agents can enter a fugitive’s home at will; unlike police, they aren’t required to read a defendant his “Miranda” rights, which informs the suspect of what he is, or is not, Constitutionally required to tell police. Equipped with a concealed weapons permit, issued in Washington, she can draw a gun, if she needs to. And with the luxury of choosing when to arrest a fugitive, Shapiro can bide her time, confronting skips alone or in public places like a corner drugstore or supermarket.
“When you’re at the grocery store with your hands filled with oranges and milk,” she asked, “just how dangerous are you?”
Still, things can get sticky when recovery agents cross state lines. A handful of states, including nearby Oregon, don’t allow agents like Shapiro to make arrests, and it’s illegal for U.S. agents to do so in Mexico. Illustrious “Dog” is currently facing criminal charges south of the border, after capturing convicted rapist and cosmetics heir Andrew Luster in 2003. His next court date is Dec. 22, and he faces up to four years in prison.
Looming deadlines pose another, milder hazard of the job. Agents typically have six months to zero in on a skip, or a bondsman loses thousands in bail to the courts. Smaller agencies tend to play it safe, scrutinizing applicants’ credit before they write bail. Dino Garcia, a bail bondsmen with Pacific Coast Bail Bonds, with offices in Gilroy and San Jose, says he seeks responsible signers – as responsible as criminals get, he jokes – so that he doesn’t have to track them down later. He’s critical of the big dogs in the business, who charge lower fees, write more bonds, and chase down more skips.
“Pay a few bucks, and they’ll let anyone out,” he said of large agencies. “It’s hurting the little guys.”
Nor is he too fond of “Dog,” star of A&E’s ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter.’ The Hawaii ex-con is more of an entertainer than an agent, he argues. “You could see him coming a mile away.”
Shapiro agrees that with more resources, larger agencies can afford to write more bail. The Cates’ agency, California Surety Investigations, handles cases referred from Aladdin Bail Bonds, one of the largest bail agencies nationwide, with more than 40 offices in California and seven in Idaho. According to Gary Cates, CSI made more than 38,000 arrests for more than $60 million in bail last year.
“Aladdin takes risks a mom-and-pop shop can’t,” Shapiro said, “because we have the folks behind us to find the skips.”
If they’re as good as they claim, they’re very, very good. The National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents has claimed a 90 percent success rate, and Shapiro sets her agency’s rate even higher, at 96 percent. Good agents are well-paid, but those who fail don’t get their paychecks.
“It’s impossible to say what an agent makes,” Barth said. “One guy in New Jersey makes $150,000, $250,000 a year. Others don’t make enough to pay their phone bills. Unless you hustle and work hard, in this industry, you’re not going to make it.”
Shapiro, who specializes in high-liability bonds of $50,000 or more, has made up to $76,000 on a single case, and juggles 80 to 90 cases at a time. Descended from a New York police family, she once aimed to join the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Instead, the cash lured her into bail enforcement.
“No joke,” she said. “I can make real money in this business.”
To earn that $76,000, Shapiro and Cates rifled through a Los Angeles mother’s garbage cans, looking for information on her son, an accused rapist and kidnapper she said was nowhere to be found. A doctor’s prescription, panned from the filth, pointed the couple to an Encino drug treatment center. Over and over, the two had trailed the mother on Los Angeles highways, only to lose her amid traffic. Now, they realized, she’d been visiting her son in Encino. At the ritzy treatment facility, Shapiro spotted the mother’s Mercedes before the son emerged, “looking like Moses,” with a grizzled beard, tan robe and Jewish skullcap.
“That helped us buy our first home in Gilroy,” she said, grinning.
It’s not always glamorous. Recovery agents spend more time combing through court records for clues than in hot pursuit, and stake-outs can be pretty mundane. Cates is often sent to Mission Street in San Francisco, seeking “some guy with a red blanket, pushing a shopping cart,” says Shapiro. “How do you do that?”
Nor is it stress-free, even for the bail agents left back at the office. For Garcia, the profession entails “a lot of babysitting,” with collect calls ringing his phone off the hook. His clients come to trust him, and when they get nervous, he said, they’ll call him for comfort. Twenty-four hour shifts leave him drained, and holidays don’t exist.
“Christmas Eve is just another day to me,” said Garcia.
And while Shapiro tries to defuse danger by making arrests in quiet moments, the technique doesn’t always succeed. Once, she tracked an elusive skip to Campbell, and ended up arresting the woman in front of her kids, a thing she’s loath to do. The kids bawled, said Shapiro, and she didn’t feel too good, either.
What’s more, the stigma is tiring. Bail bondsmen are often stereotyped as sleazy shysters, and bail enforcement agents afforded only an underworld glamour that doesn’t square with the everyday trials of tracing skips. If people alternately love and hate police, it seems, they don’t know what to think of bounty hunters.
“It’s known as a shady business,” Garcia said. “It used to be. But now, I’m regulated by the California Department of Insurance. We’re audited constantly. It’s clean.”
No matter what anyone thinks, Shapiro says, she loves her job – the independence, the variety, the rush of a capture.
And that hefty paycheck doesn’t hurt either.
