Delivery men

THE gigs are irregular but, thanks in part to mostly lax regulations, good money can still be made by bounty-hunting, says Rob “Daddy Rat” Hoyt, a trucker in Post Falls, Idaho with an “icing on the cake” sideline snatching fugitives. All but four states allow private citizens to bounty hunt. Nearly a third, Idaho included, don’t bother licensing armed “fugitive-recovery agents”, as they are also known. Bondsmen typically pay bounty-hunters expenses plus 10% to 20% of the value of a bond on someone who fails to appear in court. Some bonds run into six figures.

It is not work for the faint of heart—plenty of fugitives try to fight off pursuers. So many bounty hunters lift weights and practise a martial art or wrestling, the better to snap on handcuffs and, on some fugitives, ankle cuffs, lest they try to kick out a backseat window on the drive to jail. Tools of the trade include ballistic vests, pepper spray, Tasers, handguns and, for some jobs, a shotgun loaded with a beanbag that “folds you up like a newspaper”, says Mike “Animal” Zook, an affable bounty-hunter in Spirit Lake, Idaho. Though built like a bear, he has been clubbed and, on four jobs, stabbed. The pain didn’t really kick in until the adrenalin wore off. It’s “definitely not easy money”, says Rex Taylor, a bounty-hunter in nearby Coeur d’Alene who also runs All Freedom Bail Bonds.

Bounty-hunting affords plenty of free time, and the mostly hands-off approach (especially in conservative Idaho and neighbouring Montana and Wyoming) has opened the profession to many, Mr Taylor says. To help them get a start, the National Association of Fugitive Recovery Agents (NAFRA) in Delaware refers rookies to old hands seeking an apprentice. Like many such groups, NAFRA favours more regulation. No capture means no pay, so some overzealous agents end up on the news, says Chuck Jordan, NAFRA’s boss. Tired of managing the bad PR, he is pushing for federal rules on training and background checks to weed out current or hopeful bounty-hunters who, for example, “have perhaps murdered someone”.

Bounty-hunters generally resist calls for more rules. Thanks in part to a Supreme Court decision of 1873, if a fugitive is known to be in a house “we have every right to break down that door” without a warrant, notes Michael O’Halloran of Wyoming Fugitive Investigations in Cheyenne. The police have little time for such work because of the long stakeouts that are occasionally needed. Proposed restrictions, Mr O’Halloran says, could keep bounty-hunters from getting the job done. The National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents, now part of NAFRA, has estimated that nearly 90% of bail-jumpers get nabbed.

That success rate has a lot to do with technology for “skip tracing”, the term of art for locating a man on the lam. Knowing that a certain fugitive had a weakness for 7-Eleven’s Slurpees, Mr Zook got access to security video recorded by the firm and used face-recognition software to learn when and at which outlet he was most likely to swing by. He caught the man as he emerged from an Idaho 7-Eleven with the frosty drink in hand. Online services like Skip Smasher and Bond Tracker search numerous databases for clues to a person’s whereabouts, with the latter even reporting the place and time an ATM is used.

Such resources are making bounty-hunting easier than during its frontier heyday in the Old West, but success still requires ingenuity. Bounty-hunters sometimes fool a fugitive’s child or partner to reveal his hideout, and generally prefer to seize them when they are asleep or otherwise unprepared. Kathy Wilson, a former prison guard who now captures fugitives for Big Sky Bail Bonds in Kalispell, Montana, prefers to nab them leaving a supermarket with arms full, or in casinos where firearms are banned. Trickery is common, too. Agents with Wyoming Fugitive Investigations sometimes pretend to deliver a TV won in a competition, or don a FedEx uniform and knock on the door holding an empty box. “Everybody wants a package,” Mr O’Halloran notes.