Busting For Bucks
Interview with a Bounty Hunter
Hector Rivera on Fugitive Justice
Story by Chris Ridder, illustration by Chris Brandt
Hector Rivera is
built like a tank. This in itself doesn't explain why he
spends his free
time kicking down peoples' doors, but it might help explain the
frightened
expressions on the residents' faces when he strides into their
living rooms
through a cloud of splinters and swirling plaster dust, badge
glinting,
handcuffs clanging. Invariably, the expressions change from
frightened to
mortified when he demands one of their loved ones, cuffs him, and
spirits
him off in a beat-up Buick sedan.
As incredible as this may sound, it's all in a day's work for Rivera, one of the few remaining free-lance bounty hunters in the Bay Area. Bounty hunters are hired by bail bondsmen to bring in people who have forfeited their bail bonds. In return for this service, the bondsman offers 10% of the bond, on average about $1,000 to the bounty hunter, which Rivera splits with his partner.
Kicking down doors and beating people up isn't the only way bounty hunters bring in bail jumpers, but sometimes it's necessary. However, Rivera strongly emphasizes that physical violence is an evil, to be avoided at all costs, and prefers to work things out on "friendlier" terms when he can.
"When you work with [people who jump bail] enough, you really get an idea for how they think. Most of these guys are just scared — they don't want to go to jail. Sometimes they've just been busted on a first offense DUI and they'll just get a fine, or community service sentence, and they don't know that."
If a target can be persuaded to turn themselves in, Rivera will help them reinstate their bond — extend the court date at no penalty to the person. "I'm playing with peoples' lives here. Their future is dependent on me. Maybe they're having some real problems, their wife left them, their kid died of a drug overdose, they're having financial troubles — and they're really in a hole. When you're in a situation like that, maybe you think a little irrationally — you don't want to go to jail, so you run. They don't know what's going to happen to them. If I can reinstate their bond, that's one less crime they have to deal with."
Rivera always prefers a more civil solution because it's less trouble for him and the criminal, and he gets paid the same amount regardless. It's also less trouble for bondsmen, because they don't have to pay for damage to the house or the criminal, and cases are solved more quickly. His intuition is very dependable. Very few of those he trusts to make their second court date forfeit a second time.
Even with those he doesn't trust, though, he prefers not to confront them at their home, where relatives and friends can help fend him off. To avoid such dangerous confrontations, he's learned a number of slick strategies.
One of the most effective methods is to entice them into the open and then capture them. "These tricks work for sometimes a week, sometimes a month or more, until people on the street catch on. You've got to play with their mind, give them what they want. If it's a girl, you offer them a girl. Maybe it's money..."
One of his most memorable schemes involved posing as a packing company offering work.
"I'd sit outside of the house for hours, just making sure who was in there, seeing if the guy was home. Then I'd call him from my cellular phone, and tell him I was from a packing company and had heard through the grapevine he was looking for work. People on the run need work, and cash up front, no questions asked is too good an opportunity to pass up." Of course, he'd throw in some details to make it more believable, ask them to bring a sack lunch and work gloves. While the person was on the phone, Rivera would make a positive confirmation of their identity by asking for their social security number and date of birth. Then he'd inform the person that he was sending two of his workers by in a couple of hours to pick him up.
"We'd monitor the house for the next two hours, making sure he didn't leave, keeping tabs on who was there, and then we'd go in," he explains. The unsuspecting person would answer the door, freshly showered, lunch in hand, to find two people dressed like truck loaders. Then Rivera and his partner would lead him to the open passenger door of the Buick, one would stand guard in case anybody ran from the house, and they'd show him the warrant and their bounty hunters' license, termed, 'badging.'
"The poor guys must have felt really stupid, walking out of the house with their lunch and their gloves only to have us cuff them, throw them in the car, and drive off," he said.
In addition to his run-down Buick, he owns a number of props and costumes that allow him to blend in with his surroundings for surveillance, and to gain the trust of the people he's after. Because he deals a lot with gang members, he sometimes masquerades as one, other times he'll pose as a businessman. He's also posed as a drug dealer, wearing gold chains and driving around in a cherry-red convertible.
Another trick he uses to avoid being overpowered is to catch the person when they're not at home. Sometimes he will follow them to the grocery store and capture them while they're shopping or in the parking lot. Once, he followed someone into a hotel elevator, overpowered him, and handcuffed him. When the elevator hit the first floor, he led the struggling man out to his car and back to jail. His favorite method of avoiding fights in these cases is to intimidate them with his physical presence and by adopting a serious attitude. If this doesn't work, "You can usually get them to back down if you apply enough pressure to the throat," he said.
While Rivera finds his job exciting and loves the action, he also has a strong sense of responsibility to his charges and of the impact he has on their lives, so he tries his best to make his contact with them a positive one. Besides his desire to get bail reinstated at every opportunity, he does other favors for them. "We had this guy once who really wanted to talk to his wife. I thought he was sincere, so I took him to see her, even though we were taking an incredible risk of him escaping. We kept him locked up in the back seat, and made her stand three feet away, and let them talk. She kept advancing on the car, and we had to make sure she didn't free him. It wasn't the best of circumstances, but at least he got to explain what was happening. It really meant a lot to both of them."
He also takes the time to talk to the family if they are involved in a 'scene.' "They think you've got to be crazy, kicking down their door and barging into their house, beating up their relative. It's really hard on a family," he says. So he takes a few minutes to let the family know where they can reach their relative and why he's being taken.
"A bounty hunter can be your friend, or he can be your worst nightmare. It all depends on the bounty hunter, and in how you react," says Rivera. Often, people will respond to favors with favors in kind when they get out of jail. Rivera has a network of snitches who help him track down people he's looking for. "Of course, you still have to bribe them," he qualified, "but it really helps out a lot."
But there are those times when becoming a criminal's worst nightmare is the only solution for Rivera, and it invariably complicates the job.
"We were in Gonzales, " he says, somewhat nonchalantly, "and we were going after this guy. Everything was going well. I made sure nobody was around, approached him, and asked him for directions. As he was talking, I walked back towards my car, trying to get farther from his house, and he followed. I knew that if I took more than about 15 seconds to cuff him, that people would run out of his house and attack me.
"Suddenly, things started going wrong, and he resisted. I had him on the sidewalk in a half-nelson, and he was putting up a hell of a fight. He started reaching for bottles, 2x4s, anything he could find, so I just started hitting every pressure point I could find, trying to distract him with pain, but it wasn't working.
"And then it happened — his friends and family came out of the house and attacked me. I remember this woman on top of me, pulling my hair and kicking me. I kicked her in the chest, and I must have knocked the wind out of her, because I don't think she was there for a while after, but I was still getting beaten up by his other friends."
While the police bailed him out of that incident, Rivera recalls another time when he was on his own. He had kicked the door down to a Seaside resident's home in a housing project, and found his charge eating dinner with his family. During the struggle to handcuff the man, four other families barged in and demanded he back off. "I had my back to the wall, and all these people were threatening me. All I could do was show them my badge and the warrant. I started talking mean, and demanding that they turn him over to me."
They refused, and the man broke and ran away. "I had to chase him over fences, through neighbors' back yards." Eventually, he tackled the man, cuffed him, and dragged him back to his car, in front of the house. "All of his relatives were there, yelling at me, but there was no more fighting, and we left," he recalls.
Rivera loves bounty hunting, but he worries about how those who are close to him react to his job. "My wife hates it," he says, "It caused a lot of troubles when we got married, but it's what I love to do." It's also a very private thing for him. None of his co-workers at his full-time job know that he is a bounty hunter — it's an aspect of his life he only shares with close friends and family, because he feels that bounty hunters have a bad reputation. "People don't like bounty hunters, they don't really understand what we do. That's why I'm doing this interview, to give people a more realistic impression of what bounty hunting is like."
When I asked him how he felt about what he does, he said, "Sometimes I feel bad after I've picked someone up and put them in jail. I mean, it really blows their mind when we find them — they didn't think they'd get caught," says Rivera. But he makes it a practice never to visit them in jail, no matter how much he likes them. "If you do that, then it becomes personal, and you can't let that get in the way of your work."
© 1996 Tweak and Chris Ridder