The bickering starts before Larry Benton even steps foot in the van.
“Don’t ding up the fucking side, man,” shouts Greg Price from the window as Benton bends acrobatically out of his Jeep, trying not to hit his car door against Price’s 1994 maroon Safari.
“Don’t mess up the love van?” Benton comes back with sarcasm.
It’s hard to imagine a van in worse condition. The windshield on the driver’s side is cracked in the shape of a spider web, the result of a collision with a fugitive’s head (Price served as a middle man in the accident). As the back door slides open, an extra large gas station coffee cup and an empty gallon water jug — part of the small garbage heap on the floor of the van — fall onto the street. “Don’t fucking litter,” Price calls back from the front seat.
Inside the messy van, the first row of seating in the back has been removed to create a buffer between Price and Benton and their unruly guests. A Hustler sticker with a naked woman’s outline is plastered to the center console below the radio, and a miniature American flag sticks out of a hole Price drilled into the plastic next to the dashboard. He added the patriotic touch when he came across “made in China” written on the flag. Before he had the van, he hunted fugitives in a white Crown Victoria with the words “Big Daddy’s Taxi” painted across the side.
Price turns on the ignition and instantly begins beating on the dashboard with his closed fist.
“You’re going to yell at me for scratching it and you’re beating the hell out of it,” says Benton. Wearing a black T-shirt over a long-sleeved undershirt and $200 dark jeans, Larry looks more like a college boy or a singer-songwriter than a bondsman.
“Gotta get the lights to work on the dash, man,” says Price. “Sometimes you gotta beat on it a couple times. You’ll get over it.”
Price looks more the part. The few days’ worth of stubble on his face match the length of his sloping buzz-cut hair. Tonight he wears a sleeveless, label-less black shirt, which reveals his tattoos. Scripted on his right triceps are the words “You think you know,” with “but you have no idea” on the hidden part of his arm. Emblazoned on his left shoulder is the paw-shaped crest of his security school alma mater. Price is overweight, but he doesn’t wear it like fat.
On our way to Hidden Valley, a gangland in northeast Charlotte, Price is chatty, talking about an insurance company that scammed him out of a windshield. “‘We’ll put in a free windshield for you,'” he says in an old lady’s voice. “They have that commercial where the Grandma says that shit: ‘I’m a grandma, you can trust me.’ I called up for a free windshield I didn’t get shit from Grandma but fucking clap.” If Price goes five minutes without saying something offensive, check his pulse.
We pull into the drive of a small, robin-egg blue home. We’re here to find Saul Valdovinos, a skip who missed court on drug charges. “You just sit there and look pretty like you always do,” Price says to Benton before we leave the van.
“Cómo estás, Saauuuul!” Price howls in an exaggerated Hispanic accent. A briny smell is so strong as we enter the house you almost expect to see visible odor fumes like in a cartoon.
“He’s in Mexico,” the shirtless patriarch of the house answers, his tan belly poking over his tight black jeans. “He don’t come back.” The shoebox living room is filled to capacity with the man’s family: his wife and four children ranging in ages from the unattended baby in a carrier on the couch to a preteen who serves as the translator. Most of the photos hung on the walls are crooked. In one, the family with fake smiles is superimposed under the embrace of a larger-than-life Jesus.
“Homeboy says he ain’t coming back,” Price turns to tell Benton, who has just come in after searching behind the house.
Price strolls around the room altering his posture so the gun resting in a holster against his hip can be seen more clearly. He feigns interest in the photos. This is not Price’s bond; it’s Benton’s. And Price knows it’s hopeless. Saul is also a coyote, a person who makes his living running illegal immigrants over the border and, in Saul’s case, finding them a home in Charlotte. If illegal immigrants are hard to find, coyotes are impossible.
The TV by the door is on too loud, and the enthusiastic inflection of the Spanish announcer’s voice provides a cacophonous background to the heated conversation that ensues. Playtime is over.
“We know he’s a coyote. We don’t care,” Price says. The shirtless man gives a knowing smirk. Price continues: “I’m not la migre. I don’t give a rat’s ass. He didn’t go to court. He’s got to pay for that.”
Benton breaks his silence: “$5,000 and we go away. That’s the reality.” That’s the price of Saul’s bond. Benton wrote the bond, and had Saul gone to court, Benton would have made $500, the 10 percent fee Saul paid to the bondsman for taking on the full liability of the bond. But the condition of all bonds is that the criminal show up in court. Once a person skips, the bondsman has 150 days to return him to jail or the entire bond (in this case $5,000) comes out of the bondsman’s pocket. That’s the game.
And there are a few types of players. Benton, a professional bondsman, prefers writing the bonds. He got into the business with a genuine desire to help the down and out who are too broke to afford the 10 percent bondsman fee. Price, a runner, enjoys the hunt. He makes most of his money on the back end recovering skips, and is often hired in a freelance role — a last-minute option if someone proves too difficult to locate.
Benton and Price aren’t bounty hunters, though the difference is minute. Unlicensed bounty hunters, such as reality TV celebrity Duane “Dog” Chapman, can have felonies on their records. Not bondsmen. In North Carolina, all felony charges must be expunged by a judge before a person can become a bondsman. Lloyd Patterson, vice president of the Mecklenburg Bail Bond Association, dislikes when bondsmen are confused with bounty hunters. “They have a reputation for renegade behavior,” he says of Dog and his ilk.
Back on the chase for Saul, a young girl at the Hidden Valley house is talking to Benton. “He’s got no connection with nobody in this house,” she tells Benton of the fugitive. It isn’t exactly true. This is the house Saul had listed as his residence when he was bonded out. Upon searching the back of the home and seeing all the subdivided rooms in the basement, it’s clear to Benton that Saul’s coyote business is still bustling. According to Benton’s regular Spanish-speaking interpreter, who is not with Benton and Price tonight, Saul had been living here with his girlfriend — the cosigner, homeowner and mother of the shirtless man inside. To a bondsman, that’s enough of a connection.
Price threatens to bring immigration to the house but later explains to me it was an empty threat. (“You can call immigration right now and say you have a van full of illegal immigrants and they’ll be like, ‘And your point?’ They don’t care. Now if you say you’ve got a fucking car full of Abu Dhabis from Iraq-a-stack, oh, they’ll be over there like swat.”)
“I’m tired of saying it,” Benton continues. “Give us $5,000 dollars or we’ll be back and back and back.”
The girl is unfazed. “You’re going to come back and back and back, and we’re going to say the same thing.”
“I’m not stupid,” Benton yells at the 12-year-old girl. “You don’t know anybody who knows Saul? You play hard and I’ll play hard. I’ll be back. I’ll be back at three or four in the morning and I’ll wake you’re whole fucking family up! And I’ll keep doing it until you pay the money or get Saul to fucking come fix this! It’s up to you.” He storms out.
Price is all smiles as we follow in Benton’s stormy wake. “Hey, Larry. You calm down yet? You want to go have a beer?” He turns to me: “Larry got mad. He used dirty words.”
In the bonding industry, people are resources and Hispanics are like a valuable kind of oil no one’s figured out how to extract. One hundred and forty-four bondsmen work in Mecklenburg County and another 50 come into Charlotte periodically from surrounding counties. Only two deal primarily with the Hispanic population. Price says it’s a cultural difference. Illegal immigrants think appearing in court may result in deportation. Others simply don’t understand the system and fail to show up for continuance after continuance.
“Every bondsman in this town has got ‘the interpreter,'” says Price. “And every single bondsman who’s done it has gotten burned.”
Benton needs his interpreter, Lewis, to help with Saul’s case. But on this late February night, Lewis has claimed he needed to finish his taxes. Price doesn’t buy it.
Price: “Motherfucker. It’s like rock-paper-scissors … pussy. Pussy out-beats everything.”
Benton: “Shut your hole.”
Price: “Man, I’m hungry. You don’t understand. I’m wasting away over here.”
Benton: “You’ve got plenty of reserves there, fat boy.”
Price: “Hey, sticks and stones and I’ll shoot you. I don’t give a fuck.” (We pass by a strip mall of restaurants.) “Man those Chinese will make a buffet out of anything.”
Benton first met Price in 1993 at Plum Crazy, a popular watering hole off Exit 9 that is now a strip club. Price was bouncing when Benton, a 20-year-old UNCC, student tried to get into the bar with a fake I.D. Price decided to confiscate it, but Benton protested. “I was like, ‘Listen, dude, you’re not keeping my I.D. It’s one thing to not let me in this bar, but you’re not keeping it. How am I going to buy my beer?'” says Benton. Later, Benton’s bondsman brother-in-law, Toby, who started Benton in the business, hired Price.
That night at Plum Crazy marked the first of many arguments among Price and Benton. In 13 years of hunting together they’ve had the cops called on them more than once for arguing too loudly in public. One time, during a downpour, neither wanted to go around the back of a house and make sure the skip didn’t sneak out. During their argument, the skip they were looking for pulled into the driveway behind them, walked up to their car and asked them to move out of his driveway. Benton was so caught up in the fight, he told his fugitive to get lost.
“We call him ‘Let ’em Loose Larry,'” Price says of Benton’s reputation for bonding out desperate people with a higher risk of skipping. “He’s the one with the kind-ass liberal heart that believes their sad-ass fucking stories: ‘It wasn’t my crack rock.’ ‘I didn’t mean to hit her so hard her eye ball came out.'” Price says, “With me, they say, ‘Why’d you send that fat fucker in the Hawaiian shirt?'”
Hawaiian shirts are Price’s trademark. He has more than 20 and orders them from a Honolulu-based company that uses authentic bamboo or coconut buttons. When it’s warm out, he orders one or two a month, but now only in rayon. He stopped buying the $100 silk shirts when he found they stained too easily. Blood from one guy’s nose that Price “mashed in like a potato” stained his white silk shirt with yellow pineapples on it.
No one in the business has a bad word to say about Benton. Price is another story. One bondsman, who asked to speak anonymously, told CL that while Price has a reputation for getting the job done, it’s not always by the book. “The line we have to walk is so narrow that we can teeter from one side to the other … You’ve got to have common sense and enough smarts to know what line not to cross.” Specifically, the bondsman said, Price has a reputation for using “excessive force.”
More than just a bad ass, Price can be flat-out vindictive. While pursuing a 19-year-old man in Lake Wylie wanted on charges of statutory rape, Price became irritated at the boy’s mother, who lied to him about her son’s location and wouldn’t let him enter her house to search. While Benton went up the front pathway, Price dragged his feet through the red clay outside. After forcing his way into the house, Price wiped his red prints everywhere he could, ruining the woman’s white shag carpeting.
“It looked like a damn elephant fucking walked through there,” says Benton with a laugh. (The 19-year-old was hiding in his room under the bed.)
Once they’re caught, most skips want to know how they were found. If Price suspects his informant has lied to him or withheld information in the past, he’ll give the skip that person’s name, knowing that more than likely the skip will seek revenge. “He didn’t provide me with the information I wanted, so I’ll fuck him over,” Price says.
“Loud” and “obnoxious” are the first two words Tammy, Price’s girlfriend and the mother of his 6-month-old child, uses to describe Price. “But with a big heart,” she adds.
Count on Price to put a profanity-laden spin on his own acts of good will. “You’ve got the green, we’ll set you free. We don’t give a fuck what you did,” Price says of the bail bondsman motto. “Me, on the other hand, I won’t touch people who’ve fucked with kids or serious shit like that. Drugs are like this, bro: I ain’t never seen nobody twist an arm to go smoke a crack rock. You want to smoke the rock? Go smoke the fucking rock.”
Recently, Benton asked for Price’s advice on bailing out David Boland, a man charged with six counts of child porn. Boland’s parents, the co-signers, put their house on the bond, meaning if Boland disappeared Benton could foreclose on the house. Benton wrote the $300,000 because with such a strong cosigner, it was basically guaranteed money. But after talking to Price, he thought better of it and sold the bond off to another bondsman.
“Larry was like, ‘It’s all about making money.’ I said that’s the problem with some of these fucking businesses. I asked him ‘What would you do if that guy got out and ran across your boy?’ Nah. Some people don’t deserve to get out.”
Price’s softer side may have been coaxed out by the arrival of Spencer, or Price Jr., as Tammy calls him. Only 6 months old, Spencer has already inherited his father’s bulldog countenance.
Price’s day starts at 6am when Tammy has to get ready for work. Price takes Spencer to the courthouse, carrying him kangaroo-style in a front carrier against his stomach while he does paperwork for cases. Or with Spencer in the front seat of the van, they ride around surveying areas Price plans on hitting later that evening.
Daddy day care he calls it, saying he would never consider traditional day care after hearing some horrifying stories of molestation from friends and witnessing Benton’s day care-attending child come down with multiple ailments.
The daddy in Price’s nickname Big Daddy is a role he’s still learning. This winter some of the clerks at the courthouse had to tell him to take Spencer’s coat off after noticing the baby was flushed. And on a warm April day, Benton took the carrier Price put down directly in the sun and moved it into the shade of a nearby tree.
Price says his maverick days are behind him. “I’ve taught Larry it’s better for us to use our brain than our brawn … Like old-school me and Larry, if we were out at that coyote’s house and that motherfucker was running his mouth like he was, back in the day we would have taken him for a ride and we would have got our info.”
To be a Bondsman in Mecklenburg County you need to take 12 hours of classes, pass a basic test and train under another bondsman for a year. The year of training was instituted only two years ago by the North Carolina Department of Insurance, but the problem with the statute is that many bondsmen who are doing the training have no formal training themselves.
Because of their roguish ways, bondsmen aren’t usually favored among conventional law enforcement. “Some police officers have problems with bondsmen because they put people in jail and we get them out of jail,” says Benton.
“They ain’t gotta problem with that,” argues Price. “What they’ve got a problem with is us fucking breaking the law. They hate us for the money we make for the same job them fuckers do. And they don’t get to cuss at people, spit on them and kick them in the ass like we do. That’s what they’re fucking mad at.”
Many bondsmen believe Mecklenburg Sheriff Jim Pendergraph is trying to run them out of town. They see his recommitment to the pretrial release program starting in 2004, and a recent $650,000 purchase of ankle bracelets to monitor released criminals, as predatory action to their business.
Pendergraph’s stance is understandable. The history of Charlotte bondsmen hasn’t exactly been squeaky clean. Billy Hardis, a bondsman in Charlotte for 21 years, was trained by David Lee Fisher, a man who was later found to be wanted for conspiracy to murder. Fisher was captured in 1987 and executed in 1999. Larry Mackins, the current president of the Mecklenburg Bail Bondsmen Association and son of one of the original Charlotte bondsmen, Alonzo Mackins, was accused along with his brothers of a large money-laundering and drug-trafficking conspiracy using the bonding business as a front.
A bondsman will do almost anything to protect his money, which sometimes means crossing over into the gray area of the law. According to Patterson, a Charlotte bondsman for 25 years, “If you break in and enter and that person’s not there, you would be considered just like a citizen. You can’t do that. You have to know beyond reasonable doubt that the person’s in there.”
In Cornelius, we arrive at the condo of another man who skipped court on drug charges. The door is locked and Benton wants to kick it in. Price, noticing the door isn’t bolted, uses a credit card to unlock the door and enter the dark home. They draw their guns with the flashlights on the top of the pistols turned on and search every room in the house as if they were in a TV detective show.
The house has been abandoned. A pot of mashed potatoes and a pot of white beans are full on the stove. In the bedroom we find an open letter from the state of South Carolina indicating there’s a warrant for his arrest. They suspect the guy took off after reading it.
I ask them what happens if you kick the door in and no one’s there. “You get in the car and get the hell out,” says Benton.
If a bondsman writes off a bond and throws his client back in jail, he keeps the initial fee the client paid. By law, there are five reasons he can throw a client back in jail: 1) failure to pay the bond fee (the initial 10-15 percent fee); 2) changing the address without notifying the bondsman; 3) leaving the state without notifying the bondsman; 4) physically hiding from the bondsman; 5) violating a court order (i.e. not appearing in court). But some bondsmen cheat.
“There’s a lot of bondsmen out there that will make up shit just to keep the money,” says Price. “Oh shit, some bondsmen, let’s say they got you out last night, then tonight you got arrested for a whole other charge. They’ll write off your bond.”
“They’ll say ‘you changed your address,'” adds Benton. “‘You’re living at the jail now.'”
Manipulating information from people is where the real skill of the trade comes in. Price has a bag full of accents and ages he can assume over the phone, not to mention an ability to switch genders, should the situation call for it.
“It’s all a game. You have to figure out what bait do I put on the end of the hook to catch this motherfucker,” says Price. “Do I go and put pressure on Mommy and Daddy? Do I go put pressure on the sister? Do I find the girlfriend — the baby mama? Do I use one baby mama against another baby mama? It’s all a game. You’ve got to figure out the best way to play the game against them.”
Price acts out a two-person scenario:
“You just walk up to the door. You know her name is Shanequa or something, [but] you go, ‘Hey Lequisha.’
‘My name is Shanequa.’
‘Don’t you be seeing Booboo …?’
‘Yeah, that’s my man.’
‘Well I heard he was dating this [other] girl.’
‘Oh, hell no! Who’s that bitch?’
They’ll immediately get on that motherfucking phone: ‘Motherfucker, where your ass at?’ Then she’ll hear some girl in the background — and the dumb ass usually does have some girl in the background. ‘Oh hell no. That motherfucker is four doors down. He’s supposed to be at his Mama’s house, but he’s right down the street.'”
He’s caught.
On a Friday afternoon in March, we’re out by the airport on the hunt for Brad Jordan, a 34-year-old man wanted in Gaston County for missing court on his third DWI charge of the year. “You can tell by his picture he’s a white fucking redneck,” says Price, looking at Jordan’s mug shot.
Jordan is wearing a Panther hat and Carolina blue and black shoes when we arrive at the freight company where he works. He stutters, trying to explain to Price that his lawyer was responsible for him missing court. Price uses his “I’d rather talk you into jail than fight you into jail” strategy, essentially confusing Jordan into incarcerating himself.
Price: “I’m not a hard ass like some of these folks are. You look like a working man. I’ve got worse shitheads to deal with. I’ve got drug dealers I’ve got to go chase. There is a warrant for you in Gaston county. You living in Gaston?”
Jordan: “No.”
Price: “You’ve got a warrant there. You might want to stay out.”
Jordan: “So what are my options?”
Price: “Well, we can ride to Gaston and get this served and we’ll get you back out. That’s about the only option. We’ve got an agent there that will get you back out.”
Jordan: “What does that mean?”
Price: “You’ll be free in an hour.”
After reaching Gaston and getting processed, Jordan is led to a police car to be taken to jail. He looks forlorn and betrayed. For skipping court, the bond doubles, and without a co-signer Jordan has trouble getting another bond. He ends up spending five days in jail.
“You miss court on me, you can kiss my ass,” says Price as we get back into the van. I ask him how Jordan is going to get back to his job. “I don’t give a fuck how he gets back,” says Price. “You broke the law. Go to fucking jail.”
At the end of the first night, we pull back into the parking lot where Benton’s jeep is parked. It hasn’t been a successful night. No progress was made on the Saul case or any other case.
“Back in the day, we’d hit ’em every night, either that or the bar,” Price says.
“Sometimes we were out all night,” says Benton. Other times, they combined hunting and drinking in the course of one evening.
Last month, Benton took a sales job and for the first time in his life will be bonding only part-time. Price, too, says he wants to get out soon. “It’s like a disease. It just wears on you. The liars and the cheats and the thieves in every single way. When they sit there and say crime goes away. Never. Never ever.”
The conversation turns to Saul.
Benton: “I’m not done. I’ll be back there.”
Price: “I’ve got a funny feeling you have to fucking cuss the rest of those kids out. The kid’s eating his Cheerios and you were cussing at him.”
Benton: “Shut your damn mouth. You cuss in front of your kid.”
Price: “My kid doesn’t understand nothing but waah-wa-waah-waah-waah. I can say ‘motherfucker’ in front of him all day long. Except the first minute he goes ‘motherfucker’ back at me is the day I quit cussing in front of him.”
Benton: “It’s probably a little late then, huh?”
Price: “No it’s not. Because then I’ll be like, ‘That’s a bad word. We don’t say that any more. We’ll work on that together.’ That’s what raising a child is about.”
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 2, 2006.
