Bounty Hunts That Go South

Fresh off one prison stint and facing trial on child molestation charges in Madera County, William Baker answered his legal woes with a time-honored gambit. He jumped bail and bolted to Mexico.

Soon after, a pair of bounty hunters from Fresno and Los Angeles were on their way south too, hot on Baker’s trail.

On June 24 the duo, Maurice Martines and Edgar Jose Rundquist Salas, drove to an Ensenada apartment, where they were tipped that Baker might be holed up. The goal: get Baker back into U.S. court--voluntarily, they insist--and save the bail-bond company the $30,000 it put up for him.

It would not be that simple. When the pair confronted the 43-year-old Baker, a struggle broke out. Ensenada police charged in. By day’s end, Rundquist and Martines were themselves in jail, charged with detaining their quarry in violation of Mexican law.

It was the latest such reversal of fortune for American bounty hunters in Mexico. At least 11 Southern Californians--some full-time bounty hunters, others friends along to help out--have wound up behind bars during ill-fated searches for fugitives in Baja California in the past year and a half.

The cases offer a tragicomedy’s supply of misadventure: unlucky timing, language mix-ups, bungled plans, some brutality, and towering lapses in judgment. In Mexico, where authorities are sensitive to possible violations of national sovereignty, bounty hunting amounts to rogue police work and is considered a serious crime.

“I’m simply telling people--don’t do it,” said Marco J. LiMandri, who runs a San Diego bail-bond firm and heads the California Bail Agents Assn. “If you find [a bounty hunter] dumb enough to go down there, chances are they’re going to be calling you to get them out.”

A month before the Ensenada incident, four Americans working out of a San Diego bail agency were jailed--and now face potentially long prison terms--on charges they tried to abduct a woman outside a Tijuana home that they considered a possible hide-out for a bail-jumper from Colorado.

Three other men who went to Tijuana to bring back a convicted San Diego drug dealer last year instead wound up with 15-year prison sentences. The fugitive, meanwhile, was set free.

In years past, U.S. bounty hunters’ work was often winked at by Mexican police. A change occurred after 1990, when bounty hunters working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration seized a Guadalajara doctor believed to have taken part in the torture and killing of U.S. drug agent Enrique S. Camarena. Mexican protests prompted Presidents Bush and Clinton to disavow transborder abductions by U.S. law enforcement, but a binational treaty outlawing such seizures has not been ratified.

Nerves were chafed anew last year when Mexico found that U.S. agents carried out portions of an undercover drug money-laundering investigation, called Operation Casablanca, on its soil without Mexico’s consent.

Although bounty hunting is legal within the United States, these days only the most canny--or most reckless--of its practitioners track wayward suspects south of the border.

“A lot of the bad things that happen to bounty hunters are done by bounty hunters. They’re Rambos who saw a movie,” said Bob Buckner, a longtime San Diego bounty hunter who works all over the world and says he returned 52 fugitives from Mexico last year.

Buckner, who prefers to be called a “bail recovery agent,” said he has worked trouble-free by enlisting Mexican police agents and presenting the arrest warrant at the U.S. Consulate when hunting for cross-border “skips.” Buckner insists he has never relied on bribery of Mexican authorities.

“I’ve got friends all over down there,” Buckner said. “I don’t go down there war-whooping it all up.”

Buckner claims, at the same time, to have escorted skips past unsuspecting Border Patrol agents along remote spots and walked them through Customs at the San Ysidro port of entry.

Governments Prefer to Be Involved

U.S. and Mexican authorities say they would rather see the fugitives brought to justice through official channels, such as extradition or prosecution by Mexico for crimes committed on foreign soil.

“We have been working together--both authorities--against [cross border] bounty hunters,” said Adriana Gonzalez Felix, legal specialist at the Mexican Consulate in San Diego.

Indeed, “Some renegade bounty hunters find it convenient to ignore the laws of both countries,” said Alberto A. Arevalo, an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego who prosecuted two bounty hunters arrested in Calexico last year.

In that case, Don McHenry Garcia of El Centro and his friend Francisco Peraza were arrested under a new U.S. law barring conspiracy to kidnap in a foreign country. They were collared trying to haul a fugitive, bruised and shoeless, back into the United States at Calexico. The fugitive, Jose Angel Corrales Nunez, was a resident of Mexicali who had jumped bail on drug charges in Las Vegas, according to court documents.

Garcia had first inquired with U.S. law enforcement authorities but then ignored their repeated warnings against carrying out the cross-border capture. The pair were extradited to Mexico for prosecution there. Corrales, meanwhile, was handed over by U.S. officials to Nevada for prosecution.

Bounty hunters say they have a legitimate role to play. For one thing, they claim they often can get bail jumpers to return with simple persuasion, because bond notes are signed by a family member or friend who ultimately will have to cough up the forfeited bail. And they note that the governments aren’t helpful in retrieving fugitives whose crimes aren’t deemed serious enough to trigger extradition--a slow and selectively used process--or foreign prosecution.

No one knows how many fugitives live in Mexico, but the U.S. marshal’s office says it has solid information that 250 people wanted on federal warrants in San Diego and Imperial counties alone have fled and are living across the border.

The United States typically has 100 to 150 active extradition requests before Mexico, which is willing to hand over U.S. citizens but, like many nations, rarely gives up its own. Still, Mexico sometimes tries some of its own. A little-known provision of Mexican federal law, called Article 4, allows prosecution in that country even when crimes occurred on U.S. soil, as long as the suspect or the victim is Mexican. The San Diego district attorney’s office annually refers up to 15 such cases, most involving violent crimes. Juan Jose Briones, who readies Article 4 cases at the San Diego prosecutor’s office, estimates that about half of them result in conviction in Mexico.

For bounty hunters tempted to go after those still on the lam, a century of U.S. legal doctrine offers some encouragement if they succeed in getting them back. The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected defendants’ pleas that charges be dropped because they were seized abroad and returned illegally, said Peter Nunez, a former U.S. attorney who teaches at the University of San Diego.

But first the bounty hunter must find his quarry, and then run the gantlet of Mexican and U.S. authorities.

In the case of Diane Parsons, who was wanted for jumping $75,000 bail in Colorado after being charged with bribery and other offenses, bail investigators traced old telephone calls to Tijuana. On May 18, three contract bail agents for Already Out Bail Bonds in San Diego decided to make a quick early-morning trip to Tijuana to check who was living at the receiving end of the calls. The Spanish-speaking office secretary went along to help interpret. The plan, their boss said, was to return for the start of the business day.

According to Tijuana police, the group encountered a woman named Jennifer Leigh Buie--believed to be the fugitive’s sister--outside the home. One of the men flashed a badge bearing the logo Fugitive Recovery Agency, then pulled out handcuffs and told her she was being arrested, according to the account she gave Tijuana police.

Police, summoned by witnesses, said the San Diego group apparently sought to pressure Buie into disclosing her sister’s whereabouts. Found in their car were handcuffs and keys, binoculars and a loaded ammunition magazine, according to the police report.

All four--Mark Carley, 32; Mark Williams, 35; Chris Auerbach, 23; and Louisa Aguirre Herrera, 36--are being held without bail. They face abduction charges that could spell prison terms of 15 to 40 years if they are convicted by a Mexican judge hearing the case, already underway.

Thomas Price, owner of Already Out, said the group didn’t intend to seize anyone--and had no room in the crowded Toyota if they had. “These people were not bounty hunters,” Price said. “Going down there and talking to someone is not a crime.”

The four declined to speak with a reporter who visited the state penitentiary in Tijuana where they are held. Parsons, meanwhile, is in custody in Colorado, having been picked up by another bounty hunter--in Wyoming.

A defense attorney for the bounty hunters in custody in the Tijuana case predicted that the judge would soon set them free. “These guys did nothing wrong and are going to be acquitted,” said Fernando Benitez Alvarez del Castillo.

An Ill-Fated Decision

That’s a rosier outlook than Kenneth Rustay, 32, and Ronald Ford, 26, can muster from inside the same state prison. They got 15-year terms last fall for their roles in the botched capture in Tijuana last year of Joseph Swint, who remains at large. Swint had pleaded guilty in San Diego to having marijuana for sale, then fled before sentencing last year, skipping out on $35,000 bail. Rustay and Ford said they were duped by novice bounty hunter Christopher Levi into joining the foray, which would have paid $2,000.

“He needed a ride down there. I asked him if it was legal,” Rustay, a former pawn shop manager, said through a grated window in a prison visiting area.

“He said it was legal to bounty hunt in Mexico.”

That’s not true. The trio traced Swint to Avenida Revolucion, the busy stretch of bars and souvenir shops favored by north-of-the-border tourists. Rustay and Ford said they stayed back while Levi grabbed Swint, snapped on handcuffs and pulled him down the street to a cab. They all piled in. Then the police showed up. In a strange postscript, Rustay and Ford said Swint was housed in the same quarters as his captors at the prison for several weeks before he was ultimately released.

Levi declined to be interviewed. All three of the convicted men have applied to be turned over to U.S. prisons as part of routine prisoner swaps between the two countries.

Sometimes bounty hunters can accomplish what the authorities cannot. Rundquist and Martines, the duo which pursued William Baker to Ensenada, got their man, in a way. While the bounty hunters were working to get bailed out of the Ensenada jail on false-imprisonment charges, Mexican immigration officials were quietly handing the fugitive over to authorities on the U.S. side. Baker is now in custody awaiting trial this week in Madera County on charges that he molested a 10-year-old girl three years ago.

“I’m just glad we have him back,” said Madera County prosecutor Karen Mitchell.

Rundquist and Martines were bailed out by associates for $18,500--six times the pair’s fee for the job. Martines, back in California, insists he and his partner meant merely to speak with Baker but said they have no intention of appearing in a Mexican court. They’ll forfeit the bail and stay out of Baja California for good--becoming fugitives of a sort themselves.

With four of his own people on trial, Price, the owner of Already Out, can relate.

“There’s no margin,” he said, “in trying to find a skip in Mexico.”