Fugitives Roll Dice on Vegas

Fidgeting with her bulletproof vest, Monique Panet-Swanson paces outside Room 221 of the down-on-your-luck South Cove Apartments, then raps hard on the door.

“Dave, this is Lisa,” she shouts, waiting several tense moments without a response. “C’mon, open up. I want my clothes. Now!”

Still no answer. She looks over at Alfredo Cervantes, a cop who’s also schooled in the intricacies of the wrong-room ruse. Gun raised, back to the wall, he shrugs.

Suddenly, the door swings open and out storms Larry Barber, a convicted robber who allegedly skipped parole in Los Angeles and disappeared. Until now.

Roused from a nap, his handgun left beneath his pillow, an angry Barber confronts his tormentor.

But with a sucker-punch tackle and a blast of pepper spray, Cervantes and his crew take one more wanted felon into custody, boosting the arrest total of the nation’s busiest fugitive apprehension team.

“The element of surprise is our trump card,” says the 44-year-old Las Vegas Metro police sergeant, part of a task force composed of FBI agents and local officers like himself. “Before these characters even get a clue, we’ve already got the cuffs on them.”

When it comes to catching crooks on the lam, this city’s 11-member Criminal Apprehension Team knows a sure bet: Felons fleeing the law from Toronto to Tampa Bay often head to Las Vegas for one final fling, one last shot at beating the odds.

Some search for bright lights and gambling action. Others seek a new beginning from a troubled past. Many continue committing crimes.

The never-ending parade of criminal runaways has enabled the city’s task force to become the No. 1 fugitive apprehension team in the United States, booking more dangerous fugitives than even big city teams in Los Angeles and New York.

Cervantes and his crew make their collars everywhere from tawdry hotels and apartments to the roulette tables of The Strip’s most posh casinos. Their prey is a motley collection of misfits, loners and felony losers straight from an episode of “Twin Peaks;” recent targets include an armed midget, a husband-butchering grandmother and a cross-dresser gone underground.

This city has held an allure for outlaws since it was scratched into the desert by mobster Bugsy Siegel in the 1940s.

In 1959, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith blazed a trail for Vegas after butchering four members of the Herbert Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan. In his narrative “In Cold Blood,” author Truman Capote wrote that the pair saw the casinos as a prime spot to “hang some paper,” or pass bad checks.

More recently, white supremacist Buford Furrow--accused of wounding five people in a shooting rampage at a Granada Hills Jewish community center and later killing a mail carrier in Chatsworth--hailed a taxi and headed for Vegas, where he turned himself in.

In between have come countless killers, rapists and robbers who gambled on Las Vegas as an escape from their legal hassles.

There’s the teenage robber from Virginia who headed west after faking his own death. The wife-killing Canadian who was caught after a restaurant cashier finished a Reader’s Digest story on the murder as the suspect walked up to pay for his meal. And the slippery L.A. fugitive nabbed after casino surveillance cameras spotted one telltale characteristic: his huge Herman Munster-like head.

One disgraced New Jersey prosecutor heeded The Strip’s beckoning neon after bailing out on corruption and tax fraud charges. So did the former San Antonio policeman and convicted bank robber who laid low for six years under the alias Cesar Chavez. And a New York drug dealer was arrested onstage at a strip club after team members spotted her snake tattoos.

“I’m amazed how many felons think they can hide out here,” says Panet-Swanson. “It makes me look at people twice--on the street, in the casinos. Because you never know when you’re gonna bump into that wanted killer on the loose.”

Carnival of Vice and Greed

Las Vegas is the nation’s fastest growing metropolitan area, with a population of 1.3 million. Every month, 4,000 people decide to relocate here. And each week, half a million tourists visit the city.

Fugitives mix with both groups. Some are lured by the city’s reputation as a magnet for restless transients, a 24-hour carnival of vice and greed where cash rules. Some, like one Reno bank robber, are high-roller wannabes who brazenly book casino penthouse suites and flaunt their loot as they continue committing crimes. The robber was caught at his hotel with bags full of cash and heroin.

“Sooner or later, they all end up in Vegas,” says Cervantes. “Criminals, like everybody else, know they can get anything and everything here, from girls to gambling. If they do get caught, at least they had one last hurrah in Sin City.”

For others, Las Vegas is a place where they hope to quietly disappear, to start a new life with a bogus identity and an under-the-table job at some construction site or parking garage.

During the first 10 months of fiscal year 1999, the Las Vegas task force arrested 840 felons, the largest number by any of the 56 U.S. fugitive apprehension teams created in 1992 by the federal Safe Streets Program, according to FBI statistics.

In the same period, the Los Angeles team netted 382 arrests, New York’s 301 and San Francisco’s 251.

The Las Vegas arrest numbers continue to soar. From 429 in calendar 1994, the team expects to make 1,000 apprehensions in 1999.

Prosecutors are impressed with those numbers.

“This task force deters some career armed felons from making this town their safe haven,” said Howard Zlotnick, an assistant U.S. attorney in Las Vegas. “These guys go after the worst of the worst. They never know who they’re gonna come up with. But all these fugitives have one thing in common: They’re bad people.”

The Vegas task force is so busy that only the most dangerous fugitives appear on its radar screen. Sorting through 700 warrants each month, members forsake embezzlers and scam artists for the more violent elusive offenders.

Made up of investigators from the FBI, Las Vegas Metro police, U.S. Marshal’s Service, and police departments in North Las Vegas and Henderson, the task force is a plum assignment for officers who thrive on the excitement of the chase. Supervised by Cervantes, eight men and two women work in competitive two-member teams, knowing they must keep arrest numbers up to remain on the squad.

But with the city’s wealth of fugitives, productivity isn’t a problem. One team recently made 10 arrests in a day. The monthly team record is 116 arrests, an average of nearly four a day and more than the entire year’s total for fugitive task forces in some cities.

“Some people in our office see our job as unsophisticated, knuckle-dragging work,” said FBI Agent Dave McKean, a task force member. “But for younger agents right out of the academy, it’s a priceless opportunity to quickly learn some street savvy.”

For Cervantes, the squad’s most veteran member, it’s a chance to hone his hunter’s skills. In three years on the task force, the Bay Area native has studied the habits of wanted criminals with the watchful eye of a casino card shark.

“Chasing human beings gets right down to basic instincts,” says Cervantes. “You survive on your wits. And these fugitives survive on theirs. It’s a game. Sometimes it gets serious, but it’s a test of wills nonetheless. You versus them.”

On a warm morning, Cervantes waited inside his sport utility vehicle, peering out through its tinted windows at the Maverick Apartments. Convicted sex offender Michael Hagen, wanted in the alleged sexual assault of a minor in nearby North Las Vegas, has just taken up residence.

Hours of patient waiting paid off. A man resembling the 42-year-old Hagen emerged, carrying a bag of trash.

“This could be my boy right here,” said Cervantes.

Ten minutes later, after tailing Hagen as he strolled along the street, the task force moved in for yet another surprise arrest.

Later, Hagen was still stunned.

“How’d you find me?” he asked.

“It’s our job,” Cervantes said with a smile.

Cervantes carries the tools of his trade: Along with his service revolver, there’s the cell phone that rings constantly with calls from tipsters and fellow cops; body armor; a collapsible baton; a can of pepper spray, plus the sunglasses that rarely leave his face.

Some task force members call Cervantes “the cat” for his wiry frame and the predatory way he stalks fugitives. Others coined another nickname after one fleeing suspect ran over Cervantes’ leg in a souped-up Mustang convertible: They call him “speed bump.”

Few Arrests Involve Violence

The jokes belie the danger of the job. Some offenders, facing life terms or the death penalty, are prone to use violence--against their pursuers or themselves. So far, the team has made 4,500 busts without serious injury to its members. They have yet to shoot a fugitive during an arrest, but three suspects have taken their own lives.

In the last three years, Cervantes says, the unit has twice been investigated for alleged use of excessive force. In both cases, the claims proved unfounded, he said. Internal affairs officials from two local police departments who conducted the probes refused to comment.

Cal Potter, an attorney who works with the Nevada chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he was unaware of any claims of excessive force or other types of complaints against the task force.

But most fugitives are taken with a minimum of force. Rather than storming in with guns drawn, the task force relies mostly on stealth and trickery.

Team members make regular cruises through casino parking lots in search of suspect license plates. They pose as plumbers and pizza delivery men and make regular checks of the registers at the Elvis-themed wedding chapels.

To catch one reticent felon, two female task force members went to his home after he’d just fought with his girlfriend and had thrown her clothes onto the front lawn. Posing as opportunistic shoppers, they sifted through the clothes until the man ran outside and yelled “What do you think this is, a garage sale?”

Then they put the cuffs on him.

More often, the team finds itself returning to the same sleazy motels near downtown, where fugitive arrests are easy pickings. But some fugitives spring surprises of their own. The team busted one felon hiding inside a clothes dryer, one tucked into ceiling insulation and another hiding in a trap door beneath his water bed.

Most crooks aren’t that smart. Many don’t even change their names when they hit town. And their numbers are so plentiful that the task force spends just 20% of its time on surveillance and 80% making arrests.

But some felons are so vicious they draw special treatment from the task force.

One local gang member shot a man between the eyes at point-blank range, then poured bleach on his body. Team members hounded the suspect’s haunts for more than a year--interviewing his uncooperative parents and cronies. Each time they got close, they came up empty-handed.

Finally, acting on a tip, 20 officers overwhelmed the suspect outside a trailer where he was living. Cervantes calls the arrest one of the most satisfying of his career.

“We came to hate this guy, for how vicious he was, for what he represented,” he recalls. “You don’t want to kill him. But you want him real bad.”

Still, some fugitives take longer to track than others. For more than two years, Margaret Rudin evaded arrest on charges of murdering her husband, a millionaire real estate agent whose severed head was found near Lake Mohave outside Las Vegas. Arrested in Phoenix, she talked her way out of jail, using an alias.

Last Friday, Rudin ran out of places to hide. Massachusetts authorities arrested her in a home outside Boston.

“Rudin caused us two and a half years of frustration,” Cervantes said. “But not anymore.”