Packing a Pistol Pales Next to Packing Pete

Bail bondsman Gary Cooper speaks softly and carries a big snake.

If someone Cooper posts bond for doesn’t show up for trial, he goes looking for the bail jumper armed with Pete, a 6-foot boa constrictor.

Cooper never has to pull out the snake. Just the sight of the huge black serpent writhing in a pillowcase Cooper carries is enough to make most fugitives submit.

“There are two kinds of people I deal with: fearful people and rebellious people,” said Cooper.

“The snake makes rebellious people fearful people,” he said. “I have seen mean drug dealers from Miami melt at the thought.”

Cooper, whose mother named him for the Hollywood movie legend, owns Express Bond and Collection Agency in Thomasville, 10 miles north of the Florida line. Surrounded by plantations, Thomasville’s streets are lined with mossy oaks and Victorian homes built in the early part of the 20th century, when the town was a winter vacation spot for Northern industrialists.

Pete’s home is a 4-by-2-foot terrarium in a back room of Cooper’s office. The snake likes to sleep coiled beneath a black motorcycle helmet.

When Cooper takes Pete out, the serpent coils around his arm, peers around the room through beady, black eyes and flicks his forked tongue.

Boa constrictors are nonpoisonous snakes from the jungles of Central and South America. They kill their prey by squeezing it to death and then swallowing it whole. Most adults are 6 to 10 feet long.

“I give him everything he needs,” said Cooper, 49. “I’m his daddy image. I give him a rat once a month.”

That doesn’t sit well with Daphna Nachminovitch, an official with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in Norfolk, Va., which opposes removing exotic animals from their natural environment. She said Cooper should consider kick boxing or karate as a more humane way to collar fugitives.

“What, heaven forbid, if he was in danger?” she asked. “He’d . . . have one hand occupied by a pillowcase.”

Cooper, a Baptist Sunday school teacher, said the idea of partnering with a serpent came to him while praying. Hoping to avoid guns, pepper spray and violence, he said he asked God to help him find a way to nab fugitives “non-lethally, without abuse and trauma.”

The serpent, he said, “has been cursed and has had to crawl on its belly since Adam and Eve. It is the base root of absolute fear.”

He purchased Pete in 1993 at a pet shop.

“I only use Pete in high-risk situations, where a person is very dangerous and has a violent background,” Cooper said.

Unlike law enforcement officers, bondsmen can bring fugitives across state lines without the extradition process.

To travel quickly, Cooper flies his own plane. In his spare time, he writes poetry and shows Pete at schools and nursing homes.

When Cooper goes after a fugitive, he carries Pete but also packs a pistol and a beanbag gun, a non-lethal, carbon-dioxide powered weapon that packs the punch of a heavyweight boxer.

“I’ve never had to take out my snake,” he said. “It’s the idea that works.”

Cooper said he went to one house where he knew a fugitive was holed up and was met at the door by the man’s mother.

“I said, ‘Ma’am, I don’t want to pull out my viper,’ ” he recalled.

When he entered the house, the fugitive was waiting, standing spread eagle and propped against a wall.

“This is just another way to distract people enough to get them back in the criminal justice system,” he said. “We’re desensitized to pepper spray and guns. We know guns will hurt us, but for some reason people don’t seem to know because they shoot each other all the time.”

On the Net:

Professional Bail Agents of the United States: https://www.pbus.com