It’s Brutal in the Bail Business

Outside Bad Boys Bail Bonds, somebody had illegally painted the curb red. Again.

Neil Angos, Los Angeles operations chief for Bad Boys, said he suspected that his business rivals had ordered the curb lipsticked this time and at least once before to keep prospective customers from driving up to his door.

“They really hate us,” said Angos, toeing the flaking paint, which was a touch paler than the city’s official red.

This is Bail Row -- a trash-blown block of downtown where the competition for freedom-buyers is as cutthroat as it gets. Lately, as growing numbers of companies scramble for fatter and fatter bonds, corruption investigations have targeted Bad Boys and other bail purveyors in Southern California.

On Bail Row, about a dozen bond offices are lined shoulder to shoulder in a mustard-colored, carnival-lighted mini-mall and a stretch of neighboring storefronts in need of Windex. They sit across Vignes Street from the Men’s Central and Twin Towers jails.

The lockups anchor the nation’s largest local penal system, a 24-hour-a-day gold mine for the bail sellers. And while it might appear that there is plenty of get-out-of-jail lucre to go around, the enterprises engage in a kind of urban combat for every dollar.

“It’s really a dirty business,” said Bertha Comar, owner of Aliso Village Bail Bonds, a tiny firm in a burglar-barred building a few steps from the mall. She sat slumped at her desk in a warren-like office, with a painting of the Virgin Mary on the wall behind her and a poster for the gangster movie “Scarface” to her right.

Comar said she could no longer vie with the bigger outfits and was preparing to shut her shop down. Several Bail Row tenants say they manage to stay above the fray, but others complain of having their tires slashed and windshields smashed. Gripes of petty behavior include prank phone calls from agents posing as clients and even bogus pizza deliveries.

“It’s stupid,” said Comar, who told of being tormented by the unwanted pizzas, which she says were ordered by someone at the mall.

Then there are the ever-present tow trucks that quickly hook the cars of patrons who park at the mall but meander to bail offices elsewhere on Vignes or Bauchet Street, Bad Boys among them. The latter have no mall parking privileges.

Vince Ebarb, owner of the mall’s Anyway Bail Bonds, said the tow trucks “probably make more money than anybody.... It’s kind of a comedy.”

Willie McCray wasn’t laughing. “They towed my truck!” he exclaimed, standing at an empty spot in the mall lot.

The Lancaster resident had been trying to bail out his wife, who was charged with real estate fraud. He clutched a couple of brochures and a promotional keychain from Bad Boys.

“Everybody’s got a different gimmick,” McCray said as he looked bleakly down the street for his wheels.

Bail can be posted without an agent, providing the court gets the full amount in cash or collateral such as the deed to a house. But the vast majority of defendants use a bond firm, which normally charges a state-set, nonrefundable 10% fee. Sometimes the fee is spread out in installments.

Agents file a written promise with the court to pay the entire bail if the defendant “skips” -- fails to show up for a hearing. That pledge is backed by the agents’ insurance companies.

Only a small percentage of defendants vanish, and most who do are eventually caught. The low risk of forfeitures, plus the steep profit that a single bond can bring, has broadened the field of vendors, including those on Bail Row.

In the last eight or 10 years, the number of bail agents in the state has doubled to 2,200, and the average bond in Los Angeles County has jumped from $5,000 to $20,000, according to Frank Repetti, an officer in the Los Angeles and California bail agents associations.

“You don’t have to write nearly as many bonds to make as much money,” Repetti said.

The easier riches have spelled an end to the days when mom-and-pop businesses ruled the industry and marketing consisted of a Yellow Pages ad and neon come-ons winking above the door -- “0% Down for Homeowners” or “Collateral Not Always Needed.”

Newer and larger companies have upped the ante with radio and television commercials -- and, in Bad Boys’ case, a fleet of vehicles tattooed with images of a beefy man in women’s clothing and the slogan, “Because Your Mama Wants You Home.”

The state-mandated fees limit discounting, so firms like Bad Boys try to outdo the competition by offering more creative financing arrangements. For example, Angos said, “We’ll get 20 co-signers” on a bond agreement.

Bad Boys also issues bonds for bail amounts as low as $500, which some agencies reject as not worth the trouble.

“The greed comes in,” said Joel Diaz, an agent for Eddie Nardoni Bail Bonds. “There are people here willing to sell out their moms.”

Seven years after it was founded, Bad Boys says it generates $300 million in bail annually, making it No. 2 in the state after Aladdin Bail Bonds. Bad Boys joined the battle on Bail Row three years ago, moving into a cinder-block building at the side of the mall. The company was not warmly received.

“I think I’m safer in the wilds of Africa than I am on Vignes Street,” Bad Boys President Jeff Stanley said in a phone interview after he returned from a safari on that continent.

He said his security cameras once captured a competing agent knifing the tires on three cars belonging to Bad Boys workers. The slasher was confronted with the tape and agreed to replace the tires, Stanley said. He would not identify him.

“We constantly have vandalism going on with our employees’ vehicles and threats made to our employees,” said Stanley, a former bounty hunter whose firm has three offices in California. “We haven’t experienced anything like that anywhere else .... It’s brutal.”

The company has struggled for 14 months to rid its curb of red. Twice, parking officials ordered the illicit paint removed. But the city has since granted the mall landlord’s request to keep the red.

Bad Boys has another fight on its hands. The Los Angeles County Grand Jury has indicted the company on more than 40 counts of perjury, forgery and offering false evidence for allegedly lying to the court about efforts to track down clients who skipped. Bad Boys has pleaded not guilty.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Shirley Sun said unscrupulous agents, aided by regulations that bail lobbyists helped write, can flummox judges with technicalities and dog-ate-the-homework excuses to avoid making good on forfeited bonds. Some have lied that defendants fled to Mexico or died, Sun said.

Ongoing state and local investigations have focused in part on allegations that volume-selling agencies broke the law after fronting bail for too many people with too little collateral, costing counties and cities millions in potential revenue from unpaid bonds, plus the expense of pursuing defendants on the lam.

Whittier-based American Liberty Bail Bonds closed on Bail Row after authorities raided its offices last summer and charged the owner and five employees with kidnapping clients and extortion, among other offenses. They have pleaded not guilty.

Rumors fly on Bail Row of raids and indictments to come. The day-to-day drama, though, is of the dust-up variety. Agents recount shouting matches in the parking lot, the occasional punch thrown over a towed car and countless instances of a competitor snatching a customer from the doorstep.

“Everybody be stealing bonds,” said Guy Quinteros, a fidgety 34-year-old who recently lost his agent’s job at Aliso Village. “I hate it.”

Much of the prevailing animosity stems from the all-hours action on the sidewalk.

Bad Boys innovated the use of street teams -- employees who pass out fliers and key chains to jail visitors but are not authorized to negotiate bail. The company successfully sued the city of Los Angeles for permission to deploy the teams.

“A lot of bail agencies think what we’re doing is illegal, but it’s not,” Angos said.

He was working late in his office, perhaps the most corporate on Bail Row, with its pods of sleek, dark furniture. The former software manager wore a business suit, an equally uncommon sight in the shadow of the jails.

On the corner outside, homeless people, many fresh from a cell, howled obscenities in the night. Drug dealers and pimps use the parking lot as a way station, ratcheting up the tensions for agents.

“One of every 10 guys who parks here has a gun in his car,” said Bert Potter. He stood in the lot as yet another car was towed. “They’re going to visit someone in jail or they’re leaving dope around for someone to pick up.”

Potter and Eddie Nardoni are Bail Row’s grizzled old-timers.

“It’s a good business, with good revenue,” said Nardoni, sporting a baseball cap and a snowy mustache. He was wrapping up an afternoon behind the long counter in his office, where clown paintings hang on the walls. His face grew clouded.

“But the revenue isn’t what it used to be because of more competition,” he said.

It was a typical day, with prisoners’ bewildered loved ones wandering in to ask about costs. Angel Hernandez dropped by to see about bailing out his nephew.

“This one looks larger, well lit,” he said of Nardoni’s office.

The 57-year-old Los Angeles resident stepped out for a second glance at the other shops in the mall. He aimed his finger at the illuminated window signs that touted discounts in red, green and yellow.

“That one just had a couch and desk, it didn’t look like a real business,” he said. “And that one’s marked ‘5% Down,’ but I don’t like the looks of it.”

Hernandez left without striking a deal. Nardoni agent Diaz watched him go. So did the suspected solicitors lurking on Vignes.

Next door, Potter’s disdain for Bail Row’s newcomers was palpable.

“Bad Boys has three or four people out there,” he said of the street team. “It cuts right into the flow of business.”

A soft-spoken man in a loud print shirt, Potter presided over a domain of scuffed desks under stark lights, where two of his employees worked the phones.

He thumbed through his mail while inventorying the many trials of earning a living on Bail Row.

“Most of these people, you understand, are trying to make money illegally on the street,” he said of his bailees. “Your busiest time might be 1 o’clock in the morning.”

His repeat business is frequently a family affair. “I’ve done three generations maybe 40 or 50 times,” Potter said. “They’re still living in the same house, doing the same things.”

Like most agents, Potter depends on repeaters, referrals and ads for the bulk of his sales. He estimated that walk-ins account for 20% of the bottom line. And that brought him back to the skirmishes on Bail Row.

“They’ll say we’re bad people, we’ll steal your money,” Potter said vaguely of his competitors, summing them up with a vulgarity.

Richard Negrete says it doesn’t have to be that way. He launched Platinum Bail Bonds with his brother Raymond about a year ago after working for Ebarb at Anyway. Negrete and Ebarb said they remain friends.

Platinum occupies a second-floor walk-up on Vignes, a short stroll from the mall. It writes bundles of $50,000 bonds for domestic violence arrests, a growth sector in the industry. Negrete calls them spousal bonds.

“Nine times out of 10 it’s the spouse who posts it,” he said.

The 34-year-old former football player for Cal State Chico blamed Bail Row’s entrenched veterans for the nasty atmosphere.

In the old days, he said, they could adopt a take-it-or-leave-it attitude with customers, who had few other choices.

“These guys have been sitting back making a lot of money for a long time,” Negrete said. “There’s new blood in this business. The game’s changed.”