Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given (2010) (2 page)

What little money we had left was constantly going toward our legal expenses and to put food on the table for my family. We were flat broke, living hand-to-mouth, literally surviving by writing one bond at a time and living hand-to-mouth with each one. We’d write a bond and pay a bill. Write a bond, buy some groceries. Write a bond, pay our rent. We owed thousands of dollars on our cell phones because of roaming charges we’d racked up in Mexico. It was terrible. We were seriously behind in all of our expenses, and whatever money we did have was going to our lawyers.

During those months of scraping by, our financial stress was so bad that even the power to our house was shut off several times. The last time they shut us off, all of the fish in my aquarium died. I was devas
tated. Anyone who has ever had fish knows what it’s like to come home to find them floating upside down. I stared at that tank for an hour before I could bring myself to scoop the poor guys out.

We had no money to speak of until December 24, 2003, when A&E came through with a deal for our television show. They gave us a small down payment of twenty-five thousand dollars to get us through the holidays. That was the only sliver of money we had seen since before my capture of Luster earlier that summer. Although the twenty-five grand was a lot of money, we were so far behind on everything that it didn’t make much of a dent in our debt.

As we began filming the first season of
Dog the Bounty Hunter,
the excitement I had from finally having my own television series was offset by my constant fear that I could be sent back to Mexico at any moment. I was scared to death because I felt there was nothing I could do about my situation but wait it out and put my absolute trust and faith in the Lord, my lawyers, and the judicial system. At the time, the Lord was the only thing I knew, without any doubt, I could truly trust. The lawyers and the system were still very much in question.

Lucy Pemoni

T
he impact of what happened in Mexico was hard on the entire family. It took all of us some time to adjust. But after nearly three years, we had gotten back to living life as usual.

Everything seemed fine until the morning of September 14, 2006. That was when a team of federal marshals stormed my home in Hawaii and arrested me for kidnapping Andrew Luster. As far as I knew, the kidnapping charges were never reinstated in Mexico. The idea of the United States government arresting me for a crime I didn’t commit and wasn’t even being charged with was absurd beyond my wildest dreams.

It was so crazy that for a moment, I thought I was being
Punk’d.

But I wasn’t.

They had what looked like a valid warrant for my arrest but no search warrant. They only had the essential paperwork to take me into custody. My first inclination was to run. Jump. Go out the back door, down the street, head toward the beach and disappear. I was innocent. Not everyone who bolts is guilty. Some are overwhelmed by the system, others are just plain scared. The warrant they had expired in twenty-six days. I actually believed that if I could run out the clock, then everything would be fine. But then I began to worry about Leland and Tim. Had they already been taken into custody? I wasn’t about to let my son and
brother from another mother take the fall alone. No, I was the leader of this gang. I had to stand tall and hold my head up with dignity. So I got dressed and let the feds take me in.

The law is very specific about setting bail in these types of situations. The bottom line is that there is no bail for a fugitive wanted on kidnapping charges who fled another country. The only way I could get out of the federal prison they put me in was to prove special circumstances, which is a phenomenally tough thing to prove. Brook Hart, my lawyer in Honolulu, never wavered. He was able to convince the judge that Leland, Tim, and I were not flight risks. We had no place to go. Somehow, he got the judge to agree. A day and a half later, I was released on a $300,000 bond while the boys each had a $100,000 bond. When I asked why mine was so much more than theirs, Beth just laughed.

“Oh, right,” I said. “I am the leader of this gang.”

We were ordered to wear electronic monitoring ankle bracelets so that we weren’t tempted to run. I hated wearing that thing around my ankle, but I detested bounty hunting with it on even more. It was hell booting in doors wearing a monitoring device that made me feel like the people I was chasing. If a fugitive caught a glimpse of it, he’d rib me for it. I took a lot of crap for having to wear that thing. And it was ironic that I was now wearing an ankle bracelet just like the one Luster broke out of when I began my hunt for him. A judge finally agreed all three of them could be removed in November so we could go back to work, doing things the way we used to. The week that bracelet came off my ankle, I caught my first jump in months. It felt good to bust out my rusty cuffs.

From the beginning in 2003, there was a lot of confusion in our case. We were referred to a lawyer named Bill Bollard, who came highly recommended to us through some friends who worked at
Dateline NBC.
He handled all of their Mexican-American cases. They sent me a videotape of Bollard in an interview so I could see what he was like before meeting and then making my decision about hiring him. I liked what I saw. He was a clean-cut man of Mormon faith. I thought he seemed secure, stable, and honest. I could get by with that type of guy handling my case. At least I thought I could. I hired Bollard and
his Mexican co-counsel Enrique Gandara to handle the charges still pending in Mexico, while I had Brook Hart, the lawyer I knew from Hawaii, heading up the extradition case in the Hawaii federal court.

Brook Hart was set to argue our case to the federal judge in Hawaii, to prove that the only charge we faced in Mexico was “deprivation of liberty,” which was just a misdemeanor. There was a lot of confusion and rumors as to whether the court documents had been translated incorrectly somewhere in the chain between Mexico and Hawaii and interpreted “deprivation of liberty” as “kidnapping,” which is a felony and an extraditable crime. Several hearings took place from October 2006 through February 2007 and my legal team argued my case and why I should not be extradited to Mexico on the lesser charge. Despite their best efforts, in February 2007, the Mexican Federal Court cleared the way for me to be extradited by ruling there was no reason not to try me on the charge of deprivation of liberty, a minor charge in Mexico. Several politicians rallied behind me during this time because they truly believed that an injustice of massive proportion was taking place. Finally, on March 7, legislators in the International Affairs Committee of the Hawaii State House passed a resolution asking the Mexican government to drop the extradition proceedings.

Earlier that year, A&E had hired powerhouse San Francisco–based attorney James Quadra and another lawyer named Lee Levine, who specialized in First Amendment law, to represent the network and us in a lawsuit that had been filed by a small group of people from the Hawaiian Islands who didn’t like the way their heritage was being represented on our show. Lawsuits that have no merit are a part of fame and stardom, so the nature of this particular suit didn’t surprise anyone. Even so, the network hired two top-gun attorneys to handle the case and make it quietly go away.

I didn’t know anything about either man before the network hired them. When I met Lee for the first time, I understood exactly why he was considered the very best. He is an honest and a straight-to-the-point type of guy. After that meeting, Lee sat down with me for a few minutes.

“I want to talk to you, Duane. In your world, you are considered the greatest. In mine, so am I,” he said.

I told him I had heard that from several people we knew in common. He wanted to lend me his support in my pending case against the Mexican government and offer me some professional advice.

“You can win this case. You have to persevere and fight as hard as you can,” Levine said.

The reality was that I had been seriously considering surrendering because the stress and lack of progress in my case was wearing me down. I had been contemplating going to the border and turning myself in. I didn’t tell anyone what I had been thinking, because I knew they would try to talk me out of it. I also knew that if I did go back, I’d have to capture my surrender on tape so there would be no confusion about what I chose to do. I didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to say they caught
The Dog.
I privately shared my thoughts with one of the producers of my show and my most trusted cameraman, who both agreed to meet me on the border when and if it ever went down.

Lee’s words were heaven-sent. It was divine intervention to have such a powerful man like him tell me not to surrender to Mexico. God knew I’d listen to a guy like Lee. I’m not sure a man of lesser stature would have had the ability to convince me. Of course, I wanted to hire Lee on the spot to be my own lawyer. I told him a little about my case and my growing concern about the legal advice I’d been receiving. He listened closely.

“You know that James Quadra speaks fluent Spanish, right?” I had no idea Quadra was bilingual. Lee told me how much we’d like James Quadra and that we ought to discuss our case with him to see if he could assist.

“He’s the best I know. He’ll like you a lot. And more importantly, Beth will like him.” He was right. My Beth has to get along with whoever is in our life or they won’t be in it for very long.

With Lee’s endorsement, and since Quadra had done such a great job for us in quickly settling the lawsuit in San Francisco, we thought we’d meet and tell him about our case. I wanted to get his professional
insight on what he thought we should do regarding our case in Mexico.

When we finally had our first conversation with Quadra, the chemistry was there from the start. He was one of us and immediately became my brother. He never tried to push his way into the Luster case. Never. We told him that we had been working with a lawyer named Bill Bollard and shared our concerns with the way things were going. He wanted us to tell him everything.

We explained that Bollard was calling the shots every step of the way. I told Quadra that I was worried that the criminal case in Mexico was not proceeding in our favor.

Beth and I thought that something wasn’t right. She has incredible instincts on many things, it’s extraordinary really, and she shared with our manager her concerns that the pieces of the puzzle were not fitting together properly and she had a terrible feeling about our legal team. The defense costs were ongoing and Bollard had asked us and our manager to make some payments which made us feel uncomfortable. I was dumping every last penny I had into lawyer fees to keep my family and me safe from extradition.

I told Quadra how Beth and I were shouldering the brunt of the day-to-day stress of the case. We didn’t want the boys to know what was going on. They put their faith in us and buried themselves in their lives while we got things figured out.

Once there was finally some money coming in, I still wasn’t able to save any from the first three seasons of my show because of the extraordinary legal fees involved in my case. Beth wasn’t even paid a salary for the first two seasons, so she couldn’t help out either. I had one of the top-rated television shows on the air and the number one show on A&E, yet I was short on money. It was frustrating and maddening. I didn’t deserve to be in this position after my successful capture of Luster and I felt all my hard work was eaten up in legal fees.

I sometimes sit back and think how different things would have been for Luster if he had been caught by me before he was convicted. Could I have saved him or made a difference? I would have told him I
could help him. I would have encouraged him to take a deal, serve his time like a man, and put the situation behind him. I would have treated him like any fugitive I capture, by trying to help him get his life on the right track. I guess I’ll never know, and at the time, I had to focus on my freedom.

A&E bought two specials from us,
The Fight for Freedom
and
The Family Speaks,
as their way of helping us out financially. Everyone who worked on those two shows donated their fees to our legal defense fund. We were overwhelmed by that demonstration of support from our A&E family. The encouragement we got from the staff was a tremendous help, and the love and adoration we’d received from our viewers and fans was beyond my wildest dreams. There is safety in numbers, and we were surrounded by millions of people who gave us strength when we needed it the most. And still, as fast as I was raising money for my defense, it went out the door quickly. Bollard was calling upon us to make more legal payments that would hopefully make our case progress easier, including payments to people on the ground in Mexico who would be able to gather information for us, as he was telling us there were still people associated with Luster attempting to thwart my case.

The situation in Mexico created so much fear and panic in me that I’d sometimes just shut down. If I shut down during production, the show came to a screeching halt. If we weren’t shooting, we fell behind schedule, which costs money—a lot of money. It wasn’t fair to anyone, especially the network.

I felt like Bollard was slowly pecking away at my flesh—taking every dime I had and then some. He’d ask for money and then warn me that if I didn’t pay we’d suffer the consequences. So I sent him the money. He’d send e-mails with yet another reason he needed additional cash. His e-mails scared me to death so I’d send the money.

In one particular e-mail, Bollard explained that Enrique, his co-counsel in Mexico, had been warning the lawyers that while the magistrates in Mexico were beyond the reach or influence of Luster’s powerful friends and family, the court support staff could be reachable and could cause
considerable “mischief.” He went on to remind Beth and me that we had already seen examples of this, especially in the case of the late-night announcement by the court typist which included misstatements attributed to our lawyers that caused considerable confusion.

Bollard said that Enrique was concerned about additional incidents of “mischief,” including misplaced files or notifications which could delay the process or disrupt them altogether. Unfortunately, Bollard reminded us that this is a sad reality in the court system in Mexico. His suggestion to counter against this happening was to have Enrique use someone from his office to “babysit” the file and the court functionaries until such time as the hearing could take place and a ruling was made. Bollard knew that Enrique had been paying Enrique’s staff to fly to Guadalajara and do this non-stop, but he was once again asking us for an additional payment of $35,000 to keep this vigilance going. He believed our “adversary’s” efforts to interfere would soon be stepped up, as the matter had been formally assigned to one of the two appellate panels.

For us, this meant this was a case of the Luster family money against ours until this could all be sorted out. To be clear, the Luster family’s pockets were much deeper than mine. Money was getting tight. That’s when I started asking questions, which is how I gather information in everything I do from bounties to my fight for freedom. Still, I was worried if I didn’t supply everything my attorney asked for, he’d throw his hands up, walk away, and abandon my case.