Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given (2010) (6 page)

Bondsmen have traditionally been given a bad rap because of their image as rough-and-tumble characters, perceived to be almost as crooked as the guys they’re bailing out of jail. But as the profession grew, it became more regulated, which made bondsmen more respected and reputable.

Several years ago, when I was writing bonds in Denver, I wrote one for Calvin Pope, the president of the Rollin’ 30 Crips. The Crips are one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in the United States, with an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 members. They are known to be involved in murders, robberies, and drug dealing, among many other criminal pursuits.

I had caught Calvin’s daddy and another one of his relatives, so I knew his family pretty well. Calvin had sixteen warrants and needed
sixteen separate bonds. His sister, Lil, had originally contacted Beth to put up the bonds for him, but she was too afraid to write that many. So we ended up splitting them between the two of us. Calvin was often called the “king of the road” because he didn’t give a damn about the law. The first time I went down to the station to write a bond for Calvin, he said to me, “I thought you were black on the phone.”

“I ain’t black, but I am the Dog.” Somehow I thought that would matter to him more than the color of my skin.

Calvin was worried that the judge was going to sock it to him. I told him he had nothing to be concerned about.

“You’re young, Calvin. As long as you get a reputable job, I think you’ll be all right.”

The case was going in front of Judge Marcucci, who hated every bondsman in the business, except, perhaps Beth. I think he liked her low-cut blouses and Italian moxie. They used to run into each other at volleyball games where his daughter and Beth’s niece, Jacqueline, played against each other for their respective teams. None of the other bondsmen in Denver had that kind of social connection with the judge. For the most part though, other than Beth, he never gave any of us enough time to properly plead a case for our clients.

“Why are you here today, Chapman?” Judge Marcucci asked.

“I’m here to support my client, Judge.”

“You know he’s got to show up fifteen more times this month, right?”

“Yes, Your Honor, I’m aware of that. Do you think you could put all of those warrants into one bond?”

“No.” He didn’t even have to think about his answer.

The judge knew it wouldn’t be easy getting a guy like Calvin Pope into court fifteen more times, so it was a setup for disaster.

“Mr. Chapman, how do you propose you’re going to get Mr. Pope here for his next appearances?”

“I’m going to call him, Your Honor.”

“Oh, is that right?” he said with more than a touch of sarcasm.

“Your Honor, I am going to call him on his pager. Would you like the number?”

“Yes, I would. For the court, we most certainly would!” Remember, I was promising the judge the phone number for the president of the Crips.

Our little cat-and-mouse game went on for several minutes—longer than any other exchange I can ever remember having with Judge Marcucci.

When we got into the hallway after the hearing, Calvin let me have it.

“What the hell, Dog?”

“I had to, Calvin.” I knew the judge would probably be giving him time. Calvin backed down because he realized that I’d done what I had to do.

A few weeks later, Calvin called me up at home to tell me to look outside my window. For a moment I worried that he was setting me up for a drive-by shooting. To my shock and surprise, out there was a royal blue 1986 Buick Regal that had been lowered to the ground, had a landau top, custom rims, fur seat covers, and a special paint job. It was a major pimped out ride.

“That’s your car, Dog.”

I loved it. I drove that ride all over Denver. My license plates said, “DOG LEE,” so everybody in town understood that car belonged to me. The Crips and other gangbangers knew the Dog was coming to get them when they saw that car in their neighborhood. And I purposely used it to hunt down those brothers too. When Calvin gave me that ride, all of the other bondsmen in Denver knew the black bail was mine and off-limits to them.

If I hadn’t been standing beside Calvin that day in court, the judge would have hammered him. I had grown frustrated with the justice system’s apparent double standard. If a white kid gets busted with less than an ounce of marijuana, he gets a slap on the wrist. But if a black kid gets caught with the same amount of weed, he goes to jail. I had
watched this happen too many times over the years. That’s why I always went to court with my black clients. I didn’t want them to get jacked around.

I once got really upset after another judge sentenced a young black kid to thirty days for a minor charge—one for which she could have easily let him off with a warning, probation, and a small fine. This kid’s momma was in the courtroom and had to witness her son being taken away in handcuffs for something a white kid would have surely been let off the hook for.

I was enraged with the judge’s sentence. “Your Honor, I thought the scales of justice were supposed to be color-blind!”

The judge freaked out, pointed her finger at me, and screamed, “Get out of my courtroom!”

I suppose I was lucky she didn’t find me in contempt and sentence me to a night in the clink too. Even so, I thought her decision was totally unfair, and yet that type of thing still goes on every day.

Calvin’s first court date was fast approaching. I was stunned when he told me that Judge Marcucci actually paged him on the day he was set to appear in court.

When we showed up, Judge Marcucci said, “I noticed you answered my page by being here, Mr. Pope.”

I think the judge respected Calvin’s willingness to face the music for the crimes he had committed and take responsibility for his actions.

Unfortunately, Calvin had too many felonies, so the judge had no choice but to convict him and send him to prison. Even if a judge likes you, he still has a responsibility to uphold the law. While serving his time, Calvin was diagnosed with leukemia. While he was in the hospital, Judge Marcucci showed up for an unexpected visit.

Calvin was so inspired by the judge that he decided right there and then to fight for his health and not give up on life. I knew he’d beat his disease for sure.

I stayed friends with Calvin over the years. He eventually gave up the gang life, got married, and had a few kids. The last time I spoke
with him was in October 2007. He told me he was applying to be a security guard at the Cherry Creek Mall outside of Denver. He called to ask me how he should answer the question on his application about being a convicted felon. He was nervous to lie but didn’t think he’d get the job if he confessed to all of his various convictions.

I told him to write “will discuss” on the line and then explain the circumstances during his interview. Calvin hesitated to take my advice, fearing that they’d discard his application with that type of vague response.

“Dog, I’m going to get in trouble if I lie.”

“With who?” I asked. “The paper cops? By the time they run your record and come back to you, you’ll have been on the job for at least six months.”

“Six months! Hell, I only need the job for two weeks! I’m just looking to make a few extra dollars.”

I had to laugh because Calvin was sweating bullets and agonizing over his answer. I offered to call over to the person in charge of hiring and give them my personal recommendation if he thought that might help.

“You’d do that for me, Dog?”

“Of course,” I said. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll give it a shot.” When we hung up, I called the woman in human resources and told her who I was.

“Hi. This is Dog the Bounty Hunter. I am calling on behalf of one of my good friends, Calvin Pope.” I hoped she knew it was really me and not a prank call.

“Oh, sure. I remember him. He really impressed me.” I wasn’t positive if she was being sincere or not, but I decided to play along anyway.

“I’ve known Calvin for many years. He is a great find for you and will definitely be an asset to your security team. He’ll be terrific in catching shoplifters and keeping an eye on things. He’s really good—you should definitely hire him.” I hung up feeling hopeful my call would seal the deal.

A few days later, Calvin called to say he’d gotten the job.

“Dog, they gave me a uniform and a badge, man.” I could tell he was proud of his new career. When I asked Calvin how he answered the felony question, he confessed that he had left it blank. In my heart, I was proud of him for not lying. He was a changed man who was being given a second chance in life. It felt good knowing that despite his past, he too had eventually ended up on the “right” side of the law.

Lucy Pemoni

October 31, 2007

“D
uane,” Beth whispered.

“What time is it?” I asked her.

“It’s four
A.M
.”

We’d been out celebrating Beth’s fortieth birthday the night before. I never gave her a surprise party because Beth is hard to pull one over on, but I’d wanted to do something special for her for her big four-o. We met several of our friends at Duc’s Bistro, a well-known restaurant in Honolulu. I was in bed at our home just outside of Honolulu and still pretty out of it when I heard Beth say, “We’ve got trouble.”

The only time Beth wakes me in the middle of the night is when I am having a bad dream or when there’s some awful news. In the past couple of years she has woken me to tell me my daughter Barbara Katie died in a fatal car accident and then when federal marshals were outside our door to take me away. If Beth wakes me up, it’s never good. She’s never once woke me to say, “We just won a million dollars!”

“The
National Enquirer
has you saying the ‘N’ word on tape. This is bad, Duane. Really bad.”

I thought,
What’s so bad about that?
“Bad” is one of the children is hurt. “Bad” is you’re going back to jail. “Bad” is someone we love just died. The
National Enquirer
story didn’t fit into any of those categories, at least not for me.

“Where are all the kids? Are they all right?” I asked.

Beth said they were fine. The only one I worried about these days was my son Tucker. Tucker went to prison in 2002 for robbing a Japanese tourist with a BB gun. He received a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery and was later paroled after serving four years. When he got out, Tucker came to live and work for me in Hawaii.

It wasn’t long before he was hanging with a bad crowd. Within weeks of his release, Tucker had a girlfriend who Beth and I thought was a terrible influence on him. I suspected Tucker was getting high again and it broke my heart. He was making one bad decision after another, but there wasn’t a lot I could do except tell him how I felt.

So when Beth woke me up that night, I figured it had to be about Tucker, though I had no idea what he’d done. When she told me it was a tabloid news story, I said I was going back to sleep.

“Duane, I don’t think you get it. You’re in deep trouble.”

“Beth, it’s me. Nobody’s going to be angry with the Dog for using the ‘N’ word. I use it all the time.” And I did.

I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. I kept thinking this wasn’t bad. I know bad. I thought this would pass. I had no idea my dream was about to become my worst nightmare. Beth knew she had to rally the family, so she immediately called our daughter Baby Lyssa to the house to help soften the eventual blow that before the end of the day would unravel everything I held dear.

Beth told me that my son Tucker had recorded a phone conversation that he and I had had several months earlier. I had to think back to exactly when that call took place. And then it occurred to me, it must have been back in March 2007.

Beth had been suspicious that there was something going on with Tucker for some time. None of us liked his girlfriend, Monique, from the very start. She and her friends had been hanging around the back door of our office in Honolulu trying to hit on Leland and Duane Lee. Ironically, the girls were working at the Kirby vacuum store, the same vacuums I used to sell when I first got out of prison. Whenever the boys were out back on a break, these girls would hover around them.
We called them “Lot Lizards” because they were like the lizards that crawl all over our back parking lot.

Beth kept telling everyone to stay away from those girls. She worried about them right from the start. Whenever one of the boys would make a comment like “They’re really nice,” Beth would quickly say, “Stop it! You’re not going to start socializing with people you met in a parking lot. You don’t know who they are or what they’re capable of.”

While everyone thought Beth was being a little paranoid, the bottom line is that she is usually right. One day Beth hit her threshold of tolerance and finally told one of the girls to get lost.

“You’re not a client and you’re not a tenant. I don’t want you hanging around here anymore, got it? Now, go!” She literally shooed her off the property. The girl was pissed and ran as fast as she could to tell her friends, including Tucker’s girlfriend, Monique, that Beth had been mean to her. That’s when we believe they hatched their plan to catch us doing something really bad on tape.

Monique is an African-American woman. I am sure she heard from Tucker that from time to time I used the “N” word. After the Michael Richards and Don Imus catastrophes, that would have been a perfect way to set me up or, worse, bust me in the press. Tucker must have said it upset him whenever he heard me use that word so he could seem sensitive and heroic for defending his girlfriend’s honor. Shortly after Beth chased off the girl in the parking lot, an anonymous note was left under my office door that had the word “N***er” written on it over and over again. Who would send me such a note? It was a message, but I had no idea what it meant. I gave it to Baby Lyssa, who handed it off to Beth.

“This goes into the shredder.” Beth was certain she knew who was responsible for such a reprehensible thing.

Beth warned me. She said, “Duane, these girls are nothing but trouble. In fact, they’re outside our door again. I’m sure they’re up to something no good. Don’t fall for any of their tricks.”

Beth was right, but she didn’t realize one other important thing: These girls were out to get
her
every bit as much as they were me. Tim
“Youngblood” Chapman came to us to say he’d overheard the girls scheming, and their alleged plan was to call Beth a “f*cking wop,” which they were certain would start an argument or some type of altercation. They would tape-record Beth’s reaction, hoping that she’d say something damaging and trying to get her to throw the first punch. It was a good plan, because everyone knows if you start calling Beth names, you’ve grabbed the bitch by the horns and it’s on like Donkey Kong. Beth fights back, but she generally fights fair. If you call her a name, she’ll come back by calling you a name. If you talk about her family, she’ll go after yours. If you throw down a racial slur, she’ll respond with one about you. There was no doubt she’d let loose, and throwing the first ethnic slur was the trigger they hoped would get Beth to say something racial.

I was furious. I called Tucker to find out what was going on. When I told him Monique was in our parking lot trying to set up Beth, he denied it.

“No she’s not. She would never do a thing like that.” Tucker firmly stood his ground while defending his girlfriend and her actions. Little did I know that he too had a recorder running, waiting to get what he wanted from me on tape.

It had become pretty clear to Beth and me that Monique’s intentions toward our family weren’t sincere. She and her friends talked about taking us down and making some money in the process. We both totally believed that her goal was to sell us out. Beth never wanted her in our home, for fear of something leaking to the press that would surely be taken out of context.

Tucker was always fighting with Beth about her refusal to let Monique come to our home. There was constant bickering between the two of them. And then one day, it all came to a head. Tucker was working for us selling T-shirts at our family-run souvenir shop in downtown Honolulu. He quit for one reason or another almost every other day. He was perpetually angry for reasons no one else could really understand. And then one day he came over with a nasty attitude saying he was done for good. I don’t really know what exactly caused
him to quit that day. It could have been anything from a fight with Beth to our shooing away his girlfriend.

Because Tucker was a felon, it was hard for him to find steady work anywhere else. He was on parole, so I felt it was better to keep him close. I have always ridden Tucker hard to keep him in line. When he first came to Hawaii after getting out of the joint, he was actually really well behaved. Everything was “Yes, sir,” “No, sir” and “Yes, ma’am,” “No, ma’am.”

Looking back, I see that Tucker had us convinced that he was a totally changed man when he first got out. And, for a short time, he was really great. That is, until those girls started coming around. Once he began dating Monique, everything started spiraling out of control. We told him from the start that we didn’t like her, that we both believed she was a bad person. I tell all of my children, “You are who you hang out with.” And it’s true. You become who you hang out with. And still, Tucker refused to break up with Monique.

Beth would get frustrated with his half-assed approach to doing things, and that sometimes caused an argument between the two of them. He’d do whatever we asked without a major fuss, but he’d always only do it halfway. If I asked him to sweep the floor, he’d forget to pick up the piles of dirt. If I asked him to water the plants, he’d leave the hose unraveled and on the ground instead of putting it away when he was finished.

Tucker was a good kid when he was a youngster. Up to the age of eleven or so, he got good grades, never missed a single day of class, and was never in any trouble. It was around this time that he started going back and forth between my place and his mother’s house. He visited her regularly over the course of the next couple of years. He’d go for a week or two and come back a totally different kid than when he left. I was shocked when I saw him for the first time after coming home from an extended visit with his mom. He had left a clean-cut young boy and returned two weeks later a petty thief with his fingernails painted black.

Beth and I began to notice random items showing up around the house that we both knew Tucker could never afford to buy—like a fog
machine! The only conclusion we could come to was that he was stealing the stuff. Although I tried to talk to him about his behavior, the more I spoke to him the worse his attitude became.

As they got older, Tucker, Baby Lyssa, and Barbara Katie had each figured out how to play mom against dad. It’s a pretty common trait among children of divorced parents. Add stepparents into the equation, and you’ve got a recipe for constant conflict and drama unless all of the adults find a way to work together and in the children’s best interests—something I should have done with their mother, but didn’t.

The atmosphere at my ex-wife’s house was decidedly different from the one at mine. For one thing, the kids told me there were no rules at her house. They said their mother had become more of a friend than a parent, which made for a pretty inviting environment for three prepubescent teenagers. They could stay out as late as they wanted, didn’t have to go to school on a regular basis, and were exposed to a party lifestyle that impacted all three in unimaginable ways. My children were not only exposed to hard drugs, they were invited to join in on the partying. They were too young and impressionable to understand that what they saw their mother doing was wrong. By the time Tucker was thirteen, he was old enough to understand what was really going on at his mom’s house. He said he didn’t want to visit her anymore because he hated what he saw happening to his mother and sisters. I think it was a constant internal battle for Tucker, who tried but failed to keep his sisters out of trouble. He wanted to be the heroic brother who protected his sisters from harm. Despite his efforts, he couldn’t stop them from acting out in ways that would eventually hurt them both.

Of course, when the kids returned to our house, Beth and I were always the bad guys because we had rules they had to live by. We set pretty tight boundaries and had expectations that had to be met. The kids all had chores and responsibilities, which they didn’t like very much. Whenever Beth and I told them to clean their room or take out the trash, their usual response was “I’m going back to Mom’s!” I felt so bad, I usually caved in and let them have their way when I ought to
have practiced some tough love and been stricter and more secure in my parenting.

Over time, I became aware of what was happening at their mother’s house and tried to talk to her about it, but I never stopped any of the kids from seeing her whenever they wanted. Looking back, I realize that I should have forbidden them to be in her presence until she stopped her partying ways. I should have gone to court and demanded sole custody. I should have told my kids that I’d cut them off and that they’d get nothing from me if they didn’t stop using drugs. But I didn’t. I passively allowed things to continue until it got so bad that I had to put a stop to it.

When Baby Lyssa was raped and became pregnant at the age of thirteen by her twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend, I hit my breaking point. It was time to intervene. Tucker was living with me while Barbara Katie and Baby Lyssa were living with their mother. My teenage daughter’s only influence was that of a woman who was partying hard and endlessly dating. She didn’t pay any attention to the kids, often working or staying out until two in the morning and sleeping all day. I needed to get the girls out from under her before one of them ended up dead. Beth and I stepped in and brought Baby Lyssa to live with us in Hawaii so we could get her off drugs and look after her new baby. She hasn’t left since.