The two men in coveralls slammed the young father up against the crib made up with Disney-character sheets and cuffed his hands behind his back. Before hustling him down the staircase, they told Melissa to give him $20 spending money for jail. As Sean was being maneuvered into the car, Melissa’s sister called to him, “You need anything, just call. I’ll get you anything you need.” Then she turned to Scott and George. “Try not to drive over the grass as you leave,” she said.

Scott lives in Rockland County, George in Clifton, New Jersey. But for both these men, the city streets are hunting grounds, their prey those who jump bail. Scott and George are paid by bondsmen who stand to forfeit their investment if the “skippers” are not caught.

Typically, hunters receive 10 percent of the bond for services rendered; in Sean’s case, $1,000 on a $10,000 bond. Occasionally, a single capture can net a top hunter enough to live on for a year. Arizona hunter Bob Burton, who is now president of the National Institute of Bail Enforcement and who founded the National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents (NABEA) -- the nearest thing the industry has to a union -- says that in the eighties, he chased “huge, million-dollar bonds,” snaring Miami cocaine barons, which means he was clearing at least $100,000 a head. As one of New York’s elite skip-tracers says, “You do it for the money, and you do it for the money. It’s the bottom line.”

Until recently, bounty hunting was a little-discussed vestige of frontier justice, revisited every few years in movies like The Bounty Hunters, A Fistful of Dollars, The Hunter, Blade Runner, and Midnight Run but rarely scrutinized. After all, everyone benefited: The bondsman got his money back, and the service cost the taxpayer not a penny. These mercenaries were a key cog in the justice system, for without them, fewer bondsmen would risk lending out money for bail and more people would spend months sitting in increasingly overcrowded jails awaiting trial.

According to Bob Burton, 87 percent of those who jumped a bondsman-loaned bail, or some 23,000 people, were picked up by bounty hunters in 1996. “Less than two dozen complaints were issued against them,” says Burton. But on the last day of August 1997, the industry suddenly had a lot to answer for. Early that morning, five men burst into a house in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, tied up three of the occupants, and attempted to enter the bedroom of a young couple in their twenties, Chris Foote and Spring Wright. Foote picked up a gun and began firing through the door. By the time the shoot-out had ended, Foote and Wright were dead. Later, under arrest, the bandits claimed they were bounty hunters and admitted that they were, in fact, looking for someone else.

Two weeks later, after further investigation, prosecutors announced they now believed the bounty-hunting story was just a fib, and that the five men in ski masks were burglars whose sortie had gone awry. But the news came too late for the country’s bounty-hunting community. Across the United States, politicians and legal commentators began howling for regulations to control these vigilantes.

Bounty hunting is legitimized in New York by state law and at a national level by an obscure 1872 Supreme Court ruling holding the bail contract to be a unique civil affair between the bailee and the bondsman, empowering the bondsman or his employees to use any means necessary to return a bailee who flees. In New York, only a minority of the hunters are legally entitled to carry guns (35 percent, Bob Burton estimates, although hunters privately admit that a lot of their peers are packing weapons without permits). Says one old-timer, “This is a citizen’s arrest. We’re there under lawful pretexts. If somebody pulls a weapon, you can use deadly force in defense.”

After the incident in Phoenix, State Senator James Lack ordered his staff to research the industry, with a view to introducing legislation that would require hunters to alert local police to busts. There has been talk of introducing age minimums and higher educational standards or military qualifications similar to those recently introduced into the NYPD. Hunters would also have to undergo a physical exam as well as take a written test and submit to an interview that would determine their psychological stability.

Whether or not Lack’s reforms go anywhere, what seems clear is that post-Phoenix (an event more than one hunter describes as the industry’s Rodney King case), the hunters are in for a rougher ride.

The ranks of New York’s bounty-hunting community include everyone from moonlighting private eyes to people who answer the phone at Dial-a-Mattress. There are ex-suits like Bob R., a middle-aged man laid off from his spokesman’s job at IBM; former military personnel like Sonya S., a young woman with eight years in the army who teaches at a parochial school by day; Raymond T., a bus driver with a powerful taste for Long Island iced teas; and one man old enough to claim Social Security who is too addicted to “getting these scumbags off the street” to retire.

Stan Rivkin is described by many colleagues -- with grudging respect -- as a “forefather” of the city’s hunters. Unlike quite a few of his peers, who prefer their beeper-toting anonymity, he is an inveterate self-promoter, a man whose antics are at least partially responsible for bounty hunting’s blustery, square-jawed, camera-friendly public face.

The goateed, cigar-chomping Long Islander, now 65, began hunting in the mid-fifties, shortly after he’d finished serving in the Marines. He was working as a repo man for a New York City finance company. Paid $25 by a bondsman for his first human catch, he was one of the only active skip-tracers on the East Coast. His West Coast counterpart was Ralph “Papa” Thorson, who worked out of Los Angeles and died in 1991.

By the seventies, Rivkin, who was raised mainly in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage in Yonkers, was being profiled in People magazine. CBS made a film titled Rivkin: Bounty Hunter that starred Ron Leibman. Rivkin used to store apprehended fugitives in his Franklin Square basement overnight. A photo of Duke, the blue Doberman who watched over Rivkin’s detainees (“higher-strung than your average Doberman,” says Rivkin), still hangs on his living-room wall.