“I’m not a rabbi or a priest or anything like that,” says Rivkin. “But I think I get through to these people more than a court of law or a counselor because I talk their shit. If you want to catch these guys, you gotta get down in the gutter with them, down and dirty.” It’s a point of pride that in 1988, Robert De Niro rode with Rivkin to prep for his role in Midnight Run. (“I rode with De Niro, too,” says Bob Burton. “Ralph Thorson also went out with De Niro. Everybody wants to believe that it was modeled on him.”)

In 1990, Rivkin had a triple bypass, and since then, he’s been content to walk around with an unlit cigar jammed in his jowl. He’s no longer as active as he once was; if there’s going to be a chase, he hires somebody to help. Nowadays, there are plenty of hungry young hunters who welcome the chance to work with the old pro. Rivkin, once the baddest piranha around, no longer has the tank to himself.

Manei M. and his Trinidadian partner, Hayden P., do better than most with a mainly local practice. Their specialty is tracking down men and women who lived in New York City legally as noncitizens but who committed a felony offense and went to prison. These people are subject to a unique form of double indemnity: Upon their release from prison, the INS immediately begins deportation proceedings, regardless of the severity or circumstances of the offense -- even if they have lived in the United States since childhood.

While the process is under way, they are bonded back out into society. When the appeals are exhausted, their bonds are retracted. If they do not show up for their deportation hearings, the bondsmen send Manei and Hayden out to collect them. Sometimes the hunters use a van to pick off several people in a single sweep. Frequently, the deportee does not even realize his appeal has been denied. He finds out when Manei and Hayden kidnap him.

The captives are hustled down to Federal Plaza, where they are kept in holding cells on Varick Street; out-of-state cases are flown to the INS’s main processing facility in Louisiana. Manei and his partner drive to the airport, buy the plane tickets, alert the crew that they are transporting someone who is under arrest, and fly to Baton Rouge. From the airport, Manei usually drives the deportee to a small parish jail renting out cells for $45 a night. And there the deportees stay until the INS office in Oakdale opens for business. The paperwork is filled out, the bounty hunters claim their money, and within a few days, the hapless ex-felons are on planes back to lands they may not even know.

On the twenty-third floor of the Peninsula Hotel, at the swanky rooftop bar, Manei greets the maître d’ by his first name. They shake hands. The maître d’ leads Manei to a table and walks off to fetch him a cocktail. Manei calls the bar his “office away from home.” He may be contacted only through a pager number with a Long Island area code; the Peninsula is one of the places he goes to rendezvous with bondsmen.

The 31-year-old has a boyish face and shoulder-length black hair. His body is thin and wiry, and he is dressed casually, in black jeans, a T-shirt, and flashy chains. But this is the Peninsula, so he’s thrown on a sport coat. Manei still manages to look like the college student who acted in Molière and Tennessee Williams plays ten years ago at Long Island’s Dowling University. If he catches his man early in the morning and gets down to Federal Plaza before the INS offices open, he can sometimes be found sitting in the McDonald’s on Broadway across from the Federal Building, wearing his bulletproof vest and reading Gogol or Dostoevski while Hayden, his tall, baritone-voiced partner, sits outside at the steering wheel of his gold 1997 Chrysler Sebring, glancing occasionally through the rearview mirror at the cuffed prisoner in the backseat.

Manei fell out with his mentor, Stan Rivkin, in the early nineties. He isn’t well liked by the NABEA crowd, either. Somewhat more cerebral than your average hunter, he’s been talking recently about setting up a more exclusive organization to rival Bob Burton’s. Many of those in NABEA, he feels, are small-timers. “Out of 10,000 people,” he exaggerates contemptuously, “you’re lucky if there are 10 people who are real bounty hunters, who make a living out of it 24 hours a day.”

Describing his work, the hunter quotes Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu writes -- according to Manei’s paraphrase -- “If you can win a battle without fighting, then you’ve truly won. If you win by destroying a city, you’ve got yourself a headache. You go around being some superhero gung ho guy, you just get a headache for yourself.”

There was the time Manei and his sensei, Rivkin, staked out a house in a snowstorm in Pennsylvania, looking for a 68-year-old cocaine importer from Florida. After four days, they saw him on the street and rolled down the window to ask for directions. When the old man stopped, Manei called out harshly, “Hey! Jack! Why don’t you get in the backseat? You’re under arrest.” The hunters jumped out of their vehicle, and within seconds, the man was cuffed. Once they’d shuffled him into the car, Manei changed tack, becoming the gangster’s friend, agreeing to send him socks and T-shirts in jail. “And I did,” the hunter remembers fondly.

The wiles are endless. “I make a phone call to a guy’s house,” Manei continues. “I’ll ask for his wife or sister. Then the guy’ll say to me, ‘She’s not home right now; who’s this?’ I’ll tell him: ‘Tell her it’s Mike. Who’s this? Her brother?’ Then I get him in a conversation -- you know, I want to take her out, or whatever. Then I ask, ‘What time can I call back?’ I get his name because I’ve got him in conversation. Little tricks like that.”