That’s how Manei gets definitive proof the fugitive is in the house. “I know bounty hunters who call a house, the guy answers the phone, they raid the house, he’s not there. Because he’s got call-forwarding. So what do I do? I go to the apartment. I’ll listen by the door. With my cellular phone, I’ll dial the number. If the phone is ringing in there, I’ll hear the person pick it up. And then I have an option. I’ll either wait you out, or I’ll go knock on the door. I usually prefer to wait.”

On TV, there is a theatrical emphasis on the brute force it takes to apprehend bad guys. NABEA has advised members not to participate in the syndicated show Bounty Hunters, which re-creates real hunts with real-life hunters. “They’re too much into the Rambo-SWAT-team image,” says Bob Burton. “They ignore the 97 percent of talking with attorneys, detectives, witnesses, and, most of all, the victim. There is very little kicking in doors. Less than 3 percent of the people we arrest resist us.”

A good bounty hunter prefers to flush his quarry out with tactics closer to those of Sherlock Holmes than those of Steven Seagal, only rarely breaking down doors. After all, one never knows what’s waiting on the other side. In Washington State two years ago, an overeager hunter opened a closet door and got shot in the face. Scare your not-quite-subdued quarry, and he might do something rash. One of New York’s skip-tracers once chased a teenager onto a roof only to watch in horror as the young man, in his terror, tripped and fell over the edge.

Often Manei deals with this by confronting targets on the street with a name he knows isn’t theirs. “I’ll come up on you, show you some I.D. I’m gonna tell you, ‘Listen, Mr. Rodriguez, you’re under arrest.’ He says, ‘Okay, I’ll come with you, but I’m gonna sue you. You got the wrong guy.’ Once I have him in custody, in cuffs, I say, ‘Listen, it’s really you I’m looking for,’ and I show him his picture. He says, ‘Man! That was a good one!’”

Manei has a new trainee, Leo. Leo found his way into the business the way Mr. M. did -- through an old-fashioned apprenticeship. As Manei explains while Leo is out on the street spying on a house in the Bronx, “You’ve got to do all kinds of shit. When we’re teaching you, and we’re doing it for free, you’ve got to break your bones for us.”

The custom of allowing prisoners back into society before trial has its origins in Norman England. Because dungeon conditions frequently finished inmates off before they ever set foot in court, judges began releasing prisoners into the hands of their family members or fellow villagers. No money changed hands; if the prisoners legged it, their guardians could swing in their place (though in practice, the Crown usually exercised mercy and levied a fine). But the Tudor courts hammered out some of the system’s roughest edges, and the substitution of money or chattel as bail gained acceptance. Bail soon begat bounty hunters, who were hired out-of-pocket by family members (since England has never had legal bondsmen). By the eighteenth century, London newspapers were chronicling the escapades of bounty-hunting gangs like the Broyles Street Boys. In England, bounty hunting finally disappeared in the nineteenth century, leaving the field to the police. The United States is today the only country that allows bounty hunters to apprehend bail jumpers.

Nationally, there are an estimated 2,100 men and women who call themselves bounty hunters. Bob Burton calculates that NABEA has more than 250 members in New York State and New Jersey. Still, there are plenty of people -- Rivkin, for example -- who choose to operate outside of NABEA’s purview. Freelance hunting is an antisocial, even paranoid affair. In a trade whose unofficial operative motto is “No body, no booty,” established hunters fear colleagues who sell their services for a smaller percentage of the bond. And, of course, there’s also a queasiness about captives coming back to seek vengeance on the guys who put them away.

New York hunters are generally employed by out-of-state bondsmen to track down fugitives who have disappeared into the roil of the city. Unlike in most states, where the bondsman has between one month and one year to return a fugitive to the court before the bail money is forfeited, in New York, the forfeit goes into effect as soon as a person fails to keep his or her court date. It is entirely up to the judge’s discretion whether he will set aside the forfeiture and return the bond money should the defendant reappear.

Many judges will, in fact, give the bondsman up to a year to return the fugitive, but bondsmen such as Brooklyn’s Helen Mavica, unwilling to send good money after bad, are reluctant to employ hunters, instead preferring to wait until the Police Department’s 170-strong Warrant Squad brings the bailee in. Although the squad is notoriously inefficient -- a recent ABC PrimeTime Live report estimated that 35,000 people (the majority of whom do not borrow from bondsmen) jump bail every year in New York, and the squad catches only 6,000 to 10,000 of these -- its services don’t cost anything. By contrast, if Mavica were to hire a hunter, she would have to pay him a fee upon the fugitive’s arrest, even if the judge refused to “exonerate” the bond.

‘There is no hunting like the hunting of men, and those who have hunted long enough and liked it never care for anything else thereafter.” The quote is Hemingway via NABEA’s training manual. “Street smarts really come into play in a town like New York City,” Bob Burton tells his audience as he paces back and forth on the blue carpet in a conference room at a Quality Inn in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Eight to ten times a year, NABEA’s founder conducts three-day training sessions around the country. On the last weekend of October, 32 people dropped $427 apiece and made their way to Lyndhurst so Burton -- who covered Central America for Soldier of Fortune magazine in the eighties and who counts G. Gordon Liddy as a business associate and friend -- could teach them how to “psychologically overwhelm the weak.” Since automatic NABEA membership is conferred at the course’s end, these weekends do a lot to burnish Burton’s godfather stature within the business.

Of the students present at the Quality Inn seminar, nearly half are from New York City. There are repo men and social workers, students from John Jay College, and a 41-year-old grandmother (the only woman in the class) studying computer science at Hunter and looking to salt her midlife years with some adventure, “experience different walks of life,” she says. There aren’t many women in the business -- and none in New York are full-time -- but there is a hunter in San Francisco, Mackenzie Green, who’s appeared on several TV shows and runs her own Website, Bounty Hunters Online.

Under the conference room’s enormous, low-hanging chandeliers, Burton and several colleagues tell war stories and swap macho, innuendo-drenched, backslapping repartee. “In this business, you’re going to be dealing with swines sic, scum, street trash, and with lawyers, attorneys, and cops,” says Burton, pausing long enough for a crony to repeat the “swines, scum, street trash” chorus. “Suhn uhm’va bitch,” Burton exclaims, and the audience roars.

The lights go out, and students watch a few documentaries, including a BBC production about a California bondsman who ends up catching his man by shooting into the dirt in front of his motorbike as he tries to flee.

The lights back on, Burton starts to shake the profession’s dirty tricks out of the bag -- from setting up “trap line” 800 phone numbers operated by companies such as Colorado’s TelScan that automatically locate where the caller is phoning from to how to “spirit” (read: kidnap) fugitives out of other countries and back into the good old U.S. of A.