Adog's Tale

The world's most famous bounty hunter on the trail of America's most notorious fugitive: the exclusive step-by-step account of a manhunt

"¿Hay pistolas? ¿Tienen pistolas?"

Half a dozen screaming Mexican federal police swarm the dark blue Chevy Suburban, yanking open the doors and pointing assault rifles at the four men inside the vehicle. Safeties are off; fingers nervously graze the triggers.

"íNo pistolas! íNo pistolas!" shouts a big, mean-looking gringo in the backseat. His hands are raised alongside his head, and some sort of badge hangs from a chain around his neck. Two soldiers quickly cover him.

"íÁndale! íRápldo!"

Carefully the gringo swings his legs out of the car. He's wearing white snakeskin cowboy boots with silver tips, black jeans and a black leather vest. The soldiers take half a step back. ¿Quién es este rubio Rambo, este chingado vaquero?

Duane Chapman, a.k.a. Dog the Bounty Hunter, is concerned about the assault rifles but not about the situation. Just a misunderstanding, he tells himself.

Still painting their guns, the soldiers reach in, grab a handful of Dog's vest and haul him out of the car.

"We're Americans," Dog pleads, his knees hitting the rocky ground, "and we've just captured----"

"Keep quiet!" shouts one of the soldiers in English. "Get down! This is no USA. This is no America, pendejo! íVamos, vamos!"

Dog's crew is thrown to the ground around him. From the van that was following him the soldiers pull out his son Leland, 25, and a cameraman, Jeff Sells, 35. As they shackle Dog's hands behind his back, two more bodies hit the ground: Dog's longtime friends and colleagues Timothy Chapman (no relation), 38, and Boris Krutonog, 41. Dog can't see his prisoner. God, he prays, don't let that piece of shit go free.

A few minutes later the men are marched to the back of a pickup truck. A tall, goateed man, still wearing the handcuffs that Dog snapped onto his wrists, is also forced into the back of the truck. Leland scoots over and smiles wickedly at the guy. "Here, motherfucker, sit next to me," he says with mock civility. "You're going to jail."

The main jail in the Pacific Coast resort city of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico is only a few blocks from where the Americans were arrested. As the pickup truck idles outside the old, nondescript building, a guard unlocks a large barred gate and swings it open. The truck drives through it and into the courtyard. To the left is a row of ground-floor prison cells. On the right is a receiving area filled with curious guards and police.

The prisoners' prisoner is taken out of the truck and shoved toward the receiving table. He and the officials speak in Spanish. The American squares his shoulders and stares down arrogantly at the seated official. "Me llamo Andrew Stuart Luster," he says at last.

The five men are escorted to their cell, one of the cells, a 12-by-I5-foot concrete room. The walls are solid, though one small, barred window looks out on the street. Three cement bunks are built into the opposite wall, and in the corner a cracked cement toilet overflows with shit. As Tim scavenges an old paper bag and carefully tears it to spread over the pile of human excrement, Dog stands guard at the bars, a position he will rarely relinquish over the next several days.

Krutonog, a Russian-born character actor who has landed small roles in films such as The Hunt for Red October and The Italian Job and who acts as, in his own words, "Dog's consigliere to Hollywood," says that when they were first shoved into the cell, "we were all feeling a sense of jubilation. I saw Luster go into one of the cells, and as I looked at him I shivered. We had caught him, and now he was a man going into the darkest place imaginable.

Late in the afternoon the police escort Luster from the jail. As the passes Dog's cell, Luster suddenly leans over and spits. Dog cocks his head and avoids the assault. "I'll dance on your grave, motherfucker!" Luster says, sneering.

Hollywood's Favorite Bounty Hunter

Duane Chapman, 50, tells anyone who will listen that he is the world's greatest bounty hunter, with more than 6,000 "arrests" in his 25-year career. More than a few of the estimated 2,000 bounty hunters and bail-enforcement agents in the United States find this claim hard to swallow. One California bail agent says flatly, "Chapman is a liar," though in the same breath he claims to have made more than 5,000 captures himself over a shorter period.

Bantering arrest figures may be typical bail-enforcement braggadocio, but Dog Chapman is undeniably the most famous bounty hunter in the world. No one comes close to his combination of street smarts, outlaw bravado and media savvy. Since the early 1990s Dog has been Hollywood's favorite bounty hunter, appearing regularly on the Discovery Channel, A&E, Court TV, Fox News, At Large With Geraldo Rivera and even Hollywood Squares. His media persona has, in fact, become so honed and buffed that one isn't quite sure if there is an off-camera. It's as if the public character of Dog Chapman were created from action-film outtakes and Geraldo brawls, educated in WWE smackdown rhetoric, outfitted from the Jerry Springer wardrobe department and then set loose in the netherworld of reality TV.

While the image may be tightened and tailored, even exaggerated, for maximum effect, Dog Chapman is also the real thing--and the last of a breed that lives to hunt men. Dog himself is a creature of stiking contrasts: A convicted murderer and a devout Christian, he is four times divorced and the father of 12. He is an ex-biker with 18 arrests for robbery who has shared the podium with General Norman Schwarzkopf at Tony Robbins seminars. He has used his face to stop more punches than an Everlast speed bag, yet he spends more time each day on his coiffure than most New York matrons. He is a conservative Republican law-and-order tough guy whose memories of his ill fortune, gifts from God, betrayals and triumphs--even the smell of a flower he once gave to his mother--can reduce him to an unabashed flood of tears.

Dog stands about five-foot-seven, and for much of his life he was a fast, wiry welterweight--until, he says, "I got older and the bad guys seemed to get bigger and tougher." His midlife muscle building has resulted in a boulder-solid upper body that tapers down to skinny claves and AA narrow feet. The heels on his boots and his big hair give him an additional three inches.

"There are two types of guys in the fugitive-recovery business," says Zeke Unger, an L.A.-based bounty hunter who has worked with Dog. "The new type of bail-enforcement agent is more like an insurance agent. The other kind is the old-school bounty hunter. These guys are street-smart. They know how criminals think, know where criminals go and then hunt them down. That's Dog. Is he one of the best in the world? The day he got Andrew Luster, he was the best."

The Fugitive Heir

On July 18, 2000, Ventura County sheriff's detectives pulled over a green Toyota 4Runner along the side of West Ocean Avenue in Mussel Shoals, California. The 36-year-old man driving looked a lot like the surfing, beach-loving locals: six-foot-four, with a deep tan and muscles turning to fat from years of heavy partying. Only a block from his home, he was puzzled when the deputies asked him to step out of the SUV and shocked when they placed him under arrest.

A day earlier a young woman had gone to investigators to report a sexual assault. She described how she and Andrew Luster had met at a bar in Santa Barbara and gone back to his beach house to continue drinking. She woke up in the morning on Luster's couch. She knew she had been sexually assaulted but had no memory of it. In the following days she pieced together what she thought had happened: Luster had put GHB, the so-called date rape drug, in her drink.

Detectives weren't prepared for what they found in the man's bedroom: a collection of videotapes of Luster having sex with what appeared to be several unconscious women.

It would have been sensational news if it had been only the story of a lothario surfer who liked to film his rape victims. But Luster happened to be a great-grandson of the Hollywood cosmetics giant Max Factor. His personal net worth is estimated to be more than $30 million.

The district attorney's office and Ventura detectives were able to identify two more victims on the tapes, young women who agreed to testify against the millionaire rapist. Deputy district attorney Maeve Fox, who was co-counsel for the prosecution along with Anthony Wold, says, "It came down to those tapes. The girls in them are absolutely lifeless. And Luster moves them around like toys, arranging them and assaulting them."

Despite such damning evidence, Luster's legal team pulled some slick moves. Not only did they delay the trial for a year and a half, they also persuaded the judge merely to restrict Luster to house arrest, for which he was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet. Judge Ken Riley even ruled that Luster could leave his house and travel freely during certain hours to meet with his attorneys. Just before the trial was to begin, the insurance company that backed the bond Luster had posted went bankrupt, and he gave the court Sl million in cash as a guarantee against his flight.

The trial began on December 16, 2002. The strategy of Luster's defense team--claiming that he was an aspiring porn-film producer--drew incredulous looks when it wasn't eliciting out-and-out laughter. When the trial halted for the holidays, prosecutors were confident. On the schedule for early January were selected film works of Andrew Stuart Luster.

Then, on January 3, 2003, Luster's ankle bracelet set off a signal that he had missed his eight P.M. curfew. Probation officers were alerted. The next day police searched Luster's home. Gone were the defendant and his Toyota 4Runner, his dog and his warm-weather clothes. A collection of pre-Columbian artifacts was also missing.

On January 6 Judge Riley declared Luster a fugitive and ordered the trial to continue. Two weeks later Andrew Luster was convicted in absentia of 86 criminal counts and sentenced to 124 years in prison.

Wouldn't It Be Great?

Three days after Luster's disappearance, Dog Chapman and Beth Smith, his companion and business partner, boarded a plane in Honolulu and flew to Los Angeles. Smith, 35, and Chapman operate several hail bond companies in the islands, the principal one of which is Da Kine on Oahu. Smith also owns several bail bond companies in Denver. Between them they have 40 years of experience in the fugitive-retrieval business.

The plan was to spend several days in Hollywood. There were pitches to be made, and Krutonog had a new contact who wanted to meet them "and get something in development." Smith was paging through the Los Angeles Times en route when she saw an article about Andrew Luster's disappearance.

"Duane, wouldn't it be great if you got this guy?"

Dog dismissed it as an expensive long shot. They'd spent five years building up their bond businesses, and at his age Dog was getting tired of tackling huge, meth-crazed criminals in the street. Hollywood was knocking, and he wanted to tear the door off the hinges and let the party in.

Over the next several weeks, though, it seemed that half the entertainment industry expected him to track the Max Factor heir. On Court TV Catherine Crier asked him if he would take up the hunt. At a poker game hosted by writer-director Chris McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Dog says, the table was raucous in its encouragement. According to the bounty hunter, a couple of days later LL Cool J approached Dog in the Four Seasons Hotel workout room.

"Hey, you the bounty hunter, right?" asked the rapper.

"Yeah, I'm Dog, bruddah."

"Then why don't you go catch this Luster guy?"

In January and February Dog appeared on Court TV, Fox News and At Large to discuss Luster's case and announced his intention to go after the fugitive. On Rita Cosby's Fox News program he vowed to bring in his man. Turning his game face and steely blues to the camera, Dog harked, "Run, Luster, run."

License to Rumble

Most of the civilized world, even the third world, looks on our institutions of bail bonding and bounty hunting as horrifying evidence that Americans haven't broken with their rip-roaring, gun-toting frontier past. We are, in fact, the only nation on earth that has a Supreme Court ruling (Taylor v. Taintor, 1872) that empowers a private citizen to kick in another person's door, put a gun to his head, haul him out the door, stuff him into a car trunk, drive him across state or international boundaries and then dump his ass at the appropriate cop shop for a reward.

The idea of posting a bond or a guarantee for someone the state has accused of a crime may go back as far as the golden age of Greece, when Plato tried to post bond for Socrates. In England during the Middle Ages, (continued on page 118)Chapman(continued from page 68) posting bond--and retrieving fleet-footed skips--was a common practice. English law codified it in 1689, as did our own Eighth Amendment.

In the 20th century bonding became big business--an insurance business. An insurance company backs every bond posted through a bondsman in the U.S. for the full amount. (Defendants usually surrender 10 to 15 percent of the amount the court sets as bail.) To get started, a bail bondsman will put up substantial collateral with the insurance company in exchange for a book of "power of attorney" checks ranging in value from $5,000 to $500,000. These are an accused person's "get out of jail" card.

It can be a nice, stable, highly lucrative business, as long as the defendant doesn't skip and leave the bondsman owing the insurance company the full bail amount.

Every state handles the question of skipping a bit differently. Hawaii gives bondsmen only 30 days to get their fugitive back in custody to collect the reward. In California, however, the state gives bondsmen 180 days from the time the bench warrant is issued. This messy business has a public benefit that most law enforcement agencies are loath to admit. Bounty hunters, or (if you're inclined to be PC) bail-enforcement agents, return 87 percent of all bail jumping fugitives in the U.S.--and at no cost to taxpayers.

Talk, Talk, Talk

For the first couple of months, Dog did what he does best: talk.

He talked on television; he talked to newspapers, the cops, the FBI. He talked to Luster's mother, his lawyer, his friends, his enemies, his ex-girlfriend's maid and even his cell phone message center.

When Dog returned to Honolulu to take care of business, all his focus was on catching Luster. "I started thinking about the GHB," he says. "Where do you buy it? I put Tim on it, and he says you can get it at gyms. So we start calling all the gyms." Dog tells me this one night at his home outside Honolulu, a few miles from his downtown offices. It's a quiet, well-tended neighborhood, and Dog's house, with the new SUV in the driveway, the pool out back and the sectional couch around a 60-inch TV, is solid middle-class American. Particularly impressive, despite the periodic havoc caused by toddlers and teenagers, is the living room's immaculate white carpet. "Every time I turn around, that man is vacuuming," says Smith, eyes raised to the heavens. "I yell at him, 'Duane, stop already!' Ten minutes later I hear the vacuum again."

Dog found a gym with Luster's name in its data bank. After hearing the bounty hunter explain who he was and what Luster was doing, the clerk gave him Luster's cell phone number. "I call it," Dog says. "I leave a message. I leave 15 messages, until it's full. Then I call back the next day and it's clear, so I leave 15 more. It's like hunting quail. You gotta flush 'em from the bush before you shoot 'em."

"You know how he always gets his man?" asks Tim Chapman, a third-generation bondsman from the Denver area who frequently works with Dog. "His mouth." Tim, who grabbed his first bounty at the age of 14 by leaping from his mom's car and putting the cuffs on a skip, is tall and thin, with a Fu Manchu mustache and a long brown-and-gray braid that runs nearly to his waist. He runs his own bail bond agency in Honolulu.

"You know that saying 'If you're in a desert with a glass of water, he'll talk you out of it'? That's Duane."

A Dog's Life

Duane Chapman was split between good and bad the day he was born. His mother was a half Native American evangelical preacher who often took her oldest boy with her when she preached on the Navajo reservation near Farmington, New Mexico. His father, a Navy welder, taught his son to take a punch without flinching. "He also told me that when I threw a punch, he wanted to hear bones crunch," says Dog.

The angry, conflicted adolescent took to the Denver streets when he was 14, sniffing glue behind shopping centers and stealing whatever he could to survive. At 16, with a reputation for violence beyond his years, he was adopted into the Devil's Disciples, one of the nation's 13 original biker gangs, a group that included the Gypsy Jokers and the Hell's Angels. "I took off for Arizona with the president of the Devil's Disciples," he recalls, "and for the next nine years the Lord was gone from my life."

Those years involved 18 arrests for robbery. He and his 1963 Harley Pan-head stayed on the move: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, even Chicago. While hanging out at the Chicago Disciples headquarters, he got a call from his first wife, LaFonda, who begged him to come down to Pampa, Texas and help her look after their babies. He agreed, bought a little house in the panhandle town, got a job operating heavy machinery and settled down.

Except that he was still with the Devil's Disciples and not the Lord's. His fellow bikers teased him about his spiritual conflict, awarding him his biker nickname, Dog--which is, the bikers will remind you, God spelled backward.

On the night of September 15, 1976 Dog and his Disciples brothers Donald Kuykendall and Ruben Garza, along with a Disciples sister, Cheryl Fisher, went to pay a call to a rumored marijuana dealer named Jerry Oliver. According to Dog, "We were going to go hunting, so we all had guns, but first we were going to stop by Jerry's to buy dope. Donny was drinking Wild Turkey and chasing it with Jim Beam."

In Dog's account, Garza was sent to buy the dope. He came back to the car minutes later.

"He says he don't have none."

"Bullshit!" slurred Kuykendall, climbing from the car and, unknown to his friends, hiding a shotgun underneath his jacket. He headed for Oliver's door.

When Oliver answered, Kuykendall shoved the shotgun in his face. Instinctively Oliver grabbed the gun to push it away. It went off, and Oliver's body was propelled across the room.

All four Disciples were charged with felony murder. Prosecutors said the defendants "were in the commission of a felony ... it makes no difference whether it was an accident or not, it's still murder." In the end Fisher and Garza got off with probation, Kuykendall got 10 years, and Dog received five.

While he was out on bail Dog decided it was time to go back to God. "I prayed to the Lord," he says, "and I said, 'I will stop fucking whores and riding my Harley.' And that was hard, because that 1963 Panhead was the most beautiful bike in Texas."

His sojourn with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville went speedily. Dog prayed every day, promising God he would never return to prison and never disgrace his name again. It also helped that he had proved so adept with scissors and a razor (after reading a book on barbering in the prison library) that he was soon cutting the hair of the warden and all (continued on page 124)Chapman(continued from page 118) the guards. After 18 months he was paroled to Colorado.

He was arrested almost immediately. His crime? He hadn't paid alimony or child support during his stay at Huntsville.

"Mr. Chapman," asked the judge, "have you ever heard of bounty hunting?"

Dog allowed that he had.

The judge showed him a photograph. "Do you think you can find this man and bring him back to my court?"

"Yes, sir, I can find him."

"Well, Mr. Chapman, you bring this man in and I will contribute $200 to your child support debt."

A few days later Dog brought in the man, bound with Dog's own belt.

At first Dog haunted Denver's bail bond row, a garish neon-lit block of shops directly across from the city jail. He soon grew tired of the high risk and low pay (Dog estimates that he's been paid for fewer than half the fugitives he's returned) and opened his own bail business. Married and divorced for a second time by 1987, he worked 20 hours a day, seven days a week as a single parent, bail bondsman and bounty hunter. The three jobs often overlapped.

"Sometimes I'd spot a skip, and the kids would be in the car. I'd have them lie down while I arrested the perp," he says. "I'd say, 'These are my babies. You spit, you fart, you swear, you do anything, you're roadkill.' And the kids are like, 'Hi, mister, are you going to jail?' "

Somehow Dog managed to take his brood fishing in the Colorado Rockies almost every weekend. He had an old truck outfitted with a camper that was just big enough to sleep himself and the five kids. Their favorite spot was Carter Lake, near Loveland, Colorado.

One summer morning in 1988, they were at the lake, casting out, when Dog noticed something familiar about the man fishing next to him. He was a Colombian national who was wanted for drug smuggling and had skipped out on a $50,000 bond two months before. Dog had scoured Denver for him with no results.

"The kids all knew I was looking for him," he says, "so I told them we were going to follow him when he went home. He drove to a motel with 12 cabins. We waited until dark. I had a bull-horn with me that I used for calling the kids--a steel triangle just didn't work with them. All my kids had flashlights. They ranged in age from 14 down to four or five. At a signal the kids all turned the lights on the cabin. Then I said through the bullhorn, 'This is the FBI. Come out with your hands in the air.' I got the cuffs on him and then told the kids to come out of the bushes. He was pissed."

Two acts of God have left an impact on Dog's life. The first was his run-in with Alice Elizabeth Barmore (née Smith), a 19-year-old state senator's secretary whose father, Garry Smith, had been a first baseman for the Kansas City Athletics for three seasons in the late 1950s. She'd been arrested for shoplifting and carrying a concealed weapon.

Chapman's shop posted her bail. When she went into his office to do her paperwork, she fell in love. "Here was this guy with big hair, all dressed in black leather with cowboy boots with silver eagles on the toes," she remembers. "I looked him over and said to myself, 'Oh yes, he will be mine.' "

Smith admits to stalking Dog. She says she got into the bond business simply to interact with him: "I wrote some really bad bonds just so the bounty hunter would have to come sit in my office."

The other event happened during a training course with FBI agent Keith Paul. (Paul confirmed an ongoing 20-year relationship with Dog but declined to comment further.) During the course several agents approached Dog and told him he needed to meet a guy who was helping sharpshooters with their concentration. The guy's name was Tony Robbins.

Improbably, the bounty hunter and the self-help guru became instant friends. Robbins wrote about Dog's rehabilitation and transformation in his book Awaken the Giant Within. Soon Dog was being flown around the country to Robbins's seminars to talk about his life and work.

At one seminar in Austin, Texas Robbins asked Dog what he thought was the worst part about what he did for a living. "I said not being told thank you," Dog says. "The seminar was over, and Robbins asked everybody to come up and say, 'Dog, thank you.' Several hundred people came up and hugged me and said thank you. At the end I was completely soaking wet with tears and sweat. Here's this multimillionaire, and he's saying, 'Duane Chapman, forget about prison. You can do anything you want to do.' "

The Hunt is on

On April 6, 2003 television producer Howard Schultz, 49, read an article in the Los Angeles Times about a bounty hunter named Dog Chapman who had vowed to bring fugitive Andrew Luster back into custody. Schultz, whose ABC reality series Extreme Makeover is in its second season, began imagining a reality show starring Dog and his crew that would be like "the WWE meets Cops."

A meeting was set for May 7. Dog strolled in wearing his usual regalia. Schultz recalls thinking that Chapman "was really everything I could have hoped for."

After a few pleasantries, Schultz got right to the point. "I don't know anything about bounty hunting. I'm a TV producer. Can you really get this guy?" Dog didn't hesitate. "Absolutely."

On April 30 Dog had taken a call from an Englishman named Mike Curtis, 50, who was living in southern California. Curtis had just returned from a trip to Thailand with a friend of his named Dave. "We're in this club," recalls Curtis, a former racehorse trainer, talking about a gentlemen's club a few miles south of Bangkok, "and we see this man. Dave says, 'Hey, that looks like that guy wanted by the FBI, the Max Factor guy.' "

When he got home Curtis contacted Ventura County sheriffs and then the FBI. A sheriff's detective directed him to Dog's website.

At first Dog was skeptical; he had been overwhelmed with bogus tips. Still, Thailand seemed like a pretty good bet for a Luster hideout--good surfing and plenty of local and foreign girls. Mexico and Brazil also seemed like strong possibilities.

Schultz filmed Dog's interrogation of Curtis and Dave. One of the more intriguing bits of information concerned a meeting at the club Curtis remembered. "I was with this Thai girl who is a friend of mine," Curtis says. "And Luster looks at her, and he turns to me and says, 'Well, at least you can go home when you get done here.' "

Dog and Schultz talked for days about their next move. Finally they decided to send Dave back to Thailand to see if he could make contact with Luster--and ideally get his fingerprints off a glass to send back for verification.

When Dave returned on June 4 he brought bad news. A joint U.S.-Thai-Singaporean military exercise called (continued on page 142)Chapman(continued from page 124) Operation Cobra Gold had U.S. military all over the gentlemen's club. If Luster was still there, he would be lying low until they left.

The investigation stalled. Still, Dog was undeterred. When Rita Cosby offered him a chance to appear on her show on June 7, he agreed, thinking it might spook his quarry. On the show Dog told Cosby that his team was only "seven to 10 days" away from catching Luster. He concluded his appearance with a warning: "Fee fie fo fum, look out, Luster, here I come."

The next evening he called Schultz.

"What are we going to do about Thailand?" the producer asked.

"Forget about Thailand."

"What do you mean?"

"Howard," Dog said, slowly and with emphasis. "I think he's in Mexico."

Dog says his tip came from a young Bellingham, Washington man named Chris, who'd been vacationing with his girlfriend north of Puerto Vallarta at a resort called Costa Custodio, near the tiny coastal village of Platanitos. They had met a guy there who described himself as a surfer from Hawaii who was living in Guadalajara and looking for real estate investments along the coast. The owners of the Costa Custodio, Min Labanauskas and Mona Rains, had invited the man, who called himself David Carrera, to look over their property.

Back in Bellingham, the couple caught Cosby's show and made the connection between Carrera and Luster. They called the Ventura authorities, who referred them to Chapman's website. Dog was intrigued. The next day, June 9, he got a call from Labanauskas, who said he'd looked up Luster on the Internet and was convinced that he and Carrera were the same guy. Carrera means "run" in Spanish.

On June 12 Dog, his son Leland and Tim Chapman were in Los Angeles, ready to board a red-eye to Guadalajara. Their carry-on luggage included two duffel bags filled with Kevlar vests, shackles, handcuffs and a case of pepper spray.

The Mexican Problem

Nine people were on the overnight flight: Dog, Tim Chapman, Leland Chapman, Mona Rains, Boris Krutonog, Jeff Sells, Howard Schultz and his film crew, Richie and Fernando. Early the next morning they boarded a puddle jumper to Puerto Vallarta, where they rented a Chevy Suburban and a van and headed north.

The crew was dubious. The village of Platanitos looked like the kind of place where the pigs in the road never roused themselves, from birth to the butcher. Before long the crew arrived at Costa Custodio, the compound that Labanauskas had built over the past eight years, an oasis of nine villas sitting at the edge of the jungle and overlooking some of the best surf on the Pacific Coast.

Dog swung everyone into action. After getting their gear stored in the various villas, they set up cameras and began rehearsals for the filming of Andrew Luster's capture--starring Chapman as the bounty hunter and Krutonog as Luster. After several tense hours of practice under a brutal sun, the crew collapsed around the pool. But no one was relaxing. "Every noise, every car horn, every voice, every bird," says Schultz. "Bam! We were out of our chairs."

Mostly the crew spent the afternoon discussing various plans, the most prickly of which was what to do with Luster when they got him. The U.S. and Mexico have extradition issues. Mexico is more than happy to deport undesirable aliens. But because Mexico does not recognize conviction in absentia, life sentences or capital punishment, its authorities are reluctant to hand over people, especially Mexican citizens, to such justice.

Until about a decade ago, bounty hunters and sometimes U.S. law enforcement agencies would use various ruses to drag criminals back over the border while their Mexican counterparts looked the other way. This secret rite of extradition seemed to satisfy everyone until the case of Kiki Camarena. A DEA agent, Camarena was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Mexico in 1985. The DEA then conducted an operation in which "Mexican bounty hunters" kidnapped Mexican national Dr. Humberto Alvarez, suspected in Camarena's murder, and brought him to the U.S. for trial. The Mexican government demanded that the DEA agent involved be extradited to stand trial for kidnapping. The U.S. refused.

Mexico and Canada were alarmed. Both countries vowed to prosecute any individual attempting to bounty hunt on their soil. The official line is that a bounty hunter must contact the appropriate local officials in Mexico, show a warrant, inform them of the suspect's whereabouts and then let them make the arrest.

Many bounty hunters, however, are unwilling to follow this procedure. For one thing, the painfully slow Mexican judicial system can keep the suspect in custody long after his bail has been forfeited in the U.S. Bounty hunters also complain that bribes often eat up their profits.

Dog and Schultz were aware of the problem, and both had been in contact with current and former law enforcement officials. The message they got back: Be extremely careful if you make an apprehension, and be damn sure to have a Mexican police officer present when you do.

Labanauskas told them they were covered. He introduced the crew to a Mexican named Filiberto. Dog understood the man to be a local cop who moonlighted as a cabdriver. (Dog says he was shown a badge and a specialized holster containing a concealed gun.) The others say they understood that when the arrest was to go down, Filiberto was their man. Labanauskas denies this. "He was just a cabdriver who once worked as a tourist security guard," he says.

But where the hell was Luster?

Unfortunately the man they suspected of being Luster couldn't be lured back to Platanitos. Labanauskas asked him to come by on several occasions, but he said he was busy. Luster didn't sound suspicious, but something would always come up to prevent his arrival. Saturday passed, then Sunday and Monday.

The tension around Costa Custodio was rising with every hour. Krutonog, who had never seen Dog so amped up, was concerned about the growing animosity between the bounty hunters and the resort owners. Dog suspected that the couple was scheming to cut the others out of the capture. Labanauskas and Rains said they were fed up with "testosterone-crazed bounty hunters."

Schultz was more concerned with the $3,000 a day exiting his pocket. He decided to send Richie and Fernando and their rented camera gear back to L.A. Sells and Krutonog would operate Schultz's own cameras for the capture.

On Tuesday morning Dog came into Labanauskas's kitchen to find that his host had prepared him a cup of tea and set a jar of honey beside it. What follows is Dog's account of what happened next, disputed by Labanauskas.

"I wondered why he was being so nice," recalls Dog. "I said, 'Where's Mona?' "

"Oh, she went into town this morning."

Dog felt needles along his spine. "What?"

"Well," Labanauskas explained, "she went and bought a wig, and she's going to grab Luster herself."

Let's go Drinking

The heart of Puerto Vallarta's party scene is the Malecon, a cobblestoned walkway along the beach, in the city's downtown area. A concentration of bars and clubs runs the gamut from the bland corporate flavor of Carlos 'n Charlie's to rave palaces that could have been plucked from the streets of San Francisco.

Dog directed his men to drive down to Vallarta to find Rains before she stumbled across Luster and spooked him. Dog and Krutonog stayed behind at the villas. Dog's crew was amazed by the scene that greeted them in Malecon. "Thousands of teenage girls," says Tim. "They were all blonde and drunk and tits hanging out and making out with anybody." The crew had stumbled into an annual rite of passage for American high school kids celebrating their graduation in a party town where the legal drinking age is 18.

They found Rains scoping out the scene in one of the bars. She and the bounty hunters had all come to the same conclusion: Drunken teenage girls equals Luster heaven.

Rains told Dog's gang that she had spoken earlier that night to Luster on the phone and that he told her he'd checked into the Motel los Angeles, just a mile or so north of downtown. Though the plan was still to lure Luster to Costa Custodio--Labanauskas, according to Dog, had assured him that if the team was to take Luster on private property the police would regard the capture as if they had caught a burglar--they decided after a conference call that they would scout around and try to spot Luster in one of the clubs.

Tim dropped Leland off at the Motel los Angeles. Leland got a room overlooking the motel parking lot to see if he could spot Luster's white Jetta.

The rest split into teams and started a sweep of all the clubs and bars. By 1:30 A.M. they still hadn't spotted him. Tim decided they should regroup at the motel. "When we got there, we parked about half a block away," he says. "I went up to get Leland. He was about 10 steps behind me when we were leaving. When Leland turned around, a car drove into the driveway. It was a white Jetta. I looked at Leland, and he had his thumbs raised to his chest. It was Luster."

The Takedown of Andrew Luster

Dog didn't let his terrible sense of direction affect his driving; he simply pressed down the accelerator as far as it would go and prayed. The normal driving time between Platanitos and downtown Puerto Vallarta is two and a half hours. There are three police checkpoints along the way. Dog made the trip that night in one hour and 20 minutes. During the drive he called Tim repeatedly. Luster, he learned, had left the motel again, and they had lost him.

As Dog passed the airport north of town, Tim called back to say that Filiberto had located Luster in a club called Collage. Dog arrived at the bar a few minutes later. The team and its followers split up and waited outside the club. After a while Luster emerged from the club with three men. The four got into Luster's car and drove down the strip. The bounty-hunting team--which then numbered four vehicles, containing three bounty hunters, two cameramen, the two resort owners and a cabbie who may or may not have been a cop--departed in pursuit. Luster stopped in front of another club, El Zoo, and the four men went inside.

At 4:45 A.M. Luster emerged from the club alone and got into his car. He sped off and made a couple of quick lefts. For a few panicky seconds, they lost him again.

Almost immediately Tim called Dog. "He's at the next street. He pulled over next to the taco stand."

The taco stand, near an intersection with a Pemex gas station on one corner, is a lively place 24 hours a day. The caravan found parking places as Luster ordered tacos. Dog got out of his car and started walking toward him.

It was just Dog versus Luster. The focus, the concentration, the fearsome tenacity were how Dog had taken down so many fugitives. Dog saw man. Dog attacked. To hell with the consequences.

"That Eminem song 'Lose Yourself' was in my head," says Dog. "I got down on the ground like Spider-Man. I was invisible. Tim was coming up on him from one side, Leland from another. Then I stood up suddenly in front of him, my tongue went out like a Samoan warrior, and I went, 'Ahhh ... ahhh!' Luster freaked."

The fugitive jumped back from this leather-clad, tongue-wagging, mullet-wearing madman right into the arms of Tim, who locked a forearm around his throat. At the same instant Leland came from the side in a flying tackle and hit Luster in the knees. As the three fell toward the ground, Dog jumped on top of them.

At the cars, Sells and Krutonog had barely started filming before it was over. The glare of the floodlights on their cameras lit up the night, and the screaming bystanders must have been wondering if they were the audience for a strange new bit of gringo street theater.

After weeks of planning, Dog and his men were now improvising wildly. Dog had only one thought: Get this guy to the cops--now. The whole event had taken less than 30 seconds by the time they dragged Luster to the Suburban. Dog put himself and Luster in the back-seat while Labanauskas climbed in on the other side. Krutonog, still filming, jumped in the front passenger seat, and Tim took the wheel. Behind them, Sells was riding with Leland in the van.

Filiberto the cop got into his cab and led the way. Rains drove her car somewhere behind them.

"The whores set me up!" screamed Luster. "Those fucking whores!"

Dog cracked a forearm across Luster's chest to calm him down. "You weren't set up--you were hunted down!"

Suddenly, Dog says, Labanauskas produced a small bottle--a cocktail of vodka and GHB he had made back at the villas--leaned over and tried to force the liquid down Luster's throat while the fugitive gagged. (Labanauskas claims he left the GHB cocktail at the villas.)

"No more!" Dog screamed over the noise. "Leave him alone! Tim, pull the fuck over!"

The caravan suddenly came to a halt at a side street. Troubled by what was "going to go down next," Labanauskas was opening the door to get out. Dog kicked out with his lizard-skin boot and helped him on his way.

As the vehicles took off again, Dog called his wife. "I got him! He's right here! We're on our way to the cop shop."

Smith called Schultz in L.A. "Howard, they got him. Dog got him!"

When he got off the phone, Schultz remembered that he'd left his Mexican cell phone with Dog. On a hunch he dialed his own number. Dog answered the phone.

"Howard, we got Luster!"

"Dog, where are you?!"

"I don't know. We're driving to the cop shop."

Tim was following Filiberto, whom he believed was leading them to the closest police station. A moment later, in another car, Labanauskas and Rains passed the van and the Suburban.

According to the two resort owners, the car ahead of them wasn't driven by Filiberto, who'd gone home. The car ahead of them was just another Puerto Vallarta cab. They were headed back to Platanitos. They had no idea where Dog was going and, at that point, didn't care.

"Dog, listen to me, where are you?" asked Schultz.

"There's a roadblock up ahead." "Dog?!"

"Get your papers out. Where's my black book?"

Schultz heard Mexican federales screaming orders. Then the phone went dead.

The Three Amigos

The day after his capture by Dog Chapman, Andrew Luster was back in the U.S. and on his way to spending the next 124 years in prison.

"It was, in fact, a deportation," says spokeswoman Laura Bosley of the FBI's L.A. office. "There is a provision in Mexican immigration law that denies entry into the country to a person who has a foreign criminal warrant. It's discretionary, but because our agents had such a good rapport with their counterparts in Puerto Vallarta, they decided to act on that immigration provision. If Luster had to go through the extradition process, he might not have been returned at all."

A happy ending for everyone--except Dog Chapman. During the four days that he, Tim, Leland, Krutonog and Sells were in a Mexican jail, the local DA weighed charges against them. Finally, kidnapping was dropped for the lesser charge of illegal detention.

Bail-enforcement experts were almost universal in their condemnation of Dog's actions--publicly calling him "a liar," "a renegade cowboy" and "an irresponsible publicity seeker"--and distanced themselves from a man they believe is bringing disgrace on their industry.

Not only the bail industry turned its back. FBI special agent Eric Jensen, while acknowledging "occasional contact" with Dog during the investigation, says, "We would have strongly advised Chapman not to do the capture." Agent Ralph Boelter of the FBI's L.A. office adds, "Chapman's actions are beyond what I can condone. We will not be acting on his behalf, and we will not be assisting him." The FBI claims that it was only days behind Dog and would have made the capture legally.

Dog, Leland and Tim posted $1,500 bonds for their criminal charges and $300 apiece for their immigration charges. On June 22 they walked out of custody and into house arrest at the plush Westin resort a few miles up the coast. (Krutonog and Sells had been released a couple of days earlier.) The three were facing one month to four years.

At the Westin, Dog was a celebrity. Mexicans in Vallarta began calling him El Perro. The nickname has associations for many Mexicans with one of the most popular local wrestlers of all time, El Perro Aguayo. Nonetheless, the tres amigos--Dog, Leland and Tim--knew they couldn't afford to linger in luxurious captivity.

On July 1 they checked out of the Westin and told every staffer that they were moving south into a house they'd rented from a famous local gringa named Silver. They loaded into a van and promptly headed for the airport four hours away in Guadalajara. Their plane landed in Tijuana, and they transferred to a van booked to take them to the border. Everything seemed to be going smoothly.

Then, about 200 yards from the border, the van driver suddenly announced that he'd forgotten his visa and stopped the vehicle. The amigos looked at one another, fear growing. Leland glanced out the back window. "There was this federale in a green uniform, and he was motioning at our van with his submachine gun. Then we stopped, and he started running toward us."

At that moment the van driver found his visa stuck to the van's visor. He stepped on the gas, and two minutes later the tres amigos were walking on U.S. soil. A Homeland Security officer came out of his office and greeted them.

"I wondered when y'all would show up," he said.

Not a Cent

On August 7 Chapman and Smith sat in Ventura County court as superior court judge Edward Brodie considered their request to be paid from Luster's $1 million bond and the sheriff's $10,000 reward. It was a sticking point. Though Dog had effected the capture of Luster 16 days before his bail was forfeited, it was not clear how he could collect when no one had actually hired him to go for the bounty.

"It was a cash bond. There was no bail bondsman involved and therefore no bounty," says Mark Bernstein, a Fresno, California lawyer who specializes in bail cases. "There is simply no precedent for a judge to award a percentage of the fugitive's cash bond to the person who brought him back."

Yet the judge is allowed to distribute money from the bond to the victims and to law enforcement agencies to compensate them for their expense in bringing back the fugitive. Dog felt it was within the judge's power to reward him.

Judge Brodie disagreed, strongly. Saying, "I cannot condone vigilante justice," he decided the money would be distributed among Ventura County law enforcement agencies and the victims. Dog wouldn't get a cent. In fact the balance, about $410,000, would go back to Luster.

Chapman and Smith stormed out of the courtroom trailed by an army of cameras and reporters. Outside on the courthouse steps, Chapman said simply, "It's not about the money. It was Andrew Luster against the Dog, and the Dog won."

•

A month later I am sitting with Chapman on the sandy beach near Makapu'u Point, Hawaii. Smith is nearby, fixing up plates of chicken and fruit while Chapman's two youngest children, Bonnie, four, and Gary, two, play in the tidal pools.

It hasn't been a pleasant summer for Dog and his family. Though Dog denies any wrongdoing by leaving Mexico, Roberto Juarez, the Puerto Vallarta district attorney, says that Dog, Tim and Leland are "fugitives from Mexican justice" and has vowed to extradite them to Mexico. Though probably an empty threat, it has kept Dog in a constant state of agitation--not because he thinks he'll ever go to jail in Mexico but because of what it does to his name.

"Twenty-five years ago, when I took up bounty hunting, I prayed, 'Lord, I am going to work on the side of good. I am going to work for justice. I am going to make up for every bad thing I've done in my life.' And all I want back is my name. Not Dog the ex-con or Duane the ex-felon. No, I want my name, Duane 'Dog' Chapman. That's all."

Dog pokes a stick in the sand for a while, and we look at the sea. Finally he says, "When I think about what this has meant, two things occur to me. The victims got the justice, the vengeance, they deserved."

And the other?

"Now I'm not only Dog. I'm El Perro."

Born to Run: Four who Skipped before Justice was Served

Alex Kelly

Crime: Rape

On the lam: Eight years

Bail: $200,000 (paid by his parents, who used their home as collateral)

Arrested in 1986 for sexually assaulting two high school girls, this Connecticut rich kid disappeared two days before his court date of February 18, 1987. After a tour of Europe's top ski resorts and spas, he surrendered to Swiss authorities in January 1995. He is currently serving a 16-year sentence.

Marc Rich

Crime: Tax evasion

On the lam: 18 years

Bail: None. When feds issued an arrest warrant, Rich was abroad and chose not to return.

A billionaire who made his money by moving vast quantities of oil and metals, Rich was indicted in September 1983 for failing to pay $48 million in taxes. He holed up in Switzerland, where tax evasion is not an extraditable crime, and received a pardon from Bill Clinton on the president's finalin office.

Ira Einhorn

Crime: Murder

On the Lam: 20 years

Bail: $40,000

A counterculture guru in 1970s Philadelphia, Einhorn was picked up in 1979 when cops found the mummified body of former girlfriend Holly Maddux in a steamer trunk in his apartment. After followers posted bail, Einhorn split for Europe. Discovered in France in 1997, he was extradited in 2001 and convicted of murder in 2002. He is now doing life in Pennsylvania.

Robert Durst

Crime: Murder

On the Lam: Two month $300,000

In October 2001 bizarro millionaire Durst (who also answers to "Dorothy") was arrested for the murder and dismemberment of his Galveston, Texas neighbor Morris Black. He posted bail and fled, only to be nabbed for shoplifting at a Pennsylvania supermarket. Durst copped to the killing but claimed self-defense. A jury found him not guilty.

"He told me that when I threw a punch, he wanted to hear bones crunch," says Dog.

"These are my babies. You spit, you fart, you swear, you do anything, you're roadkill."

Dog's carry-on luggage included two duffels filled with Kevlar vests, shackles and a case of pepper spray.