Auto Biography
editJuly of “68” Patrick was born in Portsmouth Va. to 19 year old father in the Navy and a 15 year old mother, both from New Jersey. They divorced shortly after and he was left in the care of his grandparents. At age seven Patrick reunited with his father, and bounced between Flint MI and Elizabeth NJ until he graduated from high school. He received a media arts scholarship to Michigan State University but decided to enlist in the Navy instead.
He worked as a flight deck crewman aboard the U.S.S Dwight D. Eisenhower, where he met Jonathan Brown his co-writer. The two Jersey boys forged a fast friendship. Patrick joined Jonathan in the ship’s armory as a gunners mate and discovered a new adrenaline high, weapons and special tactics. Honorably discharged in 1990 he returned to his grandparent’s home in Elizabeth NJ.
After two years as a liberal arts major he became painfully bored with academia and lusted for action and adrenaline. Gravitating towards danger he left school and took employment as a bodyguard and private investigator which eventually landed him at a bail bond agency.
Patrick flourished as a bounty hunter and also pursued a second career as deep sea commercial diver. He dedicated his complete being to bounty hunting and has worked in America’s worst ghettos apprehending violent fugitives. He set several legal precedents in favor of the industry both on a state and federal level. In 2003 he became “Bounty Hunter of the Year” the only time the award was ever given, and pioneered immigration recovery.
He was the inspiration for the fictional character Dev Shannon in “The Crimson Hit” and “Bullet Blues”, both novels by Bob Burton who mentored Patrick’s career early on, and was also the advisor to Robert DeNiro on the film “Midnight Run”.
Patrick is also featured as himself in the biography, “Track Down, Memoirs of a Bounty Hunter” by Walter Fernandez as his bounty hunting partner.
Currently he is an SIU Investigator, hunts high dollar fugitives, and is the co-founder of the Coalition of Bail Recovery Agent’s (C.O.B.R.A.) with Bob Burton.
Patrick draws his inspiration for Hideous Winter from his vast experience with dysfunctional families, the underbelly of society, and a fifteen year study of Gnosticism and mystery religions.
Bounty hunter's rule: 'If you catch, you eat'
editBy JULIA MALONE The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
PHILADELPHIA -- With his baseball hat worn backward to display the word "dragon" just above his orange sunglasses and an official-looking "fugitive recovery agent" badge he designed himself, Pat Salerno knows he's an illegal immigrant's worst nightmare.
"If there's any job where you feel like the grim reaper, it's this one," said the 34-year-old Navy veteran.
Salerno read a book about bounty hunting 10 years ago, and he was hooked.
A year ago he became one of the few "skip tracers" nationwide who work full time looking for immigrant fugitives on behalf of bail bond companies. He has no personal animosity toward the immigrants, Salerno said. It's just that the difficult job of finding them pays well.
He doesn't care that some immigrants call him El Gordo Diablo, Spanish for "Fat Devil." This is because he is commonly known as "Fat Henry"
"It doesn't make me mad," he said with a grin. "I get paid."
Most nights find him driving with one or two partners through East Coast towns and cities, stopping at any hour to knock on the doors of the friends, family and co-signers of his targets.
"We never say we're INS," said Salerno, meaning the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was recently folded into the Department of Homeland Security. "That would be against the law." He introduces himself as a "fugitive recovery agent" who has come about "an immigration matter." "Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, they let us right in," he said.
Sure enough, even at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on a recent night in New Jersey, people in Paterson and New Brunswick were opening their doors and giving him information as he kept up a steady stream of polite banter. About seven times a week, this effort leads him to a bond jumper. Salerno carries no gun and says that the fugitives are generally docile once they realize they're caught. He said that in 8,000 apprehensions, he has never nabbed the wrong person or mistreated anyone.
That is not true of all bounty hunters, who generally are not formally trained or licensed. Every year a handful are charged for violence or for seizing the wrong person, and legislators periodically debate regulating their business.
Bob Burton, director of the National Institute of Bail Enforcement in Tucson, Ariz., said there are as many as 2,000 bail recovery agents who made more than 23,000 arrests last year nationwide. Only a small percentage involved immigration bonds, he said, and fewer than three dozen full-time bounty hunters specialize in immigration cases. Burton, the author of the book that launched Salerno's career, has become a mentor and friend to the younger man. "He's hyperkinetic and hyper-energized" and so brings in more cases than the average bounty hunter, Burton said of his protégé.
Salerno, who last year was "bail recovery agent of the year" for the Capital Bonding Corp., then the nation's biggest immigration bond writer, claimed bounty hunters are far more productive than salaried police. The rule in his business, he said, is "If you catch, you eat. If you don't, you don't."
Any fugitive who can elude a bounty hunter, he said, has little to fear from federal agents or other officiers.
"Once we're done looking for you, you can stay here the rest of your natural life because we're the only ones who will find you," Salerno said.
Unwanted: Fugitive illegals
editBy JULIA MALONE The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
PHILADELPHIA -- Oscar Martinez Martinez, a 31-year-old illegal immigrant from Honduras, became a fugitive in March when he failed to show up for deportation. So you would think federal authorities would be pleased to see him. You would be wrong.
Pat Salerno, an agent for a bail bond company, received a chilly reception when he showed up with Martinez at the downtown Philadelphia immigration office.
Despite increased attention to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant "absconders" who have vanished after receiving final deportation orders, surrendering them can be a bureaucratic obstacle course. Salerno, ordered to leave the fugitive outside the building with an assistant, took an elevator to a fifth-floor waiting room.
"I'm a fugitive recovery agent," Salerno told a receptionist standing behind a thick glass window. "I have a defendant I picked up in Atlantic City." Salerno asked whether he could hand over Martinez, which would get the bond company off the hook for $5,000 in bail forfeiture. Because the deportation order had come from a judge in Houston, Salerno asked that the case file be transferred to Philadelphia.
The clerk disappeared briefly to confer with a supervisor and returned with a terse answer. "He has to be taken to Houston," she said.
The exchange could have taken place almost anywhere in the country.
In Miami, two recovery agents -- bounty hunters paid by bond companies -- reported they had given immigration agents a list of 30 fugitives they planned to deliver, but were told to wait two weeks because there was not enough detention space.
Other offices, like Philadelphia's, rigidly follow long-standing rules requiring the bond company to deliver the illegal to the office that ordered his removal, and then only after giving 72-hour advance notice.
Asked about the reluctance to accept fugitives, Tony Tangeman, director of detention and removal in the Department of Homeland Security, said Thursday that such responses "defy logic and they're unacceptable." Tangeman said he was changing the policy.
"Illegal aliens that are wanted by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are going to be taken into custody at any location in the United States," he said. Tangeman said available bed space should never be a factor when deciding whether to take an absconder. "If this is someone who has a final order and he's been delivered and they no longer have a legal venue for appeals, they have to take them," he said. "We're working to change the way that we do business," he said. Within hours, he sent immigration field offices a memo, a copy of which was made available to Cox Newspapers, giving the new instructions on accepting fugitives.
The policy change was announced amid failed attempts to reduce the absconder list, long a symbol of the nation's dysfunctional immigration system.
In December 2001, the immigration service announced that 314,000 people had disappeared after receiving final deportation orders. The orders have been dubbed "run letters" by agency workers because 87 percent of the immigrants who receive them flee, according to a recent report by the Justice Department inspector general. Immigration authorities in Atlanta say agents for bail bonding companies rarely apprehend and deliver immigrants who have received final orders of deportation. They said it has happened about "three of four times in the last 12 years."
When it does happen, authorities said, they take the immigrant into custody after verifying the deportation order. They said it does not matter whether an immigration judge in Atlanta or elsewhere ordered the immigrant's expulsion.
"An order of removal is valid nationwide," said Sue Brown, spokeswoman for the Atlanta office of the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement, one of the agencies that replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Most people ordered deported are like Martinez, who entered the country without papers to seek a job. Others are child molesters, deadbeat parents or spouse abusers. A few thousand come from countries where terrorist groups are active.
As of last month, 2,256 of the 314,000 absconders had been found, and 696 -- a small fraction of 1 percent -- had been removed from the country. Even that effort has been like bailing out a boat that's springing new leaks. The absconder list grows by thousands each month and now has 389,000 names. Most immigrants who are ordered deported are not held in custody, but are allowed to post bond and remain free until their deportation date.
The bond companies typically collect one-third to one-half of the bond from the immigrants, their friends or families, but are technically responsible for the entire amount if their client flees. The extremely high absconder rate meant that the bond companies' debt to the government rose to more than $30 million, according to a recent federal report. That could mean financial disaster -- except for the fact that for more than a decade, the immigration service often collected about 30 cents of each dollar in forfeited bonds it was owed.
In recent months, federal officials launched an effort to collect that debt. That financial pressure has hit Capital Bonding Corp. of Reading, Pa., especially hard. The company writes about one-third of the immigration bonds nationwide.
Capital has announced it will no longer write immigration bonds and has hired bounty hunters such as Salerno to hunt down and deliver their missing clients. That's what sent Salerno to Atlantic City, N.J., where he found Martinez hiding outside a house at 2 a.m. last Tuesday. Hours later, the Honduran was swinging a bag containing his belongings over his shoulder as he walked toward the Philadelphia immigration office -- only to learn that he would not be going into federal custody just then.
Instead, he was directed to a waiting van, to be driven to Houston by transport agents from Capital Bonding. Settling in the back seat, Martinez cheerfully shook hands with one of his bounty hunters and made it clear that his absconding days may not be over yet.
"I'll see you when I come back," he said with a laugh.
Staff writer Mark Bixler contributed to this article.