REPO ALASKA

Stealing a car isn't as dangerous or as difficult as you might think. So say Alaska repo men - and they are men - who steal cars for a living, as well as trucks, motorcycles, snowmachines, ATVs, boats and airplanes. For them, stealthily driving away in a car, sometimes right out of the would-be owner's driveway, is as routine as a letter carrier delivering mail, a bartender mixing drinks or a doctor peering in ears.

When someone fails repeatedly to make payments on a loan for a car or other property, the lender usually will try to recover it. That's where the repo men enter, often with a tow truck, sometimes, for protection, with a gun.

Some debtors surrender the property quietly. Repo men call that a “voluntary repossession.” When it comes to the most stubborn or elusive debtors, however, folks who have been notified several times of an overdue debt and still have not made payments or surrendered the property, the repo men must perform their work more surreptitiously. That's when they sneak into driveways in the dark and hitch a vehicle to a tow truck or hotwire its ignition, hoping the debtor or the debtor's dog doesn't wake before they're gone.

“You're a legal thief,” says Ken Lee, collections manager at the Anchorage Cal Worthington Ford dealership. “You're basically stealing a vehicle from a debtor.” And that, Lee says, is a “rush.”

In his 28 years of repo work, Lee says he's twice had a gun pulled on him. Once a man in his underwear ran after him down Tudor Road, he says, as Lee drove away in the man's car. Lee, who's worked for Worthington since 1985, says debtors rarely become confrontational when the repo man comes, but when they do, the stakes soar. Some repo men like the thrill of that, he says, and some “don't want any confrontation at all.” In any case, he says, the repo man cannot take it personally - “it's just business.”

For Lee, “business” has entailed, among still other things, the time that he and a partner were following a Thunderbird in Anchorage. They'd been searching for the car for two months, he says. Now they had it in their sights. The driver pulled over.

“He was running ladies,” Lee recalls, and he was “jittery,” and “we were like, 'Let's confront him.'”

Then the pimp in the Thunderbird leveled a gun at Lee's partner, he says - at his partner's crotch.

They retreated and got another repo man to follow the Thunderbird. They found out where the pimp was parking it, Lee says, and snatched it that night.

Another time, another job: Lee was trying to get a Ford F150 back from a farmhand at Point MacKenzie. It was the middle of the night, he says. As he started the truck's engine, he woke the farmhand's dogs. The dogs went nuts.

“I saw a light come on. As I'm speeding out the driveway, I heard a shot, and just kind of lay down and got out of there. Nothing hit the car, so I'm pretty sure he shot into the air...

“You go into an area that's off the beaten path, they're a little different. They're pretty protective of their home turf.”

Lee guesses that 20 to 25 percent of the debtors he's dealt with were either confrontational or tried to hide their ostensible property.

There are some popular misconceptions about repo men, Lee says, but in fact, most repo men prefer not to use aggression. They try to give a debtor as many chances as possible to either pay up or surrender the disputed property. “If they would just communicate, the problem would go away,” he says.

When a delinquent account goes to collections, the first step, Lee says, is to start making phone calls. Using personal information compiled by the lender, he calls home phones, work phones, cell phones - any numbers for the debtors that he can get. If that doesn't work, and he's looking for a car, he'll go to the debtors' workplaces, searching for vehicles. If he strikes out there, he'll go to their listed home addresses. He'll check to see if they still live there, peering at names on mailboxes, talking to neighbors. If they've moved, he starts calling references from their loan applications - parents, friends, siblings. “Basically, you're doing detective work,” Lee says, trying to ascertain the debtors' habits.

Most debtors are not inclined to violence either, Lee says. “Most of your people don't have guns or weapons, although, he says, they “might get in your face and scream at you.”

Their pets are a different story, Lee says, which is one reason he carries pepper spray. Carrying a gun, he says, is just inviting trouble. If the situation is so dangerous that he needs one, he says, it's too dangerous. “You can call back pepper spray, you're not going to kill them. You can't call back a bullet.”

“Everybody that knows me knows I carry a weapon,” says James, a youthful-looking, 29-year-old repo man in Anchorage who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that his real name not be published.

“I'm pretty good with my guns, I practice a lot,” James continues. “I hope to never use one on someone. I have no desire to kill somebody, I don't want to kill somebody” - but, he says, “I have a desire to protect myself and use my constitutional right.”

James maintains that people in Alaska are more likely to be armed than people in other states. Like Lee, he also says that people who live in less developed areas are more likely to use their arms. He's had guns pulled on him most often in the Mat-Su Valley and on the Kenai Peninsula, he says.

“If they're shooting at you here in Anchorage, they're usually too drunk to hit the broad side of a barn door.”

James was in the Valley the first time he was shot at on the job, he says. “I hot-wired his car and drove off and heard this 'dink! - dink, dink.'” He says he was a few miles down the road when he stopped to check the car and noticed fresh bullet holes.

On the dashboard of James's tow truck, a box of nine-millimeter Remington shells sits beside a stack of about 20 manila folders that contain debtors' names, addresses, phone numbers, criminal records and other data. Each file represents a vehicle that James is seeking. One lists a debtor's conviction for first-degree murder.

Today, James has been shuttling cars he's already repossessed from one of his four secured lots to Dealers Auto Auction, near 88th Avenue, where, every Wednesday, they're sold to licensed car dealers from around the state. The lenders sell some repossessed vehicles. About 90 percent of the rest are auctioned at Dealers, says president Steve Sautner, who started the business in 1994. Dealers sells about 50 repossessed vehicles a week, he says, which compose about a quarter of his sales. James has been dropping them off there all day.

James is at one of his car lots, a fenced-in area in Midtown. He's going through a black Dodge Neon with a flat tire. “The reason they have flat tires is, people run from us. What I do is, if you keep running and running and running, I'll take the valve stems out of the tires.

“I will take your car. It doesn't matter how, but I will get it.”

He removes clothes and other possessions. “You have to hang onto their stuff for 30 days before you can throw it away,” he explains.

James backs the Neon out of the snow surrounding it and lines it up with the “stinger,” a special T-shaped hydraulic lift on the back of his $70,000 tow truck. Then he's off to the auction lot.

Once, he says, he saw a car he'd been looking for when it pulled out right in front of him. “I motioned for 'em to pull over. I told 'em they had a flat, and then I gave them a flat - I pulled the valve stems off.”

James says the yank-the-valve-stem trick is one of his favorites. Another tactic he says he uses is the gift-certificate-fake-out: He calls the debtor pretending to be in charge of a local promotion, offering $50 in free groceries if the debtor will meet him at a grocery store. He really does shell out 50 bucks for the gift certificate.

“We'll give 'em the gift certificate,” he says, laughing, “and they'll go in to buy their $50 worth of groceries while we're stealing their car.”

Ken Lee says he once used a fishing pole with a steak on the end to lure a dog out of the front seat of a car he repossessed. Another time, Lee was trying to repossess a car the debtor chained to a tree - so he cut the tree down. The vehicle happened to be on state property near Willow, and at the time, Lee says, getting a woodcutting permit was simple. The firewood was a bonus.

The repo business can be exciting, entertaining, and intense, says James, but, like any other job, it can get old. “It's a lot of fun to steal your first few, but after a while you're like, 'If they would just pay their bills...'

“But then I'd be out of a job.”

“This time of year, people tend to overspend because of Christmas,” says Ken Lee. “Your repossession numbers tend to go up.”

It's not just Christmas that derails people's finances, of course. Divorces, layoffs, sickness, lack of discipline and a dozen other reasons can cause people to miss a loan payment, or two or three. Life can sneak up on them, says James, adding that a lot of the people whose vehicles he takes aren't bad, necessarily. Yet James also says that in most of the cars he repossesses, he finds drug paraphernalia or drugs. Sometimes, he says, debtors will track down a repo man to try to get their drugs back, although they don't try to recover the vehicles.

There are times “where I do feel sorry for them, like single moms where it's their only vehicle,” says James, who has two kids. “I've paid for groceries out of my own pocket.

“Mostly I feel sorry for the kids, because the kids shouldn't be a victim of their parent's stupidity.”

James recently picked up a truck on a voluntary repossession. The debtor depended on his snowplowing business and hadn't had much snow this year. James punched the man's address into the Toshiba laptop that sits atop the center console in his tow truck, found directions, and drove to the house, where he recovered a gray Chevy pickup with little fanfare.

“This one seemed like a nice guy,” he said when he was done. “I mean, he gave me both sets of keys and left a quarter-tank of gas. That says something.”

Many down-on-their-luck folks are easygoing, James says, which can ease the repo man's task. Some can be jerks, however, he says, or “high-profile,” as he calls them, and then James doesn't feel bad at all for taking their wheels.

“'High-profile,'” he says, with a laugh, “means they're known for being huge assholes... I've thought about charging an asshole fee.”

James says he's also repossessed vehicles owned by millionaires. “They've got enough money on paper to pay for it six times over,” he says, but they're so over-extended that they can't make payments. “I've repo'd a Mercedes Benz out of the Providence Hospital parking lot.”

Steve Sautner, at Dealers Auto Auction, concurs: he's sold many high-end vehicles that were repossessed, he says, including several tricked-out Humvees.

“A lot of people think when the economy's bad and people are out of work is when you're going to have more repos,” Sautner says.

“In the repossession business, when the economy's good is when you have more repos, because the banks have more money to lend.”

There are only a handful of repo operations in Alaska, says Sautner: Four or five in Anchorage, two in Fairbanks, and one in Juneau. Repossessed cars in Juneau often head south on ferries or barges, he says, but most of the cars repossessed from the rest of the state end up at his auction lot. Lee and James say most Alaska repo men work all over the state.

“We go statewide,” James says. “I don't care if it's in Nome or Nikiski. I don't care if it's in Barrow - we'll get it.”

James says he's repossessed three cars in a single day from Fairbanks by flying one-way to Fairbanks and driving the vehicles back to Anchorage, one after another. “They even blacked out my credit card because I was burning up so much gas.”

Repossessing vehicles from remote communities creates challenges unique to Alaska, James says. Getting a car out of some villages means waiting until rivers are frozen and ice roads plowed. For repossessions in Kodiak, James says he's paid cabbies to locate vehicles for him. When the cabbie spots the car or truck, James says he flies down and gets it back to Anchorage by ferry.

People in villages and other small, remote communities tend to be hostile to outsiders, James says, particularly when a repo man comes calling. “People know who I am out there. They won't pick me up, they won't give me rides.”

The problem with repossessing cars in the Bush, says Lee, is that it can cost more to get the vehicle back than it will raise on a used car lot or at auction. But he says that if someone in a village sees friends or relatives getting away with missing payments, it can spread “like wildfire.” According to Lee, Bush-dwellers will figure, “'Well, if I miss a few payments, they're not going to come out here.'”

James seems to have few qualms about his profession. The money is good and business is booming, he says. For all of the job's quirks, the most demanding aspects of repo work in Alaska seem to be consistent: the danger, the huge gas and insurance bills and the many late nights.

“You just can't get any sleep,” James says. “Most people can't devote 20 hours a day and sleep only four hours. I don't have a problem with that.”

James also doesn't have a problem working holidays.

“Thanksgiving was pretty good,” he says. “We got eight in one night...

“In a perfect world, I wouldn't have a job,” James says. “But this isn't a perfect world.”