Here in Hawaii, huge crowds demanded that The Dog be let out of jail. When he was finally released, he started to speak to the crowd and was violently hushed by Beth who began cussing at his attorney for letting him speak.We’ll keep you posted…
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Duane Chapman of Dog the Bounty Hunter Finds Himself the Prey – Report – New York Times
The eight or so men crept quietly up to the house in the Portlock neighborhood of Hawaii at the crack of dawn. The woman inside was making school lunches for her children and noticed them too late. They bum-rushed the bedroom, capturing their target in cuffs before he knew what hit him.
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David L. Moore/Getty Images for The New York Times
Dog the Bounty Hunter is wanted in Mexico for a capture there.
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Duane Chapman, known as Dog, the premier American bounty hunter, would have appreciated their artistry had he not been the guy in handcuffs. Mr. Chapman, the star of A&E’s highly rated “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” was transported to the federal detention center in Honolulu to await extradition to Mexico on a three-year-old charge stemming from his capture in Mexico of Andrew Luster, the Max Factor heir who was eventually convicted of raping three women.
Back in 2003 Mr. Chapman and his colleagues were charged by Mexican authorities with “deprivation of liberty” and held in jail in Puerto Vallarta before they made bail and slipped out of the country. Now, with less than a month before the warrant would have expired and in the midst of filming the fourth season of his enormously successful reality series, Mr. Chapman was the one being brought to justice. (Yesterday the Chapman family suggested that some horse trading was under way, pointing out that Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, part of a Mexican drug cartel, was handed over to United States authorities.)
As American symbols go, Mr. Chapman is a pretty epic one. He has had 4 wives, 12 children, 18 robbery convictions, a conviction for being an accessory to murder, and, according to his math, more than 7,000 fugitives brought to justice. He belonged to a biker gang, but cries easily and enjoys vacuuming. His show, filmed mostly in Hawaii, is a mix of tweaking meth-heads and postarrest moralism, a business built on repossessing human flesh. But with Mr. Chapman, the drama always seems to continue after the cameras shut off. On the day he was to be married this spring in a filmed ceremony, his estranged daughter died. And now this.
“He leads a complicated, edgy life,” said Lucas Platt, the supervising producer of the show. “Going after Andrew Luster was a risky decision, but he thought it was the right thing to do. Now it has taken an unfortunate turn.” The turn won’t hurt ratings. A&E plans a special for tomorrow night, and the stories about his travails will only add to the legend. The man who brought vengeance to thousands of bail jumpers found himself on the wrong end of justice.
“I was totally freaked out,” Mr. Chapman said on the phone Saturday after he had posted a $300,000 bail to await a hearing on extradition. “There were guys that I had put in there that were yelling all sorts of things at me.”
His wife Beth, a co-star in the series, worked frantically for his release.
The 2003 Luster arrest, which catapulted Mr. Chapman to a new level of celebrity and eventually resulted in A&E signing him for the series, led to a lasting grudge on the part of Mexican authorities, who demanded that the United States extradite the bounty hunter.
On Thursday night the Mexican attorney general released a statement suggesting that what Mr. Chapman had done was an affront to national sovereignty.
Larry Butrick, chief of the criminal division for the United States Attorney’s Office in Honolulu, said that his staff was merely executing a valid warrant that came from headquarters in Washington.
“The court here really will just be looking at the legality of the extradition and if there is a fit under the treaty we have with Mexico,” he said.
One of Mr. Chapman’s lawyers is hoping that the matter can be settled somewhere short of a Mexican prison.
“I have a high level of confidence that we will be able work with the good will and good faith of the Mexican authorities in resolving this satisfactorily,” said William C. Bollard, who represents Mr. Chapman, his son Leland and Tim Chapman (no relation), a bounty-hunting colleague, all of whom helped apprehend Mr. Luster. For now the Dog is at large, albeit with an ankle bracelet.
“If I have a fugitive on the run and have to go out at night, I have to notify them,” he said, referring to federal officials. “I have no problem with that.”