The Learjet repo man

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/06/06/lear_jet_repo_man/index.html

by TriinT • 17 years ago

153 49 17 years ago

salon.com

boundlessdreamz• 17 years ago

It is a nice read but not appropriate HN at all.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Ah dammit...you're right. I really enjoyed this, too!

ramchip• 17 years ago

Sneaking around, bypassing security, fixing airplanes and flying them in nasty conditions?

I'd call it hacking.

blhack4• 17 years ago

/me checks notes...

I'll allow it.

robryan• 17 years ago

appropriate is really just anything of interest to the HN crowd i'd say.

TriinT• 17 years ago

And given the number of upvotes, stealing aircraft from armed mobsters seems to interest the HN crowd ;-)

jtuyen• 17 years ago

Someone should make a movie script about this guy!

dkokelley• 17 years ago

I was just thinking that, or maybe a TV series. This is great stuff. It reminds me of Catch Me If You Can.

derefr• 17 years ago

As low-brow (or pop-cultural) as this comment might be, I can't help but make the analogy: repo men are the modern day ninja. Being a ninja was never about martial arts; it was about subterfuge, and about protecting the assets of your lord by any means necessary. In the modern age, the lords are the banks.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

From what I recall, being a ninja was about being sneaky and undignified enough to succeed. Being a ninja was about dressing up as a gardener so nobody would suspect that you were about to shiv them with an abnormally pointy trowel. Being a ninja was about setting off firecrackers as a distraction -- people assume that explosions are important, and ninjas knew this. Being a ninja was about hiding in an outhouse so you could assassinate some dude from inside of his toilet (holy shit!). Ninjas were clever bastards, not necessarily badasses.

callmeed• 17 years ago

A reality show about a regular repo man is apparently quite popular among spanish-speaking tv viewers: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1045974...

uuilly• 17 years ago

Tom Wolfe wrote a book called "A Man in Full" that had a very similar character. He said that the formerly wealthy hang on to their private jets harder than anything else. They even went as far as creating fake airline stubs for debt collection meetings to act like they were flying commercial. Quite entertaining.

prodigal_erik• 17 years ago

I was thinking there's a pretty good Stephenson novella here.

staunch• 17 years ago

Getting the plane doesn't seem like the scary part. You know you're safe once you're flying away. The scary part is knowing that you just made enemies with someone who owned a $100 million toy. If just one of them is the vengeful type they might have your entire family killed.

Talking about it publicly seems about the dumbest possible thing to do.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

someone who owned a $100 million toy

No, someone who missed several payments on a leased $100 million toy. The ultra rich-and-powerful don't miss the payments.

Also, if the repo man dies shortly after repossessing your property, you are probably going to be at the top of the list of suspects... so killing the guy's whole family is probably not a good idea.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

Anyone who can buy a jet plane, can buy a judge.

blhack4• 17 years ago

Maybe you didn't read the article completely.

He isn't just repossesing airplanes from businessmen, he is repossesing them from psychotic foreign dictators, drug dealers, warlords, etc.

This is why he has ended up in South American prison.

mrkurt• 17 years ago

Most of them are probably owned by flailing corporations, not John Travolta. Flailing corporations make nice enemies. :)

jrockway2• 17 years ago

It seems like a failure of the legal system that something like this is necessary. I guess there is no law-enforcement agency that can move fast enough to prevent a jet from leaving its jurisdiction.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

Since you can get a warrant in mere hours in some cases, and it takes hours for this guy to even arrive, I don't think that's true.

There is some reason that they can't or won't just ask the police to secure the plane, though, and my guess is that the reason is more that it's legally unclear whose plane it is. That is, in some cases, this is legally just theft that's papered over later.

carbon8• 17 years ago

There are legal frameworks in place for repossession. It's not just and ad hoc grab and run situation. As I understand it, it's indeed true police usually can't get involved beyond keeping the peace since it's a civil issue and they open themselves up to civil liability, but it's very different from theft.

bullseye• 17 years ago

>> Since you can get a warrant in mere hours in some cases

I can't speak to property seizure warrants, so you may be right there. However, if it is anything like arrest warrants, this is rarely true.

Fun fact: Typically, it takes a mountain of evidence to convince a judge to issue a warrant, and then those serving the warrant have a small window of time to execute. If they are late, or the individual isn't present, then it expires and a new set of evidence has to be presented to issue another warrant.

(I often think it's amazing anyone is arrested at all).

My lack of knowledge notwithstanding, I doubt that issuing a warrant to seize a plane would be a quick, Law and Order-like process, simply due to the size and dollars involved.

TallGuyShort• 17 years ago

Repossession occurs when a person hasn't made payments. In other words, a bank or other institution is actually the organization that legally owns the property. They authorize a repo agency to recover the property that they legally own, which means that the repo agency is allowed to do all sorts of things because for all intents and purposes they are recovering stolen property.

It is a sticky spot legally, and there are rules they have to follow. But this man has experience doing high-risk repos that public law enforcement doesn't have. It's the difference between regular infantry and mercenaries.

anamax• 17 years ago

I suspect that the problem isn't so much speed as motivation.

The police get paid whether they show up or not to handle your problem. The repo man doesn't get paid unless he delivers.

If you wanted your property recovered, who would you want on the job?

blasdel• 17 years ago

It reads like a Stephen Glass article -- though it's not clear what the balance is between sycophant writer and tale-telling subject.

mrduncan2• 17 years ago

Popovich's first rule of firearms is pretty simple: The man who tells you he's going to shoot you will not shoot you.

Definitely not a job for the faint of heart.

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

An interesting point not emphasized in the article: each plane can require a significant amount of training time to be able to fly safely.

Getting behind the controls of a $10 Million plane that you've never flown before and having to take it somewhere has got to have a higher pucker factor than the guys with guns, if you ask me.

blhack4• 17 years ago

I used to think the same thing.

My Brother in Law is a very seasoned pilot, so is my dad.

I asked them about this one day. Like "guys, how do you go from flying around in little Citation 5s to flying around in massive jumbo jets?"

They were confused about my question.

Why?

Because flying isn't flying, it's systems. You learn the GPS, you learn the autopilot, you learn the radio, and after that, you follow the checklist.

You're just there to press the buttons, the rest of it is planned.

They always joke that, "if you're flying IFR (instrument flight rating, meaning that every single one of your movements in controlled by the tower), you have to get clearance from control before you can scratch your balls".

I still don't believe them, but just thought I'd chime in.

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

As a couple of counter-stories, an instructor I once had asked another instructor how long he'd last in a high-performance twin that he hadn't checked out in.

"About two minutes" was the answer

Another _very_ seasoned instructor I know confided in me that he was concerned that a private student with a very expensive airplane wanted highly-technical training and he didn't feel like he was up for it. Now this is coming from a guy who is in the top ten or twenty instructors worldwide.

I get the gist of what they're saying -- but I think there's a bit of malarky in there somewhere. Airlines pay big bucks to get pilots current on gear just a little different than what they've already flown. There's good reasons for this.

Flying your seventh type of airplane is sorta the same, but it's nowhere near like using your seventh version of a word processor.

jhaski• 17 years ago

As a pilot, I know that many of the airplanes are not locked when they are sitting on the tarmac. The keys are usually generic, so you can probably use a key to a similar aircraft to start the engines.

I never really thought about it before, but stealing a jet would probably be easier than stealing a car (minus, of course, the crazy militia who might kill you for repossessing the airplane).

mrduncan2• 17 years ago

While taking control of the aircraft might be easier, I'd imagine that you'd be a lot easier to track via radar. That's not to mention that the Air Force is probably going to assume you're a terrorist and I doubt you're going to outrun any fighter jets.

Edit: I was referring to outright theft above, not repoing.

sokoloff2• 17 years ago

Nonsense. Squawk 1200, and once airborne, you're free to use the radios. The point about not using the radio on the ground was to ensure that you could actually get the craft off the ground without the current owners or FBO knowing what you were up to.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

His firm earns in the "low-to-mid seven figures".

Call me crazy, but I think starting a tech consulting firm might be a happier way to get at that kind of money than facing down shotgun-wielding militiamen and flying off in a strange jet.

The numbers in this post kind of don't add up:

* His first repo gig got him $145k.

* Recovering a string of badly-maintained helicopters got him a "tidy six figures".

* A good year is 10 planes.

* He employs 65 "super repos" --- if these people, who actually fly dangerous aircraft out of dangerous situations --- take a desk worker's salary and have so much as high-deductable health insurance, the company's payroll overhead alone is high 7 figures.

blhack4• 17 years ago

>He employs 65 "super repos"

I doubt that he employs 65 full time pilots. It sounds like more him, his wife, and his two sons.

The other people are probably just brutes that he calls up every once in a while for doing large things like taking a fleet of helicopters.

Also, I suspect that that "tidy six figures" is a net after he has paid his employees. (I'm going to assume that they get paid per job, not per year).

tptacek3• 17 years ago

They used the word "fee" in the article. That isn't ambiguous. A six-figure fee is a gross amount.

I'm leaning towards calling shenanigans on this.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

People in these lines of work generally aren't in it purely for the money. The money is an important part, as it legitimizes them as the victor, but generally there's an appetite for risk and excitement.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

I don't know that I buy this. Contractor rates in Iraq are much higher than this guy's (especially if you take a few minutes and SWAG out the "billable hours" that must go into a single reclamation). You could easily argue that Iraq contractors face much less risk.

keltecp11• 17 years ago

I want the the movie rights.

chrisbolt• 17 years ago

Popovich is a super repo man, one of a handful of specialists who get the call when a bank wants back its Gulfstream II jet from, say, a small army of neo-Nazi freaks.

Anyone wonder why the bank is lending money for private jets to neo-Nazis?

e4m• 17 years ago

The banks are not aware of the underlying organizations. Even if they were, they probably would not care. They only see the lawyer in the suit at the loan office signing paperwork on behalf of XYZ, LLC.

The Learjet repo man

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