My Night as a Bounty Hunter   

A writer's search for a fugitive and the truth about his would-be captors.

S ETTING: THE SCENE WAS perfectly set. I had been commissioned by the British edition of GQ to shadow a troupe of bounty hunters known as the "Seekers" and pen a rollicking tale of adventure. The story looked promising.
More than repressed soldiers of fortune, these fugitive chasers claimed to be disciplined, physically fit and experts in martial arts. The group's spiritual outlook--a patchwork code of serenity combed from Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan thought--was the icing on the cake.
"We'll get him tonight," Joshua Armstrong, the founder of the Seekers, said of Tashawn Merry, the fugitive we were after. I expected he would be right. In 15 years as a bounty hunter, Armstrong claimed to have nailed more than 2,000 fugitives and boasted an 85 percent recovery rate--higher, he said, than the police and the U.S. Marshals.
Armstrong and two Seeker colleagues, Kalief and Job, were sanguine that October night as they set out on the hunt dressed in black, armed and purporting to be dangerous. Kalief showed me a photo of Merry, a forlorn teen with a cherub face and corkscrew hair. By morning--after trawling Elizabeth's seedy go-go joints and cruising past some of the busiest drug corners in the city--Merry remained at large. "He can't hide for much longer," Armstrong assured me.
The Seekers had already apprehended Merry once before, off the streets of Elizabeth in September. I had read that account--with the same mug shot of Merry--in London's Sunday Times. A few weeks after our unsuccessful stakeout, I noticed a second article in Gear magazine about the Seekers, who had this time nabbed the fugitive I knew as Merry while he was drinking beer and rolling a joint on his grandmother's front porch in Hartford, Connecticut. I was working on what would have been a third account.
Something didn't seem right. So I talked to officials in New York state, where Merry was supposed to have been a wanted man. They said they had never heard of him. That got me wondering, "Who then is Joshua Armstrong?"
After all, he came with great credentials. USA Today called Armstrong's book, "The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter's Story," an "engaging, action-packed memoir that works on several levels," and dubbed him a "widely acclaimed bounty hunter." A half dozen other reviews echoed the claim on the book jacket that the Seekers are "an elite team of the most successful bounty hunters in the country."
But in such a loosely regulated industry, "Nation's Premier Bounty Hunter" carries as much weight as "World's Best Babysitter." There are no clear standards by which one could prove or dispute such a claim. The only true measure of the Seekers' prowess, it seemed to me, was in the esteem they inspired among their contemporaries.
"They told you that they were the best?" Prince, a Newark bail agent asked. "Well, I never heard of the Seekers." He knew of Armstrong, who he said "couldn't find a shadow in a darkened room."
So Armstrong is a bounty hunter? "He has brought some people in here," Captain Barry Migliore of New Jersey's Union County Sheriff's Department acknowledged. "But I have not seen him lately."
When I showed Migliore the photo of the rifle-toting, fatigue-clad gang featured on the back cover of the Seekers' book, he laughed out loud. "They look like a bad rap band--one of those groups that I'm always telling my kids to turn off their stereo. I don't know any bounty hunters who go out looking like that."
Eric De Jesus, a long-serving Newark-area bounty hunter who does his work unarmed and often dressed in a pair of sneakers and blue jeans, turned out to be more representative of the profession, even if he was less glamorous. When I showed him a picture of the man I had been introduced to as Kalief, De Jesus said it looked like a different friend of his who didn't work with the Seekers.
My investigation of Armstrong did turn up another seemingly improbable story about the Seekers that turned out to be true: Actor Wesley Snipes and Armstrong have been friends for years, and Armstrong has bragged to at least one fellow bounty hunter that he does bodyguarding for Snipes when the actor is in the New York area.
Which was all beginning to stray even further from the search for Tashawn Merry, who turned out to be Tashawn Muhammed. (That's the name Armstrong gave me when I told him that I was having trouble confirming the capture of Tashawn Merry.) Armstrong was adamant that Merry and Muhammed are two different people, and that he had caught Muhammed in November and brought him to Philadelphia. But the local District Attorney's office had never heard of Armstrong or Merry/Muhammed. When Armstrong finally provided a hand-scrawled body receipt, it was for delivering Paul E. Baker, aka Tashawn Muhammed, to the Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Sheriff's department last October. But Delaware County had no record of any prisoner of any name, past or present, with a Social Security number matching the one Armstrong provided.
So are Armstrong and the Seekers bounty hunters, bodyguards or able self-publicists? Armstrong insists he is legitimate. Whatever, it all makes a good story. According to Amen Ra Films, Snipes' production company, the actor intends to play the role of Armstrong in a Hollywood production of his life. The film is currently on hold, the company says.
No word yet as to whether the film will feature the capture of Tashawn Merry.