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All Eggs in One Mexican Basket
How a Serial Rapist, a Bounty Hunter and I Ended up in the Same Place
By Greg Coyle
Someone told me recently: "Puerto Vallarta is full of people who are either wanted or unwanted." It naturally got me thinking about myself. As I'm pretty sure I'm not being sought by the cops, I guess that pretty much answered that one.
It also reminded me that I was moving to "Fugitive Weekly's" number one most-livable city. Rapists, murderers, bank robbers, flim-flam men, drug barons, many of their ilk had hit the road and decided to have their mail forwarded to Puerto Vallarta.
But then I knew this back in Portland, Oregon, too. Only days before my wife, stepdaughter and I pulled out of our driveway, bound for a year in the coastal town, a former convict now bounty hunter calling himself "The Dog" (aka Duane Chapman) collared Andrew Luster, Max Factor heir and overachieving rapist, in Vallarta.
We of course watched the news stories with some interest. I enjoyed the guy's sheepish, unshaven look of embarrassment as he was ducked into a car to be transported back to the States and his 124-year prison term.
But what struck me most, aside from his choice of destination, were the 86 counts of rape that put him away. Eight-six! Not in any way to diminish the horrific nature of his crimes, but that is one ambitious man! It's not often you find the heir to a fortune working that hard at anything. I mean, this is a guy who knows who he is: "I am a rapist. I rape. That's what I do." It makes one wonder what he could've achieved had he not been operating under the misguided impression that good sex required knockout pills and a hidden camera.
The news of his nabbing, falling as it did so close to our own departure, didn't trouble me so much as make me curious about my soon-to-be new home. With Luster's money, and obvious raping skills, he could've gone anywhere. But he chose Puerto Vallarta, not Tahiti, not Thailand, not an all-inclusive resort in Greece that has sea kayaks, but Puerto Vallarta. I had no choice but to conclude that it must be one pretty goddamn great town!
Still, it's possible Luster (an ironic name if you think about it) is, in addition to rape, guilty of a lack of creativity. He was just the latest in a long line of escapees to point their getaway van south to freedom and the expected good life beneath some shady palapa.
And I suppose it's not that big a mystery why. In addition to the weather and "bucket of beer" deals (five bottles for 45 pesos/US$4.50!), I think those on the run sort of look at Mexico like junior high students do substitute teachers, that is, the normal rules are suspended. "Señor Officer Martinez, the police in the U.S. told me it was OK if I shot that guy so long as when I was done I just went to Mexico. That's always been the rule with Mr. Bush."
So they crossed the border, looking to make amends for their crime by parasailing and getting henna tattoos. The Southern ones get their hair braided, join a booze cruise, maybe even buy an anklet, thinking, "I'm a murderer; when's the next time I'm going to have a chance to wear an anklet and get away with it?"
But things are changing, or so says the Mexican government. Prior to 1995, Mexico had extradited only a handful of fugitives to the U.S. under the joint 1978 extradition treaty. A 2002 report in the Las Vegas Review Journal called Mexico a "fugitives' paradise." Having worked in advertising, I can tell you that that kind of free publicity doesn't come along every day.
It was about that time that I came up with the idea of opening the first all-inclusive resort just for fugitives. These travelers have special travel needs, and who is meeting those needs? No one, that's who. They, like dwarves and the grossly over-hairy, have been overlooked for too long by the world's vacation destinations.
I hope to put a stop to that. Introducing Club Fed: "A getaway for those making a getaway." In addition to typical amenities like seaweed wraps, flamenco lessons and tai bo, we'll offer wig and facial hair services, accent development or eradication counseling, and something we call "passport crafts." Sorry, but drinks are not covered.
The way I look at it, just because someone's committed a Class A felony in the U.S. and then jumps ship for Mexico doesn't mean they don't deserve to gorge themselves on frozen fruit drinks and fresh mahi-mahi. To quote Doctor Ty Webb from the 80s feel-good golf comedy Caddyshack, "This isn't Russia. Is this Russia?"
But if I hope to get the business off the ground, and I do, I can only hope that President Fox abandons the crazy trends started during the Zedillo administration (1994-2000). El Presidente and his law-loving cronies went ahead and improved communication and treaty implementation. This resulted in the extradition of 56 individuals (read: customers) from Mexico to the United States during 1995 to 2000 (see below).
EXTRADITIONS FROM MEXICO TO THE UNITED STATES
(through 2/9/00)
Year
2000 2
1999 14
1998 12
1997 13
1996 13
1995 4
These days, not even a cosmetics billionaire can find his fugitive's paradise. If someone like Luster can't do it when he has enough money to be the only taxidermist that stuffs his wolverines with $100 dollar bills rather than embalming fluid, if he can't start his life over as David Carrera, what chance does your poorer Mexicognito have?
People like David "Spooky" Alvarez, for example, who fatally stabbed two sisters ages 8 and twelve, their uncle and a gardener during a house robbery. What's he to do?
Or Christian Michael Longo, the Oregon guy that killed his wife and three kids and dumped their bodies in the ocean. Where's his opportunity to get a good tan and sample the local tequilas?
Or Robert James Boehnlein, a senior airman in the U.S. Air Force who committed indecent acts with children. Like the others, he hit the road for Mexico. How nice to have a deviant sexual proclivity that can be exercised anywhere in the world.
But they all got caught and pitched back across the border. Thank you very much, Presidente Zedillo! Thanks to you, my resort is going to be forced, like every other, to service visor-wearing divorcees from Minnesota and drunken mullet-crowned pipe-fitters from Texas! Cue the mariachi music.
Epilogue:
Approximately three weeks after Andrew Luster was caught, we found ourselves traveling down the U.S. coast and across the border to the Sonoran town of Guaymas.
Here's the first thing I learned: It's never a good idea to arrive in a strange town at night. It's an especially bad idea if it's your first night in Mexico, your first night driving down the coast of Mexico in your own car, and/or your first night for a year in Mexico for which you quit your job and rented out your house and emptied your bank account.
We drove around the town's unlit alleys, rut-pitted and too narrow for cars to comfortably pass in the other direction. And we argued, about where to go, how to get there, what we'd find once we got there, and by the end even about the very philosophy of going places at all.
We finally ended up at the Flamingo Inn, which hugged the town's main road, and had all the hallmarks of every seedy, derelict hotel you've seen in Tucson or Burbank.
Our first dinner in Mexico was spent at the place's poolside restaurant. While we ate, me admiring how the cook had made my enchiladas so runny, we watched the young Mexican mothers take their diapered kids into the water and decided against an after-meal swim.
At first light, we hitched up and got the hell out of there. We drove eight or so hours to Mazatlan, where we went almost directly to the Best Western and its working air-con, cable TV, neat in-room safe, and rooftop pool. It was our second night in Mexico and we'd already used our "Get Home Free" card. Not a promising start.
Two days later, we fueled up on the complimentary breakfast buffet (let the record show that tops in Mazatlan for most individual small boxes of cereal consumed in one sitting is nine. And I could've eaten more if I hadn't had those damn bananas!). We then carried on the 10 hours to Puerto Vallarta.
For two weeks we stayed at a hotel on Calle Francisca Rodriguez, while we searched for a place to live, looking altogether like blind mole rats, and blind mole rats that didn't even speak blind mole rat! We looked at many apartments, including one that doubled as a cave and another that had "a little scorpion problem."
Time and patience rewarded us with a great two-bedroom place on Calle Aquiles Serdan right on the River Cuale, which splits Old Town and Centro Vallarta like a thong down the hairy center of an Italian sun bather. Situated on the second floor, it offered a big kitchen, a beautiful open-air garden patio, and a useable rooftop that provided spectacular views of the foothills of the Sierra Madre on one side and the whispering river on the other.
That first morning after our first night in the place, I decided we needed cheese and so set off to explore our new neighborhood. I had taken all but 10 steps up the street when I noticed the sign on our neighbor's large black-metal door that read, and in English: "Dogs Allowed!"
It didn't strike me as the sort of sentiment that one would go to the trouble to put on a sign. I mean, we typically make signs for those things we don't want, like nukes and fat chicks. The other way is somehow too earnest, and we in the U.S. know not to trust people who are too earnest.
I walked by the sign a couple of times a week. And when I started driving my stepdaughter to school, I saw it every morning. But it was not until much later that I learned what it meant, that the dog referenced in the sign was none other than the dog, Duane "The Dog" Chapman. The guy who pinched Luster, and some 6,000 other fugitives if we believe his Web site (www.dogthebountyhunter.com), had kept his bones right there, two doors down!
It fit somehow. And a part of me was sorry he was gone, arrested and deported (I guess he didn't know bounty hunting is illegal in Mexico). It would've been nice to have him over for some cheese.
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