From jail to bail

In February of 2000, Kansas City police responded to a 911 call and found Thomas C. McGee inside a house soaking an 18-foot hallway with gasoline. The odor was so strong it made the officers’ eyes water, according to Jackson County court documents.

Three women lay bedridden in two bedrooms; the hallway was their only possible exit.

McGee had a lighter in his back pocket but was taken into custody before he could light a fire.

“He crazy,” one of the women told police, according to court documents. “He’s going to burn the house down. Help me. Please, help me.”

McGee was convicted of attempted first-degree arson and sentenced to seven years in prison. Five years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to aiding a felon in Kansas, also a felony. Prosecutors dropped charges of aggravated assault and aggravated battery in that incident.

In 2004, while he was still on parole for his most recent transgression, the Missouri Department of Insurance issued McGee a license to work as a bail bond agent.

The license gave McGee the authority in certain circumstances to break into a house while looking for a fugitive. It also allowed him to use force to bring in a person who skips bond — and deadly force if he felt his life was in jeopardy.

Because bail bond agents are an integral part of the justice system, they “have to have a higher level of integrity,” argues Michael R. Thomas, a bondsmen who runs the Thomas Training Institute, a bail bond agent training service based in Marshall.

“If you’ve ever had a felony, you have no role in the bail bonds business,” Thomas said. “It makes us all look bad. Would you feel comfortable with a police officer, who is sworn to serve and protect, if he was a felon?”

According to records obtained by the Missourian, McGee is one of at least seven licensed bail bondsmen in the state who have either pleaded guilty to or been convicted of a felony. At least three other licensed bail bond agents are awaiting trial on felony charges.

Lots of leeway in licensing

Emily Kampeter, a spokeswoman for the Department of Insurance, said the department “doesn’t necessarily have a database that would keep track of” how many of the state’s 923 bail bond agents are felons. When a person applies for a bail bonds license, the department does a criminal background check.

If the applicant has been convicted of a felony within the past 15 years, rules state that he cannot obtain a license; however, the law gives the department discretion in enforcing that rule.

Kampeter said a patchwork of Supreme Court decisions, legislative law and Department of Insurance rules that govern the license approval process have made it difficult to decide who should get a license and who should not.

The result, Kampeter said, was that past administrations allowed felons to become bail bond agents.

“When we found out they were indeed licensing felons, we took action,” she said.

Proposals for changes

That action came from Department of Insurance Director Douglas Ommen who asked Sen. Kevin Engler, R-Farmington, to sponsor legislation the department hopes will keep people with questionable backgrounds from becoming licensed bail bond agents.

Senate Bill 153, which is now before the state General Assembly, would:

• Eliminate inconsistencies by treating people who have either pleaded guilty or been found guilty the same. Under current law, a person who has pleaded guilty to a felony and received a suspended sentence can still receive a bail bond license.
• Require bail bond agents to report convictions to the department.
• Make ineligible for a license a person who has been convicted of a felony within the past 15 years.
• Allow the Department of Insurance to look at people with convictions older than 15 years on a case-by-case basis. Under current law, a person can be licensed if the felony is more than 15 years old — no questions asked. In the bail bond community this is ironically known as the “Lee Clause,” named for Virgil Lee Jackson, a man who received a license despite multiple felony convictions in the 1980s. Lee is awaiting trial on charges that accuse him of attempting to have a competing bail bond agent murdered in 2005.

Under the proposed law, if the conviction was for a felony, including assault, arson, rape, kidnapping or a crime against administration of justice — such as tampering — the department could choose not to license the person.

A competing reform proposal before the legislature is more aggressive. Senate Bill 459, introduced by Wes Shoemyer, D-Clarence, would prevent any person ever convicted of a felony from getting a bond license.

Shoemyer was unavailable for comment.

Dissent in the ranks

Jack Allison, a general bail bond agent based out of Mexico and the legislative coordinator for the Missouri Bail Bonds Association, runs one of the largest bail bonds companies in the state. He employs 50 bail bond agents, including two convicted felons and three men awaiting trial for felonies. Among those awaiting trial are Jackson and another man, who was also charged in connection to the 2005 attempted murder charge against Jackson.

Allison said he employs felons because the Department of Insurance does not provide employers details about the criminal background checks conducted by state police. Ultimately, though, Allison said he would still hire a person who had committed what he considers a “minor” felony more than 15 years ago. That’s because, he said, people change.

On the other hand, Allison said he wants to prevent people who have committed “dangerous felonies” from receiving a license. He said he is working with the Department of Insurance and the General Assembly to clean up the industry.

To further that cause he said he would like to see the term “dangerous” better defined by law. But he said more important than legislative changes are the Department of Insurance’s concerted efforts over the last few years to cull the ranks of bail bonds agents who are convicted, dangerous felons.

“It will take a little to get rid of them, but we’ll continue to try,” Allison said.

To that end, Kampeter said the department began in January 2006 to require department investigators to run the fingerprints of bail bond agents through the state’s criminal database every two years.

All registered bail bond agents will have been through the system by the end of this year.

Already the department has taken action against at least six bondsmen who have been found to have felony convictions.

In November, the Department of Insurance filed a complaint against Donald Christian, a bond agent who lives in Farber, after learning he had pleaded guilty in 1998 to possession of a controlled substance.

Seven years later, he was issued a bail bond license. He is currently facing drug charges stemming from another incident.

‘The temptation is there’

Tina Bozarth, a bail bond agent with A Better Bond company in Columbia, said she doesn’t believe a felony conviction should automatically disqualify an applicant from obtaining a license. But she says people with a record of violence — even a couple of misdemeanor assaults — should be looked at closely before being allowed to work as bail bond agents.

She recalled one recovery she conducted when a group of people taunted and threatened her as she approached a house looking for a person who had skipped bond.

She knocked on the door. Nobody answered. She was almost positive the girl she wanted was inside, she said.

But instead of using Mace on the crowd, kicking down the door and dragging her quarry out by her hair, she walked away. She eventually nabbed the girl somewhere else.

“See, a lot of people can’t help themselves. They get upset and beat one of them,” Bozarth said. “Adrenaline is part of the deal. You’re hyped up when you go to do this stuff. There are a few characters who get off on the adrenaline too much. People should be under control because we have to deal with a lot of nonsense.”

And then there are the occupational temptations. Bozarth said a client once offered her a bag of cocaine on the Boone County Courthouse steps for bailing him out of jail in lieu of her cash fee. She declined, but said it’s a common scenario across the state.

“We arrest people all the time, and they have pockets full of drugs,” said Brian Bender, a Kansas City bail bondsman.

He said in nine out of 10 recoveries, the person has either drugs or a gun. He said that with certain bond agents, “I guarantee you those guns or drugs would just disappear.”

Bender said he even knows of one agent who routinely had other agents write bonds for his friends. The friends would then skip bail and not go to trial.

“The temptation is there, and it’s great,” he said.

Bozarth said she’s heard of bail bondsmen who accept sex instead of cash. She said often “it’s a working girl” — a prostitute — who wants to trade sex for bail. But she said agents who use nontraditional payment plans can get used to the exchange and might try to “push up on a college girl” who forgot to pay a few speeding tickets.

Doug Campbell, a bail bond agent based in Moberly, can see both sides of the issue. In 1985, Campbell was convicted of felony tampering. In 2004, he became a licensed bail bonds agent.

“I was a kid, I just got out of the service,” he said. “I was young and stupid and I changed my ways.”

Still, he doesn’t think persistent offenders have any place in the industry. And if a person has two or three felonies, he said, they shouldn’t even be considered for licensing.

But under current law, things aren’t that simple.

A Department of Insurance investigation into McGee, the Kansas City-area bondsman who pleaded guilty to both arson and aiding a felon, lasted for more than a year before the department released its final decision on March 6.

“Due to extreme mental problems at the time of the incident and from the police report, it appears that Mr. McGee was making a cry for help and this incident of arson was also an attempted suicide,” special investigator Robert Volkmer wrote in his closing memo about the case.

“There have not been any consumer complaints against Mr. McGee since his original license was issued,” Volkmer’s report states. “I believe this file should be closed with no further action.”

McGee would still have a license if it hadn’t expired four days after the closing memo. He has not applied for a renewal and neither he nor his employer, Cynthia Saulmon, could be reached for comment.

If he were to reapply, he would be turned down flat, Kampeter said.

In fact, both Volkmer and the handling of McGee’s file are under investigation by the department. Volkmer was not authorized to close McGee’s file, and the department director, Ommen, strongly disagrees with his findings, she said.

“It is not our directive of this administration to allow those individuals to be licensed with this department,” she said. “There were some lapses there.”

Senate Bill 153 was put on the formal calendar Tuesday and can be called for debate at any time.

Senate Bill 459, which would make it illegal for bail bond agents to have a felony record, was referred to committee on Feb. 2. There has been no action since then.

Missourian reporter M.B. Pell contributed to this report.