Yet not long ago in Potter's Vignes Place office in those late hours the phone did ring, and fortunately the veteran bondsman Alfred Newman was on duty. The call was from the 77th down on Broadway, the new LAPD station house that processes many of the city's female arrestees. The lady calling was a quality lead in her own right, dangling the promise of a $30,000 "assault with deadly weapon" bond. But that was just the beginning, since Newman, who in his long, checkered career has operated several bond companies himself, was alert to ask, "Anyone else need a bond?" And from this came two more prime prospects, a $50,000 "spousal" and another $30,000 "assault." Nice.
The little rush of business was not typical in these dog days of the bond business. (In a recent four-day period Newman got not one potential customer.) The office today is very quiet, the only actual "action" being that ever-vigilant tow-truck operator outside jacking up another car.
"Ninety-five bucks," Newman says, standing at the window. "On the weekends the guy gets maybe 60 or 70 of them. It's their own fault."
Like many veterans of the bonds profession, Newman has the proud paunch of the man whose work requires prolonged sitting around and a certain rumpled casualness in the dress-and-whisker department. Old enough to have fought in Burma during World War II (the first time he got the "Alfred E." Newman ribbing, and don't get him started on that), he ambles about the white-walled office, ignoring the blathering TV, and slips easily into a fragmented monologue that skips in and out of decades past. A key element in the dissertation is the infamy of Newman's "two schmucko brothers" with whom he had several bail-bond companies, a mini-empire with outposts in Temple City, City Terrace and Hollywood -- businesses in his telling that the brothers sold out from under him. The principal "schmucko" was the horseplayer, who at one point owned 10 horses himself.
"Once we're at the track and he loses the first three races, then -- wham -- six winners in a row. And he's handing out 20s and 50s and I can't win a bet, and he's up, what, 20, 25 thousand, something like that. And I'm broke, I'm tapped out." Sheesh.
A lot of the monologue concerns missed opportunities. Most especially, singing the great communal song of Los Angeles, the song of houses that should have been bought, he talks of houses that went for peanuts back then and now are worth . . . zillions. Alfred Newman, free-associating in time, lands on a moment when he and his wife had this great little house on a good street in the Valley, one that they should have held on to but noooo, his wife insisted they move. And why? "She didn't like the people across the street and we had to move. Can you believe it?"
Bert Potter, on the other hand, the man in whose domain Newman finds himself a modestly paid vassal, has done just fine, and Newman has on the tip of his tongue all the properties Potter and his wife (a real estate broker) own. Money, as ever, begetting money. Oh well. The two men go back a ways and Newman is now remembering a $50,000 bond they went in on, each man covering $25,000. So the guy skips and both men are burned, one of Potter's rare bad bets. And sure they had done their homework, used a house the guy owned for collateral, but what do you know: "He had no equity!" Talk about ultimate sins.
The monologue continues, sparing no one, especially himself, ranging from the guys his daughters married and what property they had and what the property was worth and on and on, all of it remarkably free of bitterness, the tone more a puzzled curiosity about why one man accumulates wealth and another doesn't. What, after all, is Bert Potter's secret?
Newman has no answer beyond the fact that the man obviously has the money to back his plays, that he has held his course, kept at it, hasn't disappeared into a bottle or done anything really stupid. Beyond that it's a matter of touch and luck, like at the track -- one guy wins and the other guy doesn't.
"You want to see something?" Newman asks, and his visitor says sure he'd like to see something, and Newman goes over to a knee-high cabinet on the floor near the entrance to Bert Potter's office. Inside are five or six fat blue binders, and Newman lovingly lifts one out like a man displaying precious jewels. "Look," he says, opening the book, "this one goes back to 1993, and look, this one for $50,000 . . ."
They are holds, liens, on property (cars, houses, other valuables) that Potter has on bad debts.
"You mean all of them are still active?"
Newman says they are, since when one is paid off the page is removed from the book.
Five or six fat binders chock-a-block with property, and when Newman puts the book back he does it carefully and with affection.
A quiet night on Vignes Place, the TV chattering up on the wall . . . Everybody waiting, the lights on next door at Eddie Nardoni's, and across the way at Sal Montana's, and upstairs at Anyway Bail.
Everybody waiting.
