Outside Bad Boys Bail Bonds, somebody had illegally painted the curb red. Again.
Neil Angos, Los Angeles operations chief for Bad Boys, said he suspected that his business rivals had ordered the curb lipsticked this time and at least once before to keep prospective customers from driving up to his door.
"They really hate us," said Angos, toeing the flaking paint, which was a touch paler than the city's official red.
This is Bail Row -- a trash-blown block of downtown where the competition for freedom-buyers is as cutthroat as it gets. Lately, as growing numbers of companies scramble for fatter and fatter bonds, corruption investigations have targeted Bad Boys and other bail purveyors in Southern California.
On Bail Row, about a dozen bond offices are lined shoulder to shoulder in a mustard-colored, carnival-lighted mini-mall and a stretch of neighboring storefronts in need of Windex. They sit across Vignes Street from the Men's Central and Twin Towers jails.
The lockups anchor the nation's largest local penal system, a 24-hour-a-day gold mine for the bail sellers. And while it might appear that there is plenty of get-out-of-jail lucre to go around, the enterprises engage in a kind of urban combat for every dollar.
"It's really a dirty business," said Bertha Comar, owner of Aliso Village Bail Bonds, a tiny firm in a burglar-barred building a few steps from the mall. She sat slumped at her desk in a warren-like office, with a painting of the Virgin Mary on the wall behind her and a poster for the gangster movie "Scarface" to her right.
Comar said she could no longer vie with the bigger outfits and was preparing to shut her shop down. Several Bail Row tenants say they manage to stay above the fray, but others complain of having their tires slashed and windshields smashed. Gripes of petty behavior include prank phone calls from agents posing as clients and even bogus pizza deliveries.
"It's stupid," said Comar, who told of being tormented by the unwanted pizzas, which she says were ordered by someone at the mall.
Then there are the ever-present tow trucks that quickly hook the cars of patrons who park at the mall but meander to bail offices elsewhere on Vignes or Bauchet Street, Bad Boys among them. The latter have no mall parking privileges.
Vince Ebarb, owner of the mall's Anyway Bail Bonds, said the tow trucks "probably make more money than anybody.... It's kind of a comedy."
